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[naath]

Why is it that anytime I see a post that someone has made of the form "thing X is a bad thing and I wish people-who-do-X would stop doing it" there are almost always responses of the form:
a)"but *I* never do X"
and
b)"but thing Y is bad too!"

as for (a) - great, continue not doing X. Unless the initial post clearly accused *you personally* of doing X then why bother commenting to say that? Do you have anything else to add?

(b) comes in two forms; sometimes it's *true* and sometimes it's *not*. But really, NOT RELEVANT. Sure, if you were having one of those lazy afternoons down the pub and letting the conversation go hither and yon my "OMG I HATE X" might well be responded to you saying "WELL I HATE Y" and then we can all be "YEAH, HATING STUFF". But if one wants to have a Serious Discussion about X and how it affects people, and why it is bad, then Talking About Y rarely helps.

These tactics (among others) are things I think come under the heading of "Derailing" that means that they take the conversation away from what was intended (travelling along it's rails). It takes a fair amount of effort to deal with these types of comments, even if one's moderation policy is "don't like, will delete"; they really do get in the way of serious discussion. It is certainly my experience that even reading with no intention of dealing with (because someone else is doing that) these types of comments really eats up valuable head space that I could be using to engage in interesting discussion (and I'm doing quite well for spare head space really).

If you want to use your corner of the internet to have other discussions about other things then you do that. It's a big internet, there's space for everyone. But increasingly I'm find that there are a lot of topics that simply can't be discussed in a public forum, because others come along and refuse to let the discussion happen; and I find that bad because, whilst of course we could all retreat to closed communities, it makes it much harder for people who are just starting to dip their toes in the water to find things. I have a great deal of respect for people who have been, and continue to be, willing to deal with moderating public discussions of sensitive subjects and kept their sanity.


(Hello Metafandom; OMG I've been metafandom'd!)

Comments

[tim]

To be more concrete about it, one of my friends recently made a post decrying the lack of willingness of some men to take the responsibility to use condoms. She received a comment from someone assuming she was saying "all men are bad", and responding to that point rather than the one she actually made. This sort of reply is depressingly common. You could address that by saying it's a common logical fallacy. Perhaps so, but it's one people ought to be aware of and work to avoid in their speech, which is one of the things I think was saying. The other problem there is that even if my friend *had* been implying "all men are bad", perhaps there are more important things than refuting such a statement, such as the specific point she was making about condom use. When people systematically ignore everything else somebody says as long as they can extract whatever faint "all men are bad" implications they can find, and jump on those, you have to wonder why their first priority is to defend the reputation of men (and not any specific man, just men-as-a-whole!) And I think that goes beyond universal brain wiring and into sexism, which is, again, something people need to work actively to overcome.

[tim]

Er, that should say "one of the things I think naath was saying". Haven't mastered this DW thing yet.

[naath]

:-) I was generalising, of course. Your example fits the pattern (and isn't one I've seen, which, I think that's depressing).