" hateful, meanspirited, snide, illogical, slamming,,,"
Let me see if I get this right. Jewel throws that series of insults at X, X throws them back, and you see fit to castigate X for them? Well, that's interesting. Is that like in football where player A punches player B and B gets thrown out of the game because the ref always sees the guy who throws the second punch? Well, that sounds fair to me. Not!
Let's get a little context here. Have you been reading along? Must not have been. Jewel and I were talking about kids' access to the internet in libraries for what seems like a week but was probably less than two days. I was arguing against his notion of a federal role in that as were Tim and Chris. Meanwhile Jewel was getting flustered because his point wasn't getting across and he was fighting on several fronts at the same time. I kept trying to get him to spit out his point, if he had one, and had a couple of side conversations with X about what Jewel might be trying to say. At one point Neo stepped in and translated one of Jewel's points, which X had misunderstood. All the while Jewel is getting frustrated and cranky as he tends to get when he can't get his points across and he starts throwing out little cracks, which I usually refer to as him gnawing on my ankles and he refers to as splashing in puddles. I was particularly "fond" of his parrot crack. (I notice that you didn't include the link for that one.) His cracks to me are usually accusations of some ulterior motive on my part. I foolishly continue to try to figure out where he's coming from, but I start to lose patience.
So this all goes on for a while and everyone is either frustrated or bored to tears. Jewel says something about the virtue of loving one's neighbors as oneself and X takes a swipe that was so clever I was choking with laughter.
No blood thus far, just scratches.
Then the rough-riders come in out of the blue, first JLA and then you, provoking the above string of insults from Jewel. Now there's blood. We go from to blood with just five little words. Before you showed up, yes, everyone was a little cranky, but Jewel and X were hanging in there as were the rest of us. We were handling it. They were both being pissy. It would have sorted itself out without your "help." But the gang shows up in support and Jewel just spews it out. And X spews it back.
It certainly appeared to me that X gave at least as good as she got.
This is a classic case study of how these things happen. It is a perfect example of what I've been trying to describe to you. Yes, X gives as good as she gets, but it would never come to that if outside agitators didn't swarm to the scene and inflame matters. At least I don't think it would. Since it always happens, though, there's no way to know for sure. |
