On flaming
2010-02-17 23:00:00
"Ego maniac - little homies call me brainiac
Ice Cube's an asshole and it ain't an act"
-Ice Cube in Connected for Life
So lo and behold, what should drop into my comment box, but some unsolicited advice from my favorite anonymous commenter. The comment was in response to my snarky remark on Ives Galarcep joining Fox Soccer Channel, in which I said:
Anyway, I suppose the behemoth media universe needed to balance itself out after Max Bretos moved in the opposite direction to ESPN. How in the world do these people get their jobs in the first place?
And to which M. Anonymous replied:
Q: How do these people get their jobs in the first place?
A: By not burning every bridge around them.
Think about that Sigi the next time you decide to flame someone.
The topic of me "flaming" others is something I've mostly ignored, but it has come up more often I expected. Tom Dunmore at Pitch Invasion has gone on record as saying he hates the flames, as has Richard Whittall, as has our friendly anonymous commenter as have some others.
So with my apologies, we're going to get meta for a moment.
For those that never got the joke, Fake Sigi is a character that is supposed to be bombastic, self-centered, smug, superior, and an all around asshole. He was also not supposed to be taken seriously.
As the link that sat on the left side for a long time indicated, the creation of this blog was heavily influenced by Fake Steve Jobs, to the point where most of the early posts were shameless
Of course, I suppose I did it to myself, by writing posts on things like gender issues or the salary cap or FIFA rights which caused a bunch of people to take notice and realize I knew what I was talking about. And all of a sudden, it wasn't cool to say that Richard Whittall was stupider than I thought, or that Don Garber's a walking vice machine, or that Ives Galarcep can't analyze his way out of a paper bag (something that we already knew), or that Grant Wahl asked Don Garber some of the worst questions I've ever heard.
I also suspect that my routine deconstructions of Duane have something to do with my reputation as a flamer, despite the fact that Duane's own sense of self-importance doesn't appear to be an act like my own.
For what it's worth, I don't consider anything I say here to be particularly incendiary or even that personal in the grand scheme of the internet. This blog is pretty tame as fake figments of the imagination go. I don't think that most of what I do even rises to the level of a flame. And besides, it's fake. It's a set up. I'm not lying when I say you shouldn't believe anything you read. I'm not playing it straight, ok?
It's like I said to Drew Carey one day when we were plane-pooling from Manhattan Beach to Seattle: just because I'm an asshole doesn't mean that I don't know what I'm talking about. And just because I know what I'm talking about doesn't mean people should take everything I say seriously. I think it's pretty clear when I'm being over the top, and when we stop being polite and start getting real.
Now if the issue is that what I write isn't good, or that I haven't made it clear when I'm messing around, well, that's totally different. But with a few exceptions, the major problem the haters seem to have is that I'm not a good little citizen of the blogger community who holds fire on fellow bloggers or sacred cows. And by and large my response to that is that 1) people need to chill out about the bombast, and 2) if you can't deal with snarky examination by others, then what are you doing putting your writing on the internet?
And like I've said before, I don't expect this blog to get me a cubicle next to Shawn Francis. It's not one of the goals. All I want is Sounders glory and the harmony of MLS dominance. Is that too much to ask?
Fake Sigi out.
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