Tom Gilson Joins the Cult of Victimhood

  " @bbigej Bryan, I don’t know why u want 2 keep throwing inanities like this at me, but apparently u do. Could I just ask you to stop, please?"

One person's inanity is another's satire. My comment wasn't necessarily constructive and probably uncalled for. But the arguments presented in the article linked to are just as inane. So maybe I'm just matching tit for tat.

"@bbigej I’m still asking you to cease the pinging, rather than my just muting you on my feed. It’s a matter of courtesy, Bryan, okay?"

Gilson begins to cast himself as a victim and shifts the goalposts to complain about my "pinging" instead. By "pinging," Gilson can only mean regular counterarguments directed at him onto his Twitter feed. Surely some of my tweets have not been very constructive, but most of what I post is relevant criticism:

@ThnkngChristian what well intentioned and syntactically accurate words do conservatives think aren't open to fair use anymore?

@ThnkngChristian your first question is regarding "primary" interest of marriage. If it's children, even a systems approach is pro-gay mrrg

@ThnkngChristian still unclear to me how God's existence is objectively meaningful even given his subjective attributes @CounterApologis

@ThnkngChristian Meaninglessness does not require death. One can easily imagine a pointless life stretching into eternity.

and so on...sometimes I even remenisce:

@ThnkngChristian hahaha. I remember that post. There are my comments when I was a Christian. Right there. Good times.

"@bbigej You’re missing the point. It’s not the content, it’s the incessant pinging."

Incessant? Gilson is being hyperbolic. I respond to 20% of his posts, if that. Maybe it seems incessant because I'm virtually the only user who responds to his Twitter posts (counting critics and non-critics).

I offer to restrict my comments to constructive ones only. In reply, he says:

"@bbigej Constructive is a subjective judgment, too."

I want to keep replying to his posts, keeping it constructive. But Gilson gives himself an out. Anything I now post that he disagrees with can now be interpreted as "unconstructive." Here the gauntlet comes down: no more criticism.

Naively, I try to respond with something that could not possibly be interpreted as nonconstructive in a last ditch effort to foster genuine dialogue. I am met with:

"@bbigej You’re missing the point. It’s not the content, it’s the incessant pinging."

One becomes suspicious that if I was one of his sycophants, he wouldn't have a problem with "incessant pinging." But I speculate.

The salient point here is that he responds only seconds before I post two other comments in rapid succession, which Gilson interprets as belligerence. I have no time to react and defend myself before I am muted. That is the context of his last three tweets:

"@bbigej Case in point: This kind of question I don’t need interrupting my day, and can’t be answered on Twitter anyway. Courtesy. Please."

(How does a tweet "interrupt" someones day? He's starting to sound ridiculous and like he's going off the rails. How does he know such questions can't be answered on Twitter? There's no evidence he even made such an attempt. Even a rudimentary summary would have sufficed.)

"@bbigej My requests for courtesy have gone rudely unanswered. Muting you here now. I hope that works; otherwise I’ll go to Twitter about it."

"@bbigej Muting you didn’t work. Explaining how you got that wrong won’t work either. I’ll try another avenue."

And so Tom Gilson pounds down the kool-aid following swift initiation into the Cult of Victimhood, the very thing decried in the original post. The irony, at least, is not lost on me.

Tom, if you don't want people to argue with you, "incessantly" or not, quit crying, and get off the internet. Blocking someone for anything less than threats, ad hominen attacks or genuine spam is intellectual cowardice. That goes for theists and non-theists.