I really don't understand why people feel the need to get so personally offensive with such albeit lackluster invective. I've been watching this thread and to some extent Rich's 'relationship' with the C2 forums for awhile now. Honestly, except for some relatively mild abuse directed at Roy, rarely does Rich do anything close to blatantly attack individuals unless he is responding to really offensive and generally pretty juvenile personal attacks, such as those particularly recently from Paul and John Bove. The worst he gets is dismissing people as poor rowers. While of course he doesn't really have any grounds on which to do that, there are a lot of bad, bad rowers, so I'm sure he gets lucky every now and then. I don't recall him ever claiming anyone to be an absolute idiot, moron, retard, dick, jerk, etc., or deranged, psychopathic, etc., let alone wishing death upon anyone else. So why do some people as if they are justified in these truly horrific personal attacks?
Assume anything negative said about Rich's character by anyone is true. Then
so what? So he's crazy, a narcissist, a psychopath, a compulsive liar, whatever. That is hardly the end of the world for anybody on this forum. In fact, it has no bearing on anyone's life beyond this forum. Thus the personal attacks are wholly unjustified. So instead, get on with life and piss off, no good ever comes of them.
Next, assume that anything negative said about Rich's character by anyone is not true. I.e., either people are just thinking about these things too much and taking personal offense when it is (usually) not intended, or perhaps Rich just doesn't have the social skills to communicate without offending people - and many people have this problem. Then the people who ruthlessly assault him oftentimes without provocation may take their place as true a**h**s amongst all a******s.
There's this crazy homeless guy always selling the Big Issue magazine on a corner of a main street in Bristol. I don't know that he's crazy, and in fact, I don't know anything about him at all. He tries to get attention by being obnoxious, loud, etc. In all honesty, as bad as it may sound, I find him to be rather annoying. He is ALWAYS there, and I may walk past him more than half a dozen times in one day and thus I get a lot of his unwanted attention. If one day I decided to walk up to him and start relentlessly shouting abuse on par with the things said here, or maybe even started physically accosting him, it probably would be looked down upon in a social and legal sense, because such behavior regardless of the medium is never acceptable.
Personally, I find the insults to be detrimental to my experience of this thread.
Seriously people, chill the f**k out.
