It starts out with a post containing something that is not true. I understand it isn’t my job to correct everything I see, but the correction process in a forum like this is so simple, and with the vast amount of data easily available nowadays, it isn’t much work, so why not?

Sometimes the response is a correction, and something about appreciating the new information. Oh, wait. That never happens.

The usual response is for them to come back, not with an actual fact-based refutation of my information, but a lot of insults, combined with hammering harder on the initial lie.

I don’t mind real stupidity. People who are actually stupid can’t help it. What’s like fingernails on a blackboard to me is deliberate stupidity. The kind of stupidity that highly-intelligent people have to work really hard to carry off. When this is combined with arrogance and insults, the blackboard starts developing a latticework of deep furrows.

Then it becomes almost impossible to resist the urge to rhetorically set someone on fire, toss them out a third story window, and then stand in the window and piss on them until the fire is out. I try to resist it. On occasion, I don’t.

At some point, like Tim Minchin in “Storm,” the diplomacy dike lets go. And with more excuse, since Storm wasn’t half as arrogant about her airheaded beliefs as some others are.

You can invent your own facts. Fine. You don’t get to invent your own facts and then stand there and call me and a lot of other people names for not swallowing them.

If this be prickdom, make the most of it.