Lissa, not slink away. Walk away. There’s a difference. I’m not being down on you at all. Just trying to ease your puzzlement. I don’t think rudeness was called for, but I suppose some people’s nerves were rawer than mine. I know you mean well. What specifically got me in that thread (speaking only for myself here) was that you spoke at length about what you knew of the American prison system, when the crime happened in the U.K. It’s that you did so in such a way that the person only skimming might think you were speaking of the jurisdiction Michael Mullen’s case will be heard in. It took knowing where you live to realize that you weren’t speaking of the U.K.'s system. Am I making sense here? I’m no angel, I’ve really irritated people too. Sometimes the best you can do is just let it be, and let people regain their composure.
Adding: I am not saying you can’t “converse” on your favorite topic at all. Just use a bit more care about how/where you do so. That statement about the American prison system…really didn’t fit in with a thread about a crime committed in the U.K. Sort of apples and oranges, they’re both fruit, but different. I hope I’m not muddying things here. (ETA: Also, s’ok I know you love the topic. Just please try to pick and choose a bit better?)
I’m not saying you’re crossing that kind of hard line. Not that you don’t give respect, only that you seem to apportion respect not in accordance with the person expressing it. Not that arguing is disrespectful, but that arguing from certainty as an (albeit informed) observer against an active practitioner can be disrespectful. It’s like if I were to argue with Stephen Hawking on physics, though I know only a tiny amount; I could disagree with him, but to say “You’re wrong on that, this is how it is” would be very impolite and pretty foolish of me.
I see this as yet another “Im not doing anything wrong, so all those folks complaining about me ** must** be mean or something”.
at some point, one hopes that some level of recognition comes to fore.
I said what I meant in the other thread. If you want folks to stop bitching at you for posting authoritavely in threads where you arent’ an authority, maybe you should consider, like stop fucking doing that.
christ. I’ve got 30 fucking years experience in my very specific field, and I tend to post more like “in my experience, in my jurisdiction” than you do.
the jail/prison med thread was a classic. You kept on and on repeating what policy was and why in a prison, as if it had some relevance to the subject at hand. just like the more recent thread where you cited Ohio and Conneticut when the topic was “what would happen in the UK in this situation?”
and when it’s pointed out you get that “you all are so mean” tone.
you aren’t that stupid. butyou have blinders on the size of South America when it comes to this type of thing.
As I suspected, you have never worked a day in your life in this field. Proof-reading policy, talking to people, and attending seminars does not – cannot – give you much insight into how policies are applied on the ground. So when you say things like “If there is no policy in place, there’s really nothing the staff could do” – as you did in the linked thread – you don’t actually know what the staff could or couldn’t do, because you’ve never faced the situation where the limitations of policy meet the realities of a real-world situation. Not once. Ever.
I certainly would tell a med student that she was spouting bullshit if she was, and if I knew she was and had provided multiple citations to prove she was.
Your posts are manifestly not authoritative. Your tone is. It is precisely the disconnect between the authority and experience that you actually have – very little – and the authoritative tone you use that is so completely aggravating.
You make very broad statements – overly broad statements – as if they are irrefutable and universally true, when in fact they are more often than not situational and may be right or wrong, depending on the factual conditions. Here are just a few examples, from the “2 y.o. raped and murdered” thread and the “rape victim arrested” thread:
“Well, you’ve got to understand that any contact between a staff member and an inmate is (technically) considered a sexual assault even if it was 100% consensual.” (Note irrirtating authoritative “you’ve got to understand”)
“Inmates are ‘wards of the state’, and in some sense, they’re regarded as ‘children’.”
“The balance of power is hugely tilted in favor of the employee.”
“[Medical decisions are] the province of the doctors and the medical board and if they can’t be reached, there’s nothing that can be done.”
“Inmates are not denied medical care.”
All of these declarative statements are in fact frequently incorrect. And they are merely examples of the style in which you post; there are many, many more.
On the contrary; you appear to refuse to entertain the possibility you may be incorrect in your conclusions, and only accept correction when you have made manifestly wrong declarations – a/k/a “whoppers” – as you did in the “rape of a 2 y.o.” thread.
Many people have raised this as being an issue with you. MANY people. Muh-aaaany people. In this thread and in BOTH the other threads. And though you have chosen to be injured by those who have done so rather roughly, the truth is that many people have done so while trying to be quite nice about it. But rather than thinking, “Hey, numerous people perceive this as an annoyance and a problem,” you continue to try to defend yourself, acting hurt, as if the problem is ours.
It isn’t. It’s yours. And if you can’t see that, I don’t know where that leaves you. But I give you fair warning that if I perceive you to be misrepresenting the law by being overly authoritative or overly broad, I will call you on it – just as I would call anyone else on it who insisted on acting the same way. If you think that makes it an “attack” or, worse, a “personal attack,” at least you have been given fair warning.
I say this with all due respect and not a single iota of personal animus: if being corrected or disagreed with vehemently hurts your feelings, then on this topic alone, you’d better stay out of my way.
Lissa, I expressed my opinion on this in the thread which prompted it. You *do *speak authoritatively, you do *not *as a matter of course make it clear that you are speaking from research or citations. I appreciate that you may believe that you are doing so.
If one person tells you that you have a tail, you can scoff at them. But if several people are telling you that you do, you might want to turn around and check.
This is my take, too, Lissa.
For me, it’s not the frequency with which you mention your husband’s occupation that is grating. As far as i can tell, you participate in a whole bunch of different discussions on this board, and i don’t think that you’re especially obsessed with talking about your husband and his work.
But…
When you do talk about it, you assume a mantle of authority, and an unwillingness to brook any criticism or disagreement, that is rather unbecoming. You tend to offer snippets from your husband’s career as if they were somehow representative of everything that goes on in law enforcement, and dismiss both individual experiences and broader statistical evidence that contradicts your own perspective. As i said to you in this post, in the midst of a rather lengthy discussion of just this type of thing:
You are irritating as shit because of the Hubby this and Hubby that crap. Even when you stopped mentioning Hubby ALL THE FUCKING TIME (Og, that’s a cloying sickly sweet bullshit word anyway) your posts still implied divine wisdom passed down from “Hubby”.
BTW, 200 posts is only two percent of your total. :dubious:
And then in this current “Everybody is being mean to me” post you say you couldn’t take the venom. Jesus fucking christ, you left that thread because Jodi flat kicked your uninformed ass.
Why doesn’t Hubby get his own account and post his own bullshit?
If I could throw in a disinterested 3rd party comment here…
Lissa, up until about a year ago, I’d never particularly noticed your posts. I can’t remember what prompted me to notice your name at that point, but from then on, I saw that a lot of them were about your husband. Specifically “hubby.” And a lot of them were “hubby says this” or “hubby says that.”
I just ran a search on your name and the word “hubby.” Got back 368 hits. Add 25 husbands, and that’s a fair bit. And to be honest, it was definitely a perception thing. “Hubby” to me is cutesy and giggly. Add that to the fact that many were you relating pearls of wisdom that your husband related to you instead of your own conclusions. After a while, it was all I noticed. “Hubby,” not even “my hubby,” makes it feel as if he’s just the biggest strongest smartest guy and I love him to pieces and he loves me and he’s just got the cutest nose and I know that everyone feels the same way about him! Made me feel as if we were all supposed to know him and how smart and wonderful he is. And I’m not cutesy like that, and I wouldn’t know your husband from Adam. Got kinda grating. 'Member - perception, not logically based on squat. Got to the point where I wondered if you could post without mentioning him.
When I did notice you posting without mention of him, my opinion changed. “Huh. Nope. She’s normal, just like the rest of us here.” And then I’d go on my merry way.
I’ve seen hubby come up in a number of threads. One of the dog ones you mentioned, apparently, “Hubby said that no dog will dehydrate itself if fresh water is available…” If it’s not his opinion, it’s something that he did at work, and how she showed himself to be honest, funny, intelligent, and forthright. The whole prison issue aside, I get the impression that you very are proud of your husband and you love him very much and that you want to share him with the world. But we don’t know him, we’re not proud of him, we don’t love him. And consistently being exposed to hubby’s opinions and bon mots on everything is tiring.
Again - this has been my perception, not based on any fact at all. This is what I’ve noticed, and this has been my resulting subconscious reaction.
My $.02. I’d suggest leaving your husband’s words of wisdom or opinions out of your posts for a while. And if you mention that you guys went away for the weekend or something…lose the hubby. Tell us about your husband, instead.
Further, Lissa, you didn’t make it clear until this thread that you brainfarted and weren’t considering that the crime being discussed happened in the U.K. when you first posted in that thread. Your apology didn’t even hint at that. So, can you see why people remained irritable now? If you’d have said that in with your apology, it would have made a difference with me at least. I’m human too, I make mistakes also. I hope that this helps you.
I should also add that IMO you should think about getting a degree or a job in corrections. You’re obviously very interested in the area; you’re smart; you have common sense and enough initiative to study the subject on your own and, yes, learn from your husband. No doubt you would be a great addition to the corrections field.
Couple of points, Lissa. I find the information you provide to be interesting and a valuable contribution to those threads. However, you suffer from the “almost an authority” syndrome – and that’s not even close to an insult. There are several fields where I know “just enough to be dangerous” in the slang expression – enough to sound authoritative but not enough to cover all the ground needed from a true authority.
You know the procedures and policies of your husband’s prison, and presumably of your state’s prison system or the greater part of it, quite well. That does not make you an expert on corrections and incarceration nationwide – although if your husband has been to multistate seminars and such, information from him on comparative procedures might be very valuable.
What you do provide is valuable. It’s more the tone in which it’s delivered than anything else – and, frankly, you did yourself a disservice in ceasing to mention him when you happened to post on prisons. He is a bona fide authority on procedures in one state (perhaps more, as noted). But your tone after stopping mentioning him was one of an unquestionable authority on the subject, and that grates on many people.
What they do in another state may be quite different from the procedures at your husband’s institution, or in your state generally. What they do at municipal lockups and county jails, both in small towns and in metropolitan areas, will be quite different – if for no other reason than they’re dealing with a different population in the sociological sense – a different cross-section of criminals.
In the one recent thread we crossed paths in regarding corrections, the post-rape contraceptive denied the arrested woman, you were speaking with authority of how medicines were administered in prisons. But what you missed was that the circumstances were quite different: this was a woman raped and then arrested on a separate charge, not yet convicted, on her first day incarcerated and with a medicine she had already been issued by a physician familiar with her case – one whom the police would need to talk to anyway with reference to accruing evidence for the rape case. Not one in one hundred of your husband’s charges has been the victim of a crime on the street and then to a hospital emergency room the day before he or his staff deals with their medical needs. Simple arithmetic will show that. Vastly different circumstance than what you and he are familiar with. Yet you continued to argue against anyone saying that she was entitled to the medicine validly prescribed her – including Qadgop, who ought to know something about prison medicine.
Do continue to share the information you have been providing; it’s valuable. But dial back the tone of authority. (I’ve had to do it myself a few times; don’t take that as a persnal insult.) Do give your source, and consider a caveat that this is the case where your husband works, not necessarily the nationwide standard for prison operation (though if he knows about nationwide criteria that need to be followed, that’s priceless info. in such a thread). And consider the differences between the circumstances someone is asking about and the institution(s) you and your husband are familiar with, and adjust your presentation accordingly. Last, forgive me if this post sounds too authoritative. I’ve tried to make it advice-filled, based on complaint and my own observation both positive and negative. But it’s by no means the last word, just my opinion on what I think is wise.
Yes, wise advise. Rubystreak doesn’t like how she harps on her looks- so never mind all the agreement with Alice_in_wonderland. After all, she’s so vain that it wipes out her point. Please continue as normal, Lissa. Rubystreak’s got your back.
IMHO Lissa, you often use your account to post things that your Hubby should be posting or nobody at all. It definitely puts me off. I understand that you take it as something of a personal hobby, as well as the occupation of your husband, but somehow it all grates when taken together.
This is precisely it. For pity’s sake, you hear some anecdotes at a freaking barbecue from some of your hubby’s cop buddies, and you seriously think that gives you the basis for striding into a law enforcement thread to decisively inform everybody what HAD to have happened, that’s that, that’s just the way it is?
Oh, wait, I forgot – hubby actually rode around with cops! Himself! He even got to go on a high-speed chase! WOW. What better authority can there possibly be than that?
And by the way, how could you NOT have noticed that the baby-raper thread was about a crime in the UK? Did you just see “baby raper” and “prison” and go into autopilot “This is how it works in prisons” spewing without, you know, actually reading the whole goddamned thread?
Damn, woman, I tried to be polite about this when you were getting your ass handed to you by Jodi, but it appears you haven’t learned a thing from that except that all these meanies are picking on you for no good reason! Poor baby.
You’ve spent a long time building up this image of yourself, working diligently at it. You’re not going to shed it anytime soon, and anything you say about law enforcement topics will be filtered through the perceptions that you yourself created. Get used to it. Whining about it isn’t going to change anybody’s mind.
On preview: Polycarp, very kindly and gently, has told you exactly why you are royally pissing off so many of us. You’d do well to take his words to heart. Otherwise you’re going to continue to get slammed.
I’m not married and therefore unqualified to comment on anything.
I’ve never seen Lissa claim to know everything about prison issues. But she obviously does know more than the average person does because of her experiences. It would be one thing if she was arguing points with people who could claim to have more experience and knowledge of this area than she does, but it appears that some of the people arguing with her have less.
For what it’s worth, I have more direct experience on prison issues than Lissa does and probably have more than any other regular poster on this board. And I’ve never read anything she’s posted on prison issues that I would substantially disagree with.
Then you either haven’t checked the threads cited or you are mistaken.
did you happen to notice in the linked threads she was posting in , the subjects weren’t US prisons, but US jails and UK prisons? where she had less than zero experience? and it isn’t her experience, of course, it’s her spouses, yet she posts as if it’s her experience.
Lissa, the thread you linked to was exactly the one where I started thinking, “Gee, she sure mentions her husband’s job a lot as a source of her authority.” Before that I hadn’t noticed–and I remember the very excellent “Ask the Detective” thread he contributed to some years ago. But that thread made me sort of think back, and it does seem like you mention him a lot.
The reason people think you’re an authority is that you charged into that thread (and others) correcting people and speaking like an authority. And then not backing down. Thereby apparently annoying people who (a) really like that this board has a wealth of people with expertise, particularly real hands-on expertise, and (b) people who hate the monikor “hubby”–not to mention (c) people who fall into both groups and (d) people who are happy to read your opinions but don’t see why yours should be given more weight than theirs because, after all, they can read books and surf the Internet, too.
On preview I see that people have said this much better than I did.
My guy works for an investment bank. Anyone want some stock tips? 
I honestly don’t understand why people are so worked up by this. If your source for a certain point is a friend or relative you should mention that, as Lissa does. If she posts something you think is incorrect, then argue with her. She’s hardly the first poster who won’t back down from a point. The vitriol over this baffles me.