I’m not selling anything. I’m sorry if I have offended you in the past, but you in particular are not someone with whom I see how the gap can be bridged. You think that the term conservative is a grave insult, and wield it at me as though I am supposed to be insulted. How should one respond to that? I mean is there even a valid response? I think your view of me is entirely irrational, and I don’t think anything I can say will dissuade you. That really is that. I won’t go around calling you stupid, in fact I will try to avoid responding to your posts so that we can be civil by avoiding interaction. With you that’s really the best I can offer.
QED. :rolleyes:
And no, I’m not engaging you about your lack of anything but utter bullshit in both your OP and your latest post. Life is too short.
Yes, I think a lot of people here are genuinely offput by who I am and what I believe. Which is ok. They insist of course that I am doing it to piss them off, when the reality is half the people who have come at me in the past two days are people whose existance I was not even aware of. There is a handful of people who I don’t get along with, who I think are total jerks, who think the same of me. My apology isn’t really for them. It’s not for KidChameleon, ElvisL1ves or Lobohan. It’s for the people who treat me as a genuine human being, just one who annoys the crap out of them. I am sorry to the Begbert2’s of this world, I am sorry to those who put their best foot forward and still see me being a dick. To those who are consistently and regularly malicious to me without any interaction outside of their malice, I am not sorry. I’m sorry to Twickster, and even to Tomndebb. I am sorry to everyone who feels like I ruined a thread they were enjoying. I am not sorry to people like RedFury who offer up unsolicited insults out of the blue who dislike me specifically because of what I believe and say so openly and directly. But to be honest I have more respect for people like RedFury who at least dislikes me because of things they understand about me rather than disliking me for the projections of their own insecurities.
I’m not here to piss people off but neither am I here to pretend to be something I’m not. I offer this apology because a lot of people came to me who I didn’t have any problem with and said that they had a problem with me. People like Half Man Half Wit.
I am sorry to Der Trihs especially, because I have singled him out for scorn in the same way RedFury does to me. When we aren’t talking about a few hotbutton topics that both of us can be passionate about, he’s a pretty good guy who is a lot more intelligent than I give him credit for.
When I got upset at RedFury the other day it’s because I was actually genuinely offended by what he did. It wasn’t just righteous indignation. And what I am going to try and do in the future rather than lashing out when I am offended is just say straight up that it offended me and try to leave it at that.
With some I don’t think there is anything to be done, but I think that’s about half a dozen people at most. The rest of you I really don’t want to be an added stress in your life and I realized that I was an added stress for a lot of people, that’s not what internet message boards are for even though so many people make them more stressful than they have to be.
I regularly accuse people of being too in love with their own opinions, and I think that’s true, but it’s true for me as well.
shrugs Go with God.
I’m going to continue scrolling past your posts as I have done for a while now. You can do the same or you can avidly read mine that’s up to you.
That’s the difference between you and me.
Just kidding, and thanks for your post.
I’ve been fencing with mswas in the pit thread. My reaction to this is apology is…hmm. Neutral.
Of course, I have this terrible memory, so I’m much more likely to remember and respond to recent actions than past ones. So if there is any change in behavior, I will respond to the new behavior. If there isn’t, well, I’ll keep my current opinions and reactions, more or less.
I think I may rely on my bad memory to avoid having to bother making conscious changes of opinion. Hmm.
Hehe, I think that’s the thing a lot of people don’t understand about narcissism. For me to login trying to piss you off I’d have to be thinking about you. 
Wrong. Having insight and having the strength every minute of every day to act on that insight are two different animals.
Or else you’re perfect, one of those.
“To act on that insight”, in this case, means nothing more than leaving the keyboard alone. Please.
To me this is just some sort of sense of entitlement on your part. Why is it that I should leave the keyboard rather than you just exercise some restraint and not get all hot and bothered every time I say something that annoys you? Rather than asking me to restrain myself why don’t you try to restrain yourself? It’s a two way street. We don’t like each other and that’s not going to change, but I am not going to seek you out in the future to heap scorn and ridicule on you, there just isn’t much point. I have been pretty effectively ignoring you recently by simply scrolling past your posts. If you really don’t want to discuss things with me then don’t. It’s not hard.
Whatever. I guess if it works for Liberal it should work for mswas.
@ Mswas
A fine post, and a reasonable explanation. But as one who, like you do now, previously gave a shit about waaaaaay too much, and who, like you, holds opinions that people just don’t like to begin with — I want to offer you a piece of advice, only because it helped me so SO much. It helped me personally. It helped me with my relations with my wife. It helped my work output. It even helped me on the board. (I’m getting comments all the time, by PM and in posts, that this time there has been a genuine change in me.)
Please do not feel insulted or put-off by this advice, but I sincerely and whole-heartedly recommend that you see a psychiatrist. NOT a psychologist. A psychiatrist. S/he is a medical doctor, not just a counselor. There are medications that help a great deal, and ordinary Internists or General Practitioners are just not competent to properly diagnose you and treat the right thing. Now, maybe I was lucky. But my psychiatrist diagnosed me within a minute of my arrival (because OCD and anxiety are so easy to detect.) Your symptoms may be different, and may require more examination. But insurance covers it, so go for it. Sorry if this angers you. I know the stigma attached to psychiatric treatment. But it CAN work. It really really can.
I submit to you (heh) that nobody acts in a way they feel is inappropriate at the moment. Marley closes my MPSIMS threads because he doesn’t understand them, but I know he regrets those decisions after a few sleepless nights as his brain wraps around their tortured brilliance. And I forgive him.
As I see it, you’re the one threadshitting on this group hug. Who’s being the jerk now? You don’t buy the apology? Fine–leave your keyboard alone and call us all fools when the OP puts on his troll face and attacks us at the end of the thread.
GAAAAH! What Stigma ? ! ? ! You want stigma? I got your stigma right here! Right on the end of my pistil!
To be honest with you I have seen psychiatrists and I have had very bad experiences with them. I’d rather just improve myself through constant self-analysis. My relationship with my wife is pretty good. The only problem with my work output is that I am unemployed. If I were to get a job then there wouldn’t be a problem with my work output.
I am not against psychiatry as a whole, I just feel like it’s a long and tedious road without much hope of finding something useful.
OK, we haven’t interacted much so hopefully you will take this as constructive criticism, not an attempt to start a fight.
First, argue the position, not the poster.
IOW, this is good:
“Naive positivist scientism is [insert definition]. This position is problematic because [insert explanation of why it is problematic here].”
This is bad:
"This board is so full of people who adhere to a simplistic naive postivist scientism. It really angers me that the SDMB can’t see it’s own weaknesses.
See, the first raises a position for debate. The second is hostile condescending and insulting.
Also I would advise against making snap psychological assessments of posters.
“your position is wrong because…”
not “You have a phobia about religion…”
Also pointing out that some people believe different things than a given poster is very condescending. Most everyone here is aware that ther are people who differ with them. If you think someone is wrong, say why they are wrong and maybe they will listen to you or explain themselves. Don’t just state that they have a world view and walk away. Everybody knows he or she has his own world view.
And argue for postions you really believe in, or at least explicitly say you’re playing devil’s advocate. Arguing for the sake of arguing may not be trolling, but it’s pretty damn close.
You’re a smart guy with interesting things to say, but people will get riled up if you say them in a condescending and insulting tone.
I totally agree with you. I do not think mswas is a bad guy, but he makes everything very personal very fast, and then says mean things that he later tends to regret. He and I have been 'round and 'round, and it always ends with some sort of apology, either in public or PM. Most of the time, he’s getting all personal with me over some perceived slight to his intellect, or because he has attached some personal meaning to something that makes him flip out in a way that seems excessive.
Maybe this is not how you mean to come off, mswas, but every time you and I have clashed, I feel like it’s because you feel personally attacked by my opinion that really has nothing to do with you personally. Larry Borgia seems to notice this about you as well, so I know it’s not actually something inherent in the dynamic between you and me.
I also think Liberal is right about the psychiatrist. I can be a pain in the ass to find a good one, but it’s worthwhile if you find the right person. Being unemployed is giving you too much time on your hands, and you’re spending a lot of it here, spinning your wheels and flailing around in a very public way that’s hard to miss even if you’re not paying much attention. You know what my advice is: take a break from the boards, don’t post for a week or so. You’ll feel much better for it.
Well in the last case I wasn’t offended by you I just don’t think you were getting where I going with it. I wasn’t saying that the girl WAS abused, just that it was a possibility and that we shouldn’t jump to any conclusions. You and I agreed ultimately so there was little point in arguing or trying to convince one another of anything. I think that is often the case between us, we argue even though we mostly agree. This is specific to you not to any wider audience. Ultimately as long as people thought it should be investigated we agreed on that particular issue. My tendency is to believe that running away from home to join a cult 1000 miles away is not normal teenage rebellion and at the very least bears scrutiny. It got muddled with my personal issues, and I felt like it just wasn’t possible to extract it from that. Mentioning your profession was an attempt to say that you should have encountered both conditions in your professional experience, both cases of actual abuse and cases of childish dramatics.
Heh, I don’t think I need a shrink, I think I need a job. Idle hands and all that. I’ll freely admit it, I am bored out of my skull. There is no therapy better than devoting a portion of your day to relieving someone else’s pain in an obvious and immediate way.
So glad to hear you’re doing something important with your life. 
It’s a long and tedious road, no doubt. But like many long and tedious roads, good things turn up at the end with much greater frequency than one imagines while trudging along them.
Because an apology consists of not just a statement of remorse, but a willingness and attempt to change.
And people say violent video games are a bad thing.