I'm not wrong, I'm just an asshole.

Hello. If you’re reading this I may have called you a delusional fuckwit on the internet.

Please allow me to explain myself.

I love a good debate, the more heated the better. I think you really learn a lot about somebody during a knock down drag out argument. I have always loathed small talk, I like getting strait down to the interesting stuff about people, ya know, sexual kinks, addictions, regrettable decisions and politics. I like it when I find somebody that disagrees with me because I’m an active militant evangelical anti-human, pro-nowhere political agnostic looking to start fires where angels fear to tread and I’m always up for a fight.

I am an especially infuriating bastard when it comes to a political argument. I’m a condescending know-it-all prick with a sharp tongue, a pretentious vocabulary,  and a deficit in my deescalation abilities. I may have the inability to foster personable relationships with well adjusted individuals, but I choose to validate my social ineptness by having a knack for corralling people with their own bullshit and hanging them with their inconsistencies; which is to say I’m a dick that doesn’t know how to let someone disagree with me.

I once had an argument with a paranoid gun fetishist, let’s call him Walter Sobchack, who was absolutely convinced that a Chicago elementary teacher getting fired from his job (for albeit bullshit reasons detailed here) was a direct result of the Obama presidency because “Obama is from Chicago.” The thing was, I agreed with his outrage about the case. It was obviously an absurd overreach of zero tolerance policies run amok that, in a very real and concrete way, impacted an innocent person’s life.  

But where the bullshit comes thundering in, its hoof beats the drum of confirmation bias, is in the speculation made fact that the President, highest office in the land, is somehow directly responsible for the disciplinary policies of Washington Irving elementary school, because he’s from Chicago.  The logic leap that this requires is powered by the same catalyst that drives people to proclaim that pro-wrestling is real, God loves us, everything happens for a reason and Batman vs. Superman was worth paying full matinee price to see; people want to believe, and they will mold the narrative to fit their desires

I tried to explain this to Walter, that their wasn’t even a literal connection to Vietnam, Obama, the New World Order or any other lunacy that hucksters like Alex Jones had ejaculated into the ovulating collective consciousness of the terrified fragile white males in the 21st century. Walter Sobchack wouldn’t hear it, he did not watch his buddies die face down in the muck just to entertain de-constructive arguments from some internet asshole he drank a beer with once at a renaissance fair 15 years ago.

He tried to end it cordially by using the ole “let’s just agree to disagree” line, but of course like I have already mentioned; I’m a dick, and my inner screaming lust to strip down the illusions of another always seems to win out if only in the most juvenile way.

I told him I did not agree to disagree and that I demand he agree with me, and holy shit he flew off the handle. And like some collective ant-colony chemical attack signal, every knuckle dragger who had been lurking unseen, waiting for a time to pounce on the instigator, emerged from their radio silence for a simultaneous filibuster ‘atta boy’ circle jerk. 

I walked away for a second, I can’t remember for what, maybe to light my crack pipe with the tattered remains of an American flag, and came back to a litany of coco puff bat-shit all lined up pretty in the comment bar, like a row of squawking birds looking for something to shit on.

Of course the back and forth got nasty; I got into an internet debate with borderline white separatists tormented by unrealized Red Dawn, manhood fantasies of expelling foreigners from the father land with a trusty AR-15 and scrappy homegrown moxy. These are guys that went to renaissance fairs and civil war reenactments, not to get drunk in public and plough theater girls like I did, but because they so desperately clung to an idealized past; a past when it was acceptable to publicly murder someone for a perceived sleight; when waste management consisted of shitting in a bucket and throwing it out your front window.

The argument ended with Walter Sobchack making some kind of vague assertion that I was “one of them” whoever they are, which is definitely not the first time I have been accused of being some kind of propaganda sleeper agent for the state; which makes perfect sense when you think about it. A deep cover Manchurian psyop agent poses as a horny teenager and blends into the clandestine world of renaissance fairs to earn the trust of conspiracy theorists so that a mere 15 years later they will accept his Facebook friend request from whence he will discredit them rhetorically in spasmodic political debates. The plan is almost too perfect.

I find a lot a conspiracy theorists on the internet these days are kind of like the dirt hippies in Golden Gate park that sell shitty shwag weed.  They hit you up, you decline and then they call you a narc, which is to say that if you’re not buying ...you’re a cop.

They refuse to come to terms with the fact that the product they're selling is crap. It's the same thing with the paranoid hyperbole I see all over the internet these days, if you don't think they’re after you, you must be one of them. A persistent fantasy world of extremes.....you want to tell these people, hey, there's better weed out there.

I had another recent debate with some closet racist civil war re-enactor who’s internet posts vacillate between the kind of tepid inspirationals that are right at home on a cubicle wall and scary black people with guns.

Shortly after another spate of police homicides of young black men, she went into overdrive, running headlong into the assertion that black people are scary and dangerous. Normally I would feel sullied just engaging with her, but one afternoon, one boring tedious afternoon, I decided I was not going to let this go unchecked, because I’m compulsively argumentative.

I delicately pointed out that she consistently posted photos of white people holding guns meant to be wholesome and a healthy exercise of constitutional freedom and in a seemingly contradictory message, sometimes within the same hour, posted photos of black people holding guns meant to be terrifying and a confirmation that hordes of mud peoples were coming to take your bibles and teddy bears. I said that any logical person could conclude that she was promoting the idea that constitutional protection was contingent upon your skin color in an attempt to force her to defend her racism.

Her answer was like a screwball in my batting average.

She told me that she was an “empath” who could tell just by looking that the black people had “hatred in their hearts”.

I was at first astonished, was I dealing with some kind harlequin tactician, throwing me off my game with a level 14 Charlie Sheen loco bluff?

I struggled desperately to herd her into the racism defense arena. I focused on my jabs, working her defense with a flurry of scoffing derision at presumed magic powers that justified her bigotry. But then a funny thing happened.

Rather than be baited into the usual white fragility stuttering defense of racism, she ignored the racism allegations entirely and doubled down on convincing me of her superhero powers, even offering an origin story. Her magic powers had been handed down to her female line as a hereditary trait from her Celtic ancestors, like a potato face or a propensity for alcoholism. She was a real life Bene Gesserit mother who worked in a real estate office because apparently, empathing doesn’t pay what is used to.

The accusation of racism? Never addressed.  In the argument it seemed to her as non-present as…well…..most white people’s experience with racism.  

But to her it didn’t seem to matter because she never had to justify her bigotry. In her mind, bigotry wasn’t an emotional response to fear and xenophobia, it was divine providence; an immutable truth gleaned from a supernatural power. She didn’t have to ponder, or read or understand the experiences of the people she so demonized. She didn’t have to comprehend their motivations or collective experiences. She didn’t have to think about it or question or take responsibility for her statements.

It was magic.

She pitied me for being too “hard hearted” to understand her gift.

I pitied her for being a delusional closet racist terrified at an evolving world she couldn’t understand without resorting to live action roleplay as coping mechanism.

She implored me to have an open mind

I implored her to be skeptical

Wanting to believe can be a dangerous game, and too many internet arguments revolve around a shoddy premise reinforced by dubious sources that make huge presumptive leaps with anecdotal narratives and ludicrous motivations ending with some all-caps half-wit slogans like “DO THE MATH!!!” or “WAKE-UP SHEEPLE!!”

I can’t blame them all for having trouble adapting to the 21st century, it’s a confusing complicated time of abundant information coexisting with startling ignorance. It’s a lot more comforting to believe that there is some kind of Blowfeldian machination at the helm of our discontent than the probable reality, that the “system” however you broadly define it, is a great headless hapless blunder, driven by self-interest and kept on life support with all of our complacency.

That’s more frightening than any conspiracy, because that’s implicates our culpability. We become……responsible.

It’s not to say that all conspiracy theory is bullshit. Look at what Wiki-leaks, Edward Snowden, Gary Webb, or even the New York Times during the Pentagon Papers era exposed to the world. But those plots were brought into the daylight by evidence, ya know, the boring shit.

Documents and data, facts and figures, peanut butter and jelly, just the facts maam corroborated and verified by professional journalists for whom editorializing was vulgarity.

For the click-bait, manic shit-fit era, we start with the assertion and work backwards until we find a kernel of plausibility to confirm our conclusion, dismiss “the lame-stream media” and gag ourselves on every turgid conspiracy dong from here to the Illuminati.

Each new revelation confirms the prior and perpetuates itself to a new host to incubate in their news feed. The absence of evidence becomes evidence of absence; the lack of any proof is yet more proof of a massive cover-up. Skeptical? That’s just what the media wants you to be!

Its bullshit and I love it. It’s like my favorite show is on every night, and every thread is just one more opportunity to debunk hokum, denigrate balderdash, and fist-fuck poppycock. It’s my stupid game and I enjoy it.

So if I, especially at my most vociferous, have offended you or put you at unease from the vehemence of my arguments, allow me to say, I’m sorry that you’re wrong.

Now let’s fight you simpleton, factually inaccurate, confirmation bias having motherfuckers!