Open Letter to All Squabblers
When I was six or seven years old my family used to take interminably long one-hour road trips to the beach for summer vacation. My parents would sit in the front seats of the car leaving my older sister and I to squabble in the back for the duration of the journey. Those were days when my sister would unwind after a hard day at school by chasing me around the house while threatening to castrate me with a wiffleball bat. At the time I thought she was being rather cruel (she was twice my size), but now she swears it was all out of love. Nevertheless we were at each other's throats quite a bit in those days.On one such trip we embarked on an epic shouting match in what was a mutual attempt to describe each other's noxious odor.
Big Sister: You smell. I don't even want to be near you.
Me: Yeah, well you stink.
Big Sister: No you stink.
Me: If I stink then you stench.
Big Sister: What does that mean?
(My mother and father let out an anguished chuckle in the front seat)
Me: It's worse than stink.
Big Sister: Then you stench even worse.
The whole affair rapidly descended into a fit of hair pulling, biting and kicking before my parents mercifully announced we were at the beach and we shouldn't talk to each other for the rest of the day.
Looking back on those days I realize that I was learning a valuable lesson that I can now apply to my presence here in the blogosphere. Over the last week or so I have gotten quite a few abusive posts and comments (on this blog and others) that, in my own stupidity, thought I could resolve by replying to. The ensuing melee has descended into a spiting and biting match that I haven't been able to replicate since I was the time I was a child. After reading some of the posters blogs, it seems that there a few people who's content subsists on little more than hurling insults.
Sadly, I took the bait a few times and now have a seething mob at the gates. In the future I will not make such mistakes. I will delete any abusive posts that appear on this blog. Though I am happy to engage in a discussion of ideas on occasion (though I may scale back on that as well), posts that include the world "dumbfuck", "puke", or just generally spout hate will no longer be welcome here.
posted by Scott Carney @ 10:05 AM
6 comments
6 Comments:
Good Call.
Ah, you're not alone in the trap of being baited online. I've been similarly lured into such downward spirals at times, though not (yet?) on my own blog (mine were years ago, in Usenet groups; had I realized then what I know now about the virtual eternity of archives and caches, I might not have been so easily provoked back then) :)
I appreciate your honesty in sharing this with the rest of us: thank you.
Very nice post. Verbal conversations tend to degenerate into conflict in any case. When we have such a spiritual forum where one can interact with one another without arousing emotions and something that our ancestors never had in the entire history of mankind, it is shameful to generate conflict.
Scott, this happens. There are always nut cases.
Just ignore them. Don't read them.
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Yeah, we all get those kinds of trolls on our websites. Some people just have nothing better to do than just cut someone else down. Hell, we even have to deal with those people in life.
Usually I just let the trolls have their say, leave it up, and move on. But each person's blog is each person's blog and you have to do what makes you commfortable and happy. I feel badly that you've been under attack lately, but just think, if the trolls are finding you, so are the good people too.
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