NOTE: I will be dealing with comments a bit differently here on WordPress; see the comments policy link at the top of the page.
Due in part to the recent massive derailing of, and general unpleasantness within, a certain discussion thread here, I will be enforcing my comments policy more stringently, especially when it comes to personal attacks, and off-topic posts that I find tiresome and/or disruptive.Also, I’m introducing short-term bans for people who are breaking the rules but don’t deserve forever bans. Blogger doesn’t let me literally ban people; I just delete their comments. If I’ve “banned” someone and they keep posting, just ignore them. I will delete their comments when I see them.
I’ve updated my comments policy page to reflect this. If you’re new here, read it.
>You guys have to keep in mind that I'm a bit socially-awkward. One of the biggest problems I have with my books is writing convincing dialogue, and to tackle the problem, I decided to carry out a bit of a meta-analysis on how people react conversationally to certain kinds of probing; how they tolerate moral or intellectual dissonance, apologetic behavior, that sort of thing. You guys have been excellent study material.
>Kave, your points in that discussion were basically: rich people have it harder than people give them credit for; everybody is always hating on rich people and it's not fair; people who criticize rich people are envious.Replace "rich people" with "men" and you have a garden variety misogynist. Deal with it.
>@ THASF:That's why a lot of the people here don't much care for you. You're not an all-knowing scientist in a lab, and we're not 'study material' for you. We're actual people – and 'studying' how people talk on the Internet reveals nothing about how they talk in real life. If you really want to study how people speak and have conversations, go rent some movies. If you can't afford movies, then go to Hulu (since you obviously have a computer and Internet connection). Watch those people, and stop bothering us.
>Trip.My initial post was projected towards an mra claiming how their life's hardships were worse then others, my post said everyone deals with their shit (could have been someone else claiming pure victimhood). I used the example of myself losing a child and my friggin brother.In my initial post I stated that we were allowed the best health care but that didn't stop the inevitable.Trip, she called me a rich arrogant bastard after my initial post, that is really sad.When I was a kid I thought of everyone who owned a business as being wealthy, from the corner store owner etc. No idea where this misconception came from but it was there. So I can somewhat understand your problems with people with money? (or maybe my parents instilled in me that the couple that owned the drugstore on the corner were our equals)Of course this comes from the same person who hates engineers. I have a personal issue with this as my mother got her degree in engineering in the early 1980, in her 60's, because it was always something she wanted and was denied to her when she went through school. Deal with your hate of my mother. Does that sound reasonable?
>I actually agree with you on that. Studying fiction itself is one of the best ways to learn how to write decent fiction. And, naturally, people online don't talk anything like they do in real life. First of all, text sent over the internet is usually carefully composed and proofread beforehand; it lacks the naturalistic disfluencies of actual speech. Second, anonymity lets people say the darndest things. See, I wanted to do a period piece that starts off back in the 1920s, but I don't really have the faintest idea how people talked back then.What do I do? Well, for starters, I figured I should be digging up books and newspapers published around that time and reading them until I get the feel for it. A lot of those older newspapers are only readily available in microform, so I've planned a few visits to a local library to pore over that stuff. It's been a while since I've been in this area of the state. Last time I was at this particular library, they had some microfiche machines, but that was before I hit my teen years. They may have already scanned everything into their system and stored it in digital format, getting rid of the old archives of analog stuff. That's a shame, because even though digital stuff is easier to sift through and copy, I have such nostalgia for microfiche machines.
>I think THASF is trying to pull a Scott Adams. Keep me alerted of any ensuing sock puppetry.@Kave, your statements were massively classist, so assuming you were not examining your privilege was the more generous position (the alternative is assuming you willfully throw around your privilege). If the pain that you are complaining of is one that happens to humans across the board, it is not a sign that a privileged person who suffered it is the oppressed class. If it is a pain like this one that is in fact more commonly suffered by the oppressed group that the privileged person is whining to (poor people loose children at higher rates due to discrepancies in access to medical care, nutrition, safe housing, etc.), you are being a privileged ass when you bring it up to try and elicit pity. Even more so when the rest of your woes are nothing more than pathetic whinging. This could be your theme song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34u_3Z9_LUw
>When I was a kid I thought of everyone who owned a business as being wealthy, from the corner store owner etc. No idea where this misconception came from but it was there. So I can somewhat understand your problems with people with money? (or maybe my parents instilled in me that the couple that owned the drugstore on the corner were our equals)Ah, so if it's not class envy that's motivating me, it's childish naivete? Splendid.If I were to "explain" to a black person why they shouldn't place so much blame on white people, or to a woman why they shouldn't place so much blame on men, I'd be a privilege-denying asshole. Just saying.
>THASF, as someone who dealt with her own social awkwardness around your same age, let me give you the most valuable piece of advice I can. It worked for me, and it will work for you. Shut the fuck up. I mean that in the nicest way possible. Shut the fuck up, and just watch people. Don't try to interject, don't try to manipulate them, don't use them as your own private experiments. Shut up, and watch how they interact with each other. Seek out social occasions and join groups with open membership (like hobby clubs or volunteer organizations). And shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up for about a year. After a year of watching how people interact without trying to force inclusion or force your ideas on people who don't care for them, you'll be a much savvier person and won't piss people off all the time with your relentless self-absorbed cluelessness. Trust me, I spent my own year shutting the fuck up and learned reams from it.
>Oh, and I'm also really enjoying your constant assumptions about whether or not *I* have money. I don't have a great deal, but I have as much as I want. I certainly don't consider myself lower-class, mainly because to do so would entail a great deal of privilege-denial on my part. I'm firmly middle class, and I'm of the opinion that middle-class people are frequent privilege-deniers as well, so please cut it out with the classist assumptions that only poor people have a problem with rich people.
Kave – Some people have their heads so far up their agendas that they’ll twist anything you say to fit their own world view. They’re not interested in a discussion, they just want to label you and tell you you’re wrong. I mean, I joke around, but it boggles my mind how twisted, bereft of empathy and generally fucked-up a person has to be to hear someone share a personal tragedy of losing a child and insult them for it. If I were you, I’d stop trying to communicate because there’s no point. These are not normal, ordinary people you’re talking to here. They’ve got issues.
By the way, I just looked at triplanetary’s blog. God, what a self-important, wordy bore. Probably thinks he’s hip and clever for parroting feminist buzzwords like ‘privilege’, too.