Quote Of The Day: Make Love, Not War
“Is it a war when only one guy is fighting and the other guy is laughing? Just askin’… because I’m all smiles.”
Ray Wert, speaking to the audience at home, after breaking a record previously held by John Horner. In the course of four hours, Wert left eleven comments to a single post. He managed to have only one of his comments deleted for uncivil language, involving either the buttocks, or a donkey, or the collection of all associated primes of a module M.
WARNING: Name calling is not tolerated on TTAC. The first offense will result in the deletion of the comment, or a ban, at the sole discretion of the help here at TTAC. The second offense will result in an immediate ban. Warnings will not be issued. Arguing with the help is a fast-track to eternal banishment.
Bertel Schmitt comes back to journalism after taking a 35 year break in advertising and marketing. He ran and owned advertising agencies in Duesseldorf, Germany, and New York City. Volkswagen A.G. was Bertel's most important corporate account. Schmitt's advertising and marketing career touched many corners of the industry with a special focus on automotive products and services. Since 2004, he lives in Japan and China with his wife <a href="http://www.tomokoandbertel.com"> Tomoko </a>. Bertel Schmitt is a founding board member of the <a href="http://www.offshoresuperseries.com"> Offshore Super Series </a>, an American offshore powerboat racing organization. He is co-owner of the racing team Typhoon.
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I'm kind of disappointed Wert only made one over-the-line comment; His behavior when he comes over here is offensive. Last time, he deflected my perfectly civilized gripe about his site's direction, trumping up Justin Hyde's "award winning" journalism credentials. And then he tried to be cute by taking a pot shot at a grammatical error in my comment. Lame. Everyone on the current Jalopnik staff has the same attitude, delivering backhanded insults with a innocent smile. "Oh, we didn't mean it. We kid, we kid." Baloney. The lady doth protest too much. I'm sick of it, and that's one of many reasons I stopped frequenting that site. Please don't let that garbage continue to spill over here.
I've seen this episode of iCarly. My only question is: Which one of you is Fred, because I really want to punch that kid. http://icarly.wikia.com/wiki/IMeet_Fred
Seriously? This is what is replacing print journalism? Print journalism was a lot of things. At its worst, it was obsequious or it was stodgy. But it was never a hair-pulling slap fight between girls in a middle school bathroom. The reason for this, I suspect, was not because there was a more collegial atmosphere back in the days of yore, but because there was someone in the organization that recognized that this did not interest readers, did not add to the bottom line, and would you kindly STFU about your petty dirt wars with rival publications. I'll humbly suggest in the absence of such an authority figure at the respective sites that the reasoning holds true, whether the words are printed on vellum or encoded in ASCII. If you seek justification in the comments of those who like to watch fireworks , I'll ask you to grade on a curve that assumes the internet is fundamentally a cesspool (see: comments on any youtube video, ever) comprised of people that like to watch cesspools form, and comment on them. I am a long time RSS subscriber (both TTAC and Jalopnik), and first time commenter. I tune in to read about ridiculously fast cars I can't afford, live vicariously through people paid to drive these cars and elaborate on how awesome they are. This is neither complicated subject matter, or reader-author relationship, so I ask you not to make it so. So can we, pretty please with sugar on top, STFU about who provides the best free content, and get back to regularly scheduled content.
If exchanging passive aggression is part of some august tradition of the printed word, then OK if you insist. I'll confess when I think of Chacucer I don't immediately reach for his lesser work, Chaucer Totally Pwns This One Dude, an Epistle in Seven Volumes. I didn't say never, and I guess my point was it was never the lede. On the subject of points, and at the risk of belaboring mine, this stuff doesn't interest me. Beyond a certain point it doesn't interest me to the degree that I would rather find another outlet with a lower signal to noise ratio. While I understand the motivations to be defensive, I believe this cat fight has crossed the line between jabs exchanged between rivals to something more annoying and less interesting. My opinion may represent a minority of readers, so feel free to take this with a grain of salt. And if this puts clicks on your counters, who am I to argue with that? I will say that irrespective of how much they totally mean it when they post mean things I don't think there would be any negative consequences suffered as a result of ignoring any effronteries, being the bigger person and toning it down a bit, or, I dunno, confining this to emails sent between you and the staff of Jalopnik. Anyways, thanks for the response. Please approve this post :)