Yeah. I know. And me commenting on world events.
I recently received a lovely piece of email from a devoted reader:
under all your idiotic talk of freedom and democracy, only a hypocrite white american male like you would be so cowardly to disable comments on their blog. what are you afraid of, pinky bottom , is it because you know that you are full of [redacted] and it will be only a matter of minutes until someone mops the floor with your latest nonsensical post if you just gave them the chance?
get a life, loser. i challenge you to allow comments to your drivels, if you have any confidence in their truth value. i promise to be there to rip your idiotic ramblings to pieces.
He's a Turkish reader (or at least somebody in Turkey) who didn't seem to like some of my posts related to Syria. My "pinky" bottom (Good God, I hope that is a color reference) could not stand up to his brilliance, he believes. Or someone's brilliance.
Who knows? A lot of writers out there are idiots. I guess I could be one of them. Or one of them on a bad day. At over a thousand posts a year, I'm bound to have a bad moment or two. Or maybe it was just a bad week to give up sniffing glue. Stuff happens. Give a guy a break.
I don't allow comments, it is true. For my readers, this is why (from my 9-year anniversary post):
I still don't allow comments. I don't want to police them--have you seen the Yahoo News comments? There are lots of idiots out there. I have an email available if you really want to comment. And if you really, really want to comment, you can set up your own blog (it is free to do so), link to my post, and blast away (or heartily agree). But mostly, rather than not wanting to deal with hostile or idiotic comments, I don't want to get ensnared by comments. I think that there can be long-term pressure to conform posts to what your fans like. I want to offer my thoughts--for what they're worth--and not your thoughts.
Yeah, what am I thinking to disable comments? I'm sure my Turkey-based reader's instant comment would have been more intellectually focused than the email he sent.
Yet there is that email address I make available that he managed to re-type into his email service. It's funny. I read books all the time and no matter how many times I look through the pages, I can never find an email link to click.
And journal articles, too. Sometimes they have emails noted. Sometimes--online--they even have comment capabilities. That's their problem if they want to deal with that.
But you know what I do? I blog about the things I read. It's an amazing free thing. My reader should check it out. Consider it a challenge. Why do I owe him the convenience of insulting me with a single click? Work for it, dude.
I'll review the email later for the aforementioned floor mopping that I was promised. I'm sure he'll make Plato look like a moron. The drivel-ripping wasn't obvious at first glance. But what do I know?
Thank you for reading. I'll save the email for my scrap book. That's all I really have to say on this subject.
