I complained that you were uncharitably misrepresenting my position. You say I’m not entitled to charity, but your representation of my position doesn’t come close to anything I ever said. This isn’t merely you not-being-charitable, this is you being either actively uncharitable, or arguing against imagined dog whistles, or something that isn’t engaging with either what I said or what I meant.
(You may say that you never mentioned me, and that’s so. But if you weren’t including me in “people get so irate”, who specifically did you mean?)
I’m not here looking for a fight with aa. I mostly just ignore him. I replied to you, when you said “this seems like good advice”, and I said that the advice you had taken from aa’s post was a much weaker version of what he had actually said, and that aa’s history makes me disinclined to engage with him.
You’re telling me that I should attack aa based on the text he actually wrote, but you’re the one who turned “if girls don’t find your son sexually attractive, he needs some kind of intervention to correct that right away” into “if your child lacks interpersonal skills, you should help them develop them”.
When you say “I find it strange that...”, I want to know if you actually do find it strange. I don’t think it matters what differences I see in the two statements. Suppose it turns out that actually, aa’s advice-as-written is sensible and he was right all along and I’m wrong. Fine. Nevertheless, right now I think his advice-as-written is bad, and you’re telling us that advice he didn’t write is good, and I want to know if you can tell the difference between what he did and didn’t write. You don’t need to see the same differences as I do, you just need to be able to see enough differences that you understand why people might be okay with one and not the other.
Do you actually think that people are getting irate at “the suggestion that people develop interpersonal skills, and that their parents should help them do so if they see a lack”? Because if so, I claim that you are just flat out wrong. That is not what aa suggested, and it’s not what people are getting irate about.
(I don’t want to say exactly what it is that I don’t like about aa’s advice-as-written. I don’t want to put in the time to do it justice, I don’t want to write a not-quite-right version and open myself up to nitpicking, I don’t think it’s a productive avenue of discussion right now, and I’m not convinced that you aren’t just asking as a distraction. This is a can of worms that I decline to open.)
And actually, when I say “I want to know”, that’s a rhetorical flourish. I don’t really care. What I started this post trying to say was: I think you’re being (perhaps deliberately) obtuse, and I don’t think I want to continue engaging with you on this. I’ve put more time and emotional energy into this discussion than I care to admit, and I don’t think it’s paying off. There are probably things you can say in reply that would change my mind, but by default, I’m done here.
I’m not sure how that’s a reply to me.
I complained that you were uncharitably misrepresenting my position. You say I’m not entitled to charity, but your representation of my position doesn’t come close to anything I ever said. This isn’t merely you not-being-charitable, this is you being either actively uncharitable, or arguing against imagined dog whistles, or something that isn’t engaging with either what I said or what I meant.
(You may say that you never mentioned me, and that’s so. But if you weren’t including me in “people get so irate”, who specifically did you mean?)
I’m not here looking for a fight with aa. I mostly just ignore him. I replied to you, when you said “this seems like good advice”, and I said that the advice you had taken from aa’s post was a much weaker version of what he had actually said, and that aa’s history makes me disinclined to engage with him.
You’re telling me that I should attack aa based on the text he actually wrote, but you’re the one who turned “if girls don’t find your son sexually attractive, he needs some kind of intervention to correct that right away” into “if your child lacks interpersonal skills, you should help them develop them”.
When you say “I find it strange that...”, I want to know if you actually do find it strange. I don’t think it matters what differences I see in the two statements. Suppose it turns out that actually, aa’s advice-as-written is sensible and he was right all along and I’m wrong. Fine. Nevertheless, right now I think his advice-as-written is bad, and you’re telling us that advice he didn’t write is good, and I want to know if you can tell the difference between what he did and didn’t write. You don’t need to see the same differences as I do, you just need to be able to see enough differences that you understand why people might be okay with one and not the other.
Do you actually think that people are getting irate at “the suggestion that people develop interpersonal skills, and that their parents should help them do so if they see a lack”? Because if so, I claim that you are just flat out wrong. That is not what aa suggested, and it’s not what people are getting irate about.
(I don’t want to say exactly what it is that I don’t like about aa’s advice-as-written. I don’t want to put in the time to do it justice, I don’t want to write a not-quite-right version and open myself up to nitpicking, I don’t think it’s a productive avenue of discussion right now, and I’m not convinced that you aren’t just asking as a distraction. This is a can of worms that I decline to open.)
And actually, when I say “I want to know”, that’s a rhetorical flourish. I don’t really care. What I started this post trying to say was: I think you’re being (perhaps deliberately) obtuse, and I don’t think I want to continue engaging with you on this. I’ve put more time and emotional energy into this discussion than I care to admit, and I don’t think it’s paying off. There are probably things you can say in reply that would change my mind, but by default, I’m done here.
You’re irate, but refuse to lay your cards on the table. That’s your prerogative.
Yes, people often don’t want to do that. A less flattering way of phrasing that is that you don’t want to open your opinions to scrutiny.
I’m not shy about my opinions, and I wasn’t going to play psychic detective with yours.