It’s pretty safe to say that there are few people out there who understand why I do the things I do. Which is a bit irritating, but I guess I have to live with it. People continually don’t believe what I say either – they think I didn’t appeal because I was actually guilty, it’s been said that I only stood for President to annoy Sen, and can’t understand why I pulled out of the race – I’ve heard a few alternative explainations, but I’m pretty sure I stated my reasons pretty clearly in that letter. So I have divided the world into three groups, and I have a message for each of you.

1. You have no idea who I am – cool, you’re welcome to have a look around. Stick to articles like this one and this. The rest of them won’t make that much sense, since you don’t know who I am.
2. You think you know me – basically, you don’t. You won’t be able to tell when I’m being serious, you can’t tell when I’m sarcastic. You’re going to read things here and jump to conclusions about my feelings towards my friends, and my opinions on the world at large, and you’ll be completely wrong. You’ll misinterpret my intentions, make false assumptions, and then take them with you and judge me by them. And you won’t ever ask for clarification, or check that you’ve got it straight. So be very, very careful. No, more careful than that. I alternate between morose and flipant, serious and seeking a reaction, and you can’t tell which is which. You can only understand the subtleties if you actually know me quite well.
3. You actually know me quite well – basically, you don’t. Because I know who really knows me well enough to not misunderstand what I say here, and they don’t read this. You belong in the previous catagory.

I hope that clears things up a bit, and will lead to far fewer hours of my day spent justifying what I write here, and why I write it.

Update : I should point out that these three catagories apply to the ‘real world’ as well, in everything I say and do. It’s just the same, except sometimes you’ll be able to look me in the eye, and see the twinkle. But you’re still don’t know me as well as you might think you do.

Unless you leave your head under a rock, it’s hard to avoid hearing about the ongoing war in Iraq. I’m still kind of ambivalent about it, since I don’t think that there’s been a clear cut case either for or against (but the US have done a very fine job at screwing up international relations; they’ve got as much diplomatic ability as I have). What I find quite interesting is listening to other people’s points of view – some of them are quite surprising, and a few of them are quite random (in the DramSoc sense of the word). The taxi driver who took us back to Luton Airport today piped up when we were talking about foreign currencies, and french francs in particular. He said, in fairly halting English, that he didn’t think much of France and Germany, and "when they say no, is bad – they were enemies of us in the past, so to do that is not safe’. Fair enough – he can see that the actions of those two countries (and I didn’t like the french attitude of ‘we’ll veto it, no matter what it says’) could lead to destabilisation of relations between them and the US and UK, and that ain’t a very good idea.

Another fairly interesting viewpoint, and surely one you’ve already seen linked to, is that of one of the Human Shields who travelled to Iraq, and found it quite different to what he had expected. One of the main points being that he was totally mistaken in wanting to help the Iraqi civilians, since he found that, at least for some, they wanted to be ‘liberated’, and his actions would hinder that goal. See, he didn’t actually know what they thought, he just assumed. Which is a bad thing to do.

But perhaps the best thing I’ve seen came off of the weblog of a Mozilla developer, Kovu. The best bit was when he was talking about religion:

As far as killing innocent Iraqis, yes, that sucks. But you have to look at death differently than we do. Life is precious, but it is also Hell compared to the next world. You cannot say that death is bad and that God exists; the two are mutually exclusive. If death were bad, God cannot exist because then God is bad.

Now that’s just trying to get peoples backs up.