I am biased. I am not afraid to admit this. I grew up without much of a father figure for a lot of my formative years, so it was natural that it would come down to the two other family members in the household to greatly shape my outlook and personality. Those two people were my mother and sister. I've mentioned it before, but my mother went to law school while still raising us children and my sister has fairly substantial mental issues. There were a lot of times where life was very trying on us all for a lot of reasons, but nevertheless, those two people shaped how I understand, how I interact with, how I exist with, how I love women. There are other girls and women who naturally have had their share of influence on me, but at the very least, I can't deny how, like everyone else, the specific circumstances of my upbringing made me who I am at this very minute.
 
Bear all that in mind as I write these next paragraphs.
 
You can disagree with what someone has to say or what they do or the choices that they make. I understand that. Not all people are made to get along like that. I should know. I'm an atheist, a former Catholic, a socialist, a Japanese speaker, a pacifist, and most of all, a humanist. I know that this world and its societies are not made such that everybody finds each other agreeable 100 percent of the time. Hell, some of the demographics I've listed myself as belonging to have had a knack for attracting death threats to this very day. This is not a message saying "let's all hold hands hands together in harmony and dance under the rainbow!" In fact, healthy disagreements are good for the soul, for they help bring about introspection of oneself and a greater sense of understanding and empathy with other people. Hence, if you legitimately found something disagreeable with tonight's antics and are of sound, rational composure, there's no problem here. I'm not here to pick a fight with anybody, let alone those who have no reason to be badgered for their perfectly fine opinions. This blog is not written to those people, whether I know them personally on here or not.
 
Where I draw the line is if that disagreement is used as a justification to deprive someone of their human dignity, or at least attempt to do so. I don't care who you are or how right you might think you are. That is no excuse to humiliate and degrade someone, especially from afar, in the safety of Internet anonymity. That's not just cowardice; that's being a dick of the worst degree. Even if that person did something to you as a person or has thick enough skin to take the insults anyway, that's not an excuse to be arbitrarily malicious, especially during opportunities when cheap shots can be plentiful and easy. Respect for people as individuals for what they've done and their opinions cannot be forced, but at the very least, there shouldn't be any question as to whether they at least deserve respect on the level of being a fellow human being. People are who they are and they do what they do and they say what they say. To that end, we all do this no more and no less than anyone else on this planet. We are all just as human as anyone else and to deny that with name-calling or anything else worse is to commit an existential fallacy I just cannot bring myself to ever agree with.
 
But much like how most forms of respect cannot be forced, I cannot force anybody who may have disagreements with me to change their thinking, and nor do I intend to do so. All I can say about this time in particular is that with the Internet, the nice thing about dealing with something unpleasant is that it's gone as soon as you hit that X button in the upper corner of your browser window. It's such a simple coping mechanism and yet I feel sometimes that isn't exercised nearly as much as it should be.
 
Let the sleeping dogs lie and let the dogs that want to stay there enjoy their own company if they want to. There's no need to disrupt that sort of order on a site like this, especially on special occasions.
 
And that is all I have to say.