In another message Tim wrote:

On Sunday, August 26, 2001, at 12:11 AM, Reese wrote:

...

It's easy to stay on topic, or on a topic, it's another thing to be appropriate. Tim is good, but easy improvement is within reach, as you sort of noted.

Fuck off. I'll take constructive criticism from people who are better writers than I, or at least in the same ballpark.

But not from those who have left no lasting impression.

I'm not sure if Reese was replying to one of my messages, but this obsession less productive posters have with Tim is peculiar. Looked at as an engineering problem, one tends to look at the underperforming components. Let's say you are running a steel mill, and the average uptime of your blast furnaces is 10%. One is 95%. Nobody would spend their time trying to get the last 5% out of the best furnace. Anybody would look at it and figure out how to get the other furnaces performing. So, some other force is at work. One candidate is the usual tedious resentment that some people feel towards people they see as smarter, more knowledgeable, and more creative than themselves. This sort of behavior is deeply repugnant to me, much more so than occasional political incorrectness. Another candidate is that certain people see Tim as somehow their leader (or something), therefore making him accountable in some way. Given that Tim is not anybody's leader and doesn't seem to want to be, this is less repugnant than it is ridiculous.