QUOTE(One @ Thu 26th March 2009, 9:53am)
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Drop the grudge. Move on. Life's too short.
Sorry, Shalom, I haven't read through the details of what's passed between you and iridescent. I've got a more general comment that may or may not be useful here.
My take is: it's often very hard to end hard feelings after someone feels he's been wronged, and much harder when the community around you won't enforce its norms in that situation. One of Shalom's complaints was that others didn't do that.
The community around the two parties plays a much bigger role than people may think. We often look away if we think there's plenty of blame to go around when two parties are fighting each other (although sometimes the drama attracts us if it looks entertaining enough or grisly enough). If we want someone to stop complaining about a particular case, or stop feuding about it, it seems to me the surest way to do it is to look into the situation, condemn the other person if that other person really did do something awful, and make the condemnation clear. That cuts down the urge of the complainer for revenge, and may even eliminate the urge.
Obviously, this example is like comparing a mountain to a molehill, but some of the same things apply if you just scale it down: I remember sitting through a well-publicized rape trial, and I had the opportunity to speak with the defendant, his accuser and the family members of each. I also remember being told by a guy -- who happened to be a cop -- that if it had ever happened to his sister or a member of his family, he'd kill the rapist. I remember thinking, "The hell you'd kill him." The experience for an accuser and the accuser's family at a trial has its frustrations, but it can also heal a lot. The accuser's family sat through the trial, experienced the formailty of the community assessing the accusation with care and seriousness, and then, after the first trial resulted in a hung jury, saw the rapist as he was convicted (at which point he bawled), then sentenced. The husband of the rape victim, a huge guy, didn't lift a finger against the rapist, and then, with a completely clean conscience, experienced the satisfaction of seeing the community punish him. If you scale all this down, I'd say that if some third party states that they've looked into a matter and found that someone seems to have been wronged, it helps diffuse the situation.
In societies where the authorities don't tend to dispense justice, traditions develop for families, private groups or the parties themselves to dispense it. The usual conflict-of-interest problems ensue, and the punishments tend to be overly harsh.
From
[[Feud]]:
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Vendetta is typical of societies with a weak rule of law (or where the state doesn't consider itself responsible for mediating this kind of dispute) [...] The practice has mostly disappeared with more centralized, rationalistic societies where law enforcement and criminal law take responsibility of punishing lawbreakers.
Not everything can be adjudicated. Many things can be condemned. I think that even if both parties are to blame, condemning both may actually be helpful to both, since I suspect most people would be willing to take the criticism if only the other side's wrongs were recognized. This is one reason why we shouldn't hesitate to say something that might irritate the complainer if the complainer is also in the wrong.
I think it seldom works to tell someone who's angry that "life's too short". That may work after the anger dies down, but that's never the time a person is told "forget about it." I think One's reply, overall, was probably helpful by indicating he looked into the matter, and, since he determined that the other person (iridescent) did something wrong, said so.
Maybe the best thing someone in Shalom's situation can do is to state the complaint briefly and provide diffs clearly showing what the complaint is (this is very hard to do, especially when you're mad).