My Complaint About your computer

Rather than engage in a point-by-point response to the textual interpretation of Your Computer's endeavors, I want to respond to the more general issue at hand. Before examining the present situation, however, it is important that I take advantage of a rare opportunity to subject Your Computer's views to the rigorous scrutiny they warrant. Yes, I realize that now is not the time to go wobbly on our opposition to Your Computer's abominable newsgroup postings, but for the sake of brevity I've had to express myself in simplified terms. It's best to ignore most of the quotes that Your Computer so frequently cites. He takes quotes of of context; uses misleading, irrelevant, and out-of-date quotes; and, presents quotes from legitimate authorities used misleadingly to support contentions that they did not intend and that are not true. In short, Your Computer is not the only one who needs to reassess his assumptions. Think about poxy, bloodthirsty power brokers. They too should realize that wherever you look, you'll see Your Computer enforcing intolerance in the name of tolerance. You'll see him suppressing freedom in the name of freedom. And you'll see him crushing diversity of opinion in the name of diversity.

Your Computer insists that the existence and perpetuation of nativism is its own moral justification. Sorry, Your Computer, but, with apologies to Gershwin, "it ain't necessarily so." Does he honestly expect us to believe that he is the most recent incarnation of the Buddha? This isn't such an easy question to answer, but let me take a stab at it: He is a logorrheic pamphleteer. I use that label only when it's true. If you don't believe it is, then consider that I am not a robot. I am a thinking, feeling, human being. As such, I get teary-eyed whenever I see Your Computer court a slovenly minority of patronizing schizophrenics. It makes me want to shelter initially unpopular truths from suppression, enabling them to ultimately win out through competition in the marketplace of ideas, which is why I'm so eager to tell you that someone just showed me a memo supposedly written by Your Computer. The memo spells out his plans to twist our entire societal valuation of love and relationships beyond all insanity. If this memo is authentic, it tells us that Your Computer's accusations are evil. They're evil because they cause global warming; they make your teeth fall out; they give you spots; they incite nuclear war. And, as if that weren't enough, I plan to foster mutual understanding. Are you with me—or against me? Whatever you decide, Your Computer uses big words like "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis" to make himself sound important. For that matter, benevolent Nature has equipped another puny creature, the skunk, with a means of making itself seem important, too. Although Your Computer's communiqués may reek like a skunk, there is no doubt that Your Computer will insist that our society be infested with scapegoatism, autism, alcoholism, and an impressive swarm of other "isms" in the near future. Believe me, I would give everything I own to be wrong on that point, but the truth is that Your Computer uses the word "hydrometallurgically" without ever having taken the time to look it up in the dictionary. People who are too lazy to get their basic terms right should be ignored, not debated.

Individually, Your Computer's ebullitions prey on people's fear of political and economic instability. But linked together, Your Computer's inveracities could easily foster exclusionism at every opportunity. I unequivocally hope that Your Computer's crotchets were intended as a joke, although they're not very funny if they were. Consider the following, which I'll address in greater detail later: Your Computer occasionally shows what appears to be warmth, joy, love, or compassion. You should realize, however, that these positive expressions are more feigned than experienced and invariably serve an ulterior motive, such as to paralyze needed efforts to seek some structure in which the cacophony introduced by his expositions might be systematized, reconciled, and made rational. I'd like to finish with a quote from a private e-mail message sent to me by a close friend of mine: "Your Computer should try being a little more open-minded".

Enough said..