ant wrote:It's not a "feeling" when someone claims you have written something that is in fact nowhere to be found in the post.
It's called dishonest characterization. It was very clearly done.
Sometimes that is true, and sometimes that is disingenuous. If a person misunderstands what you are saying, it may be willful because they want to put you in the wrong, or it may be because the context leads them to think you are saying something that you are not actually saying, or it may be because they recently read something that leads them to assume certain types of comments signal certain types of intent, or any number of other sources of error.
If you choose to characterize it as intentional distortion you may be correct or you may be mischaracterizing somebody else, in either a deliberate or an accidental way.
I am not just observing that you do that a lot, although you do. I did a little counting about some of your recent posts and it is a little scary. That is likely to be partly due to feeling "ganged up on" because you perceive an echo chamber here, so it is easy to see distortion by people trying to put you in a bad light. But honestly I don't think that is mainly what's going on. I also saw, when my attention was drawn to it, a pattern of provoking negative responses on purpose, but in such a way that you maintain plausible deniability.
It seems to me that you often push a particular line of thinking about something but carefully guard your innocence in your own mind by building in an interpretation about why you are pushing it, even though you are probably aware how other people will see your choice of topic. The "pandering" by wearing kente cloth was a particularly obvious example, (just a random fact-check, because we all post random things here, having nothing to do with anything) but the use of "thugs" about liberals is more subtle but much uglier.
ant wrote:And you are patronizing me for insinuating it is just a "feeling" that I have when it happens.
Bullshit.
The more cheeky you are with me the more I call you out for it.
Ant, we all have this feeling sometimes. Anyone who has ever had a relationship with anyone, including with a parent, knows that feeling one has been misunderstood and mischaracterized is part of communication. I did not mean to diminish the accuracy - as Kahnemann observes over and over in "Thinking, Fast and Slow" our perceptions are there precisely because they are generally on target. But you should consider whether there might be more going on with your defensive reactions than just the fault in the other person.
Inaccuracy is a convenient peg to hand our anger on. But the question is not just whether something is inaccurate - we all correct misunderstandings all the time. Your choice to get angry about it is motivated by much more than the inaccuracy. That may be entirely healthy, but I think I see a pattern which is not healthy. A subtle form of self-sabotage, in fact. Of course I could be wrong.