To all Youtube viewers:

I've posted up a couple of clips of songs I wrote. They've been up for over a year now and I had to put a filter on the comments. Here is my criteria for parsing comments:

I don't expect you to like my songs. I am not a great songwriter. I am not a great guitarist. I most definitely am not a good singer. The rate button is enabled and you can dislike my songs if you choose as most have who have bothered to rate them to a 2:1 ratio. You may remark, "You suck!" or "Worst performance on youtube!" or "This is the worst crap I have ever heard." Any such comments will be parsed. I don't care if you like my stuff or not and I don't expect you to sugarcoat anything. If you hate it, you hate it--your right.

What will not parse are comments as: "This fucking sucks!" or "You're an ugly motherfucker, dude!" or "You look like a potato nigger." You could at least explain what a potato nigger is. Insults and obscenities don't cut it. One guy wrote on one of my pages: "This motherfucking sucks!" so I deleted it. On the other page, he wrote, "This sucks too" and I parsed it. The second one was a criticism and I don't care whether he thinks it sucks or not. The other was just a dickwad wiping his ass on my page and that ain't happenin'.

Now if you say, "That was a fucking awesome song!" That will parse.

What's the difference? It boils down to intent not the words themselves. Saying my song is fucking awesome is intended as a compliment. I know of no other way to take it. Saying my song fucking sucks shit is an attempt to defecate all over my page and then leave your foul-mouthed shit mess for me to clean up. That ain't gonna happen.

The problem with youtube as I see it is not the shocking level of immaturity, cruelty and rudeness that abounds there, it's that on the vast majority of clips, it's allowed to stand and assholes then think it's okay to act that way on anybody's page.

Youtube really makes white people look bad. The reason is, anytime a black person or an Asian person or whatever posts something, you're sure to get racist comments that you know were not written by anyone but a white guy and sometime even a female but mostly males. To be a minority appearing on youtube is to run a gauntlet of white racism. These people float from clip to clip just to post racist shit and then flee--hiding under their anonymity.

But I get really angry at the person who owns that clip because they don't clean that shit up. It just stays there. Like one clip showed a 3-year-old black boy playing a classical piece on the violin with an orchestra before a large audience. One jerk commented that the kid was out of tune and I responded that he's three playing an entire piece from memory with an orchestra and thousands of people watching and he expects the kid to be perfect? Stop whining, I said. His response was along the lines of "I'm not whining you stupid fucktard! You must be some kind of nigger!"

That's often the level of intellect you have to deal with on youtube when all I did was gently rebuke the asshole from attacking a 3-year old kid for not being perfect. But why doesn't the owner of that page delete that shit?

That's other thing: the jealousy. One teen girl was playing Scottish pieces on the fiddle and there's clips of her playing since she was seven. And people were attacking her for her posture, her fingering, her way of holding the bow--as if this makes any difference how good she is. The only thing they didn't attack was the quallity of her playing because this girl was undeniably good. But, see, they know she's good and they know they can't attack that so they have to find some other way to cut her down so they can feel good about themselves and lie to themselve that they are not jealous.

One guy played Paul Simon's "Something So Right" and does a beautiful job. I mean, he really does it good. It's a song I've always wanted to learn but it's just beyond me. So I told the guy that he played a version I wish I could equal. Some other guy writes in and tells him his technique is all wrong. The more he posted, the stupider he made himself look. But he kept posting trying to invent some kind of intelligent critique that wasn't there. Someone finally told him he was clearly jealous and to just stop. "I'm not jealous at all," he writes, "He does it better than I can." But then how can he sit there and offer advice to someone on his technique who plays better than him? Does that make any sense? If you play fast and clean and some jealous jerk who's sloppy and hits wrong notes all the time tries to offer you advice on your technique, what would you say to him?

In another clip, this girl was dancing to some old 1940s stuff. She had some really good moves even though she never took a lesson. Someone then wrote in, "When you post a clip about dancing, I expect to see dancing. I have better things to do than watch you stomp around like Charlie Chaplin." What could be more obvious that this was pure jealousy?

If you post some jealous remark on my pages, I will parse them so that everyone who logs in can see what an asshole you are unles it has obscenities (that spreading your shit around thing again). You'll have to log in and remove it yourself because I won't. It's like hanging a dead chicken around the neck of a poultry-killing dog.

Imagine being jealous of a teenage girl or a three-year-old boy or even a grown man who plays and sings well. I'm envious of the talents of others but not jealous--there's a difference. I wish I had their talent and I tell them so--that's envy--but I never cut them down or attack their technique or spew some stupid racist shit--that's jealousy. "If I can't have your talent, then I'll spead my feces all over your page and leave and you don't know who I am so HAHAHAHA!!!!"

So, on my pages, I'm going to make you behave. You cannot come in posting shit and expect to see it parse. Won't happen. You can criticize as mean as you want but you can't swear or it will not parse. You'll have to get your stupid jollies off on another page that doesn't care where you wipe your ass.