White flags

For once I could talk a lot about my personal life, which has been more interesting as of late. And so I am not going to, because there would be to much to say and to process and the whole thing would get overwhelming. I guess it is better to have things be overwhelming rather than stagnant and depressing, but it still isn't quite at the place where I could stand back and give it a quirky, entertaining, bloggy spin in a few short paragraphs.

On the other hand, I happened to browse some of my old comments from posts on various blogs and discovered, much to my ego gratification, that some of my comments and garnered serious responses. Which is not necessarily saying much in a blog community, but it is nice to know that I got people thinking. Most of the time it was for making less liberal comments in a very liberal atmosphere. This is especially awkward because a) I am very liberal in most respects and b) there are so many concern trolls on blogs that I think I automatically get lumped in to that category.

I'm not sure if I need to explain concern troll, but essentially it is a person who acts sympathetic to your argument just to tear it down (ie. "I agree that women should have equal rights in principle, but this is a time of war...). As you can see, obnoxious. So when I come along and point out that maybe Giuliani taking a phone call during a press conference wouldn't be quite so frowned upon in that blog if a democrat had done it, people assume I am concern trolling. Which makes sense really, because even though all I'm really trying to say is that we shouldn't worry about minor crap like that, it sounds high-handed.

My problem is that I never figured out a genuine white flag to raise, like "no really, I am sympathetic to your overall concerns, but there are some minor points I disagree with." Because just about anything you say like that comes across as concern-trollish. And even if there were a genuine white flag, concern trolls would just co-opt it immediately and it would become meaningless. One of the reasons I stopped belonging to these communities as a rule. Rosemary's is still fun, though.