This is the first, and I hope the last, time I do something like this. But...

[fpb]

...friendly advice to everyone who reads this: stay away from castaly.

Comments

[mosellegreen.livejournal.com]

Sirrah, this is no way for a gentleman to behave. If you must speak against a lady publicly, you ought to give your reasons, not just give rise to base speculation.

[kadeshaderow.livejournal.com]

Stay away from me too, I'm absolutely reprehensible!

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Well, for a start, I notice that all that equality jazz does not stop you from demanding to be treated as *ladies* when convenient. And yet you may have noticed how I titled this entry: as something quite extraordinary and that I hoped never to have to repeat. Oh yes, I've got reasons all right. I've got reasons up the wazoo.

Let us start with the point that I have not asked for any of this. It was she who friended me out of the blue last Monday. Well, as it happens, I was having a bad time, and I did not answer for a couple of days. So by the time I am posting, I find that I have been defriended.

Being a gentleman, I write to ask wherein I may have offended.

The answer is not very clear, but contains a reference to having seen my name in fandom_wank. (BAD sign!) I more or less offer to try again, at which point I receive the extraordinary response that it would be all right so long as I could show that I was not an anti-semite or any other kind of reprehensible creature.

Question the first: who started this, me or you? Question the second: does this sound to you like any kind of way to start an acquaintance? As it happens, I loathe what I call "Jew-bashing" (for I find "Anti-semitism" a pansy kind of euphemism), but that is beside the point. The question is insulting, and shows a very bad spirit for anyone who wants to start an acquaintance. But I read in a post that she has had no sleep in three days, so I put down the rudeness to exhaustion, and pass on.

And then I find this: http://fpb.livejournal.com/59346.html. At which point, I think I can honestly say that the young lady is nothing more than trouble, and that anyone who wants a quiet life would do well to cross the road when they see her coming. End of story.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Read the above response.

[mosellegreen.livejournal.com]

Don't pin that "equality jazz" on me. I had no part in that.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Fair enough.

[theswordmaiden.livejournal.com]

I clicked your link and saw that she, too, said you need to be off her f-list, without explaining why. I think the reason is obvious, though. You called Tony Blair a flirt!!!

I trust it will indeed be the last, dear boy.

[wemyss.livejournal.com]

I certainly shan't be dropping my friend.

I trust I shan't need to drop any of them.

I've any number of besetting sins of mine own: intellectual arrogance first by several lenghts, all the other forms of elegance second, 'and the field nowhere': you have yours, by your own admission, and, by yr own admission, amongst these is a savage temperament. I urge you to consider that the only thing accomplished by quarrelling - as opposed to even-tempered debate however strenuously entered - is to bring yr own principles into disrepute (and do imagine how this looks to the extreme Prots, dear boy. Your communion has quite enough to do in overcoming prejudices without anyone's adding injudiciously to the task).

I again beseech all parties, and remind all of those on my f'list to whom the holding of my good opinion matters, to consider a modicum of Christian charity, of collegiality, and of courtesy even in principled dispute upon grave matters - particularly if one is setting up as a moral arbiter. Odium theologicum is deeply unpleasant. Or as GKC put it in his life of Aquinas,

If there is one phrase that stands before history as typical of Thomas Aquinas, it is that phrase about his own argument: "It is not based on documents of faith, but on the reasons and statements of the philosophers themselves." Would that all Orthodox doctors in deliberation were as reasonable as Aquinas in anger! Would that all Christian apologists would remember that maxim; and write it up in large letters on the wall, before they nail any theses there.

I am not interested in the 'auld scuil-yaird protests' of 'who started it', or who can claim to be the more aggrieved: the rule remains simple: turn the other cheek. I trust I shan't be required to speak to anyone on my f'list, in any dispute now or in future, in this fashion again. I don't care to find myself impelled to speak magisterially and after the fashion of a very senior man in such circumstances. We're all adults, and we all know better.

Here endeth the lesson, if you don't mind an Anglican rubric.

Re: I trust it will indeed be the last, dear boy.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

As Pontius Pilate said, what I have written, I have written. I found myself in a situation I neither liked nor understood, and reacthed as anyone might have been expected. End of story.

Re: I trust it will indeed be the last, dear boy.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I do not see that anything needs explaining. Or can be helped thereby.

Terrible thing, reaction.

[wemyss.livejournal.com]

When, that is, it is substituted for response. I should know: it's one of my worser traits, wherefore my friendly advice.

If positions have hardened, they've hardened. I can only reiterate that forebearance, mature consideration, and Christian charity are the goals to be lived up to, on everyone's part including mine, and I can only employ moral suasion to those ends. Free will prevails, and one accepts that (as one must the consequences). Without allying myself with the prefect of Judaea, I wash my hands of the matter and trust that it will not recur and may be forgotten.

Re: Terrible thing, reaction.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Reaction is caused by action. In this case by the action of someone who intruded into my life, messed me about for no reason, and finally performed the equivalent of slamming the door as she left, with the implication that - because I had speaken ill of Tony Blair, mind you - I was something too repulsive for her. And who then asks what she has done that was so terrible. If the recital of her behaviour is not enough, I cannot imagine that anything I could ever say could make an impression. At any rate, what I have said, I have said. I said it because I did not expect any apology from someone who could behave like that and look at herself in the mirror afterwards. She evidently thinks that is the way human beings behave to each other. Hence the warning to third parties.

Re: Terrible thing, reaction.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

So you performed the public actions you did because you had some private issues. In other words, I am supposed to pay for your problems. And where did you get the idea that telling me this would make me even the tiniest bit more sympathetic?

Re: Terrible thing, reaction.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Since we are talking about personal issues, perhaps you may not realize that people who make others pay for their own issues are one of my pet hatreds. I loathe that kind of behaviour and try to avoid it in my own affairs. You could not know that. But it does not make me any more sympathetic to your actions.

Re: Terrible thing, reaction.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Look, who the Hell ever asked you to read anything? Did you think that this blog was called "reflections of a stormy petrel" without a reason? I just now had another poster who seems to think that the duty of bloggers is to coddle his views. Well, to the both of you, welcome to planet Earth. And if you are worried about being "hurt" by someone's views, why on God's green Earth and in the name of all angels and saints in Paradise do you begin with friending said person when my blog is open to all readers without any need to join any clubs? I know perfectly well that my stuff is not for all stomachs. Here you simply dragged me into a psychodrama of your own, and I do not appreciate it.

Re: Terrible thing, reaction.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Exactly. You don't understand. To drag others into your own psychodramas is evidently regular behaviour for you.

Re: Terrible thing, reaction.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The fact that I was put through a dance of friending and defriending and completely incomprehensible reactions - including the insulting question whether I was a Jew-basher - is nothing to you, it seems. These things do not take time, let alone involve any personal feelings on anyone's side, do they? It is not as though the other person is a real person. And for God's sake, it's not as though I am asking something difficult. ANY time I come across someone I might want to friend, I ALWAYS first go and anonymously read some of her/his LJ and her/his user info, to see what kind of person s/he is. It seems commonsense to me. It has also saved me from trouble a few times.

Re: Terrible thing, reaction.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Just one question:
Why go on with this exchange?
I can think of things I'd rather do.