They say that you shouldn't meet your idols - it only leads to disappointment...

Well I can tell you from my own experience that it is true. You follow someone from afar, and you idealise them in your own head... put them on a pedestal, and create an image in your mind of what you expect them to be. But then you forget that the image that YOU project onto them is YOUR invention.

I had a hero. And the image i created of him was of a "defender of the wronged" - I decided in my mind that he was the advocate of free speech, supporting everyone's right to have an opinion. I thought that he respected others for their diversity. I had made him up in my mind to be the sort of man who valued intellectual debate.

How wrong I was....

Becuase now i know him better... and I find that he is arrogent. He is the advocate of free speech - as long as it is his own. He does not mind the minority opinion - when he is in the minority. And while I do not mind an odd tirade against, for example, someone advocating the restriction of someone's free choice, I would prefer to see it done as an intellectual rejoinder.

Instead of this... my idol lowers himself, and instead of embracing reasoned and structured argument, goes for the low blow of insults and ridicule.

One of the very first posts I made here at GA was a tirade against an article written by Ray Comfort... one of the themes of that post was that Ray was using ridicule and scorn to score cheap points. I never thought i would see one of our own liberalists stoop to the same level.

I had thought we were better than that...

West