I wondered for a bit what the purpose of this pit thread was, especially after others began attacking people for essentially answering your OP. Good for you for listening to other people’s advice constructively instead of jamming your fingers in your ears like we all do sometimes.
IS, that seems weird to me: That someone could read this whole thread (you did read the whole thread, right?) and still miss the fact that Lissa’s “style and tone” is actually the “topic du jour” of that very thread, which Pit thread was opened by Lissa herself inviting feedback on her posting. That seems so juvenile.
Or perhaps asinine would be a better adjective to employ. But them’s the breaks.
You really are the master of the signature worthy one liners.
To clarify now that I’ve had some sleep:
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In someone I like, I’d want to see an annoying habit modified so that it doesn’t throw sand (however small an amount) into the gears of our relationship. In someone I don’t like, it merely confirms my dislike. In someone I don’t give a rat’s patootie about either way, it affects the possibility of my looking with favor upon that individual. Clearer now?
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I don’t give a rat’s patootie about the word “hubby” – it may bother others, but I don’t care. What I have objected to is the overuse of her husband as a secondhand authority.
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An authoritative tone based on secondhand information, when employed in arguing against someone with firsthand experience, is not an approach likely to be persuasive. When an individual persists in such tone in the face of well-grounded rebuttals it tends to be off-putting to say the least.
I’m not sure why you call it “secondhand” information. It’s first hand information, isn’t it? If I ask Stephen Hawking what he thinks of black holes, and then I tell you what he said, haven’t I gotten the poop straight from the horse’s mouth? Second hand information would be if I read it in a book, or someone told me that Stephen said such-and-such. Isn’t that how you see it?
Except for the fact that you get horse poop from the other end, you’re spot on.
Either that or I have a bizarre, disordered obsession with some magnificent Bitch Queen archetype that projects up out of the collective unconscious directly into my reptile brain…It’d probably make more sense if you’d met my mother.
My apologies for not being clear, myself. I was up way too late as well. I felt that people were unfairly bashing her in the baby-raper thread for something she had not done in that thread. In this thread, since she asked for constructive criticism, it’s not so out of place, although I still feel any correction on her part is unwarranted. I know that someone once accused another poster of being arrogant and dismissive and was told, that’s just how said poster is. But here’s Lissa being treated, at least in my opinion, differently and unfairly.
And I see things very differently than you on the topic of annoying habits. Maybe, I’ve just managed to fool myself into believing I don’t mind them. Because this is how I react to the annoying habits of other people:
Me to person I like: Did you know you are clicking your teeth in 4/4 time?
Me to person I don’t like: Stop. Clicking. Your. Teeth! Throws something
Their positive qualities overpower the irritants.
You know what? I’m not really a debate person and I don’t usually read the threads with a lot of citing. I know Lissa best from her museum stories, so maybe I just haven’t had the same exposure to it as the rest of you. Anyway, I hope I’ve explained my response adequately.
I’m not ETF, but no. Second-hand information is something that comes through a filter, whether that filter is a person or a book or the tv. I have first-hand information if I observe something directly, second-hand information if I get it from a book or from a person. Each additional filter adds another layer of possible misunderstanding. Usually, Lissa is a good filter because she does caveat things fairly well and she tries to cite her points (we all have bad days sometimes).
You* are a spectacularly bad filter. You could work on that.
*I’m not that great either.
I guess it depends on how you define these things.
I thought that, in this case, “first hand information” would be seeing it for yourself. So, Lissa’s husband gets first hand information about prisons every day when he’s on the job.
Lissa, on the other hand, gets information about how prisons work filtered through the perceptions and the priorities of her husband. If he tells her about an incident that occurred at work that day, all she gets is his interpretation of it. That might reasonably be called “second hand information.”
He would give her a “first hand account” of the incident (that is, an account based on his first hand experience of it), but the information she receives is second hand. Does that make any sense? I’ve never really thought this closely about this particular terminology before.
Well, the others said how you’re off on the secondhand info thing, but seriously Liberal you simply have to stop trying to use analogies. You suck worse at them than anyone I’ve ever seen. You don’t even seem to know what they’re for. hint: they try to help explain your reasoning.
First hand knowledge of black holes?? Lissa’s hubby opinion on prisons is akin to the greatest living mind in physics’ opinion on black holes?? FFS.
BTW, great response back there to ETF. You would fit right in at “the other place”. In fact, someone does a delightful rendition of you there that you might enjoy.
Yes, you have, and I see I took it a bit wrong. My apologies.
Okay, take my hand, fill your lungs, and SING! “Kuymbaya, my Lord, Kumbaya…” 
Almost there. She receives firsthand information from him, but when she tells it to anyone else, no matter how close to verbatim she tries to be, it becomes secondhand.
The point about filters made by stretch is spot on.
That makes sense, too. But in that case, the only possible first hand information would be from biologists about evolution, NASCAR drivers about race day, George Bush about judicial appointments, and so on. It means that there’s an awful lot of second hand information floating about, and that Lissa is in no way remarkable in that regard.
Yep, most information that the average person has is second hand; we can’t all be specialists in everything. It’s a matter of how you present your less-than first-hand information that is important. And how much you change that information when you interpret (filter) it.
I second Miller. Lissa, I like you. A lot. Your posts are interesting and well-written. You are pleasant and supportive of your fellow members. I always smile when I see that you’ve contributed to a thread that I’ve started because I know that your post will be a pleasure to read. There are a number of snide, unhappy people on this board. Don’t let them get you down. As Miller says, “Just keep on doing what you’re doing.” Don’t let the unhappy ones change you.
Your post, like Miller’s, is a disingenuous response to this thread.
You’re both acting as if the critics have come in here specifically to offer snide and unjustified slams, to do nothing but savagely rain on the parade of Lissa’s sunny disposition. It’s simply not true.
I’ve made clear (like quite a lot of other folks in this thread) that i have no problem with Lissa as a general matter of course. I’ve participated in many of the same threads as her and, like you, i find many of her contributions to this board to be interesting and entertaining.
My only problem with Lissa—and, indeed, the only issue over which i’ve ever crossed swords with her, in my recollection—is the one specific issue that she brought up in the OP. And, as i said in an earlier post, i never would have made anything of this issue if she hadn’t started a thread specifically seeking opinions on the matter. I’m not here to make blanket condemnations of her, and neither are most other folks in this thread; i came here specifically to respond to an issue that she raised when she started the thread.
You are welcome to disagree with me, but you do yourself no credit attributing to me motives that i do not have, and attitudes that i do not hold.
You? My post wasn’t about you. My post was about Lissa. Far from attributing motives to you, I wasn’t thinking of you at all.
True, Lissa did invite the responses she’s gotten in this thread. But she opened this thread in the first place because she was getting those sorts of responses in other threads. If her question is, “What am I doing wrong in all these other threads, and how should I change my posting style as a result?” I think that, “You aren’t doing anything wrong, and you shouldn’t change a thing,” is as valid a response as any other.
There are almost 200 posts to this thread. Although I haven’t worked out the percentages myself, I’m fairly certain that your own posts make up a fairly small percentage of the content in this thread. In the spirit of offering constructive criticism to posters one otherwise admires, you might want to consider getting over yourself just a teensy bit.
Miller’s response is a justified one – he sees no problems, and recommends no change in consequence. I personally like Lissa a great deal, and the only issue I have, which I would ordinarily not have mentioned, is the air of authoritativeness she takes on in threads related to correctional institutions generally. I hope I explained my concern with tone – not, generally, with content – well enough that she saw it as constructive criticism – and be it noted that she opened this thread asking for constructive criticism, or I would never have broached it.
Someone who is an unmitigated dickhead, who sincerely holds in his heart that his view is the only possible way for a sensible person to think, and who divests himself of his pearls of wisdom to inform the ignorant rest of us, deserves a comeuppance. Lissa is not that sort; she simply (IMO, which could be wrong) places too great a store in the universality of what she has learned from and working with her husband, in that one area of interest – and letting her know that, in a relatively polite way, and in response to her own question about whether there is an issue, seemed a valid step to me.
What she does provide, on corrections as well as other matters, is fine, valuable information; it’s important that she realize in questions related to imprisonment that her experience is not always valid universally, and post accordingly. For example, I’ll wager that any attorney happening on this thread can name three distinctions between the rights of convicted felons and those of persons incarcerated before conviction pending trial – a very pertinent matter in jails, and undoubtedly never an issue to her husband or herself as regards their expertise on prisons. And that’s all I tried to convey – and I hope I succeeded.