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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   4277 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 23, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Why block users? I have never blocked a single user on any platform. I cannot imagine getting so asschapped that I need to signal just how upset some guy on the internet made me (and I used to get into some heated arguments in spaces with no rules on decorum). The user in question may even say something interesting later, or I may want to participate in a thread that he parented.

If it's actual spam usually admins or moderators step in.

There are some users whose comments asschap me a whole lot. But I can't live with acting on it and blocking them. Not there yet in terms of achieving true nirvanna where I don't get asschapped in the first place, maybe one day.

FWIW, it's not exactly their opinions, as someone mentioned downstream, some posters just have really annoying writing styles. I recall reading a post where some guy almost literally hedged every single statement he made. Motherfucker, just commit to it! Its's not like we can't fill in the "it seems like"'s or "I think"'s using our imagination.

I've also been blocked by 4 different users, 3 of them, never even responded to. I'm quite the asschapper myself (mostly unintentionally?).

Like urquan and some others here, I also tend to hedge my comments most of the time. In my case, it’s something I started to do in middle school, following the advice of Benjamin Franklin:

While I was intent on improving my language, I met with an English grammar . . ., at the end of which there were two little sketches of the arts of rhetoric and logic, the latter finishing with a specimen of a dispute in the Socratic method; and soon after I procur’d Xenophon’s Memorable Things of Socrates, wherein there are many instances of the same method. I was charm’d with it, adopted it, dropt my abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation, and put on the humble inquirer and doubter. . . . I continu’d this method some few years, but gradually left it, retaining only the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence; never using, when I advanced any thing that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; it appears to me, or I should think it so or so, for such and such reasons; or I imagine it to be so; or it is so, if I am not mistaken. This habit, I believe, has been of great advantage to me when I have had occasion to inculcate my opinions, and persuade men into measures that I have been from time to time engag’d in promoting; and, as the chief ends of conversation are to inform or to be informed, to please or to persuade, I wish well-meaning, sensible men would not lessen their power of doing good by a positive, assuming manner, that seldom fails to disgust, tends to create opposition, and to defeat every one of those purposes for which speech was given to us, to wit, giving or receiving information or pleasure. For, if you would inform, a positive and dogmatical manner in advancing your sentiments may provoke contradiction and prevent a candid attention. If you wish information and improvement from the knowledge of others, and yet at the same time express yourself as firmly fix’d in your present opinions, modest, sensible men, who do not love disputation, will probably leave you undisturbed in the possession of your error. And by such a manner, you can seldom hope to recommend yourself in pleasing your hearers, or to persuade those whose concurrence you desire.

This method also saves embarrassment, as I think Franklin pointed out elsewhere in his autobiography, on those occasions when what you thought to be so, isn’t.

In this place, people tend to speak more dogmatically and forthrightly, but at least for me, having gotten so used to hedging my words in such a way, it would take a conscience effort for me not to.

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