After almost two and a half years of blogging, I have seen certain comments crop up with scary regularity and had to learn to decipher them. Here is a list of such popular comments and my translations of what they really mean. Feel free to add your own:
This is a straw-man argument – How dare you denounce sexists, racists, and homophobes to whom I proudly belong?
Where is your respect for freedom of speech? – I will spout any kind of rubbish I want and you will listen and never object.
You would gain more allies if you were less aggressive – Shut up and go into your corner, you woman.
Everything you write is ridiculous – I’m vaguely bothered by something you said but I’m too stupid to verbalize what it is that bothers me.
You don’t even know me, so how dare you say these things about me – I’m such a center of the universe that everything published online has to be about me.
This is a horrible blog! I will never come back! – I will read all of the posts you ever wrote, commit many of them to memory, and keep leaving endless comments about how this is a horrible blog and how I will never come back to it.
You just say this because you are autistic – I am bothered by clear, logical arguments.
You are elitist – I don’t understand all these long three-syllable words.
You are lying, this never really happened to you – I don’t know how to reconcile your experience with my very limited world view.
All of you Lefties / feminists / autistics / women are the same – The world makes no sense to me unless I have subdivided people into groups and assigned labels to them.
It is a waste of time to argue with you – I have no idea how to respond to your arguments.
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