When all you use is a hammer...

Everything starts to look like a nail. Methinks this fellow has dealt with some shit and is blowing all of this out of proportion. But "There are ways to reply to criticism (if you simply can't ignore it) and there are ways to dramaticise and exacerbate conflict."... And then he goes on to blow shit up. Sad.

We have a post about protesters and China blah blah. Kid criticizes my writer for a final graf that wonders aloud why these folks aren't targeting ALL THE OTHER companies using Chinese labor (and ALL of them do far less than Apple to fix things). My writer goes off on him. Then the kid starts to conflate this experience with his experience as a writer of LGBT issues.

I call bullshit. This is typical "mom, Billy is looking at me weird!" type crap that comes up now and again from people who have often been victimized in their personal lives. I get it -- it's easy and human to think you are being attacked for making a critical remark. Then again, maybe you're the douchebag whose skin is so thin that you don't even realize what the issue was to begin with. Maybe you're so adept at transmuting the world around you that you see all forms of conversation against your words as some form of attack. Perhaps you even see it as latent homophobia. I've known people like this, so I'm not pulling this out of thin air. I don't know if this guy has the same thing, but given his conflating of gay rights and our "attacks" it certainly seems like, at the least, his skin is very, very thin.

Oh well. Now I'm engaging this kid in a Twitter conversation, which I should not. Because he feels like his blog post is the "last word."

Actually the last word will be Chris Rawson continuing to write for TUAW. He's received a number of accolades, in fact, and I feel he's a skilled writer and logician. I have found that only the slower kids in the class have a hard time finding out what he's talking about, and it reminds me of the subversive filmmakers from Soviet Russia who would make movies that were really poking fun at the politburo, but the people in power were too dim to realize they were the butt of the joke.

Human stupidity is infinitely variable and amazing.

Update: Why do I like Rawson's writing? Read this and tell me it doesn't sound like Hunter S. Thompson would have written the same thing. Bingo.