http://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/irish-girl-turned-down-south-4571951

All I know is he claimed to be gay, used words like “faggot” a lot, hated Irish people, and loathed women.

So, you know, not inviting him to any parties.

No one is saying Irish people didn’t have an assimilation advantage being white, but they didn’t used to be considered “white”. The meanings behind ethnicity have changed over time.

Just as Jews are routinely discriminated against regardless of skin color, so once were the Irish routinely discriminated against, regardless of skin color.

Just because everyone has the same skin color, that does not mean they don’t experience stratification: layers of privilege. People in privileged groups can discriminate against other people in privileged groups. I think WII was one long example. But for some reason, some people believe that whatever discrimination experience Irish people had in Europe, this did not transfer to the USA. Which is nonsense. People didn’t suddenly lose their prejudices when they crossed a border.

I’m not comparing the treatment of black people with the treatment of Irish people by putting that sign in a picture. I’m not diminishing the treatment of black people by doing so. I don’t know why this guy seemed to believe that was the case. It’s not a misery contest.

But since he also spouted unbelievably nasty comments about women, he had serious issues I can’t even fathom. Some of his letters ran on for a dozen pages or more. The guy was just full of rage. About everything.

Anyway, I also got a couple of angry letters from people who believed my response was ‘proselytizing”, saying they’d never read my work again.

You really can’t win. Respond to some misogynistic guy with hate for Irish people, and I’m the bad guy! I doubt if they’d have been so thrilled wit this dude had they read his original letters.

Moreover, it was creepy. Because he went looking for where I live, which I did not appreciate. He concluded I lived in VA Beach (where I have never lived,) and decided it would only be a few hours to the prison for a visit, so I should just do it.

I posted before about how some poor woman in VA Beach who had my name used to get calls and mail intended for me, and this was one instance. Which meant this guy tried to find out where I lived.

Got a chill from that.

I honestly don’t know what this guy’s thing is. I’ve had several people very similar to this guy, and one of them spent years using sock puppets, one day making interesting conversations, and the next posting really nasty jibes. I never knew what this dude was going to say, but he was mean as heck.

I finally figured out the small group of people was all one person, called him out and then blocked him. He then wrote this impassioned letter about how he wanted to get into the comic industry and was worried that if I knew who he really was and he disagreed with me, I could get him blacklisted.

That’s just nuts.

Regardless, all pros deal with people like this. If you give them attention, they just blow up like blowfish.

I caught the last guy after seeing him search for his own name on my stat system.

So they keep an eye out for you, to see if you are dissing them, and frankly, on a daily basis, I can’t even remember their names. I can remember some of their weirder antics, but don’t know much about these people. I guess they assume we’re paying as much attention to them as they are to us.

No. Really.