If the business is going downhill then that's one thing. I wouldn't know; I am not in the habit of asking retailers to price-match a 33% discount and it was an impulse buy in any case, so it's been a couple years since I ordered a pen from Brian. If his company disappoints me, of course I will say so.

Beliefs in public are another matter in the United States, where I have spent my life a citizen. It is for like cause my privilege to take this rather childish campaign of character assassination exactly as seriously as it deserves.

Oh sure, the SBC has been industriously covering a Catholic-grade child sex abuse scandal since some time early last year. But the SBC also by design, being effectively a 501(c) something-or-other front and to my view encompassed by RICO, isn't really capable of responding; the appropriately equipped organizations would be the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Absent their involvement, and even in light of their present and ongoing compromise, am I meant to imagine Reddit is better in this regard? Good grief, that place has been as bad as the worst you hear of Discord now, and nothing out of Reddit's ownership or the regulatory environment suggests meaningful intent to do better.

But what do I know? I'm just a dumb old redneck homo who came out of Mississippi, 'trade' being one term I have heard along the way. Of course it's the just role of the fancy folk with leisure for literacy, like you, to instruct my brute if decent kind of our proper role in things. You know, like your intellectual forebears, the antebellum Southern planters who so cozened my own poor ancestors and maintained them in their useful ignorance. I like to hope we're a little more clever this generation. Or more continent in where we place our trust, at least.