[Eisel Mazard:]
You're the one hanging out in a reddit group with my name on it.
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[BunnedGump:]
Nobody hangs around..I have a little.notifaction pop up that says "NPD alert" kind of like the bat signal.
So, I pull off the road and whip out my phone and check my bullshit meter.
The group is for fans and critics. It's not the your own personal stage you're attempting to hijack.
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[My reply:]
Reddit is for anyone who is stupid enough to waste time using it: dude, look at your own history of how much time you've wasted on this group in the last several years. IT IS PATHETIC. I've seen you insulting me for reading various Ancient Latin authors: do you really think that's a waste of time when compared to what you've done in your (increasingly lonely) role as the most highly motivated "hater" of Eisel Mazard?
Dude… I've never seen you offer a substantive criticism of my work under any heading.
It's not as if I can say, "The guy's insulting, but he really had an intelligent perspective on climate change" —nor any other topic (out of thousands) that I've covered in my videos, podcasts and books.
You get to choose if you're sharpening your mind or blunting it, here on the internet: you're making the wrong choice, again and again, and on some level, you know it.
You know you'd be better off reading the Tragedies of Seneca and uploading your thoughts and feelings about the text (as I've recently done) or even making comedy videos, etc.
You know you'd be better off imitating my hobbies rather than insulting me for having them.
And keep in mind: all of this stuff you're criticizing is just a hobby for me.
Youtube is just a website on the internet. Uploading my thoughts about Seneca or Cicero or Stendhal is really just a hobby for me. And you do nothing like this in your spare time —and you know you'd be better off if you did.
[I'd remind you of what Aristotle says (toward the end of Politics) about the importance of what we do in our leisure time: this is one of those things that's simultaneously shallow and profound. Yes, it really does, eventually, have a profound effect on who you are, even if each book you read and each creative project in isolation seems silly. I'm surrounded here by people who are slowly killing themselves by making the wrong decisions under this heading: what they want is joy but what they end up with is a cycle of short-term self-indulgence, drinking themselves to death, smoking themselves to death, eating themselves to death. Imbeciles commonly claim that I have "a fake laugh" when I really am enjoying myself in making these videos, some serious, some ridiculous. I'm really laughing in that video, today, about a sixteen dollar textbook that's only eleven pages long: to me that really is hilarious, and one part of my hobby here is just sharing my sense of the ridiculous with the audience. Misunderstanding happiness is dangerous: what people will do to be happy is fatal in every sense of the word —it becomes your fate. Understanding happiness entails that you have something to share, even if (for example) your sense of humor excludes some and includes others. Research interests exclude some and include others in much the same way.]