So, today, I’m not going to bother with pictures, because today’s rant is going to rant about… my rants.

Okay, so it’s really more about the people who read and comment on my rants, but still:

It seems like there’s a lot of people who are reading my rants, stopping a couple lines in, or just glossing over the whole thing, then just trying to rip me a new asshole over something that was usually the complete opposite of what I was saying.

Please, for the love of kittens and unicorns, stop doing that. It gets really fucking irritating.

If on the other hand, you believe that you did understand what I was saying, and you did read the whole thing, and after reading this, went back to the rant you tried to rip me a new one on, re-read it, and still don’t get it: Go back to elementary school, and take a reading comprehension class. Seriously. “They” and “I” do not actually mean the same thing.

Of course, I wholeheartedly recognize the visitors we have from Bizarro World, and I wish to offer a reminder to these poor souls: This world is backwards from Bizarro World, and as such, when I say I really hate something, I really do mean I hate it, and I’m not secretly trying to say I love it.

But yeah, it’s gotten to the point now where everytime I write a rant or opinion I’m expecting there to be at least two or three people who just didn’t get it, and want to start a world war with me.

Like, if I were to write a rant about, say, America selling guns to third world countries and how stupid it is, I would expect a few people to shoot back with page-long dissertations about how I’m stupid for supporting America’s support of foreign dictatorships. Even though, you know, the entire rant was about how I’m against it.

Either that, or they’ll call me stupid for being Republican white trash that hangs out in bars on tuesdays… Even though I’m not a republican, technically not white, and don’t drink or go to bars, much less on tuesdays, and not a single bit of it was even in the article, or even implied.

It makes me wonder if there’s some other blog or site out there that is putting up articles and their comment page redirects to my site, because honestly, I really can’t see where a lot of people are getting their stuff from. Quite a while back, I had this big rant up about Tobacco Law and smoking in general. My stance on it was pretty obvious, I even blatantly pointed out my stance in the first paragraph of the rant: I am a smoker, and I recognize that smoking can cause damage to the human body, but I also know that the tests to prove it were biased, and paid for by people who wanted tobacco to be taxed, so I promote levity and fairness rather than blind fear-mongering.

For the next couple weeks I got harassed by somebody who was royally pissed that I was “out to end smoker’s rights”. My article goes on about how the taxes for cigarettes are unfair, and I have people yelling at my that I’m a tool of government oppression.

So, a bit later, there’s some little comment war going on at the bottom of my rant, where people had started talking about weed, and there are a few very vocal proponents of The Marijuana. I tell them that I don’t want people promoting drug usage on my site because I personally detest drugs and stoners. I’ll tolerate an academic discussion, but I don’t want people saying “Oh yeah man, you should try ______ and _______. I had a couple bowls of that last weekend and DAMN!!” I’ll try to be fair and all that, but there are certain things that I don’t want on my site, because the minute it starts creeping in, it will take over like a plague.

So what happens? I get a couple emails from some lady about how she loved my comic until I told everybody I was a pothead, and then she couldn’t read it anymore and I’m a horrible person for suckering kids into my webcomic and seducing them into a druggie lifestyle.

…From me talking about how I disliked potheads and don’t want it on my site, she construed that I must therefore love pot and have a sinister plan to sell drugs to kids.

I’m sure you guy can see at this point what I’m talking about. I say something, and people… just don’t read it, I guess.

I’ve had this problem with pretty much every long rant I’ve ever put up on the SEDiverse, and I would like to see it stopped. I’m not going to delete comments to “clean things up” or get rid of the ridiculous things I’m irritated about, because that’s kinda against the whole thing of SED. (Only things I police for in comments is obscenity or encouragement of unsavory things.) What I am going to ask though, is that before you post a comment, you read the damned article.