The internet is a big place. The anonymity of the internet gives people the impression that they can pretend to be anything, and they'll never have their credentials called into question; as if the only way to know someone was lying was to have an intimate personal relationship with them.
The problem with this, however, is that if you lie about your credentials long enough, you are going to run into someone who's actually done the stuff you're claiming as your own. This post is your long-forestalled comeupance.
First, it's important that we don't lose track of the original thread of this conversation, as it is quickly becoming a meta-argument on the validity of your professional claims. This started because you claimed it was impossible to think for yourself if you didn't like TNA (Post #20).
ilapierre said:
The most annoying thing and obvious lie anyone can say on these threads is that they don't like WWE but they are upset with the direction of TNA. It's a cover, it's a facade, it's a lie. I've seen Mark Madden write it, i've read all the other dipshit guys with columns write it here, but you can read in between the lines with these smarks. You can say you're little line 'just because you don't like TNA doesn't mean you're a WWE mark' but it makes no licking difference. You come on here, you bash something to the moon for months on end, you're a brainwashed zombie who can't think any other way.
Having someone come in and claim to read my mind was quite interesting, as well as being told that what I was doing was impossible to do because... well, despite my prying, you never got to that part. Post #33-
Rayne said:
Explain to me how it's a lie that someone can not like either WWE or TNA. I hear a lot of "you say you don't love WWE, but I know you secretly do", but I'm really fucking curious to hear the logic behind how it's impossible to be a wrestling fan without either liking WWE or TNA. Or the logic of how it's impossible to have criticisms of a product without having the ulterior motive of trying to destroy it.
From that point on, I got a whole bunch of stalling tactics from you.
Alright, the preliminaries are done. Now, you seem to be suspicious of how I know what a habits a journalist would have. See; I've actually
worked as a journalist. In 1999 I started work as an intern for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette while I was in college, which became a part-time contributors position in fall 2000 when the internship ended. I wrote columns on the video gaming industry for a weekly insert called "Go!" until 2004, when my job was cut in favor of using columns sent from the parent newspaper, The New York Times. I have a bachelor's degree in Communications from Worcester State College (now Worcester State University), granted in 2003. If you were a journalist worth half your salt, you could verify this for yourself and quickly have my identity. Since you aren't, and will likely play the "oh, my precious time" card for yourself, verifying my statements would be a cross-referencing task that would take about ten minutes, tops, if you were slow about it.
But enough about me. Let's get on to how I know you're lying about your credentials, by discussing with you the habits you should be familiar with if you weren't a liar; the habits of a journalist.
Journalists understand how to research the internet.
The two primary skills of any journalist, whether they're an investigative journalist or a column journalist, are research and communication. (More on communication next.) These days, if you don't know how to browse the internet quickly to find information that can help you, you aren't able to do your job. It was a dead giveaway when you tried to chastise me for researching your old statements, as if I had spent all day doing it. Any journalist active in the past fifteen years would understand the tools of internet search; like a combination forum software search and web browser search for the word 'journal' to narrow down the search results.
Journalists are experts in communicating their ideas.
Hearing you talk about your posts on this board as "rough copy" is laughable, especially when you try to convince people that you have two writer's degrees. I am well aware how much writing those two degrees require; communications is kissing sister to both. There is absolutely no way you could have successfully achieved both degrees and still write in rough fashion the way you do. This is my rough copy; look at how it's formatted. The ideas are broken up into paragraph sized chunks, so that I can more easily communicate my ideas to the people reading it. The sentence structures are clean, so that my readers don't have to repeat sentences to grasp my meaning. As a journalist, my job was to make sure that my audience knew exactly what I was talking about.
Now, read your posts. (And I welcome anyone else still reading this slop to make the same comparison.) Statements and ideas are crammed together illegibly. Sentences run into each other, forcing the reader to examine them to try to understand what you are saying. You communicate your ideas poorly. The editor of a
high school paper would give you back the slop you post here and tell you that if you want him to proofread, to give him something readable. You write at a high-school level; there is absolutely no way you have done the work for two writer's degrees, as the results of that work (those habits I mentioned) do not show up in your writing.
Journalists can tell when they're being put off.
Here's something I learned on the very first year working as an intern. If someone's giving you lots of excuses and trying to put you off from having a question answered, they're doing it because there's something they're trying to avoid telling. Since we've started this discussion, I've been after you to qualify your original statements (the whole brainwashing thing, don't lose me now), and I've received the following reasons why you can't talk about it:
- "My point is obvious, so I don't have to prove it" (Posts #44 and #48)
- "I have the free time to flame you, but I don't have the free time to discuss this." (Post #44)
- "I'm really a puppetmaster who's been controlling you by responding to your posts." (Post #48 again)
- "What gives you the right to question me" and "you're just a punk kid who I don't have to answer to." (Posts #44, #48)
Not once, however, did you try to turn back to the discussion of how it was that anyone who disagreed with your favorite promotion had to be a brainwashed slave of someone else. Nor were you much up for a discussion of your journalistic credentials. I've walked the walk; I can tell when someone can't talk the talk.
You can complain all you want about how I'm 'manipulating your words'. If you were any kind of actual journalist, you'd understand that's what journalists DO. Truth is objective; the idea is to arrange information and thoughts into easily digestible patterns to support a point of view. (We haven't discussed and no one's participating in news journalism around here, so spare me the 'objective search for the truth' canard; been there, done that.) All I've done throughout this thread is use your own collected statements over time, in concert with my own life experience to detail how you are not the person you claim to be. I could have just asked you to publish something from your portfolio and watch you stammer about how you couldn't be bothered to take the time to find it, but this bullshit session of yours needed to come to a close. (Any writer has a portfolio of their best work, which is constantly kept updated, especially journalists. There is no such thing as steady employment in journalism anymore. I haven't written professionally in three years, but I still update mine monthly, if not more often.)
And you could have avoided all of this mess just by saying "so I pretended to be a journalist in October to bash Mark Madden, so what?"