Woe of Mine Enemies, Twits Though They Be
I should know better, I really should.Posting comments at sites that are not in my Dark Wraith Publishing network is perilous business. Something about what I express and how I write seems to set off one or another group of folks looking for someone to attack.
A long time ago, it was usually the Right-wingers who went after me, but in recent years, it's been the Leftists who have taken up the call of duty. In my experience, the Right-wingers attack as loners, even when more than one of them takes exception to me and perhaps my very existence.
Leftists, on the other hand, more often than not attack in packs. They grab a thematic approach, and each plays the same tune on a slightly different chord. That happened at GroupNewsBlog; at Shakesville (formerly Shakespeare's Sister); BlondeSense; and, fairly recently, at Pundit Kitchen, the last of which got me in so much trouble that I received ugly e-mail threats and open comments that included wishing me to go to a Nazi death camp. That brutality all started because I stated my disgust at an old man whose grandkids talked him into doing a YouTube video of the family disco dancing at Auschwitz. Never mind that I had tried rather gently to explain that he was not a "death camp" survivor: were he to have been in camp II, the Vernichtungslage of the Auschwitz complex, he would not have been a survivor; that was the death camp. For his grandkids to get their viral YouTube video mojo fame is one thing, but to degrade the horror of the millions who were butchered because they weren't useful enough to be put in the slave camp is quite something else, especially when the "ghosts" of the murdered are shown in the video dancing to the idiotic beat of "I Will Survive," as if any lyric in that pop-moron jingle, other than the title, has anything whatsoever to do with the victims of the most genocidally efficient regime cum slaughterhouse in modern history. Perhaps next we can have Alexandr Solzhenitsyn do an interpretive dance at a Soviet gulag to the tune of "That's the Way (Uh-Huh) I Like It," by KC and the Sunshine Band.
Forgive me if I sound cruelly curmudgeonly on this matter, but I have no quarter in my tolerance when Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Soviet prisoners of war, and others get slaughtered because they have nothing to offer as slaves to monsters, while someone who was an able-bodied young man decades later lets his kids show him how to "celebrate" and represent that the millions murdered are cool with his survival by random advantages he had over their frail lives.
Judge that one for yourself. The link to the page at the Pundit Kitchen is here, and you can find my comment (as Dark-Wraith) not far down in the attendant thread. Although the sub-thread from my comment is pretty pleasant (in fact, it got a little weird at one point), the main thread contains the scattered and concentrated parts of the pack-wolf attack, generally from the hate world's Leftist/liberal sector, always ready to declare their total fealty to the god of Anything That Makes Me Look Sensitive and Hip.
Before and since that dust-up, I have been torn asunder in one way or another and in one venue or another for such heresies as these:
• I've been pilloried for pointing out that Google is not only a dirty, information-collecting snoop, but also no better than any telecom when it comes to that much-vaunted "Net neutrality" ruse. Google was all in favor of Net neutrality because its server farms for search engines and blogs chew up unbelievable bandwidth, but now that it's in the catbird seat of market power, it's going to play every angle of the pseudo-sovereign card, from not worrying too much when it's caught dragnet spying to worrying even less about working with the telecoms and the FCC to end the era of Net neutrality for all of us unimportant, trifling Web masters of the out world.
• I've been sneered at for daring to point out that FireFox, aside from using false trickery with caching to make anti-Microsoft folks think FireFox is better, is actually a sideshow of W3C, which has some really bad people who work with the National Security Administration in its coven. Perfectly standardized code is the friend of aggregators who have to gather up, store, process, analyze, and ultimately use the information of the Internet to manage us and convince us that our future is in the "Cloud," where even rudimentary rights against undue search and seizure are diminished by specific statutory law (passed during the Clinton era, mind you) and, in practice, just plain don't exist at all.
• I was deemed a "racist" and other filthy things for pointing out that candidate and then President Obama was nothing more than the latest authoritarian to pose to leadership of a nation plunging ever further into the twilight of Empire afraid not only of its own shadow, but of its own citizens' right to privacy.
• I was called an advocate of the sexual mutilation of boys because I dared to criticize the high-and-mighty enlightenment of the no-circumcision crowd. The sometimes violent and sick language used by those who think that they are blessed by some overarching enlightenment is appalling, and it is even more disconcerting to the idealist when people with some degree of education think they have the heads-up on all that is truth. The accusation that I want children sexually mutilated was about as vile as it gets, and that attack, which first arose at BlondeSense, then showed up again much later on my own darned Website, Big Brass Blog! Talk about bringing the war home.
• Although I still have publishing rights (I think) at Pam's House Blend, I don't even bother to post articles there anymore, given that I apparently offended a gay and a lesbian Zionist, whose umbrage spread to others of their sentiments. Lordie! Here I thought the straight Zionists were punk, what with the e-mail and DDoS action after my post about the attack on the USS Liberty, but I was totally unprepared for what happens when the GLBT wing of Zionism gets riled.
• Just a few weeks ago, Austrian hackers took advantage of a security failure at the Web host of The Dark Wraith Forums and put malware into my contact form, here. They then "alerted" a spyware site called "OpenDNS," which now, along with "Web of Trust," blocks access to my site under the ruse that The Dark Wraith Forums is a "phishing site" (and has a "bad reputation," as Web of Trust puts it). Now, if you don't know how OpenDNS works, you might be disconcerted to find out that, quite possibly without your knowledge, your Internet connection settings in your computer might be set in such a way that everywhere you are going on the Internet is filtered through a proxy that is supposedly "protecting" you from bad places. Yes, the entirety of your surfing, searches, visits, and everything else in cyberspace might be getting funneled through a single node, making aggregation of everything (and I mean everything) you do that has a connection to the Internet a one-stop shopping spree for those who want to know all about you. I'll bet you didn't know how those "protection" services work, and I'll bet that you didn't exactly sign up for that conveniently installed nose-job right inside your machine. More to the point, I'll double-down that you can't get rid of it, either, given that manually extricating it is a real pain and most anti-spyware programs are afraid to take on these supposedly helpful little agents that get into your computer. (If you want to block malware on sites you visit, I recommend Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware. There's a free version that's sweet and a pretty cheap premium version that's even sweeter.)
By the way, as a fun aside, there's even a name for malware that poses to be helping but is, in fact, itself problematic: it's called a false white knight. Perhaps the most famous false white knight was a fascinating piece of work that went out in the hours after the virus Melissa was unleashed; the white knight ran through networks chasing down and killing Melissa, then apparently committing suicide as evidence of its benevolence. Unfortunately, right before it killed itself, this white knight would kick open an obscure port to make a future exploit a breeze.
Sheesh. You just can't trust anyone, these days.
The hurtfulness just never ends, and I become so dispirited when people who call themselves "conservatives" but are not call me some kind of Leftist, and some who really are liberals (or, more accurately, neo-liberals) and Leftists heap the juice of over-the-top condemnation on me. (Not that I am always within the bounds of temperance in commentary, myself, mind you, but that obviously doesn't count.) On balance, it seems, though, that in the scope of the bruising slugs of the rough-and-tumble Blogosphere, the liberals and Leftists have been my most frequent critics.
Imagine how refreshing it was just a few days ago, then, when an honest-to-goodness Right-wing Teabaggot freak attacked me on a comment thread at GraphJam (which, like Pundit Kitchen mentioned above, is a site within the Cheezburger Network, where I publish posters and other graphics as Dark-Wraith). It was downright refreshing; and even better, the subject that started the attack was none other than the famous "quadratic formula"!
I kid you not: the quadratic formula.
The title of the graphical post at GraphJam was this: "About As Useful As Advanced European History," and the picture was this:
A whole lot of engineering types went after this howling display of ignorance about the uses of the venerated quadratic formula, but I found it pretty interesting that almost no one knew just how extensively this silly little way of finding the roots of a second-degree polynomial in the form ax2+bx+c=0 can be applied.
The fact of the matter is that I have used and taught uses for this formula in economics, finance, quantitative operations management, and even marketing, where a very cool, very useful application to price point location brings economics to very real-world optimal product pricing, which feeds into the realm of consumer psychology and right back into microeconomics and macroeconomics (as in, when to change a price that consumers in sufficient numbers already accept versus when to change package size to conceal a price change caused by something like wholesale cost inflation).
Anyway, here is what I wrote in comments:
I am a professor who teaches finance and economics. I also teach math, computer science and software skills, along with business law. I also used to teach English grammar and composition. A long time ago, I was a canon fire direction specialist. I've been a business consultant, too.Although I received a most complimentary reply from one commenter, sure enough, my oblique reference to Sarah Palin, she who needed five colleges to get a fluff degree in sports journalism, caught the attention of a Teabaggot, one of the rather unusual kind who is semi-literate. He wrote this:
To claim that the tools and formulae of elementary algebra (and the quadratic formula is quite elementary in the huge scope of algebra, specifically, and math, more generally) is to display the profound satisfaction of those who are so ignorant that they know not their ignorance.
Compounding that, to proudly display the anti-intellectualism that asserts the uselessness of European history (or any other history, for that matter) is to declare imbecility from the stilts of FAIL Kingdom.
Ignoring, contorting, rewriting, dismissing, and otherwise sneering at history and the broader traditions of thought brought forward to invite use and invention is from the realm of fools and neoconservatives. (But I repeat myself.)
The author of this post has befarted the Cheezburger Network.
(Wait. What? "Befarted”?!)
Enough. Someone find the poster of this article a job with the You-Betcha Girl. It's a match made in Heaven.
Or someplace.
spoken like a true liberal who's never had a job that wasn't paid for by the tax payers. It's the "intellectuals” like you that are teaching our kids mediocrity is best and that they shouldn't ever hurt anyone's feelings unless they are republican or white males who aren't in some victim group. If you move out of the ivory tower of academia and get a real job you wont use this equation again the rest of your life.Now, that hurt.
While we're at it can you explain the logical fallacy to Keynesian economics? probably not since you believe that for every dollar the government takes from the economy to spend in the economy will generate 3 or 4 dollars because you're a tard.
Yes, it hurt deeply.
Okay, it didn't hurt. Being attacked by a Teabaggot is actually edifying. In my case, it's even more so because I thought my detractors on the Left were the only ones who cared, these days.
I was wrong, though. The Right-wingers still have within their ranks some who are too stupid to leave me alone to worry about where they are, what they're doing, and if they're eating right, getting eight hours of sleep every night, and abstaining from sex for any purpose other than procreation.
Now, I know. The Right-wing imbeciles are still out and about, trolling for critics of their failed, hypocritical leaders with even less caution than progressives voting for Democrats like Obama as agents of real change.
Who could ask for more than the abundance that is mine in the presence of mine enemies? Some think I am a Luddite because I don't "Get FireFox," some think I'm a racist because I don't love myself some Barack Obama, some think I support sexual mutilation, some even think The Dark Wraith Forums is unsafe to visit and has a "bad reputation."
And now I know that the Teabaggots don't like me.
It's all good, tonight.
Comments
Wrote trog69:
Wrote Dark Wraith:
Good morning, trog.
I am ever so glad that commenters here can make points of detail that I, myself, would otherwise leave unwritten. I wish the original exchange long ago on this topic had included some support from folks who would have been more blunt; as it was, I made my original stand in a couple of comments, then stepped away because I didn't want to delve into any further specifics than I already had.
I see a cautionary tale, there, about engaging conversations where the opposing view has no limits on what its supporters will say, but I do.
On another matter, as far as lavendar is concerned, I favor rather more culinary fragrances for my showers. Eau de Boeuf works for me.
Ditto for Essence of Alfredo.
It might not attract ladies, but at least I never feel all that far from a good meal.
Wrote Dark Wraith:
And to answer several e-mailed messages to me asking about the grabber graphic at the top of this article, for the top and bottom panels, on the left is Karl Marx, on the right is Rush Limbaugh. Specifically to the e-mailed questions, yes, the wraith in the middle is the Dark Wraith.
Wrote Wild Clover:
Interesting that two of the topics for which you were damned are topics I have commented on recently. I was roundly condemned for my rather rather mild commentary on circumcision... I showed links disproving the meme that it is an automatic hospital procedure, as well as my own experience...insurance does not cover it, parents have to request it. The writer was someone who felt his parents had maimed him. I did point out that in many many intimate moments I had never heard a male complain about a circumcision save one, and his was a "trim" rather than a full fledged job. I was "very lucky" my eldest son was cool with being cut due to his heritage as a Jew, and he "hoped" my son's would continue to feel this way. All in all, I got the impression I was an awful person who was justifying mutilation that would forever scar the psyche of my boys....mmmm, no, but doing what I would have wanted if I'd been born male of Jewish decent. It is what parents do. As for functionality, what little science there is showed no real change, anecdotally, nothing I found persuasive. But then I'm a girl, who regularly feels like some of her "feminist" sisters have some issues they need to work out. Modern sexual harassment policies would have gotten a whole slew of us fired back in the '80s... we girls gave back to the guys quite handily. But we were secure as individuals first, male and female second. Like the homophobe who hides his attraction (however fleeting) to others of the same sex by virulently attacking anyone openly gay or bi, thesse feminists, male and female, have issues that go beyond their narrow little PC world.
The second topic I will take exception to your opinion...the Auswitch video. I watched all three posted. The third had grandpa explaining his own feelings....I watched them with Imp..., whose grandparents had managed to get to the US pre-Hitler, but had family still who died in either the ovens or the camps. We were both moved to tears, and quite frankly, the fact that grandpa could go back, with his new family, and share his experience on the spot, to be able to dance his victory, and the victory of all who survive such is both his right, and a validation that despite horrors, despite hate, life continues and the human spirit and love is not extinguished. It may be that my own particular view is colored by the fact that I like the song, and that I always have used it as a personal theme for more than simply surviving a romantic break-up. Nor is my opinion overly insensitive to actual holocaust survivors, as I read through all the comments on You Tube that went with that particular video.... 90% or more of the commentators with actual connections to the Holocaust were positive. Most of the negative comments were made by clueless Christian Zionists and a bunch of bigots who were making hay over the fact of the dance "proving" there were no camps, no Holocaust.
That the video went viral shows it speaks to something within us. If just one person recalls it as they look at their last can of Spam with the eviction notice before them, and says to themselves that they too will survive to dance where they were once oppressed, the video is a worthwhile thing.
Wrote Wild Clover:
Oh, and while I personally have never used the quadratic equation after college,I do believe the ones that doubled up on math to take calculus in HS(I didn't) went on to college, where they certainly used it, so I have to agree that the picture is a fail.
Wrote Dark Wraith:
Good evening, Wild Clover.
Yesterday, an old friend read this post and, knowing my rather unusual history of relationships with both Christianity and Judaism, reminded me of some time-honored advice about making disagreements apparent to the goyim.
I should have known better, but the video that stirred me to sharp response struck close to an important nexus in what has become the way I see the world, distilled as my vision is through my own experiences.
I worry that these points of moral absolutism are in conflict with a broader principle I hold of tolerance for different ideas. I have had occasion in the rise of American neo-fascism to dispense with blanket relativism, and I must be wary of a slope of intolerance upon which I might tread as I retreat from such rank liberalism in considerations of others.
That having been noted, if I am to emerge among the living when those weaker than I have perished, I must live the remainder of my life with an almost unbearable combination of relief, certainly, but also shame that I, by no feat of my own value as a living soul, survived while those who had no reason to die other than they were unlike me did, in fact, suffer the ultimate pain.
I am reminded of a video that was popular several years ago of an embedded journalist who accompanied five American soldiers into a darkened house in Iraq, where they had as their task killing five local "insurgents" who were hiding in there. As the video progressed, the blackened scene was pierced by bursts of light from the soldiers' weapons, and the near silence was broken, first by the spray of bullets, then by the screams as each of the Iraqi fighters, one by one, was killed, some crying praises to Allah in the seconds before death.
Far, far too many people hailed our soldiers as having acted heroically in a horribly frightening, urban, close-quarters combat confrontation. Much worse, far, far too many liberals at The Huffington Post, where the video was published, drooled their praises for the American GIs.
I was sickened by that display of false fealty to a twisted idea of what constitutes heroism in our time.
The Americans had night vision goggles, electronic telecommunications gear, Kevlar vests, solid weaponry, excellent training, and other advantages, some too nuanced to explain easily.
Winning does not always mean victory, and surviving does not always mean superiority.
In fact, in my experiences, I have found that victors almost always have advantages that render them much more to the situation of their trials than those who lose.
I celebrate survivors, but I cannot bring myself to consider them more than those who are not unless their differences are of the order of their superior will, courage, and personal commitment.
That is why I draw the line when a man who lived because he was a young man poses to claim that the ghosts of those who were slaughtered by the Nazis share his love of life so much that they will dance with him.
Anne Frank and several million other frail girls, women, children, aged, deformed, and otherwise useless died, not because they were less than the man who lived to dance at Auschwitz, but because monsters saw him as preferable in continued life as a slave while seeing the murdered as preferable as corpses dispensible in mass graves.
Maybe ghosts we could not see really were dancing with him on that day when his grandchildren produced a YouTube video. I cannot pose to say one way or the other. What I can say, though, is that I would not, for my own part, claim those disembodied souls, if they really are there at all, celebrate anything whatsoever other than the relief of having already passed through the portal of horror in the gas chambers being pumped full of Zyklon B.
Certainly, celebration would be rare from the sullen graves to which they were sent by monsters whose own ghosts may or may not be in Hell, but whose real, living progeny now, once again, stalk the earth with a devil's eyes on rebirth of their aspirations to rule the world.
Although my sense of any relativism in this realm is absent, that does not disabuse me of thanking you for sharing your own, different judgment both clearly and civilly.
Wrote rm hitchens:
Seems a bit over the top in the "woe is me" department, Wraith. Don't most bloggers have a "damn the torpedoes" philosophy?
Wrote oldwhitelady:
Good evening, Dark Wraith.
I wondered why you never commented over at my blog! I now realize those kitty pictures can bring out the animal in a person - I mean, if you dis one of those cute little kitties, you might end up being attacked. I understand :)
I used to enjoy telling it the way I thought, similar to the type of comments you mention, then arguing the attacks.
Over the past few years, I learned there are crazy nuts out there who can be quite scary.
I decided to enjoy the quiet.
I hope you keep on telling it the way it is, because people sometimes need to be brought to task on some of the stuff they post. That video sounds vile.
... and...If you can't post your frustrations and irritations on your own blog, where the hell can you post it?
Wrote kelley b:
Obviously the Wraith is and entertains the kind of people who won't be satisfied until we have Canadian healthcare and eliminated the Pentagon.
Obviously such people realize the current administration has a track record somewhat to the Right of Richard Nixon.
No wonder the current administration, like the previous one, has no love for net neutrality or the First Amendment, either.
Wrote Father Tyme:
kelly b,
No, we don't want to eliminate the Pentagon. Maybe just knock a side or two off. Then we could have a "Tri-Lateral" building to go with that sort of organization!
wink! wink! nudge! nudge!
Wrote Dark Wraith:
Without the Pentagon, Father Tyme, we would not have centralized command and control of military operations where our brilliant Dominionists in charge of war planning run the show.
Wait.
Maybe we could win a war, then.
Wrote Dark Wraith:
Good morning, kelley b.
I find it weirdly ironic that there's more than a little bit of truth in your statement that the Obama Administration is to the right (at least, in some ways) of the Nixon Administration.
At this rate, by the middle of this century, we're going to be talking about "liberals" like George W. Bush.
I hope I am dead by then. I can use a good excuse to turn over in my grave.
Wrote Dark Wraith:
Good morning, Old White Lady.
Although there has most definitely been a "compression" over the past couple of years of visits by bloggers to other bloggers' sites, I still visit more than a few blogs every day, but I almost never comment, which has led some old friends in the Blogosphere to wonder why I never visit their sites. I explain that a lack of civility from the top down has made the atmosphere at too many sites far too toxic for my taste.
In some cases, that toxic commenting atmosphere takes on a menacing or otherwise dangerous aspect. In one case, at GroupNewsBlog, one of the pack leaders of a gaggle of supposedly in-the-know Leftist bullies thought he was being cute in his attacks on me by posting a link he said I should check out. The link was to a chat board about illegal sexual activity. What he didn't know was that it was one of those trap sites run by some sicko law enforcement types. Not only could he have caused ungodly trouble for me with his arrogant stupidity, he could have gotten some of his own, fellow pack members (along with hapless readers of the comments) in worlds of trouble just following that link.
In another case, my criticism in comments at a fairly popular liberal blog of what I saw as troubling indications in then-candidate Obama's positions on many issues got me a slam of nasty e-mail messages, several of which repeated a theme about what would happen to all the racists once a Black man was in the White House.
Obviously, Obama's not that kind of person, and those who represented him as such were not speaking for him. Truth be told, I wish Obama would stop acting like his stake is in status quo ante, with all the flaws in the system that led us through the evolution of that ante to such awful times as we now suffer.
I do enjoy the stress of disagreements in discourse; they lead me to think more clearly about what I am thinking and why my thinking is as it is. Too much acrimony dissipates the underlying learning, at least for me; but the unfortunate fact is that I bring that upon myself, at least to some extent, in saying what I think instead of making use of both the "decorum" and the "forum" aspects of rhetoric.
What's really bad is that, when I used to teach speech classes, I actually keyed on the importance of assessing and shaping rhetoric to both forum and decorum.
It just goes to show that teaching a subject doesn't mean I, myself, cannot still learn a lot about it.
Always keep that in mind whenever I am teaching economics principles here, by the way.
Wrote Weaseldog:
"What he didn't know was that it was one of those trap sites run by some sicko law enforcement types."
Perhaps he did know that?
Wrote Father Tyme:
The Rrrrrain in Spain........
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For someone who hasn't had sex in over a decade, I'm particularly obsessed with the tallywhacker-whacking...off. Now, I've heard the song enough times, and everytime it's sung, the words, "as long as you keep it clean" are always part of the coda.
So, in fact, there is a difference between cut and uncut. Gee, that seems to undercut their argument, doesn't it? As a smoothy myself, I am glad I was circus-sized. The reason why is simple. I sweat. A lot. Easily. Working construction here in S. Az., I'd have a completely soaked shirt within 10 minutes of starting work. Man, the bosses never bothered me in the a.m.; they just saw all the sweat, and figured I was humping ass. But hell, I woulda been sweating like that if all I'd done was pour some coffee and light a smoke. I just have a cooler setting on my thermostat than most.
The secret to my work success now uncovered, I would be in great discomfort in my semi-forced retirement, were I to have to attend to any extra, um, odor-causing body parts. Not physically active, I don't shower nearly as much as I did while working, and my depression tells me that I smell like lavender right up until the end of the week, when the grandchildren remind me that the shower is presently unoccupied, please, and whoever Lavender is, it seems to need its diaper changed.