Another Swift, another Pope, another Wilde
Good grief, as if I don’t have enough to do, now I’m having to fend off the ravings of a reader who seems to have suddenly gone stark raving mad. Although there was, to be sure, always a whiff of madness…But now it’s more like an old overfull garbage can at the end of a hot August day. He’s pissed off because I wrote something (something very brief) about Ehsan Jami the other day; he’s been bombarding me with emails telling me how awful he thinks Jami is; the one he sent today was so rude and condescending and aggressive that I became irritated as well as bored, and told him to stop lecturing me. He sent an even ruder (and longer) reply, to which I replied sharply and, I would have thought and expected, terminally; now he’s sent me a sarcastic apology, and guess what the basic premise is? That I’m an overbearing woman who expects men to grovel at her feet. Honestly! This loon sends me a stream of scolding emails and when I tell him to knock it off, he plays the Angry Male card! It strains credulity.
I can’t resist giving you a sample, it’s so ludicrous. I don’t have permission, but he doesn’t have permission to keep pestering me, either, so the hell with permission. Read and admire.
And really, very humbly grovelling of course, touching the forelock, mistress, speaking for myself (if I may, with your permission), my gifts are not fit for being thus in public and so in private, as your magisterial self, if I may say so without seeming presumptuous, of course, can do so well. Us mere male servants, mistress, with your permission, find this almost impossible to do. It is a major weakness of mine, if you excuse my impertence of speaking of myself. A mere simpleminded male such as I has the shortcoming of saying what he thinks, presumptuous as that is, IMHO…However, if I DO make a sincere, humble effort, mistress, you see that even such a one as me, can be brought, humbly of course, to reason, and to adopt the proper position of a mere male when faced with a proud female, such as you, of such commanding presence also: cowering, crouching, crawling in sincere and humble supplication, thanking the powers that be for her kind attention…So it is truly most remiss of me to have doubted the noble words of the public spokeswomen of Ayaan the Blessed. And therefore I must most humbly beg for forgivenness, for daring to presume that one as I (a mere male, and a Dutch one at that, o horror) could possibly see (if I may breathe it: Dutch) things more clearly than you or Her, mistress, for stealing your time, for defiling your mood, for being the suffering subject of my tedious rudeness and relentless unpleasantness. I merely thought, humbly, that such a one as I – humbly begging forgiveness for the mere presumption mistress! – could conceivably be perhaps, humbly in supplication and on my bare knees, be able to, by the merest accident of time and place, of course without any reflection on my baseness, moved by the merest waft of coincident conjunctive chance of time and place – well, I beg forgiveness – … if truth matters, see things a bit more clearly, perhaps?
Pretty good, don’t you think?
Pretty good? Yes, but creepy.
I hope this person is far away from where you are, OB. Mind how you go.
Reading that was like watching a particularly dreary fight scene in a movie: Punch……. Punch……. Punch……. Punch……. Punch……. Punch……. Punch……. Punch……. Punch……. Punch……. Punch……. Punch……. Punch……. Punch…….
I RESEMBLE THAT REMARK!
Breathtaking.
Much as the smell of ripe fish guts is breathtaking.
You might have read it all wrong, Ophelia. The poor soul is pleading for you to don a dom outfit and beat the living shit out of him. He knows he deserves such.
mirax: That comment was both laugh-out-loud hilarious and grotesquely disturbing at the same time.
Does it say something about me that I often find those two things going hand-in-hand?
;-)
G
And I thought I was the biggest pain in the ass around here!
Actually, Richard, I thought it WAS you until I read the bit about being Dutch, and then began to feel that it somewhat exceeded your norm for faux gallantrie.
You can now ponder whether that is a compliment or not :))
I must say, the contention that men in general are not good at being one way in public and another way in private does not seem to me well-supported by the available evidence.
(I also remark in passing that Dutch people speaking English can come across as direct to an extent which sometimes seems to native speakers – British ones at any rate – unacceptably rude, and I have known this to be the cause of grievous misunderstandings).
Potentilla, I know it’s also a problem with native French speakers, however I also think we can safely discard that explanation in this case…
Did this person comment here using initials?
Yeah, it was G! heh heh.
(Sorry G)
One thing that interests me about the post is your allusion to possibly needing permission to quote from his emails. Do you think that is actually so?
As a matter of courtesy one might ask permission of a correspondent but it seems to me that once you receive the email, you own the words and only good manners and human decency would prevent one from printing it in its entirety. Even if someone asks for confidentiality I doubt that you have a legal burden to do so.
Forget about a writing. Suppose someone says something to you. Do you have an obligation not to quote them without permission? I don’t think so.
But then again, that’s just my sense and I don’t know the law.
Put up a hate mail section. Every blog ought to have a hate mail section. Put up a disclaimer next to your “email us” link to the effect of: “Any hate mail may be posted in the hate mail section. Butterflies and Wheels has sole discretion in determining what constitutes hate mail.”
No, this guy doesn’t comment here, he just corresponds (persistently) with me. No, I don’t really think I need permission to quote from his emails; I was thinking of it as a courtesy or a moral quasi-duty, either or both of which I took (and still take) to be negated by his colossal gall. In short, by sending me a series of increasingly ill-mannered emails, he waives all right to privacy for said emails.
Brevity should be the soul of snarkiness. He could have got his point across by saying Yes O Blessed OB.
Brevity is not what he does. He is both repetitive and long-winded – he says the same thing over and over and over and over again, at vast and tedious length. And he doesn’t give up – if I don’t agree with him he just keeps explaining why he’s right.
I stopped answering out of sheer boredom, but then he asked why, and I resumed again out of sheer guilt. And this is my reward! Well, I won’t repeat that mistake.
‘I resumed again out of sheer guilt…’
Apparently the Duke of Wellington was similarly afflicted, unable not to reply to correspondence. If he received so much as a congratulatory note from someone similarly inclined, the reciprocal acknowledgements could continue for years.
Anyway, Dawkins is on telly and I’ve open a cheeky little merlot.
Dawkins is on telly – ah you lucky bastards; I’d like to see that. Oh well, it will be on YouTube no doubt.
Well, he seemed quite taken by the dowsers, who were patently honest eccentrics and who were devastated by the results.
The astrologer chap, on the other hand copped the withering stare for his egregious bluster and bullshit.
And other good stuff.
Don,
yer, it were right good it were.
He’s clearly learned a wee trick or two from the fundy response to his last show – this time he let them hang themselves beautifully when required even more, and was careful not to appear ‘hectoring’ or ‘strident’ [:-)] Although the “Dawkins Withering Stare of Skepticism”(tm) was certainly deployed a few times, and quite bloody right too!
The amount of time he gave that crapulent psychic to bluster on about “personal evidence” was most impressive…
I even kept my older cheeky little monkey (nae merlot, alas) up so he could watch the great RD in action!
Just another reason why my M-i-L hates my guts…! :-))
Hey I have one of those! A withering stare. Jeremy calls it laser eyes. Actually it’s just that I happen to look furious when my face is in a neutral state – but it can come in handy at times. (When I don’t in fact want people to scream and run away, it’s not quite so handy.)
Don – did you note that the astrologer is a paid up employee of the Observer ? Depressing.
OB: “it’s just that I happen to look furious when my face is in a neutral state”
I look forward to those photos from Beyond Belief!
Actually, I sympathise. I have been told that I always look either pissed off or deep in thought. I am of course neither. Ever.
Nick,
Yeah, but on the plus side over at stablemate the Guardian, Charlie Booker is in fine form.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguide/columnists/story/0,,2145124,00.html
Don, that’s true… Brooker had me laughing out loud over my boiled eggs with that piece on Saturday morning.
Charlie’s always good for a laugh. His article on night clubs in yesterday’s Guardian was a classic.
Anyway, the Dawkins programme was enjoyable -although I thought Radio 4’s Front Row were onto something when they suggested it was a more general malaise in education, rather than post-modernism, which is responsible for the crisis in science teaching. The bit on the superstitious pigeons was genuinely interesting – and perhaps gets to the root of why so much superstitious quackery persists throughout human society. In evolutionary terms, it is probably less disadvantageous to spot a pattern where none exists, than to fail to observe a pattern that actually does exist.
I’m looking forward to the quack medicine show he’s doing next week, as I reckon those guys are a damned sight more dangerous, more sinister and more worthy of Dawkins’ attention, than mere spirit mediums, dowsers, astrologers et cetera.
It seems that mirax nailed it. This nutjob is begging for a strenuous spanking from OB while she’s wearing the “special outfit” of his fantasies.
(I hope _The Enemies of Reason_ comes to PBS in the States.)
He’d be very disappointed to meet the reality then – T shirt and jeans; about as ‘special’ as a glass of milk. No whips, no tattoos, no nothin’.
The astrologer’s retort:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2146775,00.html
The bit on the superstitious pigeons was genuinely interesting – and perhaps gets to the root of why so much superstitious quackery persists throughout human society.
Patrick
It’s difficult to see how superstitious notions (leading on to religions?) could arise accidentally by interacting with the world – ultimately conceiving of nature as deceiver; and there being no natural bias, how are all our individual experiences supposed to conglomerate into mighty institutions such as the Roman Catholic Church? With humans We are dealing with misconception and deception, a totally different order to animal misperceiving.
http://www.atheistresource.co.uk/mansreligiousquest.html
_
It’s difficult to see how superstitious notions (leading on to religions?) could arise accidentally by interacting with the world – ultimately conceiving of nature as deceiver;
There are a number of ways in which we have evolved to believe things other than the truth, the largest set (AFAIK) being beliefs about ourselves. Religion is mostly likely a “spandrel” – something which arises through the effects of various evolved characteristics of our minds, without itself having adaptive value. “Why Would Anyone Believe in God?” Justin L Barrett is the best summary I know of the cognitive science in this area.
The Dutch are at it again.
Refer to God as ‘Allah’ suggests Dutch Bishop. So says heading of article in today’s Irish Times.
“A Roman Catholic bishop has proposed that people of all faiths refer to GOD of all faiths as ‘Allah’ to foster understanding, stoking an already heated debate on religious tolerance in a country with over one million Muslims.”
Bishop Tiny Muskens had spent eight years as prelate in Indonesia. So it it easy for one to see from whence he is coming.
The trouble with refering to God as allah for me is every time I hear the word allah it brings to mind poor Nick Berg having his head cut off while his devout captors chant allah akbar!
Doesn’t your e-mail package have a junk filter? He would have been in mine long ago…
Oh, sure; I could have blocked his address; but I was interested to see what bizarre thing he would say next. He’s stopped now though; one final deranged outburst and he stopped.
Surely, he’s taking the piss.