Look, I never said it wasn’t a serious attempt to engage with the subject, and I respect that, and I respect the author(s).
Let me put it this way. If someone writes something unintentionally funny, are you laughing at them or at what they wrote? To me there is a clear separation between author and written text.
If you’ve heard of the TV show “America’s Funniest Home Videos”, that is an example of something I don’t laugh at, because it seems to be all people getting hurt.
If someone was truly hurt by my comment then I apologise. I did not mean it that way.
I still stand by the substance of my criticism though. The fact that I was amused has nothing to do with whether what I wrote was genuine—it was. It’s sort of… Who is at fault when someone misinterprets your tone online? I don’t think either party can really have a strong claim, because writing is extremely hard to get the tone right and then as a reader you don’t know the person who wrote it either, so you could have totally different expectations of what the author of a piece of writing is thinking. Not to mention online you’re very likely to be from different countries and cultural backgrounds, who have different norms.
As a further apology, I am very very unlikely to write any more detail on this unless the original article author messages me to ask me for it.
Look, I never said it wasn’t a serious attempt to engage with the subject, and I respect that, and I respect the author(s).
Let me put it this way. If someone writes something unintentionally funny, are you laughing at them or at what they wrote? To me there is a clear separation between author and written text.
If you’ve heard of the TV show “America’s Funniest Home Videos”, that is an example of something I don’t laugh at, because it seems to be all people getting hurt.
If someone was truly hurt by my comment then I apologise. I did not mean it that way.
I still stand by the substance of my criticism though. The fact that I was amused has nothing to do with whether what I wrote was genuine—it was. It’s sort of… Who is at fault when someone misinterprets your tone online? I don’t think either party can really have a strong claim, because writing is extremely hard to get the tone right and then as a reader you don’t know the person who wrote it either, so you could have totally different expectations of what the author of a piece of writing is thinking. Not to mention online you’re very likely to be from different countries and cultural backgrounds, who have different norms.
As a further apology, I am very very unlikely to write any more detail on this unless the original article author messages me to ask me for it.