OneAndOneIs2

It's the Information Age. It's easier to communicate now than it ever has been before, via a plethora of different ways.

This is generally a good thing. There are bills being mooted in the USA at the moment that would damage people's ability to communicate via the Internet, and this is why you may have seen the blackout notices on Wikipedia today - the "Nuclear Option" that made tech news a while ago where Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, etc. talked about taking themselves offline in protest. Communication matters.

But it does have its downsides. There are times when you might find yourself regretting that people can follow so much of what you say & do.

For instance, I recently got an email from someone I used to know. Completely unexpected, hadn't talked to them in ages. But suddenly, here was a message from them. Yelling at me for something I had written, which they disagreed with.

Slightly puzzled, I checked the article in question, and it didn't say what they claimed it did. In fact, it had a paragraph devoted specifically to pointing out the reasons why it didn't say what they claimed.

So I sent back a "Sorry you're upset, but it doesn't say that" reply. Rather than accept the correction, they sent a reply that shouted at me a bit more. There was a brief argument, that ended after they sent a "Not talking to you any more" reply.

But human nature can be so distressingly predictable, and I just *knew* that they wouldn't be happy leaving it there. So I gave it a few days, and then took a look at the blog published by my unhappy correspondent. Sure enough, there was a long post about not just our recent exchange, but a whole lot more too.

It was quite a post. It read like an account of the Angel of Reasonableness describing its encounter with a bad-tempered ogre. And obviously, when two people give an account of something, you expect discrepancies - different perspectives, different recollections, and the inevitable personal bias.

But the more I read, the more cynical I became. It went from "harsh" to "unfair" to "near absurd" before I finally came across one point that just couldn't be explained away by subjectivity or hindsight: An accusation that I had said/written something that I knew I hadn't. Just to be sure, I went back to my sent messages and checked. Nope: Clear as day, with no possibility that it could be misread or misinterpreted. I had absolutely, definitely, said the exact opposite of what they claimed I had. This wasn't a faulty recollection or an impassioned over-statement. It was a flat-out lie.

With that in mind, I re-read the post with my cynicism turned up from "They might be exaggerating" to "I know they're lying" and re-interpreted it on that basis. My final conclusion?

It was bullshit.

That pretty much sums it up. It re-writes history in a deliberate attempt to make it look as bad as possible. It over-states, it distorts, and in several places it just outright lies. Even with every possible allowance made, it's not possible to believe that the author actually believed what they wrote. Not without casting grave doubts over their sanity, anyway.

I debated replying, maybe with some screenshots of the various messages/articles/etc. that contradict their account plainly highlighted. But I decided against it - communication is a wonderful thing, but there's such a thing as too much of it. I'd already clearly pointed out discrepancies between what I was accused of and what I had actually said in the earlier argument, all of which were brushed aside & ignored. What would it accomplish to point out yet more?

So I dropped it. They can carry on happy to have got the last word; I can carry on happy that I don't really care.

Funny thing is, if this had happened a while ago - as little as a year ago - it would have bothered me massively. Somebody who I used to be quite close to, saying and thinking such nasty things.. It would have nagged at me all day and kept me awake at night. Maybe that was their intention.

But the last few years have had a lot happen in them, and it appears they've changed me even more than I'd been aware of. If someone wants to rewrite their past to justify being unhappy in the present, they're welcome to. I gave up on being this guy years ago: