> This leads me to raise an admittedly rhetorical question: does possession of wit and/or charm excuse one from the duties of common decency?

No, it does not. My post was one of the rudest things I have read on this forum, and certainly the rudest thing I have ever personally posted. I freely admit that and do not intend to offer any excuses. It was a rude, obnoxious post. I knew that when I wrote it and I still went ahead and posted it. I half expected -- no, more than half -- that it would have been deleted by the time I was online again.

I like to think that in the time I have been posting here, I have been one of the more balanced and less emotive writers. I certainly hope I have come across that way, to the people who have known me for a while. Whether it is a good thing or not (probably not) it seems to be my nature to set up incredibly rigid standards of behaviour for myself and then break myself to bits trying to hold to those standards despite what everybody else thinks or says or does. My post was totally outside all my usual personal boundaries. I posted it anyway.

I'm not going to apologise for not being perfect. So I go right off the rails and make an idiot of myself a couple of times in three years. If I lose some friends over that, so be it. Since various people *already* think I'm a vicious psychopathic jerk, I figured it would save time in the long run if it was *me* who said what a number of people have been wanting to say for a long time. I tried to moderate it very slightly with some attempts at humour. If I have any claim to wit and charm, which frankly I doubt, I always assumed that using it to lighten up a harsh statement was the whole point of *having* wit and charm.

So, yes, Sam should have just deleted my post, but since he hasn't (yet), I need to reply to what you said about my "real message". My "real message", which I probably should have just stated plainly so everybody could ignore it and live happily ever after, was "Everybody stop posting crap." That's it. That's all. I don't believe anybody on this forum is "superior" to anybody else, and I hope anybody who knows me even slightly would know that beyond all doubt.