L.A. Rams' return: The good, the bad and the ugly

There's a lot to like about the Los Angeles Rams coming home. I say "Los Angeles Rams" not because of the NFL's decision to return them to Southern California, but because that's what they'll always be to me ... and what they always have been.

The Raiders have always been associated, first and foremost, with Oakland, the Chargers with San Diego, and the Rams with ... Los Angeles. Not St. Louis, and not Cleveland, where they played for the first few years of their existence, but Los Angeles.

I was an L.A. Rams fan before Merlin Olsen was Father Murphy, when their helmets were blue and white, when they went into the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl leading the Pittsburgh Steelers. I was an L.A. Rams fan back in '78, when Warren Beatty starred in a movie called "Heaven Can Wait" about a Rams quarterback who died and came back to life in the body of a heartless tycoon. 

So I love the fact that the Rams are going back to L.A. But I've got to admit, there's also a lot not to like about how they got there. Here's a rundown of the good, the bad, and the ugly of the NFL's decision (Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2016) to put the Rams back where they've always belonged.

The Good

In a word, history. In a name - or names: Norm Van Brocklin, Elroy Hirsh, Bob Waterfield, Jack Snow, Merlin Olsen, Deacon Jones, Lawrence McCutcheon, Jim Everett, Henry Ellard, Eric Dickerson, Flipper Anderson, Jack Snow, Tom Mack, Tom Fars, Les Richter, Jackie Slater, Jack Youngblood. 

If history were the deciding factor, there never would have been a discussion about which team belonged in Los Angeles. The Rams were there for 48 years (if you count their time in Anaheim), four times as long as the Raiders and Chargers combined. They were the first major team in the city, arriving from Cleveland more than a decade before the Dodgers, Angels and Lakers showed up, and they were the first NFL team on the West Coast.

Speaking of the West Coast, if geography were the deciding factor, allowing the NFC West would never have been transformed into the NFC 3 West + 1 Midwest and the natural San Francisco-Los Angeles rivalry would have been preserved.

If fans were the deciding factor, it would have been just as much of a slam dunk worthy of Wilt or Shaq. Poll after poll showed the Rams were the fans' overwhelming favorites to make an encore appearance. A Facebook page called "Bring Back the Los Angeles Rams" had been operating for some time, and fans rallied in Los Angeles to show the NFL their support. There was no such clamor to bring back the Raiders, despite their Super Bowl win with former USC great Marcus Allen, or the Chargers, who spent all of one season in L.A. compared to their subsequent half-century in San Diego.

The bad

But, ultimately, the deciding factor was - as it always seems to be with the NFL - money. A billionaire developer with marital ties to the Walmart fortune beat out a group backed by the Walt Disney Company CEO for dibs on L.A. It wasn't about football, it was about playing hardball. It was almost as if Leo Farnsworth - that heartless tycoon from "Heaven Can Wait" -  was somehow involved.

What would the unprincipled Farnsworth have done if he'd owned an NFL team? Maybe he would have threatened to leave town unless taxpayers anted up millions toward a new stadium. Maybe he would have insulted his team's fans for failing to support a second-rate product or its city for refusing to go along with his demands. 

One good thing you can say about Rams owner Stan Kroenke is that at least he's paying his own way to Los Angeles. But don't expect that to become a trend. Most of the NFL's other owners aren't as rich as Kroenke and prefer to extort money from working class taxpayers to build new stadiums that aren't really needed. They do this by threatening to move somewhere else.

In fact, the NFL has supported this tactic for the past 20 years by dangling Los Angeles like a poison pill in front of fans from Seattle to Minneapolis to Jacksonville and allowing its owners to say, "If you don't pay, we'll move to L.A."

But when the L.A. Clippers basketball team sold for an outrageous $2 billion, it became apparent that even this time-honored sword of Damocles wasn't as valuable as the pot of gold underneath the Hollywood sign. Kroenke recognized this and decided to cash in. He could move quickly because he had the money in hand; the Chargers and Raiders had to team up in order to challenge him, but even together they couldn't match his monetary muscle.

The ugly

L.A. may be out of the picture, but owners still have plenty of other teamless cities to use as bait in the "we want a new stadium now" game. Now there's St. Louis and, probably, San Diego to go along with such oft-mentioned sites as San Antonio, Toronto and London.

Kroenke was probably the only owner out there willing and able to spend all his own money on a new stadium, so the bluff-and-threat stadium sweepstakes is likely to continue unabated. Kroenke doesn't care now that he's got his. If the NFL had denied his petition to move, he could have sued for the right to do so or just ignored the league altogether. He knew this. The NFL knew this.

The Chargers and Raiders should have known it, too.

But now, after losing this high-stakes game of chicken, Chargers owner Dean Spanos finds himself between a rock and a hard place, having thumbed his nose at both Kroenke and the city of San Diego. Now, he's got to choose one or the other. Either Spanos will be a small fish in the big Los Angeles basin, playing second fiddle to the Rams in Kroenke's world, or he'll be one big ugly blowfish in San Diego, where there's plenty of resentment over how he turned his back on that city and its fans.

Spanos has zero leverage now with Kroenke, whose relocation to L.A. has already been approved and can afford to offer Spanos little more than the scraps that fall from his dinner table now that he has nothing to lose.

Raiders owner Mark Davis is in even worse shape, because his lease is up in Oakland and his stadium is one of those that actually should be replaced. (It's the only NFL stadium to double as a baseball park.)

But I don't feel sorry for either of them. The people I feel sorry for is the fans, who have become innocent bystanders in this game of chicken between the NFL and its cities. And in a game of chicken, when one tries to cross the road, he gets hit coming and going.

I think I'll go watch "Heaven Can Wait" now. The hero dies, but at least it has a happy ending, and it's a lot cheaper than a ticket to a real NFL game. I'll watch that on TV. And I'll root for the Rams. The Los Angeles Rams. That's all they ever should have been, and whether it be thanks to God or the devil or Leo Farnsworth, they're finally back where they belong.

Acting from Kindness, not Political Correctness

I'm not a fan of political correctness for one essential reason: It's a form of peer pressure. And peer pressure has produced everything from harmless fads such as Beatlemania and pet rocks to horrific realities such as segregation and the Japanese internment.

Like any other form of peer pressure, political correctness is, in its raw form, pure majority rule: a social construct for reinforcing behavior without the crucial safeguard of a constitution.

Unless, that is, we use our conscience.

Our conscience and personal ethics function as just such a safeguard - a personal constitution, if you will - in the face of peer pressure. Any peer pressure, from fan mania to institutional bigotry. That includes political correctness - which, by itself, is just as susceptible to whim and abuse as any other form of bandwagon thinking.

No substitute

One of the worst things anyone can do is substitute political correctness for the bedrock principles of conscience that come from within - to rely on it as the sole means of regulating society. Political correctness without conscience is like majority rule without a constitution. In a word, it's scary.

Two core elements of conscience are kindness and respect. People who display these attributes do so because they genuinely believe it's the right thing to do. It's an authentic expression of who they are.

Political correctness, on the other hand, is imposed from without - sometimes by force. It's a concept that says, "If you don't comply with what we've decided is appropriate, we'll shame you, we'll hold you up to public ridicule, we'll punish you for what we consider your bad behavior."

Necessary, not sufficient

Authenticity, in itself, is not the ultimate virtue. People can be authentic bullies, racists, sociopaths and jackasses. Some of those people deserve to be exposed and, yes, even shamed. But if we settle for political correctness as a substitute for authentic kindness, we do ourselves a huge disservice.

Personal ethics are our best line of defense against bigotry and hatred precisely because they're authentic. If we substitute a socially enforced and punitive system of peer pressure such as political correctness, we can never be sure whether the actions of those under this system are authentic or not. Are they acting voluntarily, or simply because they're afraid of being exposed, shamed and sanctioned by the majority? And if the system changes, can they be relied upon to continue their positive behavior?

Then again, what if the behavior isn't positive at all? Peer pressure can be - and has been - used just as easily and effectively to reinforce bigotry as to fight it, and public sentiments can turn on a dime when circumstances change. Someone who acts merely from fear of punishment can just as easily choose the opposite course when such a threat is removed.

Fear of Punishment

Political correctness works (insofar as it does), because it invokes this very fear of punishment. People walk on eggshells rather than acting with the genuine grace of authentic kindness. True respect requires no fear of retribution but, on the contrary, demand the fortitude to maintain one's principles even in the face of the same sort of fear political correctness seeks to harness.

Isn't it better to act on conscience than to work in behalf of another's agenda? To motivate respect rather than capitulate to fear?

Authentic kindness  should always be our goal. Political correctness is a poor and fickle substitute for the courage of our convictions. 

Trump's sideshow: Smoke, mirrors, pomp and circus tents

I try not to wade too deeply into the snark-infested waters of political commentary - partly because they're so badly polluted and partly because I'm afraid I'll just add to the snark.

Too many politicians are unscrupulous narcissists  who throw out promises like they're beads at Mardi Gras, hoping we'll expose ourselves so they can get a cheap thrill out of it. For us, the thrill isn't quite so cheap. The quid pro quo for those broken-beaded promises usually amounts to campaign contributions and votes (but mostly campaign contributions).

Which brings us to Donald Trump. 

Unscrupulous? Repeated bankruptcies and more flip-flopping on the issues than your average bear, donkey, elephant or RINO. (Now a Republican, he not so long ago supported gun-control, said he believed in "universal health care" and was even a registered Democrat from 2001 to 2009.)

Narcissist?  Hey, I don't trust anyone who talks about himself in the third person and brags about how he's supposedly a magnet for female attention. (He not only said he'd date his own daughter if they weren't related, he also claimed that every woman who appeared on his TV show "The Apprentice" flirted with him, "consciously or unconsciously.")

But this isn't a piece about the seedy side of politics or even about that guy who has the audacity to call himself "The Donald." It's about us.

What do we, the electorate, see in this guy?

When asked what they like about Trump, people repeat the same thing time and again. It's his bluntness. His directness. His supposed willingness to "tell it like it is," polls and political correctness be damned.

Getting away with it

I suspect it all comes down to this: Many of the people who like Trump wish they could say the things he does and get away with it. Some of them would love to demean women, dismiss their critics as a bunch of morons and build a wall to keep anyone "not like me" on the other side of everywhere. 

Trump's supporters revel in the fact that he can get away with things they'd never dream of trying. Because he's rich. Because he's famous. Because he feels like it. But here's the irony: They're the ones who allow him to get away with it by refusing to ever call him on his you-know-what. It doesn't matter how often he flip-flops, how many people he mocks and scorns or even why he's disrespecting them. It barely even matters what he says at all. What matters is that he can say it. 

Whatever "it" is. And that's the scary part.

Litmus tests

Anyone who knows me knows I hate political checklists, litmus tests and interest group ratings, whether they're issued by the NRA or the NAACP. They're the swords of Damocles that political "purists" hold over the modern candidate's head.  Politicians - and voters - who dare to defy them by thinking for themselves are thrown under the bus routinely because they don't toe the party line, an attitude that's helped create the severe polarization seen in government today.

The political highway is littered with the wreckage of candidates who crashed and burned because they didn't toe the party line. The slightest deviation from the accepted platform is greeted by impassioned calls off "Off with their heads!" - after which donations typically slow, campaigns struggle and candidacies flame out.

Not so with Trump, a tycoon who acts like he doesn't need to placate donors because he can fund a campaign using his personal fortune ... even though he's actually accepted millions of dollars in donations. Regardless of how much cash he's raking in, he perpetuates the idea that he "can't be bought," and with it the  impression that he can say whatever  he wants without any consequences.

Cult of personality

Voters are attracted to rich candidates because they're supposedly not "beholden to special interests." These "mavericks" seem like a breath of fresh air in an age of litmus tests and political dogmatism. Buy do they really change the status quo?

Hardly.

The modern climate of rigid political doctrine (groupthink), doesn't encourage voters to think for themselves. It's all about conformity. Yet the advent of Trumpolitics isn't necessarily an improvement, because it hasn't encouraged voters to think for themselves, either. Instead, it has created a cult of personality in which followers are encouraged to parrot whatever comes out of Trump's mouth, like the "dittoheads" or "clones" who call talk radio programs to regurgitate whatever rant the host happens to be spewing.

What he's saying doesn't matter nearly as much as the fact that he's saying it.

Image is everything

A quarter-century ago, tennis star Andre Agassi did a camera commercial with the tagline "Image is everything." It was a nice play on words, and it worked well with the photogenic Agassi, who then sported not only an athletic figure but a leonine mane of hair that made him something of a sex symbol.

Trump could have come up with that tagline himself. 

He's spent years building up his cult of personality, in which substance is unimportant - or even a drawback. The name "Trump" has become iconic; name recognition has always been a big advantage in politics, but Trump has taken it to a new level. 

The catchphrase "You're fired!" from his TV show has become almost as recognizable. Is it any coincidence that Trump's ability to kick people off that show at his own discretion (whim?)  parallels talk radio hosts' propensity for cutting people off before they finish making their point? 

The phrase, along with Trump's status as host of the show, established him as an authority figure in households across America. Authority on what? It didn't matter. Nor did it matter that many of the people who appeared on his show were intelligent, more creative and even by some measures more successful than he was. What mattered is that Trump set himself up as the authority figure and America bought it, regardless of whether he had anything to back it up.

Now he's doing it again, and the stakes are a whole lot higher than Nielsen ratings. 

Fantasyland

He's not even trying to hide what he's doing.

His own words: "The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people's fantasies." 

Why?

"People want to believe that something is the biggest and greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It's an innocent form of exaggeration - and a very effective form of promotion."

Trump's open secret: He's essentially giving people a blank slate set against a backdrop of audacity and allowing them to project their greatest hopes and dreams onto it - onto him. Then he takes credit for making them come true before even bothering to lift a finger on their behalf. 

This is nothing new in politics. Voters in every election cycle become excited by some new face on the scene - often an outsider or celebrity who's made a name in some field other than politics. John Glenn, Ross Perot, Fred Thompson, Herman Cain and, most recently, Ben Carson are examples. When they announced their candidacies, they, too, were blank slates. People got excited about who they might be, and their poll numbers spiked. But the voters soured on each these candidates as they discovered more about who they really were. Either they were too boring, too mercurial or too willing to believe that pharaohs built the pyramids as granaries. 

Information was their undoing.

Teflon Trump

Pundits expected the same thing to happen with Trump, who by himself may have said more outlandish things than the rest of the 2016 candidates combined. But as of this writing, his poll numbers remain solid and people keep supporting him for one simple reason: It's not about what he's saying but the fact he can say "it" and get away with it.

Information is no antidote to that, because information is irrelevant in a cult of personality. All that matters is the cult figure's name, fame and salesmanship. He's everyone's instant, ready-made "me I wanna be." Trump doesn't talk about the issues beyond vague generalities because he doesn't have to. He's a celebrity, not a policy wonk. Kim Kardashian doesn't need talent to be popular. Trump doesn't need ideas. Same principle.

The Republicans have spent the past 27 years searching for the new Ronald Reagan, and Trump's the closest thing they've found. Reagan, like Trump, was a showman and converted Democrat with high name recognition and a lot of self-confidence. But even Reagan's ability to promote himself pales in comparison to Trump's. (Agree with him or not, Reagan did actually take specific policy positions on a number of issues, and he never referred to himself as "The Ronald.")

Barnum, not Oz

Trump's invulnerability (so far) to his own foot-in-mouth disease has makes Reagan's legendary "Teflon Presidency" look like a caked-on, baked-on kitchen disaster by comparison. Carson's odd notions on the pyramids sounded ridiculous, and they cost him plenty in the polls. But Trump? He can degrade women, threaten religious liberty - a supposed cornerstone of Republican dogma - spout unsupported stories about Muslims cheering the 9/11 disaster and absurdly claim the current president was born on foreign soil. Yet none of it, so far, has mattered.

That's because Trump has succeeded in convincing a sizable number of people that he's the embodiment of their fantasies - just as he bragged he would. He's not some two-bit circus magician from Kansas hiding behind a curtain and some phony projection; he's a used-car dealer who's spent the past three decades bragging about his ability to sell you a lemon. A fantasy. "The art of the deal," he calls it.

The astonishing thing is, after all this time, that so many people are still buying it.

Trump's no statesman, he's a salesman and a master of self-promotion who's preaching the gospel according to P.T. Barnum (as preserved by one of his critics): "There's a sucker born every minute."

And he's got plenty of us paying to see his sideshow.

Def Leppard releases worthy companion to 'Hysteria'

Stephen H. Provost is the author of Pop Goes the Metal: Hard Rock, Hairspray, Hooks & Hits, chronicling the evolution of pop metal from its roots in the 1960s through its heyday as “hair metal” in the 1980s and beyond. It’s available on Amazon.

"Do you really, really wanna do this now?" Joe Elliott asks at the outset of Def Leppard's self-titled 2015 release.

My answer? Hell yeah. I've been waiting nearly 30 years for a worthy follow-up to Hysteria, and it sounds to all intents and purposes like this is it. That's not to say that The Leps' other releases between then and now didn't have their share of highlights, but - with the exception of the fantastic cover album Yeah! (2006) - they haven't put all the parts together in a single release since then.

That changed with this fall's eponymous outing, which guitarist Phil Collen has called "probably the most diverse thing we've ever done." Full disclosure Part 1: I don't write many music reviews (this is the first one on this blog). Full disclosure Part 2: I've been a Def Leppard fan since I first heard Rock Brigade on the radio in 1980, and the only published music review I have written was of a DL concert earlier this year.

The Leps didn't play any songs from the new CD at that show, and it had been so long (seven years) since they'd put out an album of all-new material, they caught me napping and sneaked this one by me, releasing it in October when I wasn't paying attention.

This album accomplishes something unique: It manages to be derivative and entirely original at the same time. That might seem like a cut, but it's not. Only a band with this level of expertise and breadth of influences could manage to acknowledge so many of them and still sound fresh 35 years into their recording career. No, this won't rocket to the top of the charts the way Hysteria did back in '86 (pun intended) - musical tastes have changed too much. And I'm not going to go as far as to say it's a match for that classic CD, but it comes a lot closer than anyone had a right to expect.

Bands often go through a three-album "peak" during their careers. The Beatles had an arc of Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper. Queen had A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races and News of the World. (I mention those particular bands in part because their influence is apparent on this album.) For Def Leppard, it was High 'N' Dry, Pyromania and Hysteria - three releases produced by Mutt Lange.

(Fun exercise: Take a listen to Honey I'm Home by Lange's then-wife, Shania Twain, and tell me it doesn't sound like countrified Def Leppard.)

To climb back close to that level at this stage in their career is quite an accomplishment, and they've done it by paying tribute to both their influences and their own history. The album opener, Let's Go, was obviously written to be a concert opener, as well. With lyrics like "welcome to the carnival, welcome to the party, welcome to the edge of your seat," it of reintroduces the band to its audience in much the same way KISS reintroduced itself with the tune Psycho Circus  17 years ago (has it really been that long?).

Let's Go sounds familiar right out of the blocks. It starts off like the intro to Let's Get Rocked (Adrenalize, 1992), morphs into a riff reminiscent of Pour Some Sugar On Me (Hysteria, 1987) then takes off in a different and thoroughly satisfying vein altogether. The band's fondness for Queen, which has surfaced at various points throughout their career, appears for the first time in this track, the album's first single: I could almost swear that's Brian May on parts of that guitar solo.

The album's second track, Dangerous, is reminiscent of Promises, one of the two best tracks (with Paper Sun) off 1999's Euphoria, spiced with a dose of Hysteria-era styling. It doesn't quite live up to Promises, but it's not a pale imitation, either.

It's the third track, though, that seems the most familiar of any on the album. Try singing the lyrics to Queen's 1980 megahit Another One Bites the Dust along with the music to DL's Man Enough. It doesn't quite work, but it's close, and the fact that both tunes are built around pounding bass lines makes them seem even more similar. In all, Queen's heavy bass-funk era is my least favorite, but even with that said, I found myself enjoying this tune. It works the same way DL's take on Rock On worked on Yeah!

We Belong, the fourth track, is a lighter-raising ballad along the lines of Hysteria that, again, doesn't quite live up to that tune - but not much does. It's also fun to hear different members of the band take turn on vocals, giving Elliott a break. As Phil Collen proved on a dynamite cover of Rod Stewart's Stay With Me (Yeah!), he has the chops to carry off lead vocals.

The next three cuts - Invincible, Sea of Love and Energized - all hold their own. I liked the first of the three out of the gate, and the other two grew on me with repeated listening (this is the first album in years that I've enjoyed enough to keep on continuous iPod repeat for more than a day). Sea of Love particularly has quite a kick, but it offers an inverted song structure: The verses rock hard, while the chorus chills out a bit. This put me off initially, but I got to like it as time went on.

The second half of the album is, if anything, stronger than the first. At 14 tunes, it's actually two songs longer than Hysteria, although its running time is about 8 minutes shorter because the cuts are more compact.

All Time High features a rousing chorus that sounds like something out of the Pyromania/Hysteria era. It's followed by Battle of My Own, which slithers along through the sonic Bayou like a gator on the prowl. One of the album's best cuts, it's also one of six that founding member and bassist Rick Savage had a hand in writing. (Interestingly, that collection doesn't include the bass-heavy Man Enough.) Each of the six is among the album's standouts.

If you can get past the opening lyrics ("I'm not well, I'm mad as hell. Come over here, I'll ring your bell"), Broke and Brokenhearted really rocks, with a mid-section jam that keeps it humming along through a charged-up, fast-paced 3-plus minutes. 

Forever Young is probably the only song on the album that I tend to skip past. I can't tell you exactly why; it just didn't quite work for me.

The last three songs, however, more than make up for any deficiency there. The acoustic strummer Last Dance (a tune Savage wrote solo) sounds like something the Eagles might have left of The Long Run and reminds me a bit of Orleans' Dance With Me. 

Wings of An Angel sounds the closer to High 'N' Dry-era DL than anything else here, and stacks up well against cuts from that classic release. 

But it might be argued (and I will contend) that the band saved the best for last with Blind Faith, which veers from intense acoustics to Beatlesque bridge to bombastic rock near the end. In that sense, purely on structure, it's built like a condensed Bohemian Rhapsody. The Beatlesque interlude sounds like something straight out of Strawberry Fields Forever and is, fittingly, introduced by the phrase "follow you down" - a takeoff on "let me take you down?" Perhaps.

If you think I'm overreaching with the Queen comparisons simply because I count both bands among my all-time top 5, I'll defer to Elliott, who made the comparison himself in an interview: "Every single aspect of anything we've ever wanted to put out - acoustic, heavy, soft, slow, fast - it's there. That's why we call it 'Def Leppard,' because, just like Queen were, we're capable of coming up with vastly different kinds of songs."

Bands routinely talk up their latest releases as the best thing they've ever done, and they're almost always full of hot air. But while Def Leppard-the album may not be Hysteria or Queen's A Day at the Races, it's as close as anyone's come in a long time.

Bullying for a cause: You don't get to make me feel sad

The savage and heinous assaults on innocent civilians in Paris that took place on Nov. 13 have unleashed a predictable torrent of self-righteous indignation on social media. 

• "Facebook's providing this really cool French flag overlay. Why aren't you using it on your profile picture? Are you heartless?"

• "Do you really think using changing your profile is going to accomplish anything? You're just trying to make yourself feel better. Quit being so shallow."

• And my favorite: "What about all the people who died in those terrorist attacks in Kenya and Beirut? Why didn't you change your profile picture then, you xenophobic so-and-so?"

Ah, social media. The place where good intentions somehow become bad vibes as users rush to judgment like jackals on a feeding frenzy, laughing in ridicule at people they call their "friends" as they feed on the corpse of human tragedy. If that sounds harsh, it's intentional. Because this is what people look like when they go around demanding that their friends be sad.

My response to all this: Who are you to tell me why to feel sad? Come to think of it, why do you want me to feel sad in the first place?

It seems to me the height of arrogance for one person to tell another, "If you feel sad about this, you must feel sad about this other thing, too. And not just sad, but equally sad. Heck, more sad, because it's more important to me."

Compassion should know no boundaries. It shouldn't be dependent on where we live in the world, what color our skin is or whether we worship (or decline to worship) this or that deity. But demeaning someone for showing compassion in one case and failing - according to your definition - to show it in another won't resolve anything. What it will do is make compassionate people angry at and wary of one another. Instead of railing against each other, shouldn't we be focusing on the problems that are making people sad in the first place?

News flash: Most people don't enjoy being sad. Or outraged. Most people want exactly the opposite. They want happiness, support and respect. Heaping tragedy upon tragedy and demanding that people be sad or outraged about each new one in turn won't heal us from those that have already occurred or prevent others from happening down the road. It's going to do the opposite. It's going to make people numb and indifferent.

I'm sorry, but you don't get to make me feel sad, no matter how worthy your cause or how justified you may feel in your judgments. And if you think calling me racist or xenophobic or ignorant or insensitive is going to help your cause, go right ahead, because, you see, I know it won't. All it will do is encourage me to tune you out. That's what people do when people start calling them names.

People don't like being attacked - even in the name of what someone else considers "a good cause." Those of us who have been bullied know from experience that our tormentors often hide behind "good causes" to justified their actions. When someone tries to "convince" us by using force, guilt or manipulation, we stop listening to the message and pay attention to the method. People who use such tactics often do so because they're trying to hide some deficiency in their argument. Most of us won't even analyze their motivations to that extent. We see what we perceive as a threat, and our fight-or-flight response kicks in.

Sometimes, the squeaky wheel doesn't get the grease. Sometimes it gets ignored and just falls off. And sometimes it gets replaced altogether.

It's inhuman cruelty we're trying to stop here, not compassion. If someone shows compassion, and you say, "Yes, but," I can't see how that helps the situation. Awareness doesn't come through judgmental declarations (which, incidentally, the purveyors of fear and cruelty are very good at making themselves), it comes by spreading compassion. And compassion never spreads through demands and accusations. It spreads through encouragement and empathy.

So please, if someone's sad about something, don't jump down that person's throat and say, "Yes, but what about (fill in the blank) ... ?" Meet compassion with compassion. That's the way it grows.

Pithy Comebacks to Buffoonery on Social Media

I recently attended a book signing by bestselling author John Scalzi, where he read a selection from his blog titled "Standard Responses to Online Stupidity." There, he presented some witty rejoinders to online buffoonery. (My favorite: "My attention is a privilege, not a right. This is all you get.")

Since he's graciously featuring my guest contribution on his website today, I thought it might be fun to come up with a few comebacks of my own for use in similar situations. I've tied them to a few well-known axioms. Some of the results are particularly cutting, and I doubt I'd use them on anyone short of a mortal enemy (of whom I don't have any). But please don't tell anyone, as acerbity can be an effective deterrent.

1. Your logic leaves something to be desired. Just not by anyone I know.

2. No, Teddy Roosevelt did not say, "Type loudly and act like a big prick."

3. Politics makes strange bedfellows. Which explains why you're so crabby.

4. Discretion is the better part of ... a concept you're obviously not familiar with.

5. He who fights and runs away online is more commonly known as a troll.

6. I'm sorry, but faith can't move mountains if you put yours in a broken bulldozer.

7. Take your ball and go home. It's overinflated anyway. Oh, wait, that's your ego.

8. Cat got your tongue? My mistake. He's in the litter box, which must mean you're full of ...

9. I'll give you the benefit of my doubt. Here's my doubt. Now go benefit from it.

10. I'd be happy to make a gentleman's agreement, but you'd have to be a gentleman.

11. I won't just agree to disagree with you. I'll celebrate it with a trip to Disneyland.

12. I'm afraid that, in order to be a man of your word, you'd have to be literate.

13. If you've learned from your mistakes, you must be a full-blown genius.

14. A penny saved isn't worth spending on your thoughts.

15. If at first you don't succeed at arguing online ... do us all a favor and give it a rest.

16. I'll give you special dispensation to judge a book by it's cover, since it's clear you've never looked inside one.

Note: These work for Facebook, but since they're all fewer than 140 characters, they're nicely suited to Twitter, as well.