Preface

Concerning the perceived ruckus over the stuff about Japan. There are two things that come to mind when seeing the ridiculous amount of stupidity on all sides, here. They both came to me the first time I saw a well-established news media decide to do an article about "what the internet thought" and confined themselves to the stupidest people on Facebook. I remember getting frustrated first with the people in the article, then the person who wrote the article ... and then coming to my senses when I remembered these thoughts.

• Number One – There will always be stupid people somewhere. Always. You're going to meet them every day of every week of every year of your life. You're going to want to yell at them. You're going to want to scream. You're going to want to bash their heads into hard surfaces to see if maybe you can undo whatever debilitating brain damage they obviously suffer from.

  But if you waste your time getting bent out of shape over every new group of stupid people who come along, eventually you're going to end up like this guy.

  

  Boneitis. It kills.

• Number Two – Sort of related to the first point, this bit of wisdom was given to me some years ago, and I have no idea who or what it came from. However, failure to remember the source doesn't really diminish its effectiveness, to my mind, and a few of you have probably heard me say it before.

  You can't fix every case of stupid you come across.

  In fact, generally you can't fix most of it. Often it's far too ingrained in the person's personality, and just as often you and they barely know each other. Sure, it's possible for a random comment from a random person to have a huge effect on someone else's life, but most often a direct approach will be passed in one ear and out the other, usually along with the phrase (spoken or thought) "Who are you? You don't know what it's like to be me."

  Which, honestly, is the stupidest response possible, since not only does no one have any idea what it's like to be anyone else at all, but there are these little things called Empathy and Sympathy which we've developed to compensate.

  The point is, you can't fix every case of stupid you come across. Doesn't mean you can't try, but it is a reminder to save your efforts for the places they might actually help.

Now then. Got some info for you on the following pages; basically anything I've learned in between Monday and now. I'll be addressing comment stuff on the very last page.