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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Poet who wrote (65161)	10/31/2002 5:59:43 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

You are being plain. I will be also. I do not believe an apology is due. It is not my intention to rehash the entire situation once again. But having made that statement, I think I owe you, or the thread, or both, a hopefully brief statement of why I feel that way. I do not feel that my postings to you, given the context of the time and our existing relationship, are something I need to apologize for. Despite what E believes, I did not believe that you were in fact emotionally fragile to the point of being capable of being actually harmed by my posts. I have no recollection that you discussed PTSD with me, though you may have. If you did, though, it didn't stick. We had a relationship that changed significantly in a very short time from closeness to hostility. While you may not remember saying it, I do clearly recall your saying (not to me, but to another poster) that you had learned to enjoy and be good at flame wars. So when we had a flame war, it was a reasonable assumption on my part to have interpreted your responses as part of that, as essentially strategic moves in the flame war. As strategic moves, they were in many cases quite effective. You did, for example, manage to turn a number of people against me quite effectively. I was, as I posted earlier, warned by several people that you had established a practice of sucking people in with a pretense of friendship and turning on them. When I saw that happening to me, too, as several posters warned me would happen, I decided not to go gentle into that dark night, as it were. When you induced Jeff to suspend me for posts that weren't even addressed to you, I took that as a hostile shot in the flame war and responded in like fashion. Similarly, when you had your husband get involved, I saw that as a strategic move also in a flame war. Wars are seldom pretty. This one certainly was not. If you are to be honest with yourself and us, I think you also have to acknowledge that you were not a total innocent in this relationship. I posted earlier a list of some of the hostile things you did or initiated or encouraged, and I don't need to repost it here. It will be sufficient to note, as X has noted, that we fed off each other, and that things probably went to a place neither of us really expected them to wind up. But one only apologizes when one feels one has been guilty of doing something wrong in the context of the time and the relationship. And I don't feel that to have been the case. I have said before, and say again, that I regret that you feel hurt, or offended by a situation in which we both participated. But I think you got your fair share of shots in along the way, frankly. None of which you have apologized for, nor am I asking you to. So there it is, Poet. We were once friends, we turned into adversaries, we had a flame war. We each took shots, we each gave shots. Nothing to apologize for on either side, IMO. Personally, I've had enough of this particular flame war. If you have, I'm ready for a truce. But not on the basis of pretending that I believe either one of us was more to blame than the other for where we have wound up.