Well, I guess it's better to stick your thumb up yer arse than shove your foot in your mouth
Though no one has outright shunned me yet, I'm just going to say right now that if you would just because I'm on bad terms with a friend of yours, you were never much of a friend to me in the first place. This is coming not from paranoia, but experience. I've always been a lone wolf in a sense because I need friends as much as anyone else, but I don't necessarily need to be part of a group. Historically, I've always had a little circle of friends, and by association would end up hanging with the different groups each of my individual friends were down with. The difference between me and my friends is usually that I'm not very dependant on group dynamics to make my decisions, but they are. In my personal reasoning, there's nothing that says if two members of a given clique have a falling out, I can't still be friends with both of them, but not once in my life have I ever been afforded that priveledge. Even if the dispute is between me and a mutual friend, the original friend, the one that "brought me to the dance" so to speak ALWAYS abandons me for his clique.
So, to conclude this forward to the real LJ upddate, my quarrel is with this ONE individual, and not every single one of her friends. I don't want anyone taking sides, even though you probably will. But I'd like very much to be proven wrong in my instincts of people for a change. Don't start no drama and there won't be none, son.
Now, this whole thing started because I argued with someone on their opinion of the death penalty (AGAIN?! Yep. There's only a handful of issues where I consider myself a hardliner, and that's one of 'em). My vehement opposition to the death penalty isn't my inherent flaw, it turns out. Indeed, it's that I assumed too much of the reader's capacity to see the obvious, based on common decency. If I use the example of most people on death row being poor / minorities, and coming from environments where killing is fucking commonplace in its injustice, it's not safe to assume I think what's happening in those communities is itself unjust. No, you can't take it for granted that I just might think the death penalty is wrong because killing is wrong. I have to spell it out, otherwise you're not a complete and utter nimrod for thinking I actually condone the crimes people wind up on death row for. Since I need to spell things out for people, here's the breakdown: Raksha interprited my words as meaning I think executing murderers is horribly wrong, but the murders they commit are justified because of where they come from.
When she told me I should seek proffessional help and that I had fallen off the deep end, it pissed me off because at the time, I thought she was just using a cheap dis since that's a pretty common one. It wasn't until I dogged her out about it in IRC that I found out she said that because she thought my sense of reasoning truly was that warped. She spelled it out for me: "You defend murder". For someone to believe I'm twisted enough to think murder is justified when committed by one person and wrong when it's done by another, that truly hurts. Especially after the YEARS of debate and discussion on various chats and forums we both participated in where I demonstrated thinking and reasoning capabilities equal (if not greater, frankly) to most people you find in such places. Do you not know me at all?
Adding to my alleged Killer-Lover stance in her issues with me is that I talk a lot about class and "race" (her word, not mine. I've said quite a few times now that I no longer believe in race). Furthermore, I actually speak as if I know what I'm talking about instead of just citing news reports and such. I do "put myself in the middle of it" sometimes, when I'm talking about the inequalities that exist in society, as you charge. But why you think that's inherently a bad quality escapes me, unless my stories overshadowed the issue. And so far, you're the only person who has made a bigger deal of the person telling the stories than the stories themselves. Everyone else seems to get it; I'm just using my life for comparisons and examples (waits for an assload of wiggerdom cries).
The last point of contention, and this one is more weak than the first two, is that I need to "grow some balls" and "bring it her your face". First of all, in matters such as these there's really only one kind of balls anyone has, and that's virtual balls. And making me out to be a coward because I dared speak ill of her in her absense "because she's hardly that threatening" is just another facet of virtual balls. There was one point on IRC where she went AFK for a minute, and I continued with what I was saying, expecting her to scroll up when she got back. Sure enough she scrolled up, but I guess not waiting for her to return from being AFK before resuming is the same as talking behind her back. There was three other occassions in that session where I didn't speak directly to her, and two of those were PM's where two different people asked me to tell them what was going on. The other one was me saying "good riddance" when she left. If people truly followed that bullshit about not talking about people behind their backs, hardly anything would ever get said. The question is, are you willing to say the same thing to their face? There is nothing of significance I said about Raksha while she was away that I didn't say to her in person. And most of what I said boils down to this: You're wrong about me.
Last minute note: I went back and read the exchange that led up to this, and in fact I *DID* clearly state that killing is itself wrong. And I quote,
"Because I can't conceive the idea of killing ever not being wrong (self-defense aside). Killing is wrong, and a wrong is a wrong no matter who commits it"
You know what's really fucked about this? When we were having the argument, she boldly exclaimed that I had defended the act of murder, and asked if she had to get quotes to prove it. I would never outright defend it, but since the reply was written on the 24th of December I had forgotten my exact words and assumed I had made an omission which she interprited as such - hence my "spelling it out" here. I wish I had told her to dig up those quotes, because she probably would've come across the very statement she said I should've made and realized what an ass she was being.
Can we say foot in mouth?
So, to conclude this forward to the real LJ upddate, my quarrel is with this ONE individual, and not every single one of her friends. I don't want anyone taking sides, even though you probably will. But I'd like very much to be proven wrong in my instincts of people for a change. Don't start no drama and there won't be none, son.
Now, this whole thing started because I argued with someone on their opinion of the death penalty (AGAIN?! Yep. There's only a handful of issues where I consider myself a hardliner, and that's one of 'em). My vehement opposition to the death penalty isn't my inherent flaw, it turns out. Indeed, it's that I assumed too much of the reader's capacity to see the obvious, based on common decency. If I use the example of most people on death row being poor / minorities, and coming from environments where killing is fucking commonplace in its injustice, it's not safe to assume I think what's happening in those communities is itself unjust. No, you can't take it for granted that I just might think the death penalty is wrong because killing is wrong. I have to spell it out, otherwise you're not a complete and utter nimrod for thinking I actually condone the crimes people wind up on death row for. Since I need to spell things out for people, here's the breakdown: Raksha interprited my words as meaning I think executing murderers is horribly wrong, but the murders they commit are justified because of where they come from.
When she told me I should seek proffessional help and that I had fallen off the deep end, it pissed me off because at the time, I thought she was just using a cheap dis since that's a pretty common one. It wasn't until I dogged her out about it in IRC that I found out she said that because she thought my sense of reasoning truly was that warped. She spelled it out for me: "You defend murder". For someone to believe I'm twisted enough to think murder is justified when committed by one person and wrong when it's done by another, that truly hurts. Especially after the YEARS of debate and discussion on various chats and forums we both participated in where I demonstrated thinking and reasoning capabilities equal (if not greater, frankly) to most people you find in such places. Do you not know me at all?
Adding to my alleged Killer-Lover stance in her issues with me is that I talk a lot about class and "race" (her word, not mine. I've said quite a few times now that I no longer believe in race). Furthermore, I actually speak as if I know what I'm talking about instead of just citing news reports and such. I do "put myself in the middle of it" sometimes, when I'm talking about the inequalities that exist in society, as you charge. But why you think that's inherently a bad quality escapes me, unless my stories overshadowed the issue. And so far, you're the only person who has made a bigger deal of the person telling the stories than the stories themselves. Everyone else seems to get it; I'm just using my life for comparisons and examples (waits for an assload of wiggerdom cries).
The last point of contention, and this one is more weak than the first two, is that I need to "grow some balls" and "bring it her your face". First of all, in matters such as these there's really only one kind of balls anyone has, and that's virtual balls. And making me out to be a coward because I dared speak ill of her in her absense "because she's hardly that threatening" is just another facet of virtual balls. There was one point on IRC where she went AFK for a minute, and I continued with what I was saying, expecting her to scroll up when she got back. Sure enough she scrolled up, but I guess not waiting for her to return from being AFK before resuming is the same as talking behind her back. There was three other occassions in that session where I didn't speak directly to her, and two of those were PM's where two different people asked me to tell them what was going on. The other one was me saying "good riddance" when she left. If people truly followed that bullshit about not talking about people behind their backs, hardly anything would ever get said. The question is, are you willing to say the same thing to their face? There is nothing of significance I said about Raksha while she was away that I didn't say to her in person. And most of what I said boils down to this: You're wrong about me.
Last minute note: I went back and read the exchange that led up to this, and in fact I *DID* clearly state that killing is itself wrong. And I quote,
"Because I can't conceive the idea of killing ever not being wrong (self-defense aside). Killing is wrong, and a wrong is a wrong no matter who commits it"
You know what's really fucked about this? When we were having the argument, she boldly exclaimed that I had defended the act of murder, and asked if she had to get quotes to prove it. I would never outright defend it, but since the reply was written on the 24th of December I had forgotten my exact words and assumed I had made an omission which she interprited as such - hence my "spelling it out" here. I wish I had told her to dig up those quotes, because she probably would've come across the very statement she said I should've made and realized what an ass she was being.
Can we say foot in mouth?