Scylla, you are a liar. And if you do not think you are lying, then you are delusional.
Folks, I have never been one to take anything to the pit. I’d just as soon stop interacting with someone as do that. I’ve had an awful lot of downright hatefulness thrown at me here, but it was all in the form of opinion, which can be ignored.
But Scylla has gone several steps too far by making entirely ugly and vicious statements about me that are entirely false, and I feel I must set it straight.
It’s actually all quite boring and stupid, you don’t have to take time out of your lives to read it. I make no claim that it will be the most fascinating Pit thread you’ve ever opened. I only ask if you read it if you find yourself wondering if accusations Scylla recently tossed around about me had any basis in reality.
Here’s the story:
Scylla and I had had some pretty heated debates here and there, but we had mostly learned to co-exist peacefully.
Then, in In MPSIMS – (a forum for sharing, not debating) I put up this thread, in which I discuss the most horrifying thing that ever happened to me and invite others to share their stories about the most horrifying thing that ever happened to them.
I made it very clear in the thread that this was a nightmare for me.
Scylla comes along and decides to let me know that according to some buddy of his, I didn’t have the experience I know I had. Actually, I just imagined or dreamed it, and that having such an experience was impossible.
This would be offensive no matter what the circumstance, but in addition to the experience itself, one of the things that made the whole experience even more awful (which Scylla didn’t know at first) was being told at the time, by the people responsible, that I had imagined it, when I knew I certainly had not. So having Scylla come along and re-do what had already been done to me once was very, very obnoxious and upsetting to me.
But I responded to him and explained exactly that, plus gave him chapter, verse and cites about why he was wrong. (And remember, folks, this wasn’t Great Debates in the first place. Why did he feel the need to come along and try to tell me that I was imagining things? What the fuck was he trying to prove?) I dropped him this email after I posted:
If he’d had a lick of common sense, he would have recognized by this time that it was NOT cool for him to argue this point with me. I hadn’t invited it, and to top it off, he was ** flat out wrong **. He had offended me without reason.
So he comes and reads about how being told I imagined it had made the experience even worse. Reads all the facts backing up my own experience being real (including the nurse who was there assuring me privately that it had happened). Sees the cites.
And still “Stands behind what he said earlier”.
Well, I shouldn’t have allowed it to be, but this topic is a big one for me, and this just infuriated me no end. Really, the gall was amazing. And he was sticking to his story based on some friend of his, HERE, on the STRAIGHT DOPE, land of “show me a cite”, where we fight ignorance.
Well, it was then that I really began to understand that what I had suspected about Scylla already was true: the guy just couldn’t stand to be wrong.
But he was, and I had proved it. I had LIVED it, I shouldn’t HAVE to fucking prove it, but I did. This wasn’t a matter of opinon, this wasn’t a matter of ideology, this was FACT, both in my life and in the medical community. And he’s telling me I imagined it. Yeah, I was pretty damn ticked.
Uncle Beer came in and told us that if we were going to debate this, that we had best take it to Great Debates.
Well, it isn’t debatable. It’s a medical fact. (As we came to learn in that very thread CECIL has written on the topic and backed me 100%. ) The only person obnoxiously choosing to debate me on my helllish reality was Scylla. And I half suspected that he was doing it just to be nasty. So I wrote the following email to him privately:
And how did Scylla respond? Well, he’d probably get all weird if I published his words without his permission, so I shall give a paraphrase:
"If you don’t wanna debate it, don’t bring it up. If you have something else you want to say, then say it on the Straight Dope message board.
Normally I appreciate email privacy, but if you contact me with this attitude again I shall go whine to the board administrators about it."
Which struck me as strange. What exactly was it he had a problem with? That I let him know privately that I was angry with him for offending me, and doing so with wrong information to boot? Whatever, I didn’t answer him, he obviously wasn’t up for being communicated with.
So life goes on, including the aforementioned revelation about Cecil’s input.
AT NO TIME does Scylla EVER confess that he might be SLIGHTLY off base in ANY regard. Not in choosing to debate the topic, not in his “facts”. Any shred of respect I might ever have had for Scylla as a poster is so gone…
Well, some of you might be reading Biggirl’s Great Debate thread about fat people and stereotypes…another subject close to my heart. Scylla’s attitudes pissed me off, so I went after his posts and positions. He ignored me. Fine, whatever. I wasn’t going to stop saying what I had to say. Then he finally acknowledges me long enough to make weird, vague accusations about me, which I come right back at him about, and he posts this:
Threatening? Unreasonable demands? Huh? What was the threat? Was “don’t’ you dare tell me I’m imagining my experience” an unreasonable demand? Earth to Scylla! Earth to Scylla!
This is my first, and hopefully my last Pit thread directed at a Doper. I felt I had to post it because, in my view, Scylla told a vicious and ugly lie about me, and he did so simply because he’s a small and petty person who still cannot admit he made a mistake, either factual or tactical, when in fact he made both. And as a result, some of my fellow dopers might end up believing that I send scary threatening letters to people I disagree with, making unreasonable demands upon them.
And if by some small chance Scylla was not consciously meaning to tell vicious and ugly lies about me, and after running the above email through his mental filters, he really does see threat and unreasonable demands, then I must offer this advice: get some help, man, because I know you aren’t stupid, so you must be suffering from clinical paranoia.
Stoid
