Win? I’m confused. I didn’t think I was competing with you about anything! Were we arguing about something? I thought I was expressing my preferences in the form of a tangent from your description.
passive-aggressive
Aggressive perhaps and I can understand why you may say “high-handed”, but passive? There is no way that is remotely passive. It’s a clear and direct expression of active policy! Approximately the opposite to passive. Some would even take it as a threat (even though it technically doesn’t qualify as such since it is just what would be done anyway even without any desire to control the other.)
and that you should have simply asked him not to do it
I acknowledge your preference that I ask people not to do a behavior rather than declare that I downvote a behavior. In this case I will not comply but can at least explain. I don’t like asking things of those with whom I have no rapport and no reason to expect them to wish to assist me. To me that just feels unnatural. In fact, the only reason I would ask in such a case is because to do so influences the audience and thereby manipulates the target. Instead I like to acknowledge where the real boundaries of influence are. I influence my votes. He influences his comments. Others influence their votes.
In the end it could be that you upvote most instances of a thing while I downvote most instances of a thing. We cancel out, with the only change being that between the two of us we lose one person’s worth of voting nuance in such cases.
The “passive-aggressive” bit, in my opinion, was where he solicited people’s opinion on whether it offends them, and you skipped past actually saying it offends you and went to threats.
Win? I’m confused. I didn’t think I was competing with you about anything! Were we arguing about something? I thought I was expressing my preferences in the form of a tangent from your description.
Aggressive perhaps and I can understand why you may say “high-handed”, but passive? There is no way that is remotely passive. It’s a clear and direct expression of active policy! Approximately the opposite to passive. Some would even take it as a threat (even though it technically doesn’t qualify as such since it is just what would be done anyway even without any desire to control the other.)
I acknowledge your preference that I ask people not to do a behavior rather than declare that I downvote a behavior. In this case I will not comply but can at least explain. I don’t like asking things of those with whom I have no rapport and no reason to expect them to wish to assist me. To me that just feels unnatural. In fact, the only reason I would ask in such a case is because to do so influences the audience and thereby manipulates the target. Instead I like to acknowledge where the real boundaries of influence are. I influence my votes. He influences his comments. Others influence their votes.
In the end it could be that you upvote most instances of a thing while I downvote most instances of a thing. We cancel out, with the only change being that between the two of us we lose one person’s worth of voting nuance in such cases.
The “passive-aggressive” bit, in my opinion, was where he solicited people’s opinion on whether it offends them, and you skipped past actually saying it offends you and went to threats.