Fake news and conspiracies abound
What to do with an angry comment on your post
There’s a lot of crap flying around the net these days.
Fake news, conspiracy theories, anti-vax, and anti-government. It runs the full gamut.
I think people are losing their minds. It’s like the monkey I once saw at the zoo, throwing his shit at the tourists. When you are surrounded by shit, you might decide to throw some, just to see how it feels.
I don’t hang out on Facebook or respond to the posts that are sometimes shared with me. When a friend gets all up in arms about something or another, I tend to stay quiet.
At the most, I might suggest it’s not worth their time, or their health, to get all riled up. I try to stay out of it, for the most part.
Some comments are poop bombs.
Once in a while someone posts a comment on a story I’ve written and they are angry, it surprises me. A poop bomb lands in my inbox with a splat.
It’s clear they’ve made some assumptions about who I am and what I believe and they’ve decided I’ve either done something wrong to them, or I’ve offended them by my presence.
I recently wrote a story about UFOs, mentioning a report that the Pentagon released. Their take on the flying objects was familiar. They didn’t understand them so they consider they might be a national security risk.
One of my readers decided I was agreeing with the Pentagon and vehemently disagreed. The conversation escalated until I took the unusual (for me) step of blocking them.
One was in response to a question I posed on Quora.
“What do they call the Afghan War in Afghanistan? In Vietnam, the people called it the American War.”
Well, most people ignored me, but there was this one guy who decided I was the reason for all the wrongs that had ever occurred to any person in Vietnam, living and dead.
His response was long and very angry. A giant shit splat that caught me by surprise.
After a bit of research, I discovered that he cuts and pastes the same answer to every question with the word Vietnam in it.
My favorite part of his rant included this:
And of course foreigners like you are enjoying the cheap living environment in the poor country Vietnam. Therefore you have no incentives to look at the truth about the evil dictatorship Vietnamese communist party who has been your friends in providing you cheap labor and cheap food and cheap entertainment to feel good about yourself of having American dollars and passport to leave Vietnam anything you want!
I decided not to take it personally, his anger wasn’t directed at me.
Most of the time I keep my head down.
At least until today.
Over the last week, a drama erupted in a familiar space on Medium. I’ve been here for a while and I confess that I’m comfortable in my role. I’m not the boss, (thank g*d) but like to think I’m fairly well respected. And I try to get along with others.
The drama isn’t new, but it got a bit out of hand. People were fed up. A huge poop bomb started it.
There was blame and shame, then came the leadership style that I’ve seen before (but can’t for the life of me understand). People took things personally and some took actions that can’t be reversed. It’s happened before. It’s a familiar pattern, actually.
In the past, things would settle down. Eventually. And we would get back to work, back to the business of building something together.
This time, things are different.
Publications on Medium seem to be a bit … passé. There’s more focus on individual writers and the push to build an empire is a bit stale. We used to have a mutual goal, but that ship has sailed.
On top of that, there was an angry writer with an agenda, a defensive editor, and a boss who decided to side with the writer, removing the editor. An old rival surfaced to replay an old drama. One person is now referring to themselves in the third person.
That’s a new development. Or if it’s not, I think it’s gotten worse.
The whole thing has been hashed over several times in several articles by some of the involved parties so I won’t repeat it here.
My advice in these situations is the same. Don’t return the poop bomb volley.
It’s not worth the trouble. Besides, that kind of shit is sticky.
The old ‘he said, she said’ arguments are full of assumptions and judgment. In a world that is full of negative crap, we don’t need to carry on like this. It’s not worth it and in the end, nothing will change.
Except some of our team have left and I will miss them.
Now that things have settled down, and the various parties have returned to their respective corners I’m noticing something else.
I’m wondering why I bother.
And if you’re wondering why I’m still there, I’m asking myself the same question. I think it’s a pattern from childhood. I’ve been trained. I learned to ignore problems and believe the narcissist.
The whole exercise seems pointless to me now. It feels like an ending of sorts and that might be my cue.
Glad you’re here with me today.
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Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash