Stuff like this is why I went public with our Notice of Trustee’s Sale:
Author : A concerned renter
E-mail : irquel@REDACTED.com
Stopped paying your mortgage? BAHAHAHHAAHA!Welcome to the hell you brought on others, you pathetic parasite. Good thing you’re a psychopath and can’t feel anything, or you’d be really bummed.
The point was to deny vicious trolls like this the opportunity to claim that, by not disclosing the foreclosure, I am therefore trying to hide it. The fact is I told them in my post Friday night — and many times before then — that their behavior is self-destructive, but that doesn’t stop them from carrying on like this. It’s sad and stupid, but it is what it is. I called them by their true names when first I met them:
My BubbleBoys are mostly gone for the moment, no doubt off like a cloud of gnats desperate to enshroud someone else’s head. The truth is, I do have a particular kind of fun at their expense, not the least of which are their pitch-perfect echoes of the charges I make against them. They were so aghast they I called them flying monkeys that they swooped in by the hundreds to express their outrage. Surely none dare call them Brownshirts, when most of what they did was rage, swear and threaten with all their minimal mental might. A certain few of them were brighter than I expected, but not one seems to have caught on that the Heckler’s Veto doesn’t work on the internet. And for all their complaints, none of them seems to have noticed that I also compared them to the Communists.
Even so, I ended up feeling sorry for them. It’s not the specious arguments repeated over and over, not the garbled grammar, not the atrocious spelling. Those are secondary consequences. What grabbed at my heart, despite myself, was the lack of internal resources that would lead a man — and they seem to be almost exclusively men — to join a gang of thugs. Surely this is not true of each one of them, but it is true in the main, in the same way that their belief in the efficacy of browbeating is an attribute of the browbeaten and their conviction in the ubiquity of corruption betrays only too completely the contents of their own souls. This is the stuff of the Brownshirts, of the Bolsheviks, of the Khmer Rouge and the Klan. This is the stuff from which the ugliest episodes in human history are sprung.
And yet it is still a sorrowful spectacle. I’m not absolving them. If you dig deeply enough into any sort of human squalor, at the bottom of everything you’ll find some combination of laziness, deceit and envy — usually about 112% of each. But every one of these boys would be a better man if he had more to do. The curse of America’s economy — and the world’s — is not that we have too much commerce, but too little. If these men saw more value in pursuing their own affirmative values, and less in campaigning for and rejoicing in the suffering of others, each one of them — and everyone else — would be better off.
In any case, I know who I’m dealing with, and I know how to deal with them, but there is nothing virtuous in simply telling the truth.
Meanwhile, on the right side of the number line, where the human beings live, the Swallow Hill Gang is working madly in email to build the Virtual Rent Party site into a temple of human values. I’m twice delighted that something so small — taking ammunition away from ugly trolls — could serve as the impetus for something so huge.
Which do you love more? Values or disvalues? Profits or losses? What moves you — the possibility that an injured animal can be nursed back to health — or the chance that loudly lamenting that animal’s death can advance your agenda?
Aristotle taught us that we are what we habitually do. And Brother Willie is always hanging around to remind us that everybody’s gotta take a side…
