There's a difference between asking for an apology (or saying that one is warranted) and expressing your own personal feelings of offense or affront. The first would get my back up - the second would distress me and likely make me want to apologise for hurt feelings, even if not for the initial statement.

I was seeing a lot of the first.

Pinged my "grrr" instinct.

Allyson, I too am going to ask you to back down on this. You're not sorry? You don't have to feel sorry. We don't legislate feelings. But we do legislate actions, and your actions on this thread and the previous one make me uncomfortable, and I want you to stop.

I'm just not mincing words.

I know you like to claim that diplomacy's not for you, Allyson, but really. If you can't talk nice, don't say nothing at all. It's perfectly possible to make your point without resorting to trashtalk. I'm tired of it.

Back down on what?

People keep asking questions -- she's given the same answer pretty much every time -- an unrepentant one, but it's the same damned answer.

What new is going to happen here? Is it less rude for to ignore the questions?

ita, I can't speak for the others in this discussion, but my thinking is that I can't let rudeness like that go. Even if Allyson has no intention of apologizing to me, for making this thread ugly, I'd like the record to show that that kind of thing doesn't go unchallenged.

Allyson can argue her side all she likes, and I do understand what she's said so far. But I can't live with the way she's said it, not without chiding her for her tone.

Nutty, that's just the kind of thing that, were I Allyson, would be getting my back up and making me even more upset.

As you probably remember from the Go14 Debacle.

It shouldn't have been brought up in the first place, and fifty or a hundred posts like that aren't going to make Allyson change her mind about how she feels, for crying out loud.

It reads to me, and pretty much all of the posts directed after her statement read to me as the infamous pile-on. If someone says no, mind changing isn't going to happen, and I'm not going to apologize for answering the question honestly, then why the hell keep asking it/poking at it?

So, if I read it correctly, you're saying "Allyson, let us challenge you, but ignore the question, since we don't want to hear the response?"

Because a) you state that it shouldn't go unchallenged that b) she shouldn't say anything if she can't say anything nice.

Did I miss anything?

I read that Allyson did not regret her posts to Zoe, but that she did regret upsetting the community. She was pushed to say something she didn't feel. And she did say she would not behave in that manner in the future. I thought it was an honest open exchange. Just my view.

No! I am specifically not challenging Allyson on her intellectual content. I don't tend to agree with her drift, but that's not the problem I have.

If she cannot convey her intellectual content without resorting to rude words, I'd rather she waited a while and regained calm before trying to say anything. It's perfectly possible to argue -- even to argue unhappily -- without the use of rude words on either side.

By no means do I think Allyson's the only one who has gotten snide in Bureaucracy in the history of the world or even today, but she's doing it now (okay, sometime in the past 5 hours), and claiming that truth trumps politeness, a premise with which I disagree strenuously.

Okay, here's what confuses me. Allyson hasn't changed her stance. Are you asking her to restate her position in gentler words? Or are you asking her to change her position?

See, what I don't get is the point of asking her the same thing over and over again that's already been answered -- there must be a motive I'm not getting.