Thursday November 11 2004

And then we go on politin’

Got in a bit of a pissing match with another fella at work last night. Here’s, more or less, what happened:

Last month, some of us may recall, was October. Now, the team I am assigned to at work is predominantly women – out of 15 people, 4 of us are male, and, actually, that should be 17, because that count does not include one female part time worker and our supervisor, who is also female.

I mention this only because it explains how, for the entire month of October, I found my work environment transformed into an artificial cobweb festooned cavern of fake, commercialized horror, specifically oriented along a ‘witch’ theme (see, each team chose a different ‘spooky theme’, and our team ended up with ‘witches’, because our boss thinks witches are cool, which is odd given her own devout fundamentalist brand of Christianity and the Biblical injunction as to exactly what we are not supposed to let witches do, but leave that aside).

See, guys can enjoy holidays, but for the most part, we’re willing to do it without putting a lot of effort into it. For Halloween, I carve a jack o’lantern, and buy candy for trick or treaters who never show up, no matter where I’m living at the time, which I then eat. In addition, if I can somehow contrive someway to create a costume using this really gorgeous black medieval cloak that an ex girlfriend made for me many years ago, then I do so, because it’s probably the most valuable item of clothing I possess, and Halloween is about the only day of the year I get to wear it.

That’s my Halloween tradition. It’s simple, it’s easy. Most males I know do even less for Halloween.

Women, on the other hand, as a general rule, simply have no sense of proportion, or, unhappily, decorum, about the holidays. So when you have a female supervisor and are assigned to a team where the chicks outnumber the guys by a proportion of 13 to 4, which is to say, slightly more than 3 to 1, well, the holidays become, to a certain extent, rather a distraction. And that’s putting it mildly.

Now, I regard many of my human co-habitants on this globe as being imperfectly evolved, and this trait manifests itself in many different ways. One of the most personally irritating of these, to me, is how many people are bemused and delighted by these annoying electronically animated holiday figures that, upon being activated, perform some sort of generally really aggravating movement sequence and emit even more exasperatingly obnoxious and stupid noises. (Often these noises involve really obnoxiously cutesy rewriting of perfectly good lyrics from old rock n’ roll songs, as with the infamous singing carp that was popular with lackwits throughout America about ten years ago, and its endless repertoire of slightly rewritten Elvis tunes.)

Now, Christmas is normally the season where I find myself inevitably inundated in a veritable avalanche of Swingin’ Santas, Singin’ Snowmen, and Rock n’ Roll Reindeer, but you can always rely on private industry to grab any really bad idea and exacerbate it as much as possible. If there are people out there willing to buy a stiffly animatronic Santa Claus in a Hawaiian shirt which burbles “Blue Christmas” at the touch of a button while pretending to play a ukelele, well, then, there must be people out there willing to buy horrendous electonically animated witches that, upon being activated, will begin to jerkily dance while belting out a truly appallingly bad version of Santana’s “Black Magic Woman”. Or that will cackle, in the most calculatedly irritating manner imaginable, various inane and vapid tidbits like “You look like a tasty treat” and “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful”.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, we had one of these things on the wall where I work all last month. I find them obnoxious and insufferable, and unfortunately, I made the foolish assumption that someone else I work with was mature enough that, if I asked them nicely to please not activate those goddam things while I was at work, because I found them truly irritating, then they would honor that request. And, well, they didn’t. In fact, this particular person, whom I had prior to this found to be fairly adult (for someone in his mid 20s), seemed to positively exult in activating this goddam thing two or three times a night, each time loudly declaiming, with a vastly fatuous smirk firmly on his face, something along the lines of “I’m only doing this because it annoys Darren so much”.

So, bear that in mind, and then fast forward to last night, where the night crew, all five of us, are sitting around eating free pizza, because our team reached or exceeded our most important measured stats for… some period of time, I don’t know what, maybe the month of October.

So we were talking about one thing or another, and as the guy I referred to above, who had prior to the October witch thing always struck me as reasonably mature, is a Born Again Christian who can’t talk about much of anything for longer than five minutes without bringing the topic back around to religion, well, when the subject came up, I related this hilarious joke about Jesus. (“Why can’t you play hide and seek with Jesus?” ::covers eyes with palms of hands:: “Because he cheats.”) Everybody laughed, although this one girl, who has been trying to relentlessly suck up to the guy I am talking about for the last two months (because he’s very good looking) immediately said “That’s not funny” (after she laughed). However, I thought it was funny, clearly she thought it was funny, and so did everyone else there.

And then, this guy I’m talking about (I guess I’ll call him Nick) said, quietly, in tones of gravely injured dignity “I would really appreciate it if we didn’t make any more jokes about Jesus”.

Now, this is, in the workplace, more or less a reasonable request. None of us are there because we want to be there; we are, pretty much, compelled to show up, because our co-beings truculently refuse to provide us with the necessary elements of our comfortable lives, like food, shelter, and electricity, not to mention DVDs and HeroClix, for nothing. (Which I also find aggravating, but never mind.)

So, yes, it is reasonable, one would think, for one person working in a particular environment that they cannot leave, to request of other people working in that environment, that they refrain from engaging in utterly unnecessary behavior that is annoying or offensive.

You see where I’m going with this, I’m sure.

Now, having been a good boy and given the mandatory “Yes, he had a right to make the request he did” statement, I’m going to digress for a minute here and say this: When people say things like “I would really prefer it if people did not make jokes about Jesus”, it drives me nuts. The historical evidence for the existence of anyone referred to as ‘Jesus’ (and it wasn’t his name, it’s a title, which most so called Christians don’t know) is inconclusive (and unpersuasive) to say the least. If the guy did exist, he’s been dead for probably a little less than 2000 years (assuming he lived into his late 20s or early 30s). Taking offense because someone makes a joke about such a mythological figure is ridiculous, and unwise, and annoying.

However, my place of work is rife with Born Agains, and we are very politically correct there, and, well, I’m already on enough people’s lists. So I did not say any of this to Nick, nor did I convey to him how annoying I found it when, during an informal meal break at work, one of my co-workers felt it was appropriate to suppress my freedom of expression.

But I was annoyed. I have almost never in my life met a Born Again Christian who didn’t need at least one good kick in the ass, and telling me I should, or shouldn’t, say certain things is always guaranteed to piss me right off. (To be fair, about the only Born Again I have ever met who didn’t need a good kick in the ass is also a co-worker… although, come to think of it, that particular Born Again annoyed me hugely with some of his more evangelical statements back in training, so I suppose it’s just that I haven’t been exposed to him all that much since. He probably needs a good swift kick in the ass, too.)

However, I just said, “Okay, I won’t.”

And then, you know, because sometimes I’m just not very enlightened, I had to add “But I want to point out that I made a similar request of you last month about that stupid damned witch, and you had to mess with that thing three times a night every night just to aggravate me after I did it, so keep that in mind the next time I ask you to please not do something that I find annoying.”

One can very nearly hear Christopher Lee intoning solemnly to me, “That was… unwise, my friend.”

Honestly, you would have thought I’d unzipped and started pissing on Nick’s sneakers. Well, he just didn’t want to talk about that. No, he wasn’t going to… no, that was childish, trying to justify someone else’s behavior by talking about what someone else had done… he wasn’t even going to start on that. No. Plus, there was no comparison between insulting Jesus and, you know, fooling around with some silly toy. It wasn’t the same. It wasn’t… no. He wasn’t going to talk about it. He just wasn’t, and if I couldn’t see that, then, well, he just wasn’t going to talk about it.

After about a half hour, I tried to approach him and smooth it over, saying I hadn’t meant to aggravate him (which is true; it had just popped out because he had aggravated me). Had he been willing to meet me halfway and say something similar, that would have been it, and we’d have moved on. But he immediately jumped into “Well, you know, some things are just really offensive”, and we were off to the races again.

He did indicate to me that if it really bothered me all that much when he was messing around with the stupid witch, I should have told him and he’d stop. This flabbergasted me. I reminded him that I had told him, and his response had been to do it more, while obviously taking enormous pleasure from the fact that it clearly annoyed me. He didn’t like that either, and once more reverted to “I’m not going to talk about this, you can’t justify you doing something by bringing up something someone else did, that’s just childish, I’m not going to do it.”

Now, here’s the thing: I was not justifying my own behavior. He asked me to stop doing something that aggravated and offended him. I personally feel his aggravation and his taking offense were unwise and obnoxiously self centered, but, well, for a variety of reasons, I stopped. That’s adult behavior, and it doesn’t need to be justified. What I pointed out to him was that in the very recent past, a similar situation had come up, and he had responded in a considerably less mature fashion. And he just doesn’t like that.

However, as he is a Born Again Christian, and as I am an agnostic, given the work environment, I have no real choice but to back off… while bracing myself for the inundation of even worse horrors to come, next month, which Nick will doubtless take enormous pleasure in playing with, any time he notices that I am not wearing my headphones.

::sigh:: Couldn’t somebody out there buy one of my novels?

Fenwick is in the manger

Speaking of Christmas --

I mentioned in my last blog entry, which drew all of one comment, as well as a long email from someone else, that sweeping objections to the removal of ‘under God’ from the Pledge of Allegiance, mostly simply came from sheer emotional outrage at something that people nostalgically regarded as being an intrinsic part of their childhood experience being tampered with. I stated, rather sternly, that while I expected such infantile emotionalism from conservatives, moderates and liberals are supposed to be able to be reasonable and rational about such things.

In the interests of full disclosure, however, I must admit, I am every bit as emotionally truculent and ready to launch into frenzied battle at the drop of a rash syllable on the subject of ‘Christmas’.

Me being an agnostic, and, more, someone who likes the Christian religion nearly as much as I like being hit in the stomach with a two by four, it would seem more logical that I would, in fact, embrace the secular, politically correct movement to remove all specific religious phraseology from our own culture’s strangely amorphized MidWinter Solstice celebrations. You’d think I’d be right out there on the barricades screaming at people to say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”, because, you know, it potentially offends fewer folks.

You’d think.

But nooooooooooooo.

I say, if you have a problem with Christmas, shut up about it around me. That may be immature, it’s certainly overly emotional, and it’s probably unwise. I’m perfectly aware that if Jesus was born at all, it certainly wasn’t on December 25th, and I am also aware that celebrating Jesus’ birthday on that particular day is about ancient political decisions allowing a more painless assimilation of pagans into state-declared Christianity by keeping their calendar-based holy days intact. Therefore, there’s no real reason we shouldn’t extract the ‘Christ’ from ‘Christmas’, and just call it Gift Day, or Winter Day, or Solstice Day, or whatever the hell you want to call it.

But, to me, it’s Christmas. That’s what it was when I was a kid, and the very word ‘Christmas’ is one of the few things left to me out of my childhood that I have no negative associations with. (Silver Age superhero comics are another, and certain people have discovered they need to walk softly around me on that subject in the past, too.) In fact, the associations I have with the word ‘Christmas’ are all overwhelmingly positive, and nothing else will do.

So, you celebrate whatever you want, and you use whatever form of Season’s Greetings you feel like, and hey, if some school wants to ban the manger scenes, I don’t mind that much, either. But you leave Santa Claus alone, you keep your hands off my Christmas tree and my Christmas stocking and my Christmas presents, and if it offends you when I wish you a “Merry Christmas”, well, deal with it.

My work here is done.

The sniff test

Back, I think, in 9th grade, some social studies teacher (it was probably Mr. Hardy) aggravated me no end by pointing out that Prohibition had been a dismal failure, and that the reason this was so was that it was always a bad idea to try to ‘legislate morality’.

I was, at that time, just recovering from a bad case of Born Again-itis. For the past three years I’d been dragged to church and Sunday School every week because my new stepfather’s parents were deeply, deeply religious, and for the previous three years, I had also been shipped off to vacation Bible camp for a week every summer. Fortunately, my mom was a particularly schizoid kind of Born Again who never quite gave up her science fiction fandom the whole time, and who never quite gave in to my then step-father’s and then step-grandfather’s frequent histrionic declarations that all my SF and fantasy and comic books were tools of the devil and the only thing a young boy needed to read was the Bible. (They actually were that nuts. Oh my yes.) So thanks to my mom, I got to keep reading, and writers like Robert A. Heinlein and Harlan Ellison got me over that particular hump.

But once you’ve been whacked hard with the Bible belt, the bruise never fully fades. Even today many of my opinions are shaped, in some way, by a lot of the scurrilous nonsense and superstitious horseshit that was funneled into my ears like spoiling oatmeal for most of my adolescence. Back in 9th grade, when I was all of 14 years old, the knuckle marks on my soul were still pretty pronounced, and, well, I took umbrage when Mr. Hardy so snottily denounced ‘legislating morality’.

After all, if you’re not going to use morality as the basis for a legal system, what you’re going to end up with is, well, an immoral legal system, right?

See, there’s some alternate universe somewhere and in it, I am still very Born Again, and no doubt deeply, fervently conservative, and given my undeniable gifts as a writer, I am probably right up there with Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, and have my own weekly talk show and have written many successful books denouncing the treasonous anti-American liberal agenda and I have a nice big house with a heated swimming pool and probably get laid a whole lot more than I do here, even if it is only by women from the 700 Club with frightening beehive hairdos who righteously refuse to swallow. (Actually, I find it difficult to believe most Born Again chicks even go down. But this is all very much beside the point.)

However, we don’t live in that universe, for which Allah and Bast must both be unendingly praised. And in this universe, spurred on by that 9th grade experience, I have put a great deal of effort, over the years, into figuring out precisely what Mr. Hardy meant when he opined that ‘legislating morality is always a bad idea’, and, assuming he was correct, exactly what a legal system should be based on, if not morality.

I think I’ve figured out what he meant, which is, namely, that morality is a very subjective thing. America is supposed to be (as I said at great length in our last) a nation that is, above all, tolerant. Your culture is not truly free if any segment of it is in chains, or, to be less melodramatic, if there are people who live in the same country as you, and they have either more or less rights and privileges and opportunities within our legal system than you do, then you are not living in a free country. If you are in the class that has it better than, say, homosexuals, or migrant workers, or illegal immigrants, or people whose jobs have been outsourced, then you may very well turn up your nose and register with political parties whose sole purpose is to either keep things exactly the way they are (thus preserving your privileged status) or to turn back the clock to an earlier era when people like you had even MORE privileges (thus enhancing your stature).

Nonetheless, you are still not living in a free country. For a country to be free, it has to allow any form of behavior that does not directly threaten its people with real, solid, visible harm. It has to be tolerant of different viewpoints, different behaviors, and different forms of expression… and it has to allow the same range of freedom and opportunity to everyone, regardless of race, creed, color, place of birth, or sexual orientation.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

Quite some time ago, I realized that ‘morality’ is a gimme word. It, and its opposite, ‘immorality’, are labels that are entirely subjective. They simply mean whatever the person saying them (usually at the top of his or her lungs) is pointing to at the time. When you ‘legislate morality’, you are taking one particular person’s subjective standard of right and wrong and making it binding on everyone.

Conservatives, of course, do not regard this as a problem when it is their morality that is being legislated. They throw monstrous hissy fits, however, if someone with a different morality (someone who, say, thinks the human body is beautiful and who believes that inflicting silly taboos about modesty and sexual expression on children is actually psychologically harmful to them) comes along and somehow gets their particular subjective view of right and wrong pressed, however briefly, into law.

Conservatives like to say that this is because Right is Right, and Wrong is Wrong. In other words, they do not feel that their subjective viewpoints are, in fact, subjective. They believe their subjective viewpoints are, in fact, objective, and therefore, should be enforced on everyone.

This is at the crux of the entire problem with conservatives. When you are dealing with people who feel that anything in the social sphere, especially morality, is objective, you have a problem. The first step towards any sort of sane and reasonable compromise, or towards building a truly tolerant nation based on mutual respect and individual liberty, is admitting that something that works for one person may not work, or may well even be onerous and intolerable, to another person.

Liberals do not try to shut down churches. They do not insist that if Christian conservatives are going to send their kids to public school, their kids have to be publicly professing liberal secular humanists. They do not demand a Born Again free workplace, nor do they agitate for the State or Federal governments to lock up conservatives for being anti-American. Liberals do not demand that Christian conservatives be restricted from marrying.

Conservatives, on the other hand, are different. Their moral opinions are not, in fact, opinion, they are objective fact. And if you don’t believe them, well, you can ask God. God always backs up the conservative position… or at least, they say God does. And since liberals generally do not have the temerity to quote God, that’s an argument we often lose.

Still, back to my muttons… if you can’t legislate morality, what can you legislate?

Well, if we’re not looking for a subjective standard, we must be looking for an objective one. And, let’s face it, we are talking about social engineering here (that’s what pretty much every legal system is), and in any social issue, as I’ve noted, objectivity is pretty thin on the ground. Supreme Court Justices have struggled with how to find an objective standard for judging things like ‘treason’ and ‘indecency’ for decades if not centuries, correctly understanding (Supreme Court justices, regardless of their politics, do not get their jobs by sending in box tops) that no subjective standard can really be trusted in such matters.

Me, what I decided a few years back is that what the legal system is for is determining what behavior is not socially acceptable. And, again, that’s a subjective standard… but at least it avoids the whole matter of morality. It even avoids the somewhat thornier problem of ethics. Laws shouldn’t be about either, they should simply be about stating, as clearly and unequivocally as possible, what kinds of behavior our society cannot, and will not, tolerate.

This doesn’t get us out of the woods with conservatives, of course, because they just pop up, like some evil Charlie in the Box, heads sproinging back and forth at the end of their Bible-spouting springs, yammering endlessly about how a truly decent society cannot tolerate all kinds of things, including Satanic heavy metal lyrics, 9th grade girls kissing each other on the lips at slumber parties, and David Caruso’s ass on national TV.

However, here’s my sniff test for when a law should, or should not, be passed:

Something undeniably bad happening to me, or someone I care about, through no fault of my or their own.

Now, I admit, that’s a subjective standard, too, so let’s try and refine it a little more.

Some clear, demonstrable, and easily definable harm occurring to me, or to someone I care about, or to our material property, through no fault of mine or theirs.

In other words, what I’m saying here is, if you’re going to pass a law, you need to demonstrate first that if you don’t pass it, something bad, some very specific and foreseeable and undeniable harm, is either going to, or is very very likely to, occur to me, or my friends, or my or their property, and that that harm will not be due to our own willful actions, or come about as a foreseeable consequence of our own probably irresponsible behavior.

Obviously, if we don’t have laws against stealing, then a lot more theft will go on. I regard having my chattels taken from me without my consent to be a clear, demonstrable, and easily definable harm occurring to me, so I’m fine with making theft illegal. Few are going to argue with that, nor will they argue with similar laws against murder, assault, rape… all the violent, confrontational crimes that clearly have victims. No society can tolerate these acts; a culture which allows people to freely physically assault each other will quickly descend into utter chaos.

When you get beyond this, though, you are heading into the swamp. Everything becomes very subjective. Still, if you try to apply the above litmus test to most laws, I think you will find that it helps to sort things out pretty well.

For example, most drivers find it kind of onerous that they are required, by law, to have expensive insurance on their automobiles. However, if you apply my litmus test, you will realize that in point of fact, if people were not required to have insurance, well, most of they wouldn’t have it. People have many delusions about themselves. The two classic ones are “I have a great sense of humor” and “I am an excellent judge of character”. To these, I would add a third: “I am a very safe driver.” Everyone believes that they are a very safe driver; even the guy (or gal) who has totaled four automobiles in the last two years is adamant in his/her belief that all those accidents were the other drivers’ fault.

As everyone believes that they are a safe driver, very few people would insure their cars if it were a voluntary expenditure, or, at the very least, very few people would insure them adequately to cover a reasonable expectation of damages to another vehicle or person should an accident occur. Thus, the mandatory insurance law passes. If we didn’t have it, a very definable harm would very likely befall me or someone else I know, namely, we’d get run down by some idiot without insurance and nobody would pay the resultant bills and life would suck.

Mandatory ‘buckle up’ laws, on the other hand, requiring everyone to wear seat belts in a moving vehicle, do not pass my test, mostly because of that ‘no fault of their own’ clause. I say, if some dimwit wants to drive without their seatbelt fastened, or if they want to ride a motorcycle without a helmet on, that’s evolution in action. I do think that adults should be held responsible for making sure kids in the car are as safe as possible, but if a grown up wants to get catapulted at 70 miles per hour through a windshield into a highway pylon, that’s on them.

I also think that particular matter is resolvable without a law; simply let insurance companies refuse to pay off on any vehicular accident claim where it is demonstrated that the claimant was not wearing a seat belt or a helmet. Motorcycle riders seem to, by and large, be of the sort of reckless fools who simply have no capacity for believing that bad things can ever happen to them (I tend to believe that level of short sightedness is necessary in order to get on one of the goddam things, anyway), so they would probably continue to not wear helmets, rather than mess up their hair, or just not look really cool. But I have worked for a lot of insurance companies, and I am pretty sure that if motorists became aware that their accident claims would be routinely denied if they weren’t wearing their seat belts, well, they would wear their seat belts.

Laws against gay marriage are, when subjected to this litmus test, simply embarrassingly stupid. What conceivable bad thing is going to happen to you, me, or anyone else if we let homosexual couples get married? Oh, the first few weeks after the law passes the newscasts will be full of two second clips showing same sex couples kissing each other at the end of their weddings, so I’ll be reaching for my remote pretty fast when those come up (the female couples are never good looking in those broadcasts, and aesthetics aren’t a factor when it comes to male couples kissing, at least, for me)… but I reach for my remote pretty fast whenever I see Clay Aiken, Terry Bradshaw, or Nick and Jessica Simpson on tv, too. There’s a lot of stuff in this world I’d rather not look at, but I’m a liberal. When something like that comes up… I turn the TV off, or at least, change the channel.

See, when people are trying to pass laws banning things that don’t actually do any harm, they tend to get very philosophical. Grandiloquent concepts illuminate wonderful flights of oratory, as we are assured that if this law does not pass, our Entire American Way Of Life Is In Jeopardy. Democracy Itself Is At Stake. Our Precious Freedoms Cannot Survive. The Very Sanctity of Marriage, The Cornerstone Of Our Family Values, Will Be Eroded.

All this stuff gives me a rash. First, there are a lot of things about our American way of life that do not need to be and should not be preserved, and if you don’t believe me, ask anyone who has a loved one with a medical condition that requires very expensive treatments which their insurance plan (if they have one) doesn’t cover. Or anyone whose job just got outsourced. Or any agnostic/atheist/non-Christian religious person who would like to run for office. Or any environmentalist. Or anyone who feels we should be less dependent on finite energy sources. Or any creative person who wishes they could get some kind of minimal stipend to stay home and create original art of some kind, instead of expending most of their conscious energy at some dead end job, that, if they weren’t doing it, someone who wasn’t creative and can’t find work would be happy to have.

Second, and more importantly than this, while ideas are important, and the free exchange of them is vital, you should no more legislate vague, insubstantial philosophical chimeras than you should legislate morality. Laws should be about protecting real people from real harm. Gay men wearing wedding rings and having de facto power of attorney over each other without paying some lawyer to file the paperwork cannot possibly be perceived as causing ‘real harm’ to anyone.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, "Wow, I didn't recognize you in men's clothing". According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I'm reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I'd take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here's The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people's blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin's Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron's blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don't really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren't related to me by marriage, I'd most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I've learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don't care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I'd get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don't Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.