My death is prematurely celebrated

This is one of the pleasures of blogging -- being celebrated.

Since I'm writing a blog post about this comment, obviously the commenter was celebrating prematurely. Naturally I was curious about where my fan lives, so I looked up the IP address of the commenter. It came from the Punjab, in India. 

Nice! I'm being celebrated from halfway around the world!

The meaning of this pithy comment is open to discussion, of course. Another commenter was a bit generous in this regard, given the historical comparisons, but I did agree with the remark about the need for us to connect with reality.

Comments

[s*]

Very strange.., I tought for years that satsangi's were only loving people...

[Bombay Blonde]

Haters are just confused admirers.
In this case, some RSSB fanatic who's finding more answers on this blog than he's ever found at Satsang.

[Appreciative Reader]

That's a horrible thing to say! Whoever this "Sk" person is, should be ashamed of themselves! I think we should, all of us, speak up against this kind of asshattery!

No, this is not acceptable. No decent person thinks and speaks like this.

.

It would be rank hypocrisy on my part if I did not mention, in the same breath that I unqualifiedly criticize the comment of this "Sk", a very similar comment that I read on this blog not long back. Here's the link to that comment : http://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/2018/09/heres-the-truth-about-why-i-started-criticizing-rssb.html?cid=6a00d83451c0aa69e2022ad390a5ef200d#comment-6a00d83451c0aa69e2022ad390a5ef200d .

In this comment, "Jesse" has this to say about "Manjit" : "I don't love Manjit. I'd go to his funeral to laugh at his family".

No decent person speaks like this. This isn't simply a question of decency. I'd venture to say that someone who thinks and speaks like this isn't quite sane: this kind of extreme lack of empathy strikes me as decidedly psychopathic.

Irrespective of whether we agree with someone or not, I don't see why we cannot extend to others the basic respect that every decent person has (or should have) for any other person. And when it turns out that they don't, then I believe it is the responsibility of each one of us to make it clear that this sort of thing is simply not acceptable.

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When psycho Muslims carry out terrorist attacks, everyone condemns them : but I'd say it is their fellow-Muslims who carry the biggest responsibility in calling out this kind of behaviour, and making it clear that they do not endorse this kind of misappropriation of their own religion.

Following that same principle, I'd say that every RSSB faithful who comments here carries the responsibility of making clear, in clear terms, that they do not support this "Sk" person's asshattery, in so callously speaking about Brian.

And similarly, I believe that every person who criticizes RSSB here, every would-be rationalist who comments here, carries the responsibility to roundly condemn the asshattery of "Jesse" when he so callously speaks about Manjit.

[Jesse]

I said I was going away, and I am, but appreciative reader, your attempt to enforce empathy and a 1950s television feel good faux maturity ON THE INTERNET is an ugly thing. I give more credit to the buthurt Punjabis who string together bad insults in their 3rd language to defend their guru. That stuff comes from a real place. You John McCain shtick and the tactic of endless plausible deniability and doubt crap is just embarrassing enough, but the moralizing over jokes is too much.

The world is changing fast and pedantic corporate-polite idiots like you are becoming a thing of the past. Your vibe doesn't mesh well with the paradigm shift. Like Ned Flanders trying to stop a pitbull fight or something. It's a bad look and really has no place in the cultural musical chairs game we're all being forced to play right now. You and "mystic god" Manjit will have no place to sit other than on the floor together crying that all the chairs are gone and the others won't let you play.

All over the world at this moment people are being mass murdered by hypocrites who talk safely and unoffensively just like you. The US Senate is full of people asking for "productive dialogue." Nikki Haley has spoken similarly. Now that same mature, distinguished, epitome of professionalism and class hysterically shrieks on a regular basis in the UN about our need to bomb more brown Muslims and Slavs. Just because that's the kind of thing going on behind the facade of the diplomatic smile. Evil things that you're afraid of expressing.

Point is that people pointlessly calling for civility over jokes and words that hurt their small hearts are generally scum like yourself and likely have something to hide. You're the type of person who says "I'm not one of those bad racists, but the housing association needs to kick those people out. It's hurting my investment!" You should get into politics where your nannying ambition is considered useful.

I'd laugh at your funeral too because you're a clown, Appreciative Reader. Clowns and the mystic god of London exist to be laughed at.

[Appreciative Reader]

Asshole.

When you die, I won't laugh at your funeral. What I'll do is go there, and express my deepest condolences to your family -- not because they lost you, I'm sure they'll be celebrating not having to tolerate your general asshattery any more -- but to your mother for her misfortune at having spawned a monster like you within her belly, and to the rest of your family for having to subject themselves to the shame of having to say that someone like you is related to them.

On seconds thoughts, though, I won't even do that. I don't really care enough about you to even let out a loud fart in celebration when you die. You don't deserve even that, you piece of shit.

[Appreciative Reader]

No doubt you'll enjoy the brilliant wit that I display in that comment of mine, Jesse?

I'm trying to speak to you in your own language. It is a language that is alien to me, but as you see I can adapt well enough when I need to.

But this kind of Mordor-speak makes my skin crawl, so if you decide to extend this delightful conversation, then you will have the satisfaction of having the last word after all.

I have no interest in speaking with you any more. Nor have I any interest in whether you make good your drama-queen-esqe flounces from this board, or keep on proving yourself a liar by returning compulsively to vent your bile here.

[Spence Tepper]

Hi Appreciative:

You are best in inquisitive balanced assessment. It's really a wonderful strength of yours.

Jess:

You are best aiming your vitriol at real targets from a safe distance that doesn't actually involve you.
You can be wickedly funny doing so.

Let's stay with our strengths, gentlemen.

[Arjuna]

@ Spencer - you are Legendry and that’s respect coming from a soldier !

Take care - I have to cook tonight so it’s a bit tricky lol. A well balanced protein diet takes time and imagination and I fail each time lol.

Regards

Your friend

A

[Spence Tepper]

Hi Arjuna!
I've been at LAX since 5 AM, on my third bagel...and fourth coffee! so much for balanced protein!

[Arjuna]

Hello Spencer - lol. Enjoy.

I weigh 18:5 stone and need a lot to carry this muscle and a bit if fat around at speed lol.

Take care brother

[Appreciative Reader]

Quote Spencer : Hi Appreciative: --- You are best in inquisitive balanced assessment. It's really a wonderful strength of yours.

Thank you kindly, Spencer. My “balanced assessment” is that your analysis there is bang on, and cent percent correct. :-)

Jokes apart, I do understand and appreciate your underlying intention behind writing this comment, which is, basically, an attempt to douse out this unpleasantness before it gets out of hand, as this sort of thing often tends to do, both online and IRL.

Quote Spencer further : Jess: --- You are best aiming your vitriol at real targets from a safe distance that doesn't actually involve you. --- You can be wickedly funny doing so.

Funny? Really, Spence? You find “Jesse” ’s uncouth and openly hateful sentiments, expressed in near-psychopathic terms when he says of Manjit that “I’d go to his funeral to laugh at his family”, funny? Really?

No doubt, in that case, you’d found my own comment about his (“Jesse” ’s) funeral to be a rollickingly hilarious piece of wit? (I’d deliberately composed that cringe-makingly distasteful comment of mine, worded in those disgusting terms, in order to clearly make my point by intentionally adopting this “Jesse” ’s mode of speech ; and I don’t, myself, find my own comment at all witty or funny. My comment was a vile piece of text, intentionally so.)

And no doubt, then, you also found this “Sk” character’s disgusting comment about Brian’s death to be a brilliant piece of black humor? And no doubt you find Brian himself a humorless and literal-minded prig, who when he speaks out about this particular comment and about the comments under the “Nasty Comments” post/thread and in that whole “I hate Brian Hines” blog, is only actually expressing his own inability to appreciate the brilliant and witty black humor that all of these people are indulging in?

Enough with the double standards, Spence!

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Spence, I do beg your pardon if the above sounded harsh. I mean no disrespect to you, you know me well enough to know that, I hope.

And I know where you are coming from, actually.

You are basically one of the RSSB faithful. You’ve long bought the entire RSSB story hook and line and sinker, and only recently have started accepting the validity of the criticism being leveled against GSD ; and even now remain sold on the rest of the RSSB narrative. As such, and especially given your recent reversal of opinion about GSD, I believe you feel defensive, and therefore tend to acquiesce silently in absorbing the criticism sent your way (that’s the plural “your”, I mean the insults directed towards the RSSB faithful) by critics, including the uncouth insults of this “Jesse” person.

You do allow yourself an allusion to the cowardice of this “Jesse” person, when you speak of his “aiming your vitriol at real targets from a safe distance”, but you do this indirectly and oh-so-subtly. This defensiveness, that I spoke of, is why you bend over backwards to somehow see, within the naked hatred and asshattery and borderline insanity in “Jesse” ’s comments, nothing but “wicked humor” and a “love for truth”. Even as you feel no such constraint when you (rightly) criticize the asshattery of your own kind -- that is to say, in this context, the asshattery of those of the RSSB faithful who express their own brand of hatred in their comments here.

At least that is what I believe. That is what my “balanced assessment” reads. :-)

.

Fair enough, then. I understand and appreciate your defensiveness, and even sympathize with it to an extent. It therefore falls to me, and others like me -- who like to think of ourselves as rationalists, we who ourselves have nothing invested in the RSSB narrative, and who therefore have no reason to feel at all defensive -- to speak out against the asshattery of this “Jesse” person.

And I have done just that, more than once, for exactly this same reason (which reason I clearly detailed in the my first post in this thread) -- even when his asshattery did not personally involve me at all.

No, “Jesse” isn’t remotely funny. Not remotely witty. All he is, is uncivil and foul-mouthed.

No, “Jesse” isn’t remotely interested in the truth. He is an unbalanced, psychopathic asshole, who seems to attempt to subsume the frustrations of his own failed life (he has himself admitted that he is no longer exactly young, and yet has not made a success of his life even now) within these hate-laced invectives that he lets loose here.

He has found in this blog a captive audience of fairly decent and civil people -- a tame and placid anomaly within the wilderness that is the Internet space, a collection of largely naive decent folks not used to dealing with his brand of asshattery -- and he must have seized on this opportunity with glee. He has simply tagged on a rationalist mask, a rationalist pretense, in order to vent his bile, his vitriol, from behind this facade.

Far from being a rationalist, thie “Jesse” is not remotely rational in his views. He is a racist and a closet theist ; his objection to RSSB is cultural not rational (that is, of the skinhead variety -- and ironically, this half-wit does not appreciate that the decidedly brown Jesus, on whom the Christian faith itself is based, did not possess the lily-white ass this “Jesse” seems to worship) ; and even his racism he is not able to rationally defend, and he is demonstrably reduced to gibbering incoherently when his irrational beliefs are questioned.

This “Jesse” is your quintessential Internet troll. Abusive, incoherent, irrational, yet ready to latch on to any random “cause” (in this case, the anti-RSSB drive he’s espied here) that can serve as a platform from where he can safely vent his bile and indulge in asshattery. Unlike IRL, flinging random insults online carries no penalty, except perhaps a ban ; and he has found, to his glee, that the commenting policy here protects him from even that limited penalty, leaving him free to fling insults around, unopposed.

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These are not empty words. This “balanced assessment” is based on actual documented evidence.

And one last thing : you may have noticed that “Jesse” has, both here and earlier, been uncivil to me. So let me clarify this : I do not say all of this, now, in order to snidely get back at him for it. Exactly the reverse.

A couple months back, this “Jesse” had come mewling to me, presenting to me what he claimed were his own agnostic views on God and religion, and tried to buddy up to me by asking me about mine. I had made it very clear to him, right then, that I considered an uncouth psychopathic asshat like him to be an actual liability for anything and everything he might be associated with, and that irrespective of his professed ideas about God, I did not support his asshattery.

It is the (figurative) whipping he received at my hands, in our discussion spanning three threads, that set him off against me. And that is why he turned on me, and, when he found that after a while that I’d stopped wasting my time on him and starting ignoring him instead, he started snidely aiming pot shots at me. Cause and effect, clearly established and spelt out.

So here are the links to those three threads, that I present as evidence. You may have seen these threads already, of course, perhaps participated in some of them, but you can see the whole narrative I’m referring to if you if go through each of them, focusing on both of our comments, his and mine.

In these threads I clearly demonstrate “Jesse” ’s racism ; clearly document his inability to rationally defend his racist ideas ; clearly show his inability to even comprehend the concept of rationality ; clearly expose his blatant near-psychotic asshattery ; clearly reveal his closet theism ; and clearly demonstrate evidence of the fact that he is no more than a troll, who is not really interested in these subjects, but only uses them as a platform and an excuse to vent his pent-up bile.

Link to the first thread : http://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/2018/07/ive-got-a-new-non-religious-mantra.html?cid=6a00d83451c0aa69e2022ad3850393200d#comment-6a00d83451c0aa69e2022ad3850393200d

Link to the second thread : http://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/2018/07/why-god-is-an-illusion-along-with-other-supernatural-stuff.html?cid=6a00d83451c0aa69e2022ad35fbac7200c#comment-6a00d83451c0aa69e2022ad35fbac7200c

Link to the third thread, page 1 of 2 : http://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/2018/08/open-thread-15-free-speech-for-comments.html?cid=6a00d83451c0aa69e2022ad3865481200d#comment-6a00d83451c0aa69e2022ad3865481200d

Link to the the third thread, page 2 of 2 : http://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/2018/08/open-thread-15-free-speech-for-comments.html?cid=6a00d83451c0aa69e2022ad38b77cd200d#comment-6a00d83451c0aa69e2022ad38b77cd200d

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I’m speaking at such length on this, because I’m not just addressing you, Spence, but actually addressing everyone here.

Of course, this is Brian’s blog ; but Brian is himself scrupulously careful about not trammeling the free speech of commenters here, so that he is accommodative of all manner of vile comments here, even those that attack his own person!

Therefore, given the decidedly laissez faire commenting policy here, it falls to us -- we who participate in this thread -- to roll up our sleeves and clear the filth that we see littering this blogsite that we love to visit and spend time in. (It is either that, or we reconcile ourselves to living surrounded by this filth.)

It falls to us -- we who are ourselves not amongst the RSSB faithful, and who like to think of ourselves as rationalists -- to assure the RSSB faithful who do visit this place that “Jesse” ’s asshattery is not representative of everyone who participates in this blog. It is not the norm for this blog, it is just one single person’s asshattery, that the rest of us do not in any way endorse or support.

See Brian’s own posts and comments. He is never disrespectful of any individuals here, never. Never does he himself insult any commenter here, no matter the provocation.

“Jesse” speaks for himself. He does not speak for Brian. He does not speak for rationalists like me. We do not endorse or support his asshattery, or his personal insults directed at individuals commenting here.

There is a huge difference between speaking disparagingly about an RSSB or a GSD or a Trump, and speaking disparagingly about someone who comments here. The former is perfectly acceptable, while the latter is simply not done. This basic principle (‘address the issue, do not attack your interlocutor’, or ‘address and critique the message, do not launch uncivil and ad hominem attacks on the messenger’) is the very basis for civil rational discourse. People generally tend to be decent, and most decent rational people instinctively follow this principle, without necessarily having to spell this out ; but evidently sometimes it is necessary to put this principle into actual words.

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Brian, I hope I haven’t been presumptuous in saying all of this here, and at such length? I believe what I say represents the ethos of this blog (the ethos that you have yourself put in place here over the years, without necessarily spelling all of this out). This ethos is part of what draws some of us here. Ultimately this is your blog, your house, and your rules ; and if you feel that I have misunderstood and/or misrepresented anything here, or that I am mistaken in how I view your blog and the ethos and standards you intend for it, then do correct me, please : should that be the case, then I will readily accept my error and apologize, and immediately step back from here.

[Appreciative Reader]

@Jesse :

That comment of mine, posted on September 24, 2018 at 08:45 AM? The one about your death and your funeral?

I posted it deliberately. I deliberately wrote it in terms that you yourself use, and deliberately made it as hateful as you make your own comments, in order to make my point clearly, and in order to show you how reprehensible your own comments are.

Nevertheless, it was a vile piece of work, that comment of mine, no doubt at all about it. The fact that your comments are equally vile does not take away from that fact.

I do not actually mean any of what I said there, obviously : I’m sure your family is proud of you and, irrespective of your worldly circumstances, I’m sure there’s lots of worth in you as a person.

I don’t want you to feel in any way, well, feel actually hurt at that comment of mine. If my comment did wound you, then I offer you my sincere apologies.

[Spence Tepper]

Hi Appreciative
You wrote
", I believe you feel defensive, and therefore tend to acquiesce silently in absorbing the criticism sent your way (that’s the plural “your”, I mean the insults directed towards the RSSB faithful) by critics, including the uncouth insults of this “Jesse” person.

You do allow yourself an allusion to the cowardice of this “Jesse” person, when you speak of his “aiming your vitriol at real targets from a safe distance”, but you do this indirectly and oh-so-subtly."

If the goal is communication, should we be anything less?

[Appreciative Reader]

Agreed.

My point was, that you are not quite as subtle when criticizing the asshattery of the RSSB faithful. You are always scrupulously polite, but clearly call a spade a spade at those times. Isn't it?

Again, this was no criticism. Just my observation. And I appreciate where you're coming from, and sympathize with you.

I said that bit only in order to clearly explain my reasons for making the larger criticism about uncouth comments.

No offense or criticism intended towards you!

[Spence Tepper]

None taken, AR..:)