I Get Letters

Needless to say that yesterday's post about Paul Foer earned me a nastygram....from Paul Foer:

from	Paul Foer
to		brian@briangriffiths.com
date		Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 7:36 AM
subject		Thanks for all the free publicity of my ideas......

We've never met, yet you sure have taken an interest in me. I appreciate the fact that you read Capital Punishment, take me so seriously and pay so much attention to what you label as my "fringe left" views that you feel compelled to tell even more people about it--who then visit my blog. I think it's funny that you say I resort to "yelling" because I put a few sentences in bold. At least I don't resort to immature name-calling.

Regarding the Bay Bridges, you confidently feel that we'll alway have the energy available to power all the vehicles you anticipate for years and years to come. Okay. Talk about sticking one's head in the sand. There's plenty of it at the beach, so enjoy your next trip there...over two spans or ten....why not just build a fifty lane bridge? More bridges everywhere.....

It's bad enough that your views don't consider the tremendous changes we will are undergoing now, but to attack someone whose views you don't like or agree with is just silly. Now you'll turn around and whine that I'm like the people described in "Liberal Fascism" or some such thing. But you don't know me. You know nothing about me.


Paul Foer

Wow. Foer does realize that I am not promoting his ideas....I'm mocking them for their lack of foresight, thought, and reason.

If that weren't bad enough, he then tries to completely change the argument. At no point in my rebuttal of his post did I talk about fuel. Why? Because something is going to power cars. I don't know if it will be gas, ethanol, sawgrass, hydrogen, or chicken droppings, but the people of this country will be using cars. That's not going to change anytime soon. People have been using personal, land based conveyances since a minor invention 5700 years ago. If Foer believes that is going to stop, that we won't evolve to cleaner fuels, than he is even more naïve than I thought he was.

This is my favorite part:

but to attack someone whose views you don't like or agree with is just silly. Now you'll turn around and whine that I'm like the people described in "Liberal Fascism" or some such thing.

You mean like this?

No, Mayor Moyer, you're just a mean-spirited, angry, paranoid incompetent as mayor. You are not a bad person. Rough around the edges perhaps. Quick to anger. Not always warm and fuzzy. We can handle that. But please, we have a municipal government to run, a corporate body, and it just keeps getting worse.

Yeah, couldn't imagine how I'd find you a hypocrite.

Besides Foer. I know what your game is. You make money off of the transit industry, so naturally he is going to denigrate alternatives in an effort to put some money in his pocket. It kinda reminds me of this (warning, language):



Foer also makes money on boating, including gas-guzzling motorboats. So I'm not exactly sure I want to get preached at on the environment by somebody who makes a living on things that guzzle more gas than my Saturn.

I point out people like Foer because these are the people who think they know better than you. Paul Foer thinks he is better than me, better than you, and better than anybody involved in politics or government. In truth, he's just a bitter guy, mad that he wasn't old enough to be a hippie, so bitter that even reasonable liberals like Bruce Godfrey have trouble getting a meaningful conversation out of. I point people like Foer out because these are the people that are brining nothing constructive to the political conversation, and people like him need to be exposed for what they really are.