A short one from your Favorite Clete.
I was working the other day and took a break to peruse Twitter, as I am wont to do. I have another, private handle that I use for certain things and happened upon a thread where a very dear friend of mine was locked in a seemingly endless conversation with another party and the other party was rather Inflammatory in the process. I jumped in on the thread, as my friend and I often do when they see the other active, and I countered some points that the other party was trying to pass off as being untrue.
As it happened, we started texting shortly after, and this friend said that she was suddenly feeling emotional and was crying because she was afraid she had said the wrong thing and either offended the other party, or had been hypocritical about the subject (had to do with threats against elected officials like so many of them are the last week or so).
I told her not to worry about what some anonymous pixel-head thought about her, because she knows the truth about herself, and at the end of the day, that’s all that matters. It doesn’t mean a thing if your opponent hates you for gutting their argument, all it means is that they can’t answer the challenge you’ve thrown down with fact instead of ‘feels.’ Took some convincing as she’s a sweet gentle soul, but she finally saw my point and agreed with me.
Which leads me to the $64,000 question: how much do you care if people agree or disagree with you on Twitter? Personally, I don’t give a damn, if they block me – it just means that they can’t refute my arguments and the block thrown up is their signal of defeat. Which is not to say I haven’t blocked someone, because I have, but mostly for threatening or grossly abusive behavior, and it is after I’ve either reported them to @abuse or had been blocked myself for the most part (in the instance of Pastor Whitey though, it’s an imperative that I keep tweaking his TL for his readers).
Discuss.
