You can say anything you want. That doesn't mean you should. There comes a point in life when you are expected to act like an adult. If everyone got in touch with their inner frat-boy whenever they felt like it, human life would be unliveable.
Exactly. Thank you, Diane. Read the whole thing, and stop giving the Anils ammunition.
BTW I thought Anil's intentions and targets for criticism were justified, but his shrill self-righteousness, defensiveness, inability to see the forest for the trees, and attempts to start a crusade made him a troll. The participants in a comments section that keep a good discussion on a sane footing do so by adhering to basic rules of verbal de-escalation: they choose their battles carefully, they don't act morally superior, they stick to the facts instead of making personal attacks, they praise before they blame, they accurately identify trolls and don't feed them, they don't use the blog primarily to vent but to communicate. They have quiet authority, like the kid in high-school who everybody thought was a mensch, even though he/she didn't fit into any of the cliques and wasn't trying to be popular.
In other words, they are Heinlein individuals. Remember how in every Heinlein novel there was at least one whiney minor character who was never a villain but was just kind of annoying, and part of the protagonist's journey to maturity was to figure out how to handle said character with dignity and intelligence?
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