Quote:
Originally Posted by June
People have actually said "I can't disagree with June or I will be banned" and "I can't say what I want because I will get in trouble". This is complete bullshit. I don't even agree with people who have eaten at my table all the time. I think we can all tell when someone is engaging in a heated way over a difference of opinion and someone who is just being nasty because they didn't get enough attention from their parents. I can't use the ignore feature here, but I do choose (eventually) not to engage with people that I consider untrustworthy or mean spirited because of their consistent behavior patterns.
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This reminded me of the years I spent in HR. I spent a few years working for a temporary staffing agency, and a couple of years in the HR office of a huge, well-known company (whose name starts with a Q and ends with a direction). Every time there was a hiring event with lots of applicants and not enough positions for all of them, I was pretty well guaranteed to spend a few days taking calls from people who didn't get hired and wanted to yell at me about how they *knew* they hadn't been hired because "their" job was given to some less qualified woman or minority to satisfy an affirmative action quota.
That's not actually how affirmative action works, and such a thing never happened even once (and I'm in a position to know since I'm the one who was doing the interviewing and hiring), but that didn't matter even a little bit. What mattered is that they wanted it to not be their fault that they didn't get the job, and they wanted to feel like they were a victim instead of just someone who didn't make the cut. Quite often, the people making these calls were the same people I remembered vividly because of how they'd behaved during their interviews. They'd ensured in their first five minutes in my office that there was no way I was going to hire them for anything. The people I had the greatest reason for passing over were the people who yelled the loudest about how they were being screwed over by someone else.
Okay, that was a tangent. I think I've had that rant simmering for years. I think the same principle applies here, though. Some people really, really want to believe that if something doesn't go their way, it's not because they did anything wrong. They can't be wrong. It has to be that someone is out to get them.
Please be assured that when I disappear from your friends list in a couple of days, it's not because I got moderated (not that I have been). I'm just deleting my Facebook account in a couple of days in favor of Google+.