Well, Don, I follow your argument, but I think that your continual verbal tilting with WAV on this thread is itself excessive and out of proportion to the situation. I think your own ego has gotten caught up in personally humiliating the man for the sheer satisfaction of doing so...certainly not to help or enlighten him. I may be wrong about that, of course, but if I am right then I cannot applaud your efforts because they are driven by a sort of sadistic impulse, I think....and that is what I object to about them. It reminds me of stuff I've seen all my life where it becomes a regular habit for someone to pick on someone else, specially in a public setting, specially when a group of "friends" do it to someone they perceive as outside the group.

I don't think, Don, that any of us are imbued with the personal authority to ultimately judge the worth of another human being. We can offer an opinion on the quality of some piece of work they have done, we can offer an opinion on the veracity of something they have said, but we cannot ultimately judge their worth as a human being. We don't have the right to do that. That's why there are pretty explicit instructions in all the great religious philosophies of the world not to judge others.

Plain and simple: I think you are taking it too far in your personal attacks on WAV. You are able to do so comfortably because you are an insider here at Mudcat, and he is not. Were your roles in that respect reversed, you would not be able to do it comfortably.

Were Spaw not an oldtimer here also and a very beloved one, he would not be able to say the things he does here comfortably either.....although it's clear that he's just screwing around for the hell of it and for the laughs, so I don't take it that seriously.

I am not doing my Grand Lama on the Mountaintop thing. I am observing some of the uglier side of human group behaviour and commenting on it. There's a "swarming" going on here, and WAV is its target.

What I don't get is why he doesn't just leave, given his reception here? I certainly wouldn't stay if I was him. It's puzzling, and it makes me wonder sometimes if he's playing the whole thing for laughs himself? But it's hard to figure that he would have built up that entire website as a joke.

The whole thing is really odd. I think a panel of psychologists would have a field day analying the activities of people on this thread. ;-)