Mr. O'Brien has a Blog

Ah, Robert O'Brien is mad as hell and he's not gonna take it anymore. My pet troll, as PZ has dubbed him, has started his own blog, from where he will no doubt launch unintentionally amusing attacks on me. Here's my favorite part of his post addressed to me. After pasting the text of his initial email to me, he says this:

Ed responded to my message with all the wit of a schoolyard taunter (I refer interested parties to his blog for the full exchange) complete with schoolyard back up.

I'll take psychological projection for $1000, Alex. The funny thing here is that it was Mr. O'Brien - a person entirely unknown to me until 2 days ago - who took it upon himself to begin the taunting by calling me a "pompous ass" and a "pretentious idiot", and he was even dumb enough to do so on my playground, so to speak. Now it seems to me that any sane person who walked up to a total stranger in his own yard, surrounded by his friends, and started calling him names would expect, at the very least, to have his fire returned in a like manner. But not our pet troll. He thinks if you behave like he does, you've done something wrong. How amusing.

Now that he's got his own playground and has offered the "I know you are but what am I" argument, perhaps he'll move on to "my dad can beat up your dad" or "I'm rubber and you're glue". But between you and me, I think he's just making a play to insure that the first winner of the Robert O'Brien Idiot of the Month Award is Robert O'Brien himself. And by saying that he has no problem with banning all books that contain gay characters from libraries, he's well on his way to earning that honor for himself.

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Ahh yes. The good old name calling followed by feigned indigination that the insult was [gasp] returned. Then the fake shock with the obligatory charge of engaging in ad homs. You'd think they could come up with something new.

Well, we all have our crosses to bear. Sometimes it's more than I can stand to have to face "Great White Wonder's" stupidity every time I try to post something.

Timothy-
Yeah, didn't you have a pet troll that started his own blog to bash you recently? As I recall, he thinks libertarians are fascists. Quite amusing.

I don't think O'Brien ever explained why he switched grad schools. That's pretty unusual. The only people I know who did that, flunked the qualifiers.

By Ralph Pseudonym (not verified) on 06 Dec 2004 #permalink

Ralph -

There are legitimate reasons to switch grad schools. I've been keeping my options open, as there's something of a budget crisis at my institution; without financial support, I can't afford to get my degree. Sometimes, the character of a program changes dramatically, and for the worse, such as when the leadership changes. I'm not inclined to hold O'Brien's switch against him, in the absence of evidence that he wasn't able to hack it in his initial program.

There are legitimate reasons to switch grad schools.

Indeed there are. Switching grad schools is the least of this guys' flaws.