I'm of two minds here. I certainly sympathize with the fear that people out there on the Internet will misinterpret what you've said and bash you for it in ways

I'm of two minds here. I certainly sympathize with the fear that people out there on the Internet will misinterpret what you've said and bash you for it in ways that are inappropriate. There are really two separate dynamics, though: one is that people may twist your words. The other, that gets less attention, is that perhaps we should build a discourse that is more tolerant of mistakes. For example: racism is bad. A good person should try not to be racist (to say the least). But maybe, as a part of recognizing our own human limitations and pervasive reach of racist thinking, we should accept that even otherwise admirable people sometimes fall prey to it, and temper our reactions accordingly. Perhaps we've uncritically allowed our hard work towards greater awareness of these sorts of moral mistakes to result in a constant ratcheting-up of the opprobrium that they invite. Here, the problem with complaining, in the abstract, about the fear of having your words twisted, is that it assumes that you, the twistee, are right, and the "twisters" have it all wrong. But if this happens to you frequently enough that you feel compelled to write this sort of blog post, I can't help but suspect that things may be the other way around. Reframing this sort of concern about the growing social costs of routine moral failings helps with this because it recognizes the possibility that the author is not really a smarter person, with greater moral insight, than those that criticize her.