Gaslighting discussion (split from: Justin’s Miscellaneous Posts)

[anonymous88]

@JustinCEO

@Elliot

Please don’t assume, and please don’t post anything that puts a potential burden on me to respond or act.

This is a bit of a tangent, but I really wanted to say something about it, as I’ve thought about it for a while: I think that the part I bolded is, based on my current existing knowledge, actually impossible to comply with.

I didn’t read this as a hard rule. It sounds like a request to make a good faith effort.

This isn’t even that strange of a rule. I am on some facebook groups that have rules like “Please don’t post things that say ‘Moderator: Please remove if not allowed.’ If you are not sure if it is allowed, go re-read the rules. If you think it isn’t allowed, don’t post it.”

Elliot’s request seems similar to that: make a good-faith effort, don’t post things that you think are maybe not allowed.

Elliot wrote that in response to you actually doing something that you knew was not allowed under the rule. You literally said:

@JustinCEO

I’m going to tentatively assume on-topic posts of mine to this topic are okay based on the recent moderation activity, but please correct me if I’m wrong…

And the part you are quoting is a direct reply to that. You admitted that you knew you were doing something that wasn’t allowed under the stated rules, and went and did it any way, asking him to correct you if the stated rules still applied. And he was asking you not to do that. But you are misunderstanding it here as some kind of unreasonable, literal request. And you cut the context out of your quote of it, to add to the impression that Elliot is making impossible requests of you, instead of nicely responding to you knowingly breaking the rules.

You knowingly broke the rules, and Elliot responded by asking you to please not do it again, and you are using that polite request to imply that he is being unreasonable and expecting literal perfection from you.

@JustinCEO

(this is another thing I can be damned for, I suppose)

This is more hyperbole, and more implying that Elliot is being unreasonable and that you are being mistreated and victimized in some way.

I don’t think you are consciously trying to imply to the audience that you are being mistreated and victimized. My guess is that you are actually feeling this way yourself, and that is why it comes across in your writing.

@JustinCEO

I had no standard to judge whether I could be imposing such a burden. So I was basically just ignoring the request and hoping that some other bit of knowledge I have or policy would “catch” any problems.

So because you couldn’t perfectly figure out what may or may not burden him, you just completely ignored the request? And you seem to be implying here that was reasonable of you, since it was impossible for you to do anything different.

You literally knowingly broke the rules and he asked you to not do that again (and also not do anything else that knowingly would give him a burden to respond), but you just ignored the request because you can’t perfectly figure out every single thing that he might think creates a burden to respond?