Well. Being the petty, childish sort of person I am, I thought to myself ‘paybacks are hell, bitch’. And I decided I’d go out to a particular person’s weblog, go through it with a sifter looking for various things this person might have posted while in a cranky mood, yank a lot of extreme and hostile quotes, and then post them here out of context while fisking them ruthlessly, just to point out that this person, who called me a ‘black hole of emotional need’ and stated I was making assumptions about the feminine gender that put me on a level with Ann Coulter and Trent Lott, was far from perfect herself.

So, I went to Garrity’s weblog and started reading.

You know what? She’s a pleasant person. Intelligent, personable, nice, geeky in the best ways… apparently, I simply bring out the very worst in her.

How sad for both of us, that we’re never going to be able to be friends.

Some of you, especially my female readers who are somewhat geeky, may enjoy checking out her blog. She talks about her kids, she talks about a new gaming group she and her husband have formed, she’s a rather better writer than you’d get from the vitriol she spews about me… well, she’s just a rather better person than you’d expect from the hostility she projected towards someone whom she doesn’t really know at all and is, apparently, absolutely determined not to like because I ‘need to be the center of the action in order to feel loved and that spoils the conversation’.

Which brings me to my next, doubtless really tedious subject for a lot of pointless rambling…

People we really don’t like.

Sometimes, you just meet someone and you instantly do not like them. I, as many of you may have noted (and even experienced) find I frequently have this effect on folks. And, sometimes, I find I have this response to specific individuals, as well. And being a thoughtful person, when I find myself immediately disliking someone, I try to figure out exactly why, because, like most thoughtful people, I’m instinctively aware that immediately taking a dislike to someone probably reflects poorly on my character. We are, after all, supposed to be open with our hearts and tolerant and loving… it’s something our culture teaches us from birth onward, assuming we got halfway decent parenting… and it can be rather dismaying to meet someone and suddenly realize ‘jesus, I just don’t LIKE this asshole’.

Now, in my last blog entry, I reproduced some words by two people who, apparently, took an immediate dislike to me, and who were thoughtful enough, and had enough empathy and social virtue, to be troubled by the fact that they immediately disliked me. So much so, in fact, that both constructed what I have to consider to be extensive rationalizations for the fact that, well, they just didn’t like me, and they were still doing it a year after the last time they had any interactions with me at all.

However, I dealt with all that in my last entry and this isn’t about how this reflects personally on me or anyone else in specific. (Well, not at the moment is isn’t, but hey, you can trust me to bring it back around to me eventually.) This is simply me, at the moment, musing on the idea that who we dislike, and why we dislike them, does indeed say something profound about us as human beings… which is why, I think, we go to such trouble, sometimes, to try to figure out (and/or justify, and/or rationalize) exactly why, say, that geek or nerd or twit over in the corner, who isn’t really stupid, or really all that obnoxious in any way we can articulately define, or genuinely objectionable in any really valid anti-social manner, still aggravates the living shit out of us.

I think, when we meet someone like this, what we often end up doing is seeking out particular details about the person that we feel justified in being annoyed by. Sometimes this is petty shit, like, I don’t know, they snort when they laugh, or they always wear one shirt unbuttoned over another shirt, and that just pisses us off. Other times we construct these enormous structures of absurd assumption and inference, like, well, this person always wears black clothes, and therefore, they are trendy and think they’re being Goth, and being trendy is something that’s always annoying in other people we don’t like, and anyway, Goth is so much more than just wearing black clothes, so god, this person we want to dislike is a poseur and not only that, they’re bad at it, so, hey, we can dislike them, and it doesn’t reflect poorly on us because we are simply abhorring hypocrisy, artifice, and ineptness.

However, I have said it before and I will say it again: when we subject all of our feelings of aggravation towards others to any kind of really thoughtful analysis, what we will discover is that they come down to one of a few simple variations on the same essential theme: either these people are engaged in attention getting behavior that we don’t want to pay attention to (and, in a group environment, often we’d rather others didn’t pay attention to, either, because it will mean less attention being paid to us), or they are ignoring our own attention getting behavior directed towards them, or they are attempting to provide us with attention that we do not find desirable at that moment.

It is all about attention, and, yes, going back to my last blog entry, we can see this reflected pretty much comprehensively in Aaron and Garrity’s determination to find something to dislike about me that will allow them to comfortably insulate themselves from the truth: they simply don’t like me because by posting comments on Aaron’s blog, I was engaging in attention getting behavior and they did not want to pay attention to me, and I was providing them with attention that they did not find desirable.

This last is also reflected in the deliberate measures they took to keep their musings on the essential foundations of my obnoxiousness from attracting my notice… or rather, my attention. See, they don’t want any attention from me. Nor do they want me to be aware that they are paying attention to me. (In point of fact, I don’t think they want to acknowledge that by spending time and effort thinking about me and discussing me, they are, indeed, paying attention to me, but, well, they are.)

Anyway. While nearly any social equation can be boiled down, in essence, to attention getting or attention deflecting behavior, that does not necessarily address the real, specific question here, which is, why does some people’s attention getting or attention deflecting behavior annoy us, while the exact same behavior from other people entrances and delights us?

Well, sometimes it’s an unthinking emotional bias. One can very accurately measure the level of social progress our culture has made over the last century or so by checking off all the various kinds of unthinking emotional bias we are no longer comfortable feeling, and therefore, if we do feel them, we have to find some way of rationalizing them as being something else.

Racism, genderism, sexism (I differentiate the two; genderism is disliking someone based in whole or in part on their gender, while sexism, in my personal lexicon, is disliking someone based in whole or in part on their sexual behavior… note I didn’t say orientation, I think for the most part people’s sexual behavior, while probably voluntary, is rarely anyone else’s business).

Lately our notion of political correctness has been trying to add culturism and creedism to this list… we’re not supposed to be biased against other people based on the culture they are part of or the religion they practice… but that’s a tougher row to hoe, because the culture an adult is part of is often a choice, as is their religion, and both directly impact their behavior.

I personally think no one has a right to be biased against someone else for the culture or religion they are born into (this would be the same as being prejudiced against someone for what is, effectively, a geographic fluke of fortuity), but I’m perfectly willing to judge any adult on their behavior, and I don’t care if their behavior is ‘cultural’ or ‘religious’. If you’re taking pubescent girls into a clinic to have their genitalia mutilated so that they can never experience orgasm because this is how your patriarchial culture has always manifested social control over women, you’re a bad person. Similarly, if your religion demands that you kill infidels, or offers to reward you for killing infidels, and therefore you go out and kill infidels, you’re a bad person. I don’t care that this is an intrinsic part of your culture, or you are motivated by your submission to God’s will. It is shitty behavior and you are a bad person for engaging in it.

Garrity, if she’s reading my blog, may now well be horrified to find me setting forth anti-Arab hate speech. But, well, I loathe the practice of female circumcision with every fiber of my being, and I similarly loathe any religion which states that murderers of any stripe will be rewarded in heaven. Paint swastikas on me if you will.

Anyway, our culture has evolved to the point where there a lot of reasons now that we are no longer allowed to dislike someone over… or, if we catch ourselves disliking someone because they are black, or Hispanic, or male, or bisexual, or Syrian, or Hindu, it is something we are supposed to feel ashamed of. (And I agree with that, for the most part. I do not dislike Islamic men because they are Islamic, or Arab men because they are Arab. There are many Arab-American men who own gas stations and convenience stores that I’ve met and bought Pepsi and lottery tickets from, and they always have at least one really hot female relative working for them, usually behind the Subway counter, and she invariably dresses in jeans and shorts and halter tops and middie blouses, so these guys apparently ain’t culturally Islamic or Arabic, at least, to the point where they’re stoning women to death for appearing in public with anything but their eyes showing. And I have no problem with them.)

All of which means, we have now been forced to confront the notion that, as I said well above, sometimes the reasons we dislike someone reflect poorly on us. And, again, as I already set out, this means that often times, when we find ourselves disliking someone (which is always dismaying) we try to find acceptable reasons WHY we dislike that person, and, well, sometimes that’s a difficult process.

There was a guy in college I knew named Martin. Martin hung out on the Cinema Board, like me and pretty much all my buds. Martin was a gaming geek, but he played games I personally thought were annoying and boring. Martin loved Dr. Who, a show whose virtues and attractions have always been lost on me. Martin invariably liked movies I thought were awful wastes of celluloid drek, and overly cutesy to boot, like the fucking Secret of NIMH. In general, Martin just got on my last nerve, for these and other reasons, and I honestly still, twenty five years or so later, can not articulate any better than this what it was about Martin that really aggravated me. He simply wasn’t ‘cool’. He didn’t have any really discernible sense of humor that I can recall. He had no sense of proportion. He was painfully earnest about the things he enjoyed. He also, in a kind of half assed way, more or less dated a girl I had a thing for for a couple of semesters, which irritated me no end, but… again… exactly why Martin so exasperated me, I really couldn’t tell you. He just did.

I will say that everyone else in my little subclique of the Cinema Board found Martin equally annoying, except for the aforementioned girl, Ann, who seemed to find Martin’s attentions perfectly suitable without being particularly exciting. And I must also admit that many of the people I held the most dear in my life at that time shared many of Martin’s traits. The Late Great Jeff Webb, for example, was a big Dr. Who fan, as was, indeed, Ann. And even then I was capable of understanding that the idiotic and annoying geek games Martin played (mostly weird, fantasy oriented board games like Fellowship of the Talisman or some comical cutesy thing called Cosmic Something Or Other) were no more or less idiotic and annoying than the geek games I played, stuff like Titan and the original Steve Jackson version of Illuminati and a few games The Late Great Jeff Webb and I had made up together like Killquest and Pinnacle.

If I had to try and pin it down, I suppose I’d say that Martin had no sense of humor and tended to speak in painfully earnest cliches was what made me not seek out his company. For better or for worse, I’m a fast talking witty person who enjoys banter and repartee, just like, you know, those really annoying people on most of the sit-coms. I like word play and quick, clever verbal exchanges. I like nifty pop culture references and intelligent conversations about interesting concepts. Martin, as I recall, liked to converse about interesting things like, you know, in Hitchhiker’s Guide, if you wanted to understand galactic languages you had to put this fish in your ear. He thought that was really cool. And that was about the extent of the discussion with Martin. If Jeff were to begin speculating on the fact that maybe they actually had different kinds of fish for different types of languages… you might put a sardine in your ear to understand various chitonous clickings, and perhaps you could put a goldfish in your ear to be able to comprehend singing languages like those spoken by John Varley’s Titanides… Martin would look at you blankly, and then explain patiently that no, that wasn’t how it worked, there was just one sort of fish and it worked on everything.

And, you know, I’m coming to understand that on Aaron Hawkins’ blog, I was, you know, the equivalent of Martin. For whatever reason, the people that hung out there… the people Aaron found to be ‘cool’… simply did not dig my shit. As with me trying to figure out why, specifically, I didn’t like Martin, Aaron and Garrity don’t seem to be able to figure out, specifically, why they didn’t like me. They just didn’t.

Aaron flailed around quite a lot with various inarticulate notions like I was ‘too wonky’ about politics and I ‘took the geek stuff right over the edge’, and Garrity tried to nail it down by accusing me of being a misogynist and ‘a black hole of emotional need’, but I think it’s rather simpler than that.

They just didn’t like me. And that bothers them, because as both of them acknowledge, however grudgingly, I am indeed an intelligent and interesting and well spoken person, and I do indeed write clever stuff. They both seem to instinctively realize that people like them are supposed to like people like me, so, therefore, the fact that they didn’t… well… it’s cause for concern.

Which is why, a year or so later, they’re still talking about me, and tossing around whatever insults they can come up with that won’t reflect poorly on them (although, in general, tossing around insults at someone behind that person's back in no way reflects well on you regardless of context) to see what sticks to their particular walls… what they can nod at and say ‘yeah, that’s it, that’s why we hated that guy, and gee, doesn’t that make us sound spiffy, too’.

Now, for what it’s worth, having given it some thought over the past two days, I’ve decided that I categorically reject their stated reasons for disliking me. (Well. Aaron’s are simply absurd and contemptible on their face, buttressed with self indulgent exaggerations and outright falsehoods, and demonstrably worthless from the outset. However, I did have to roll Garrity’s around in my head a little before I could come to this conclusion, because she at least seemed to work a little harder at finding reasons for loathing me that weren’t quite as childish, whiney, and utterly self absorbed as Aaron’s were.)

I reject their reasons categorically because, first, well, Garrity claims to dislike me because I’m a misogynist, but she’s also clearly read my material. She simply has done so with the intention of finding things to dislike about me… in other words, with an in built emotional bias. So she’s isolated the things I’ve said that she feels she can reproduce out of context to make me look bad, so she can justify her own already established distaste for me.

Now, I’m a surly curmudgeon and I dislike, either mildly or intensely, a great extensive range of human behavior and even some of the individual humans that practice within that range. But I honestly don’t have anything against women as a gender, various jokes I may have made, which may or may not have been offensive, aside.

So I reject that in its entirety, and furthermore, I do not accept that that’s why Garrity dislikes me, either, much though she wants to think otherwise.

Garrity also says she dislikes me because I’m a black hole of emotional need, but I’ve read Garrity’s blog, and she’s a genuinely compassionate and empathetic person (or so she seems). If she really thought I were a black hole of emotional need, I suspect she’d show far more kindness towards me than she evinces. Again, she has already decided to dislike me, so now she has to rationalize it, and this is what she comes up with.

As to me needing to be the center of the action in order to feel loved, well, Garrity is certainly wise enough to understand that we all need to feel some positive attention from time to time, so, again, this is not why she dislikes me. And I absolutely do not in any way acknowledge or accept that I in any way spoiled any conversations anywhere, on Aaron’s or any other blog. I am a GREAT conversationalist.

No, I think Garrity dislikes me because someone she likes and respects very much dislikes me, and she wants to support that person and take his side. And I understand that.

I just think it’s sad that this petty, mean spirited, shallow, self absorbed, contemptible person is capable of evincing such persuasive and charismatic levels of emotional manipulation (what he would doubtless call ‘social skills’) that he has managed to pull an entire array of folks who seem to be genuinely pleasant people into orbit around him, and then influence their judgements so profoundly that they will reflect his likes and dislikes almost intuitively, while endlessly rationalizing how they got there so they don’t have to acknowledge that they are, essentially, allowing this person to completely dominate their thoughts, feelings, and responses to an extent that they are behaving in a completely uncharacteristic manner without even realizing it.

Or, to put it another way, having read Garrity’s journal, I think it’s sad that she and I will never be friends, and the only reason we won’t is that Aaron Hawkins, who is, pretty much, a contemptible turd, found (and continues to find) me threatening because I was (and am) smarter and wittier than he was (and is).

But, Garrity, if you happen to read this: regardless of whether or not I am any of the things you insist I am, you should be able to understand that Aaron is not the paragon of respect and tolerance and social virtue you seem to earnestly feel that he is.

Otherwise, I’d still be welcome (or at least, tolerated) on his blog, and he wouldn’t be fuming like a six year old about how annoying it is to still have my comments in his comment threads a year after I left.

Nor would he be taking pains to do so behind my back.

And, honestly… is that the way you want to behave?

I’d ask if it’s the way you want your daughter to grow up to behave, but you would probably find that to be a low blow.

Yumpin Yiminy!

Yesterday’s Buc’s game seemed to be a Swedish Western indeed, as a team that really isn’t very good at all came swaggering into Tampa Bay with a 5-1 record, apparently complacent in their faith that they were here to kick ass and take names, while the defending Super Bowl champions, bewildered to find themselves 3 & 3 after losing three games in really spectacularly unlikely ways, battered by disabling injuries to many key players, found themselves to suddenly be the underdog to a team that had posted three consecutive 5-11 seasons prior to this one.

FOX, ever quick to exploit the most base and mean spirited impulses among their audience, threw together some anti-Bucs commercials alleging that Jon Gruden really wasn’t all that smart, that Warren Sapp really wasn’t all that skilled, and that, in fact, the Bucs winning the Super Bowl in the previous season had apparently, been nothing but a fluke. And FOX’s sportscasters, like nearly every team of sportscasters I’ve ever listened to, lined up early with the odds on favorites, gushing endlessly about how talented the Cowboys were, how motivated they were, what a brilliant job Bill “I’m A Lying Sack Of Shit” Parcells had done with the team (although they never called him that), etc. ad nauseum.

It was all blatantly opportunistic. Everyone hates the reigning king, and lately the NFL’s current monarch has been showing some signs of weakness, so FOX may as well build a bandwagon and see if it can get up a lynchmob to ride in it. During the pre-game show the often addled and seemingly borderline senile Terry Bradshaw had huffed and puffed about how ‘it’s obvious now that Tampa Bay won’t repeat’ (a particularly illustrious piece of windbaggery one certainly hopes Bradshaw will be forced to choke on at some point in early 2004) and the rest of the bobbleheads just swayed back and forth in solemn agreement.

And then the Bucs came out, played a little football, and suddenly everybody wanted to give them a handjob.

“You know, it amazes me we don’t talk enough about Brad Johnson after the job he’s done,” one particularly fulsome asskisser slobbered somewhere around the third quarter, after devoting the entire first quarter and half of the second to in depth analysis of exactly why the Cowboys were so incredibly brilliant every time they managed to give up a completion or a six yard running gain by the Bucs, because, you know, they’d forced the Bucs to take two or sometimes even three downs to get a full ten yards.

All right, I’m not being fair, but honestly, this has become more and more noticeable with each game I watch. The sportscasters always clearly start out biased for one team or another, and it’s the sort of thing that when they’re polishing your homeboys’ boots with their tongues, you just don’t notice, but when they’re slobbering all over the opposition, well, it’s really irritating. But it’s very egregious when suddenly, the team they didn’t like at the start of the game starts to kick ass and these idiots completely turn around and start talking exclusively about that particular team. I was actually staring in utter bemusement as my screen, unable to believe that I had actually heard one of these bozos start praising the Bucs when, sometime in the third quarter, Quincy Carter ripped them for an eleven yard run and a first down. “Did you see the way that Bucs defender chased him down from behind?” I mean, holy shit. Had the Cowboys been up by 16 at that point, they would have been pointing out how the so called greatest defense in the NFL had failed miserably during that play.

Balanced sportscasting, anyone?

Well, anyway, leaving that aside, I’m forced to say that the Bucs honestly didn’t show me as much as I would have liked to see yesterday. It wasn’t even really all that fun a game to watch. In fact, it was a lot like watching the Bucs over the past couple of seasons… big defensive plays, nothing much from the offense. And let’s face it, we don’t tune in to watch big defensive plays, we want to see our boys score with long passes and breakaway open field runs.

Defensively, the Bucs certainly seemed impressive out there. Three interceptions and two sacks (and one more takeaway the Bucs lost because of a close call by the ref) certainly made the defense look good, and given that the Bucs secondary is currently comprised mostly of second stringers stepping in for the best defensive players in the League (all of whom are currently injured), I’d say that in fact the defense looked great. And on paper, it looked even better than great, because the Cowboys came into the game with the number one offense in the NFL, and the Bucs picked them apart with apparently very little effort or difficulty.

But numbers deceive. The Cowboys have recently been, up until this season, a joke among the NFL, and because of that, they were handed, effectively, a Pop Warner schedule to play. Their offense was number one because they were playing against mediocre to bad teams and yes, they have an effective, competent lying sack of shit coaching them and some talented personnel. I think Quincy Carter has a lot of potential as a quarterback, but clearly, he had never played against a championship level team prior to yesterday.

And that’s what troubles me about this win… namely that the Bucs have really only been victorious so far this season against teams that either aren’t very good, or that, when they went up against the Bucs, weren’t playing very well.

On the other hand, every time the Bucs have played against a really, indisputably good team that was performing at an elite level, they have failed. Oftentimes spectacularly.

And good though the defense looked yesterday, well, they looked good against Atlanta under Doug Johnson, and against a curiously spiritless Eagles franchise under a bizarrely incompetent Donovan McNabb, and against a clueless Washington Redskins organization as well. They looked good against a very good Colts team, as well, until the last five minutes of the game, when suddenly they looked utterly appalling. (I grant you, we now know that the Colts did not really win that game, and if there was any justice in the NFL, that would be reflected in the standings. Those two separate two minute warnings during a game when the clock running out was crucial were egregious enough, but the illegal onsides kick the refs let the Colts get away with should be grounds to simply retroactively rule the Bucs the winners.)

And all of this doesn’t really touch my major disappointment in yesterday’s game, which is to say, the fact that once again the Bucs offense didn’t really seem to show up.

Look. For all the gushing everyone has done about the Cowboys’ offense, nobody said much about their defense (to my recollection, anyway) and up against that mediocre defense, the Bucs offense… #1 in the League prior to that utterly deranged meltdown against San Francisco last week… didn’t exactly shine. They got into the red zone four times, twice on interceptions that gave them very short fields, and scored all of one touchdown. Twice they had to settle for field goals because they committed stupid penalties on the one yard line. And their only touchdown came after they had actually kicked their second field goal, and a rookie Cowboy inadvertently charged into Martin Gramatica, giving the Bucs an automatic first down on the 7 yard line and another shot on goal.

Now, next week the Bucs play the Saints, and while the Saints haven’t exactly set the world on fire over the past couple of seasons, they have established a tradition of kicking Tampa Bay’s ass whenever and wherever the two teams meet. If the Bucs offense stays home next week, then it’s going to be another long bleak Sunday in Raymond James Stadium. And the week after that the Bucs have to play the GODDAM Carolina Panthers (we hates them, we hates them forever) and I know goddam well that the Bucs B or C game is not going to be adequate to beat that bunch of ugly bad tempered mean-ass street brawlers. Those guys will carry cinder blocks in their jerseys and beat you with them in the pile ups when they get a chance.

If the Bucs don’t start playing like a championship team again, and I mean, soon, this whole season is going to slip away from them.

Hell, by the time the Texans roll into town on December 14th, that hapless bunch will be due for another win simply on the averages… and if the Bucs are still playing like a bunch of teenagers in a sand lot by then, they’ll get one, too.

So, yeah, I’m happy the Bucs won yesterday, but I’d be a lot happier if we’d buried Dallas under at least two more touchdowns. Winning by a touchdown and three field goals against a team as mediocre as the Cowboys still are simply isn’t acceptable, and it isn’t going to get Tampa Bay back to the Super Bowl.

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.