I hear ya on the pain avoidance. I have only gotten stung thrice over my career as a beekeeper and that was really three times too many.

I think my fear is more about pain avoidance, and also about causing unnecessary suffering for bees.

Bees can be dangerous, so there’s nothing particularly irrational about being afraid of them.

Let’s try a different metaphor, to begin with: A fair or convention of some kind. Could be about anything. If there’s a stall marketing something you strongly disagree with, do you walk up to the people standing there telling them they have their heads up their asses? Would you go up to them and talk to them at all? Usually, you’d just move on to something more interesting, rather than hanging around people you don’t like trying to sell you something you think is bunk. You’d simply not expose yourself to what you think is pure stupidity. On the internet on the other hand, a lot of people seem to take pleasure in dredging up stuff they think is idiotic and then complaining about it.

While I agree that blogs are more or less open arenas by definition, there is still the point to be made that people get a lot more argumentative and also rude when protected by the anonymity of internet interactions. Personally I take internet debates very seriously and always see my opponents as real people but this doesn’t seem to apply to everyone.

Still, this wasn’t supposed to be about rudeness but simply the point that when in real life, most people will simply walk away from topics and people that offend them - or switch channel or read a different newspaper article - on the internet, we suddenly turn confrontative. It’s one thing to enter into a dialogue, quite another to simply drop a one-time comment on someone’s blog telling them they’re an idiot. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or not: That’s not feedback, that’s just trolling.