An open letter to my brother requesting that he mediate a dispute between myself and his fiancee:

Wesley:

Responsibility to your family demands that you intercede in this matter and i propose the following terms of debate and suggest the following compromise.

The following regards a dispute between myself and miss minden arising from a rude comment which I made on her facebook wall. I do not defend the specific content of the message. However, I do take issue with the criticism she made that I was probably 'just high' and anyhow had (I paraphrase) astoundingly little to say. While i don't dispute either charge, i emphatically dispute that either is a legitimate grounds for objection in this context.

I understand her legitimate objection to an off color remark I had made and I had apologized prior to the portion of the correspondence which she characterized as druggy and irrelevant. At that point we were discussing the role of civility and social norms. I think civility and social norms are very nearly mutually exclusive terms in the context of online culture. Transgression for its own sake is something I will readily admit, but I won't apologize for being pointless. Criticizing people for writing on the internet when they have nothing to say is 'like handing out speeding tickets at the indy 500.' That is to say, it's like prosecuting someone for murder during a war. It's the ultimate case for moral relativism.

Further to the foregoing:
Allow me to refine my declaration of intent. I'm not asking you to defend your girlfriend. I'm not attacking her. I'm just trying to get out ahead of the her hating me narrative as it develops. Broker a cease fire for us before it makes holiday gatherings a giant pain in the ass for the next 30 years. Please. People are free to hate me and they frequently exercise that freedom. If you asked her, she might, as a courtesy, conduct her hatred of me in a manner which does not intervene in our family affairs.

I authorize you to tender the following offer: If she can bear her distaste for me and everything I stand for silently I will never say anything about her in general or particular terms anywhere to anyone and in return I will designate her to give my eulogy in my will with an explicit authorization for her to explain in whatever terms she pleases how my life was a complete waste.

If she is amenable to these terms I will consider the negotiations a success and give you a producer credit on her eulogy of me. On the principle that you should be entitled to a ten percent finder's fee and the principle that this transaction is to be conducted in silent loathing I propose to thus secure for you ten percent or so of the silent loathing.

Residual loathing produced after my death is the exclusive property of myself and it is my intent to take it with me to hell.

ad hommin' em: the asshole test

During the years when people were calling each other douchebags, I was still calling people asshole for the reason that douchebags are items which have utility for which we prize them, and yet we were trying to express precisely the opposite about the people to whom we compared them. Assholes are an inevitable but filthy part of us and that seemed to sum up my feelings about that select group of other people termed thus. To ensure that i was meeting the highest standards of rhetoric i implemented a test. when I wanted to call someone an asshole I would first picture one to be sure that it properly evoked their character.
Then, if satisfied, i would proceed to let them know what I thought of them. Surprisingly, the effect was not that I called people assholes less frequently, but that I enjoyed it more. Holding myself to this standard, i had to reconstruct people from the bottom up. The combination of holding myself to this relatively high standard while feeling at least a bit of genuine empathy for them before applying what i knew to be precisely the mot juste retained some of the emotional impact, especially to the phrase "now I feel like an asshole." the idea that i might be called upon to justify myself elevated a vulgar personal attack into a rather rarefied sphere of discourse. if anybody asked me why i had called them an asshole during that period i could have told them why they were. I hope to one3 day see universal adoption of this standard, with high school debate teams hearing the motion "chris is an asshole" without a single giggle and 17 so and so is an asshole motions on the agenda of every public hearing. wouldn't you like to know, really know, who is and who isn't?