you want pathos?

[rone]

Oprah's latest book club selection seems to not deserve its non-fiction billing.

I wonder how Oprah will react to this information, not because i give a crap about Oprah, but because i wonder if she thinks it matters enough to make a fuss about it.

Comments

There's a difference between "I was one of the people..."

[mouseworks.livejournal.com]

...this bad thing happened to and other people have had it worse" and "this bad thing happened to me and it's just awful and I am the martyr." I'm thinking of why I could actually come to like Stephen Boursy and could end up having no patience for Scott Abraham.

If one must be a drama queen, half of the dramas should be comedies.

I figure I might be one of your example drama queens. I shouldn't have posted what I did a couple of weeks ago.

Re: There's a difference between "I was one of the people..."

[eagle]

You're not, actually. And I think I should explain why since it's a good illustration of what I'm getting at (and not getting at).

The LJ drama queen problem is hard, because LJs are also personal and people are fully allowed to bitch in their personal journals about the stuff going on in their life that they don't like. I don't mind that at all, and I think people should be able to post whatever comments they feel like making about their life.

There are two key differences, I think, between normal bitching about things going on that aren't what one wants and being a drama queen. One is that the drama queen (and really, I should find a different term, since it's not gender-linked and it's also not tied to any of the other meanings of queen) says what they say specifically to evoke a response, specifically to get sympathy. In other words, just getting it off their chest isn't the point; the point is creating a particular reaction in the listeners that specifically supports them and reinforces their decisions already made. Second, they rarely take any concrete action to fix the problem and often get quite huffy about people who offer any. One gets a definite impression over time that they're intentionally not fixing the problem so that they'll have something to complain about.

When people started doing stupid things in your LJ, you banned them and started making friends-only posts so that you wouldn't be pestered by it. That's a productive way of solving a problem. The sort of people that I'm complaining about would instead escalate the situation in public so that more people would jump in and defend them, and then post their sympathy pleas and other commands friends-locked to encourage the piling on. I've seen this happen tons of times, and it's not at all the approach you took.

Forum shifting is another typical tactic of the sort of person I'm complaining about, and in fact the book that sparked this thread is an excellent example. If one isn't getting enough sympathy and mindless support (as opposed to productive suggestions) from one's current circles, write a biased take on the situation and post it somewhere completely different where you can get sympathy without regard to the other side of the story. It feels like that's what this book was, and I've seen it happen tons on LJ. People post things to public blogs or communities, and then when some argument starts, they go selectively cut and paste the argument into a friends-locked LJ entry so that they can get sympathy and support.

Re: There's a difference between "I was one of the people..."

[mouseworks.livejournal.com]

Um, understood. I still feel I dumped some stuff on friends that should have been between me and my secular confessor (not over the thing you're talking about but a later post).

Empathy leeches, perhaps, might be a better term for what you're talking about. If a reasonable person in a bad spot needs some mindless support, it's generally over in fairly short while as the person gets some distance and perspective on the bad thing. The empathy leech won't take advice and can't put what happened in perspective or use it to build bonds between people who've had something like that happen to them, much less forgive anyone or understand anyone who has wronged them.

It's fairly obviously either a way to get a good outrage going (that appears to be addictive to some people) or to get attention, or both.

A friend of mine said something about how much goes in both directions -- is the other person as much there for her as she is for the other person. I've found out I helped her when I wasn't even particularly trying, just telling her what worked for me in a similar situation. And she helped almost effortlessly when I had to deal with some things in my life. She has an empathy leech in her life and really appreciates people who aren't.

Empathy leeches don't have to be that melodramatic about it, they can be. Maybe those people are empathy vampires.