Garry Wills wrote of a flaw found in James Madison, namely that if someone took an opposing intellectual view, this Founding Father immediately decided the person must be of ill intent, for no one with good intentions could disagree with Mr. Madison's reasoned views. Madison is hardly the only person who has had this flaw, and it seems to have been manifesting itself abundantly while I was away the last two weeks. I refer specifically to the reaction to a piece I wrote on HR-1201 that ran on CNET recently while I was away. It's not every day I'm called so many foul names by so many people I've never met.

There were 59 comments posted on CNET, to which Jim bravely responded in this space. There were 291 comments on SlashDot. It seems there are a lot of people with time on their hands and vitriol in their hearts.

I am not responding on SlashDot because frankly I don't have time to read all of those posts. I scanned the much shorter CNET posts, however, and was motivated to post one response. It won't be seen by anyone, however, so I'm reproducing it below; it can also be found here. I had exactly one defender in the string of postings, and that individual was then attacked. The conclusion of the posters was that my defender was me operating under a different name. I felt I should dispel that erroneous assumption, and my post is here (by the way, CNET automatically replaces bad words with asterisks; judging by the context of its use, I think the poster that called me a ***** had typed "whore"):

Sorry for the delay in posting, I have been on my honeymoon the last two weeks and missed all the fuss (yes, some crazy woman agreed to marry a stooge/shill/moron/*****).

I'd like to thank those who posted with reasoned arguments opposing my point of view. Any examination of the digital world post-HR 1201 is by definition hypothetical, so it seems informed observers can agree to disagree.

I will choose not to respond to those posters of a more juvenile nature, who resorted to personal attacks of someone they have never met, and who base their opinion on the individual's employer based on information that the employer voluntarily discloses on its web site.

I must address this particular chain, however, involving a defense of my position by a Morgan R. I am not Morgan R, I have been without Internet access the last two weeks on various islands in the Aegean Sea and am only reading these comments today. I did notice that many of my critics here are afraid to use their own names, however, and thus it's understandable they might think I would also be cowardly and defend myself using someone else's name. That is not the case, however.

Oh, and to the individual who criticized my facial hair in the photo -- I wear a closely cropped Van Dyke (mustache and hair on the chin) that doesn't convey well in that shrunken JPEG used by CNET. Your focus on my grooming habits certainly was salient to the debate, however.