Recently, I called a commenter on this site a ‘dimwit’ (see the comments on this post for the sordid details).

It wasn’t very nice of me to call someone names, but the commenter had done two things which I felt gave me reasonable cause: 1) anonymously insulted my work and 2) anonymously made a smarmy personal insult. Both of the… we’ll call them critiques… weren’t very bothersome and I would have been happy to engage in polite debate on whether or not our work is hamfisted and whether or not Aljira’s Emerge program is akin to Tony Robbins’ motivational tapes but the comment was intended to belittle. It was also done in a very cowardly way behind the anonymity that we generously provide on this web site. So I felt calling the person a dimwit was well within what one would consider a reasonable response. Plus I was really hung-over from my bachelor party (thanks M.River :-)).

The commenter really did not like being called a dimwit and in a subsequent comment used all sorts of personal information found on this blog for an ad hominem attack on yours truly. This was truly cowardly; hiding behind anonymity while using personal attacks on another is extremely low net etiquette. Dimwit has truly earned the title. If you read Dimwit’s little schread, you’ll see that Dimwit also feels the fourth amendment is for pussies. What a fool.

But originally I thought of Dimwit as a dimwit because the dimwit doesn’t realize that the break between analog and digital materials is a real, live paradigm shift. The difference between a photo and a JPEG is much greater than the difference between a photo and an oil painting. This is the fact at the crux of the Kuspit graf I posted. If one fails to understand this simple truth of contemporary image-making then one is truly a dimwit.

And since Dimwit has proven to be annoying, stupid, ignorant, insulting and simple-minded I’ve decided to close comments on this post. You see Dimwit, this is my web site; I do what I want. permanent link to this post