Hater's Response

[note: views expressed are the Hater's own]

I found much of Professor Shogi’s rebuttal inspired and inspiring. His opening salvo regarding what I shall call the “rhetoric of hate” instantly quickened my pulse. Although equating my prose and that of Nazi Germany could only be described as “ill-advised” at best (see Senator Byrd’s, Santorum’s, and Durbin’s recent troubles on this count), part of me wishes that his attention to this riff were sustained, and his logic more fully explicated. There is rich material to be mined there…perhaps in another forum. (www.crazy_logic.com?)

I also found absolutely brilliant the flanking maneuver by which my own accusation of disc golfers’ “intense fetishism” was cleverly redeployed in a blindside counter-attack implicating me in nothing less than exclusionary sports fetishism! Ouch. Hoist by my own petard, as they say. In my own defense, I would probably call myself a “purist” rather than a “fetishist,” for a sport’s status qua sport does not guarantee it immunity from criticism (an example: baseball = sport = snooze fest).

In this and other passages Saito actually anticipated a number of points already scheduled to be made in the next Hater’s installment (stay tuned). Rather than address these in a labored, point-by-point rebuttal-rebuttal here, I shall allow the more germane topics to find suitable breathing room in my next installment. I will, for now, offer only the following two direct retorts.

1. While I found compelling the good professor’s explication of the disc golf industry as both not big business and envious of same big business practice—the “Five ‘n Dime” that wants to be the very WalMart that will destroy said “Five ‘n Dime”, if you follow— I found his conclusion, which I’d summarize as “don’t hate the player, hate the game, player hater,” rather on the weak side. If, as “Satoru” himself suggests, these disc companies, despite their shoe-string budget and limited resources, do indeed play the “corporate game,” then I’m not sure how they are immune to my allegations of, to quote Saito quoting me, “loathsome big-business commercial exploitation” and “pure capitalist commodification.” As we all know, and I quote, “if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, it must be a duck.”

2. Dude, a “muggle” is, by definition, a non-wizard. Therefore, Harry Potter does not teach us, indeed CANNOT teach us, that being a muggle has no impact on one’s wizarding ability. Rather, quite the opposite holds: if you are a muggle, by definition, you are not and cannot be, a wizard. To be fair, perhaps you meant “mudblood,” which is, of course, a wizard or witch born of two muggle parents or a muggle-wizard couple? Hang on, have you actually even read any Harry Potter? RIF: Reading, It’s Fundamental, man. And you can quote me on that.