In a comment to Eric Meyer’s “Angry Indeed” I replied, in part,
“[T]there’s something else operating here too: my gawd, maybe you don’t realize the awe you inspire … “Box Model Hack†and such. You and tantek? Guys like you are what inspired me (past tense, note) to keep sloggin’. (So on the day I set up and read through a 250 page technical document and produce with a long list of quibbles large and small. *shrug* Nobody much cares? Fine. But I know that I’ve guarded your back. Now’days you got bigger fish to fry? *shrug* Hey, no blame. But: I quit. Past tense. Done deal … a long while back.)”
On a whim I visited Tantek’s Thoughts and found, completely in keeping with the epoch, “Fight bad ideas not people“, which reads in part:
“We are not at war.
Ideas are at war. We are merely their pawns and canonfodder.
Fighting a war by fighting people is merely attacking symptoms rather than causes.
In the long run, fighting a war by fighting people is only as effective as fighting a disease by fighting the people that have contracted it rather than fighting the disease itself.”
Now it just so happens that (with Krisna Dass louder than I dare in the background) I was thinking, “I was on the hippie bus in ’68 and ’69, I trained airborne infantry (49th Loyal Edmonton Regiment) and did communications intelligence … and my sympathy is more with the mohawk-haired gunman than with the snide simpering bougeois who routinely castrate democracy.” So I thought I’d share a bit of that with Mr. Tantek.
Ha! Try reaching him … he’s a star … the “Comment” at the base of his posts links to nothing, and there’s no proletarian “Contact” to be found; mere email is beneath him. Noooooooo, such as he aren’t to be triffled with by mere citizens.
To yuppies all I say: Fuck you and the horse your rode in on. Yuppies … diseased pretenders to artistocracy … full of entitlement but with not a glimmer of what nobility means.
To pseudo-goths and skin heads, bristling with antagonism and agression: “Who the fuck do you think you are? Get the fuck outta my face!
“Fight bad ideas not people”? Ok … the idea you manifest and perpetuate is what I fight. Is all.
p.s. I was a Trotskyist, a card-carrying of the International Socialists. And let me tell you: compared to what we have long known about realpolitik tantek’s well-intentioned prattlings are a child’s babbling. But then hey, him and his friends can’t arrange decent tech_docs, so really *shrug* they’re amateurs.