fling93 loves fishies

My Original Snarkier Marriage Comment

While on the topic of short and long blog posts, I should mention that I do actually regularly write much shorter takes when I am commenting on other blogs. This is because I view blog posts and blog comments as two different kinds of media which warrant different approaches, and I think my long post and short comment on gay marriage illustrate this quite nicely, if I do say so myself. Plus, it occurred to me that some of you who read my very lengthy On Marriage post might be interested to see the original four-paragraph comment that it started as.

I view the ideal blog, as David commented, like a newspaper article or column, where readers turn for information, commentary, or analysis. I view blog comments more like message boards, where the whole point is to experience and explore a wide variety of different viewpoints. After all, a message board isn’t a committee designed to decide upon a course of action or reach a consensus. The point is to see a bunch of different perspectives and enjoy the pretty colors and patterns that they form.

So I’ve always thought that an overly long comment tends to be an attempt to monopolize the debate, having a disruptive influence (unless it sparks similar responses), and thus would’ve been better suited as a separate post with a trackback ping. This is more true on most blog comment areas, where you generally don’t have any choice but to view a single page that has every single comment, one after the other. In such a format, a long comment clearly disrupts the flow, and I find myself tending to skip or skim such comments.

I also often see very heated debates where people are trying their hardest to “win” the argument, or at least make the other person look bad, which I think also badly misses the point. Being human and thus possessing an ego myself, I’ve fallen into this trap myself, but at least I do try to keep the bigger picture in mind. Which is that it’s one thing to explain why you believe something and probe another person’s conflicting belief to understand where they’re coming from. It’s quite another to try and convince the other person that they are wrong — which you’re really just not going to be able to do unless the other person is unusually open-minded.

Sometimes one person does have a more informed opinion than the other (in which case the only result is that the other person becomes defensive or gets humiliated), but typically, you really just have two intelligent people who arrived at different conclusions through two perfectly valid thought processes. This happens because the world is a complicated place, and it’s impossible for a human being to have enough information to really completely understand most contentious issues. So instead, people make necessary simplifying assumptions to start from, and different people have different assumptions.

Anyway, to get back to what prompted me to write this in the first place, I thought I’d show you the contrast between my approaches. This is a comment (slightly edited) I wrote regarding the gay marriage issue at The Winds of Change. It’s not an ideal example, since it’s not that conversational, not really responding to the post itself or any of the other comments (I guess I’ve been itching to say something on the topic for a while). But it should still illustrate the contrast in approaches:

If you really want to fix marriage, I think the first thing you should do is remove artificial incentives for it. There are plenty of people getting married for really bad reasons like health insurance, citizenship, lower taxes, gold-digging, etc. Benefits like that should be removed as much as possible (and yeah, some of those cases are really tricky). That should cover many bad marriages.

Another thing is perhaps raise the minimum required age. I think it’s pretty rare to find someone really emotionally mature enough to handle a decision like this until at least their late 20s. And people change a lot in their 20s. Maybe also mandate a waiting period. That’d take care of cases like Britney Spears & Dennis Rodman.

Gay marriage doesn’t hurt heterosexual marriages at all. It’s just a matter of society’s comfort with the idea. Just as with interracial marriages, this will change over time. The sooner, the better.

Just like naked breasts don’t hurt children. There is nothing inherently sexual or obscene about the female breast. Many other societies don’t treat it like a sex object it like ours does — because it’s an organ for feeding babies, for crying out loud. Yet our society is squeamish over the idea of exposed female breasts for no good reason. Well, the same goes for gay marriages.

See, I can be brief and snarky when I want to be. But I would think that most of you will agree the above wouldn’t have been as good a blog post as the one I ended up with, where I explored the topic much more thoroughly.

Of course, this not exactly being that short a post, I guess there would be some serious sampling bias there.