...along with 'preachy' and 'polemical' I'm also suspicious of the term 'emotional blackmail'. Perhaps I just haven't been lucky enough to know anyone who did such a thing.

It does seem an incredibly ugly term to me designed to cause people to just hide whatever unhappiness they feel and stop the person in question from taking responsibility for their actions. Of course some people must really do emotional blackmail. Some people are manipulative/dishonest. So, I dunno.



...I asked someone who uses the term 'emotional blackmail' A LOT what his thoughts were, about the term potentially being used in an unfair and very harmful way. The gist of his response was to tell me that he's not a monster and that I should lighten up.

I didn't call him a monster but to even suggest some harm may be tied into an action of his apparently causes him to immediately reduce things to whether or not he's a monster. Also he did not actually address at all the point as to whether or not the term causes harm, instead dismissively telling me to lighten up.

Hmmmm.

This strikes me first off as a person who is closed to the possibility that they might be wrong. Secondly, that this is a person who prefers to be light as opposed to serious. And by 'serious' I mean a person who bothers to think about whether or not their actions are causing harm. Thirdly this is a person who responds to criticisms by inflating them into strawmen in an attempt to more easily dismiss them. "Can the term emotional blackmail be harmful?"->"I'm not a monster!"

I don't think that causing harm makes someone a monster. I do think that people who refuse to even look at the possibility that their actions might be causing harm are a tad monsterous.

But there are certainly reasons that people become closeminded. Perhaps as children when they were wrong their parents beat them. People learn that being wrong equals unhappiness and so one way to avoid being wrong is to simply refuse to face that they're wrong.

Then after decades spent never changing one's mind, if someone questions their usage of a word, it's not a matter of an action causing harm which can simply be changed, it's a matter of a part of their essential unchanging character being a thing which causes harm. Thus to even question the usage of a word equals accusing them of being a monster.

And anyone with a higher morality then their own is an emotional blackmailer.

The above may not be entirely true. But it's partially true. For a nice preachy polemic I'll have to make sure the antagonist/s use the term 'emotional blackmail'.