With Spin, What Goes Around Comes Around

Some people are true masters of painting others in a negative light. With all the creativity and hostility they can muster, they will find an angle . . . any angle . . . by which someone's acts can be misconstrued and used against them. Preferably they can find more than one, and when in groups such people can sling volleys of spin like shots from a scattergun.

A few months ago, an SD.Net talifan on the StarWars.com forums linked to a post full of BS on his StarWars.com blog. I crafted a rebuttal here, which I then linked to from the forums. The talifan tried to dismiss my response, suggesting that the reason I published a response here was because I didn't have a StarWars.com blog.

That, of course, was simply the same sort of response you might expect to hear on a kindergarten playground. "I think Howdy Doody is lame 'cause he's just a puppet" one kid might say, to which a brat replies "You're just saying that 'cause you don't have a TV." That in no way changes the fact that Howdy Doody is a puppet . . . it's just that the brat simply twisted the point into an attack on the kid. The sad part is that for many so-called adults, that sort of nonsense still works. Even if all of the negative BS being said about someone is false, the fact that it's being said over and over leaves a person with the idea that others have negative feelings about that someone, their ideas, and so on. This is why media bias is so dangerous. Even if you know the media bias is there and that what they say is biased, hearing it over and over can still have an impact. It's simply a more insidious version of the old poisoning of the well.

But I digress . . . I retorted at the time by noting that I was amused by his self-contradictory spin. His blog only started after mine, after all, and the SD.Net folks would always try to claim that I was copying them. So wasn't he copying me, a grave sin by his own standards?

Of course, someone like me who is not a spin doctor can't expect to really make a reply to BS that has the same emotional resonance as the spin doctor's BS. The logical response that I had no need of a StarWars.com blog since I already had one was lame, after all. But by pointing out his self-contradiction I'd gotten away from the emotional resonance that punks like that are trying to use. Intellectual resonance is quite unsexy by comparison, for most people.

However, no matter one's taste in resonance, all can now certainly enjoy that the talifan in question has lost his StarWars.com blog because of his talifan activities against a certain author.

Of course I'm sure he'll continue to bitch about me and everything else on the SD.Net forums, but we can ignore what he says . . . after all, he's just saying things because he can't have a StarWars.com blog.