Yesterday's Post

How many people hallucinated about the content of my post yesterday and argued against that hallucination?

That's 90% of what you need to know about the world. The rest is just spelling and math.

Comments

[Noumenon]

Would you, could you, take the time to go through those comments and excerpt the "hallucinatory" bits so we can judge whether it's their perception of your argument or yours that is at fault?

[Roboguy]

That's two lame posts in a row. I think you need a vacation.

[bob]

Hallucinations? We expect that from you, Scott.

My question is why you would want to apologize to any ethnic group or country for their traditional/religious/cultural predilection of killing each other? Whether it is oil or the moral high ground of installing a democracy, we need to do whatever is in our interests to stay alive. Long term, that's what it is all about.

Let the Islamic terrorists apologize for murdering Americans, Spaniards, Englishmen, Dutch, Indonesians, and kindred Muslims. Their worldwide intifada is something that makes your proposed apology just a whisper in the hurricane of irrational hate their world is bringing to the rest of us.

bb

[Cal]

Yeah, some people are real nuts. Still, I couldn't believe that you said that everything we've done in Iraq has been bad. That's just ridiculous!

[James]

Our idiot government took over their idiot dictatorship and replaced it with an idiot replicla of our idiot government. What an idiocracy we have!

[random]

This refers to your www.dilbert.com site rather than the blog. The advertisers have surpassed themselves in annoying adverts. On clicking the link on that page to this blog. The ad above the link suddenly opened up, covering the blog link image so my click went to that instead of here. Sneaky in the extreme. Do they really think that bringing someone to their site in a way that pisses a person off will really encourage them to spend money on their site? Actual effect to encourage me to install ad blocker, so rather than have a less intrusive ad being seen, it never appears on page in first place. If ads are too intrusive people will go to extra lengths to avoid them.

[D. Mented]

I missed yesterday's post, so I'll just say it now;
you're right that an apology is about useless in that situation, but there's one thing worse;
not apologising.

As dumb as George senior seemed for letting Saddam stay in power when he had him in his sights in Iraq War One, he knew a lot more about the situation than Junior.
The Iraquis didn't keep reelecting him because they liked him; they did it because they knew he was the only leader they had who could keep the Sunnis and Shiites from making war on eachother. Also, that shell game he was playing with the weapons inspectors may have been to keep Iran from being certain he was unarmed.
Not a good man - an evil man, but even snake venom can be useful to have when you're surrounded by poisonous snakes.
We should never have gone there. Having gone there, we should have had a postwar maintenance plan. Lacking a plan, we should have sent intelligent, expirienced people to run the reconstruction (instead of naive, just-graduated-never-met-anyone-from-another-country Bush loyalists)Lacking leadership, we should have let the people the Iraquis first elected to local governments do their jobs instead of deposing them to clear the way for the people who would later be elected in American-monitored general elections.
Failing all of that, an apology is a bad joke.
But not apologising is worse.
I voted against the idiot, but I'm still sorry.
D. Mented

[random]

There is a difficulty in text only communication. Something you mean as a joke or sarcastic comment will not come across that way as, were if we could see your expressions or hear your tone it would be obvious. As it is we can only go by what you have written. If you write that you are 'genuinely sorry' should we go by what you write or assume that as a comic writer we should take everything you write as insincere and not believe anything you write and not assume any of your stated opinions are necessarily your actual opinions. From what I have read from your blog I'd be surprise if you are actually sorry but guess that you do believe they deserve an apology from someone. But then I base that on what you said previously which of course might not have been your true opinion. Not being sure what way to take a blog entry detracts from its effect as whether you are being serious or not makes a big difference to how we should understand the entry's meaning.

[Mayur Puri]

Am I really the first one to post a comment?
Hurrah! What an honor!
I apologise for any inconvinience to all those with genuine opinions waiting to post...

[Jeremy]

I don't usually bother reading the comments, but I read them for that post just to see how much hallucination would occur. It was like people didn't even read what you wrote. Not an encouraging picture of humanity, to be sure. Luckily, a lot of people DID seem to get it.

[Diana W]

I didn't bother commenting yesterday because I completely agreed with you, so I didn't have anything interesting to add. I'll sign your appology card when you're ready to send it. And I still think the best way to make ammends and show that a Christian nation isn't their enemy would be to help rebuild the destroyed mosques.

[Andrew]

I dunno. I don't read the comments as they are usually a waste of time and off topic.

Are you telling me I missed a great learning opportunity...damn!!! Now I am missing 90% of what I gotta know.

[TallDave]

BTW, if you want to know what the military is doing, I highly recommend sitting in on the conference calls set up fro bloggers, which are held daily. here's a typical offering.

Bloggers' Roundtable w/CAPT David R. Pine, Chief of Staff, Joint Headquarters Transition Team

Friday 16 Nov
1030 Eastern

Topic:
- Significance/progress of developing a dedicated logistics program for the Iraqi Army. He will also discuss the Iraqi Army logistics, accountability, and personnel structure at JHQ level and the existing training facilities, training base expansion and provide as honest assessment of the many challenges they already know exist.
- Iraqi Security Forces efforts to eliminate sectarian influence
- Leadership generation remains a challenge

You can sign up for the email notification here:

http://www.defenselink.mil/Blogger/Blogger.aspx

Transcripts are also available there.

[TallDave]

Quite a few, from what I could see. Hopefully not me.

To briefly re-summarize: Iraqi civilians were much better off under the occupation than under Hussein, so calling it a "disaster" for them is probably a bit unfair, especially since nearly all of the problems stemmed from the mistaken assumption that the best policy was to let Iraqis work things out for themselves while our troops sit in their bases. Reversing that assumption is what has led to all the recent progress.

[Bradley T]

All the talk about the comments on your blog made me actually read them, and I wish I never had.

I feel dirty, and I'll never have the same impression when reading this blog, knowing the filth that awaits me if I read a little past the intended post.

I feel like I saw a Dingleberry on Tara Banks Ass.

[dreamstohack]

I think, or at least hope, that i speak for many people, when i say, "WTF?"

[CDriK]

what is it about ?

[Mike]

It's not always hallucination. Some of it is transference.

I woke up one evening in my apartment in D.C. to the sound of shouting. It was four o'clock in the morning, and pouring down rain, and a homeless person on the sidewalk below was having a furious argument with a tree. He would poke the tree with his forefinger, scream at it, then shout, "That's it, that's IT, I can't talk to you, I'm leaving," and so saying he would stalk away. Twenty steps from the tree he would freeze, twirl around, and shriek, "WHAT did you say to me? WHAT did you say?" Then he would storm back and resume his ranting.

He wasn't really arguing with a tree. He was talking to someone who was, or had been, real in his life. Probably someone who he needed to express himself to, but couldn't. Perhaps he was enacting things he himself should have done or said at some point, but didn't.

The homeless man's fight with the tree, laid very bare, is essentially the basis of Freudian psychoanalysis. The analyst simply makes himself neutral and waits. Sooner or later, the distressed psyche of the person sitting opposite him will impose on him the features and characteristics and perhaps even the identity of the person or persons who are causing him distress. The patient reveals the nature of his conflict and his need, and then the analyst can better help him through it.

Nothing personal, but it's a bit narcissistic of you to assume that everyone who writes a comment to one of your posts ought to be starting with a precise regard for your statements. Maybe they just need to say something parallel, or related, or even not quite related.

Or, maybe they just suck at reading, and didn't understand what you wrote.

[p-a]

Not too sure of where to put this: Mordac is great.
I feel like you could develop this character a bit more and get a get source of Office jokes.

Keep the black humour & cynism up! That what makes Dilbert so great, so keep practicing it ;)

P-A
http://devrouze.blogspot.com/
(Blog not in english)

[Sean]

Since I have neither the time nor the inclination to read over 200 comments, perhaps you could enlighten us as to what the hallucination was then answer today's question yourself.

Thanks.

[Kim]

It is?!

Why?

-k.

[rd]

the 1/3rd of the posters each individually
the door slamming two were pretty wholesome though

to cheer you up
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEAMQALvDC4
from this perspective..

[Bill]

>How many people hallucinated about the content of my post yesterday and argued against that hallucination?

Probably only 80% of those who pretended to ;)

Say, you know, you could actually do something real to protest the war. Move your official residence to Ireland (they don't tax authors' incomes). You could still live in Taxifornia, but your money could live in Dublin... instead of in bomb fragments in dead Iraqi children.

[J Shannow]

I noticed that too. Could we swap jobs? It looks like fun.

[ShakeAndBake]

It's official: you will not find a more pathetic blog than this one.