Well, Esprix, I also agree. :eek:
And I tend to be somewhat disagreeable.
wanders off to re-evaluate personality…
To those who agree with Esprix: In a perfect world, I would agree with you too. In reality though, how do you know which pit threads are just blowing off steam and which ones aren’t? Also, what if a rant is so full of ignorance that it begs for people to rip it apart?
I have a tendency to be too agreeable. Sometimes I’ll read someone’s rant and just nod my head, heart breaking that their life isn’t as they’d like it. Then another poster will come along and knock them upside the head with the common-sense stick. Thank goodness for the SDMB, y’all are helping me become a first class ‘meany.’
On the other hand, you have a point Esprix, sometimes a person will be the target of a vicious pile-on and-- okay, so I have a way to go before I’m no longer a push-over.
That’s not what Esprix means, I don’t think. He means when the responses are along the lines of “your rant sucks” instead of basically attacking the nature of the rant itself. There’s nothing at all wrong with people blowing off steam, but to have it all ripped up by a simple “lamest rant ever” post isn’t in the spirit of the forum. It comes off snarky and condescending. To put it another way, you can rip into the OP for what they’re ranting about (“I can’t believe you don’t think handicapped people should vote! Why I oughta . . .”), but it’s silly and trite to simply give a curt, shrill response that neither supports the OP nor refutes the OP but simply exists to be pissy.
Looks like dantheman has nailed the essence of what Esprix is talking about.
I’ve changed my plea to “I agree”!
If I did, that would be the first time I nailed down anything anyone ever said. Always a first time, though.
Ahh, then I agree.
I posted the “Fuck you all.” OP in part because I was having a bad day, and in part because I could have otherwise written about 50 specifically directed pittings, which, while perhaps more in line with the moderators’ view of what a pitting should look like, were commonly indicative of human nature in general. “Fuck you all.” was an attempt to save bandwidth by summing up those 20 potential pages into an all-encompassing OP that would not be unnecessarily long for the inquisitive reader. Thanks to the moderator that closed the thread for prohibiting even that attempt at venting a little steam. That is exactly the sort of action that would have made you number 51 in the unabridged version.
-FK
[minor hijack] I wasn’t talking about people disagreeing with the OP because they genuinely disagreed, I was talking about people that disagreed with the OP for the sheer purpose of disagreeing with something. You know, the types that will argue that the sky is red if you say it’s blue? You know, like when someone’s pissed because they tripped over a shoe or something someone left in a parking lot and someone just has to respond with an “well, you should look where you’re walking dumbfuck” or something equally useless?[minor hijack over]
If that’s what Esprix meant, then I agree now too. The rant rating thing is a waste of electrons.
Haj
Well I’ll agree with what dantheman said, but I also meant other things that are slightly more serious than, “Your rant sucks.”
I WILL USE THE FOLLOWING AS AN EXAMPLE, AND AS AN EXAMPLE ONLY - PLEASE DO NOT LET THIS BECOME THE VERY THING I WISH TO DISCUSS. THIS DID NOT ACTUALLY HAPPEN.
Sometimes, straight people get on my nerves. Yes, all of them, when I feel like the world is against me. If my life is bad, if crappy things are happening to me, if my relationship is on the skids, if work is driving me insane, and I’m just in a cranky mood, and the straw that broke the camel’s back is my co-worker who insisted on shoving her wedding photos in my face and was bubbling over with joy, then guess what? I’m gonna want to let off some steam. And in that venting, I may start a tirade against straight people and their fucking weddings and their patriarchal heirarchies and their demeaning of women and society’s attitudes towards gay weddings and how unfair it all is and I just want to punch my boss’s lights out and set this woman on fire and blow up my building and and and…
You get the idea.
Do I hate all straight people, all the time? No. Or my boss? Or this woman? Or society? No, probably not. But in that particular moment, when life is at a very, very low point, I just want to vent, rage at the machine, let it all out. I also want to hear some people agree with me, and validate my feelings. (No, the SDMB isn’t a replacement for therapy, but it still counts as social interaction.) The next day - hell, the next hour - I will be back to normal.
So, basically, am I allowed a moment of anger, passion, or blood-boiling frustration - that will pass once I’ve vented - or must I suffer through everyone picking apart my post and calling me a straight-hating, man-hating, marital-status-discriminating, authority-bucking, society-bashing bigotted asshat?
Feel free to replace “I” with “anyone” to make it more universal.
Esprix
Oh and whatever you do, when you’re angry at the moment and venting about whomever, do not use the ‘F’ word… <whisper> fat! Otherwise, suddenly you’ll become the most vile person to draw breath and will be beaten black and blue.
I dunno. Tough call.
On the one hand I can fully support the idea that people might want to blow off a little steam. On the other hand, the question becomes: “Are we letting a statement based on baser emotions that is ultimately ignorant remain unchallenged? Ya know, just sitting there. On a board devoted to fighting such things.”
I dunno.
Well, Esprix, I’d say that’s precisely the sort of thing you shouldn’t be ranting about in the Pit. Like others have said, that’s something you vent about in a private journal or to like-minded friends. It’s not the sort of thing you say to a roomfull of random strangers. Which is what The Pit is, postcounts not withstanding. You don’t blow off steam about straight people bragging about their weddings in a setting where straight people who brag about weddings are likely to hear: not unless you want a fight. Because whatever it is you’re venting about, sure as shit someone who does that themselves is going to read it and take offence. So either target vices that no one is ever going to admit to (murder, pedophelia, telemarketing), or be prepared to defend your rant. If you just want validation, that’s what you have friends for. Get a bunch of your buddies together for beers and bitch about that breeder cunt. They’re your friends, they’ll understand that you’re just frustrated, because they know you. I don’t mean this to sound harsh, but we’re not you’re friends: we’re just a collection of vaguely interested strangers. We don’t know you, and we don’t know you’re just frustrated. You might, in fact, be a “straight-hating, man-hating, marital-status-discriminating, authority-bucking, society-bashing bigotted asshat.”
I see your point, Esprix, and I agree with it by and large. I think, though, the fact that the pit is also open for you to come back an hour or so later, when you are back to normal, sort of saves the enterprise.
You have ranted, and having ranted can move on. In a more reflective mood, you will be able to learn what people who don’t share your (temporary) opinion think. You will be able to enjoy the wit that is scattered within the vitriol, and if nothing else you’ll be able to construct a better rant next time based on what happened to that one.
It also serves as a kind of natural selection. There are many posters here who have pitted, and been pitted, for years. They are, whether one agrees with them or not, usually worth reading. There are also a number of posters who have arrived, visited the pit, and shortly thereafter transgressed the boundaries to the point where they were banned. This may be viewed as a good or bad thing, but you have to admire the elegance of the mechanism.
I like knowing that if I post a pit thread I may see my OP torn to little tiny pieces. If the opinion can’t stand up to the scrutiny, it wasn’t worth having anyway.
To echo others–no, you cannot realistically expect to be able to “just vent.” Posting is a free and deliberate choice to speak in front of potentially thousands of listeners. Many or most of those listeners are every bit as much of emotional beings as the speaker, with the same needs to “just vent”. Quite possibly, they just need to vent about how you chose to just vent.
Personally, I’ve found it an initially bitter, but ultimately calming realization that demanding human nature be changed because the warts of it make me uncomfortable is a hopeless errand.
Mind you, I also think that the idea that venting-catharsis is a helpful and good thing is pretty much a crock–I don’t think that’s distorting my view here, but it might well be.
Esprix qualifies the rant though, by saying that sometimes straight people get on Esprix’s delicate nerves, and why.
If someone posted a rant with real moral outrage about straight people, I’d … well, I’d proably not bother. The point is if someone is going on and on about some horrible person or workplace, and the facts in the story don’t exactly point to the ranter as a victim, I’m might call bs on that - or at least ask some pointed questions.
You know: “my boyfriend still hasn’t forgiven me for sleeping around all those times, my mom still doesn’t trust me even though I haven’t stolen any of her credit cards for at least a week, and my boss expects me to show up for work every single day… poor poor me.”
You must remember this,
a kvetch is still a kvetch,
a rant is still a rant,
the fun-da-men-tal things survive,
as flames go by.
[sub]Yes, I know it doesn’t really rhyme. Shut up.[/sub]
There’s actually a place for the milder rants - MPSIMS. If you can get worked up enough to use a bit of profanity, then the Pit is the right place, but if you just want to talk about how you had a crummy day at work, MPSIMS is the right place. In MPSIMS, people won’t rip you apart, so you can feel safe in posting. And, as an added bonus, you’re much more likely to get sympathy.
In fact, all too often we see people put minor rants in the Pit and then throw in profanity at the end just because they somehow feel obligated to do so: “And since this is the Pit, fuck you all.” If the OP didn’t need profanity in the first place, it’s more likely that it could have been put in MPSIMS.
In the example rant (e.g. “Straight People Sometimes GET ON MY NERVES!!”), no SDMB posters or publically known figures were used as examples of a “type” specifically being ranted against. So it would be easy to ignore the coworker’s-wedding-picture example, and respond with sympathy and understanding to your general irritation with “straight” society preconceptions and conceits. However, in the hypothetical instance where an OP is unyieldingly condemnatory of actual board coacquaintances, one might reasonably expect those examples to be dealt with critically.
JMO