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Paranoidwriter: I'm rereading the thread on Greenpeace, and I'd like to clarify something, if I may. The point at which you said:
And as my friend once wrote:
"Well so much for your famous ambivalence;
Who's going home in a fucking ambulance?"
He has a point, don't you think, Haus?
What was that intended to say?
I think the discussion was really pretty polite up until that point - I hadn't realised that you found the comment about Police Constable Hell offensive. I regret that, and would like to assure you that it was not an in-joke, except I suppose insofar as almost any citation of Political Correctness will trigger some japery through familiarity.
Also of interest on that one, I think, is why Deva is not mentioned in your account, and Flyboy and I are.
However, hindsight is demonstrably a very useful thing, here. For example, I had no idea at the time that you had found my question about "Police Constable Hell" (which was intended as a reasonably jocular way to draw attention to the position that "PC" was a more controversial phrase than might be assumed):
a joke which I felt was not laughing along with me, but laughing at me. It felt like you were performing to the stalls, sharing some "in-joke" and pointing at my words and laughing.
So, we had a situation in which you felt hurt by my comment, but felt it was better to put a brave face on it, and I did not realise that you had been hurt by it, and thus that the broader point - that the terminology was subject to criticism - was in danger of getting lost in a feeling of personal affront, which was also raising the emotional temperature.
Now, at times I have in similar situations asked people why, if they felt such things, they did not express them at the time. However, I have realised over time that there are all sorts of reasons why one might not: the fear that expressing emotion will be seen as weakness, the pressure to "be a sport", the desire to avoid threadrot, the wish to avoid going further into a conversation they don't want to have (however successfully that strategy plays out).
So - and FFF's complaint about the title of this thread, and Dead Megatron's subsequent uncertainty about whether a picture of Prowl in the "Lessons Learned" thread meant that I was not listening at all also feed into this - I think I'm learning that I have to be more careful with what I see as fairly uncomplicated jokes. This is probably in part because my sense of humour may not be everyone's (I'm really not sure if the headcrab stuff or the Athena Cyberman are flying, but I'm amusing myself, at least. It keeps me off the streets), and also because if I do have this instinctive creation of a guard position in some members they are more likely to assume that I am probing for weaknesses or getting a dig that they cannot perceive but feel others might in.
So, the lesson there is, presumably, that I have to be more aware that throwaway jokes can be easily misconstrued, and in fact that I may myself be using the throwaway joke as a way to express an emotional reaction to something without wanting to provide the hooks to get into a discussion - that is, doing pretty much exactly what sibyline, above, doesn't think I do - not letting go of an argument. So, I will have to try in future to be more careful about making it clear when IT WAS A JOK3!!! and when it was in fact not only a joke but also a challenge - for example, when, in the discussion of Sony's advertising, I said that our greatest weapon in the war against misogyny was racism.
So, PW, I'm sorry that you felt you were being made the butt of an in-joke in that thread - you were not, but your terminology was beng criticised, and that could have been done with less ambiguity to begin with, and I am also sorry that you did not feel comfortable with raising the question of the motivation behind the gag at the time. I will endeavour to create conditions where this will not recure. |
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