@opacey, I’m not really doubting your well intentions, and personally I am very aligned with your tendency to critizice and scrutinize – I personally deeply value such (when honest) directed towards me as guidance (however, very importantly, without guaranteeing that I would always respond as if – I can of course be annoyed, stubborn and grumpy as well as the many other possible responses to such). If dishonest I don’t rule out going war-mode if necessary (worst case scenario, but generally least common I would say as well). But if the criticism and scrutiny is just objectively wrong I do not (personally) need to care. If it is correct then it is possibly providing me with information I didn’t have, which would be absolutely necessary to not repeat my errors. That makes me very grateful. I hate to not know my weaknesses and errors.
It’s more complicated in public discussion. Most often criticism is semi-correct, and when semi-correct and repeated, it is hard to just say ”yeah, you’re right, thanks” because it isn’t quite right (and as a public person, confirming it all to be would be simply damaging to my work), and correcting it draws me into potentially long winding discussions, draining energy, where it is in the end still not clear to the public what is true or not. In that case, and especially if there are numerous such occurrences, cost/benefit in engaging in them all might be poor, and a strategy where all such is straight off discarded, could be rational (depends so much on context it is not even worth going into here).
I do not doubt that you consider your criticism and scrutiny to be accurate and fair, and that is why I do not consider any of what you say straight out malicious (not ruling out some drops of bitterness though, which could explain some of the harshness). But, it’s not certain that what you say actually is accurate and fair. If only looking about the statement about HMRC in 2014; myself I have no idea what UK regulations are or were, but it would seem from what @happybeing and @dirvine says, that your statement is not accurate or fair (aka ”the premise”). And so… that might apply to the other things you say as well (in any number of ways…), which makes it hard to accept it all straight off. It certainly will take more time to distinguish it, not only for recipient but also the wider public (which is where it becomes damaging when true and false is confused). You must acknowledge this (given ”the premise”) to be somewhat reasonable?
So, I would say that if you really really consider your observations and your analysis to be important, you must be much more selective with the contents and delivery, spending more time on providing them in a form more likely to be both objectively correct, as well received (any minimal drop of bitterness can waste the whole drink…) given any and all circumstances (purely my personal assessment, do what you will with it) because the cost / benefit, from receiver perspective, of giving attention to it might not be that high otherwise, which would increase the likelihood of some other strategy to kick in (discard this criticism with some low cost method - saying nothing is often not a good alternative, and well balanced, tailor suited responses for your words personally, are higher cost to produce).
If you don’t think it’s worth the effort to be more selective or crafting the message (even more) for the context, then probably the contents aren’t that important? (Or well… you might just not see the value and utility of it, in which case I guess you’ll just have to trod on with the approach you consider suitable, with what ever results that gives).
(cast the line a little bit more down river etc.)
