I am shocked by the negative comments about me on the “What the Gulch Is” thread. I knew people disagreed on stuff, but I didn't realize people were thinking about not using the website just because of me or that so many people think I'm anti-Objectivist. I agree with the tenor of the vast majority of what I read here, so I assumed people similarly agreed with me.

Some comments focus on things I know most people disagree with me on:
Anthropogenic Global Warming – AGW will likely have huge costs in the future. It's one of the biggest problems of our time.
President Obama – He is doing a decent job, as mainstream politicians go. No one person can stop the trend toward more intrusive/costly gov't.
PPACA – It's a mixed bag and a huge improvement over the system we had based on vestiges of WWII-era price controls. We need to get away from gov't “systems”, but IMHO the law did more good than harm.
Welfare Programs for the Poor – They're not always alms. If it's moral to do forced taxation for a proven program to catch an incarcerate criminals, it's moral to do forced taxation to provide something like job training if it's proven to reduce criminal behavior.
Religion – Most educated religious people of the world are moderates whose worldview is informed by their cultural traditions but who generally accept reason and religious pluralism in their daily lives. The raving Bible-thumper, the Islamist militant, child-molesting priest, and the people who promote essential oils are the exception to the rule, the man-bites-dog cases that grab our attention. We need to promote pluralism and avoid needlessly taking on someone's Olive Tree (in the Thomas Friedman sense of the phrase).

How these fit into Objectivism is a very good question beyond the scope of this post. All the things I agree with most people here on are also beyond the scope.

I don't apologize for disagreeing with people, but I sincerely apologize to anyone I've been cranky with regarding my pet peeves. My peeves are arguments that sound like this:
- “My life is ruined because of [President Obama, Wall Street, monetary policy, etc].”
- “You voted for President Bush. That means you're personally responsible for Medicare Part D and the invasion of Iraq.”
- “I keep yelling at people about how stupid they are, but for some reason they won't respond by changing their minds.”
- Any argument that says something is non sequitur or based on faulty premises without stating the logical fallacy or faulty premises.
I am sorry about when I let my peeves make me rude.

I feel weird responding to any posts with this thread out there of people carrying on condemning me. Should I just respond with my ideas on a posts about things like ham radio, being cautious of the tidy narrative that the US was founded on purely libertarian principles, or about John Adams and imposing democratic gov't and central banking on the world, without regard for all the people saying they don't want me to comment at all? I don't want to bother people when there's a universe of people, maybe people you might consider anti-Objectivist, to talk to.

I feel awful about distracting people from Objectivism, and I want it to stop.