I don’t think I understand the question.
Well, one could argue – I will! – that you lose credibility when you fight trivial battles. You get a reputation as a miserable crank who hates everything, so you have no authority or influence when you take up a meaningful battle, like equal marriage rights.
I’ve done research on organizational change, and it is really dependent on people who are opinion leaders – they may or may not be leaders in the organization, but they are perceived by others as being informed, reasonable, and ethical. If you walk into your office place and start yelling at the secretary because she’s playing “Jesus music,” I assure you, nobody will listen to you when the organization considers extending benefits coverage to same sex couples.
His exact words were:
He did not say that this philosophy should be applied in every situation.
Regardless, none of this changes the fact that you are guilty of excluding the middle.
That’s why I indicated that its the way I read his statement and added the YMMV at the end. It was my interpretation of his words and nothing more or less. You can feel free to get angry about anything you like. (not that you need my permission ;)) Raise hell if you want, file lawsuits, scream rant and rave in any manner you see fit.
All I ask is that you try to understand why others of us who are also minorities in this issue do not.
Well dammit.
Hey, WhyNot, can I borrow the pinking shears? I wanna cut triangles.
Oh, come on, you’re going to have to be nastier than that! This is the Pit Ladies Sewing Circle, after all. You can’t just be all namby-pamby asking for the goat-felching pinking shears all polite and shit. We have fucking standards to maintain, you know. Beeyotch.
No, you fucking moron, I’m not excluding the middle at all under the interpretation I was using, which is that he meant his terms in a general way. If I thought he meant what you think he meant, then I would be, but I don’t. It’s pretty simple. I don’t know why you’re having such trouble with it. Your interpretation may be valid – maybe he didn’t mean it as general advice, in which case my comment was mistaken.
What I don’t get is why everybody is acting like anything even close to those things happened. What happened was that MsRobyn said she doesn’t shop at those places, and lets the management know why, and a whole bunch of people declared that that was fucking insane. Then I came in and defended MsRobyn, at which point people started screaming and whining about me being insanely upset about Jesus music, which I’m not, and MsRobyn isn’t, and nobody here ever was. My vitriol was always directed at the sneering at her very reasonable reaction to a public nuisance.
Why? What difference does it make what I understand? I understand that everyone has to choose what’s going to piss them off, big and small. I know peopl e pick different things. Remember, I was never insisting that you all had to stop shopping in those places or write letters to their managers, but defending the right of one person to do so.
I’m sorry, the second two are quotes of Antinor01.
Right. I believe the etiquette of such a request prescribes something more on the order of “Hey you festering crooked-stitching cunt, are you going to pass me those goat-felching pinking shears so I can fucking cut some triangles, or am I going to have to ram this splintery darning egg so far up your rectum that it pops out your eyes which I will then stick on my pincushion as a warning to other festering crooked-stitching cunts not to keep hogging the motherraping assreaming goat-felching pinking shears?”
Yes you are, you fucking moron. There is no possible way to interpret WW’s comments that would ever include “not ever caring nor ever acting”.
I agree with The Swan. I meant only that getting upset about “this,” meaning “the way stores choose to acknowledge or not acknowledge Christmas,” is silly. It’s also silly to complain to management. A waste of your time and their time. No store is going to change practice during a busy season to accomodate one pill who probably wasn’t going to buy anything anyway. You have to take a long hard look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, “am I really a victim of something, or am I just a crazy old crank?”
Once again, all I was doing was giving my interpretation of that one statement about panty twisting. I never said anything about MsRobyn or her choices.
I believe that over my posts in this thread I have made my own position quite clear; I do not like round the clock ‘seasonal’ music but I’m also not going to get angry over it. If other people wish to get angry or have any other reaction then that is their own choice to make.
I would put more vitriol into this, but I’m been horribly sick for the last few days and just can’t summon the energy for it.
But they very easily could be made to mean that /less/ acting and /less/ caring could somehow change things, which was what I objected to.
WhyNot, look at Walter’s comments, by the way, for an example of exactly what I was objecting to that you mysteriously missed in this thread: characterizing writing to management about this as crazy, pointless, silly, and so on. You may wish to pretend that everyone has been as civil as you and Antonir feel, but it just ain’t so.
PS: And Walter has clarified that he did mean this specific issue. I still don’t see how less complaining about Jesus music would somehow make this a better country, but I withdraw the comment I made based on my erroneous interpretation of his comment.
I never said it would make this a better country. I just said you excluded the middle, regardless of interpretation.
I said (and I believe) that whining about things that have no measurable harmful effect on oneself and which make other people happy contributes to the general divisiveness and social erosion that has plagued our country. It would be too specific to say that our country would be a better place to live if Edison stopped complaining about Muzak, but there is cumulatively a toxic effect when people generally feel like they ought to be offended by things and ought to say something to the manager. But I think the main thrust of my argument is that Robyn and Edison would be happier if they didn’t get sweaty over trivial shit.
I tried to stop this one before it went through. I didn’t want to pile on, or give anyone the impression that I did.
Feel free to ignore.
Swan, just for clarity’s sake: I didn’t mean to claim you said that, but that he implied it.
I pretty much agree with this entire post, but most especially with the last sentence. It’s not that we aren’t all entitled to be offended by whatever we wish, but the question I was trying to pose was when does it become in our own best interests to pick our battles a little more judiciously?
If you mean the second part, the first is just blowing sunshine – “you’re entitled to be wrong”, essentially. If it’s against our best interests, it’s wrong, regardless of whether we have the right to do things that hurt us. I respect someone like Walter for at least understanding his own damn position more than all the people who want to have it both ways.
I disagree that not shopping somewhere and writing a letter is injudicious. I’d like to see you or Walter substantiate the idea that there’s something excessive and reckless about such actions, and that somehow they take away from the “real” struggle.
I don’t understand this fashionable dismissal of the idea that small, even symbolic gestures can be incredibly important, or the seeming belief that unless jackbooted thugs are actually kicking down your door, no unfairness is worth even the very small act of writing a letter over.