Let me start by saying that there is no other individual blog entry I’ve written so far that I’ve been as excited about as this one you are about to read. I feel like a kid at Christmas—I could hardly sleep the other night because I couldn’t wait to start writing this. And what is the subject that has me all giddy? The angry and crazy reactions my fellow Offender Sung got on his last two blogs from a “few” readers (read here first and then here to get caught up if you’re in the dark. I’ll also explain shortly why I put the word “few” in quotes—I promise you’ll love it!).

Now, let me add that one of the things I love most about this blog are the always-interesting comments that you, our YOMYOMF readers, leave. For the most part, your comments are witty, funny, insightful, supportive and/or down right cool. Now occasionally, we’ll get comments that are rude, angry and/or just plain crazy. I can’t speak for my fellow Offenders, but I love the negative comments (and quite frankly, surprised that we don’t get more). They’re often hilariously entertaining and usually say more about the person commenting than on the blog itself.

For example, check out this blog I wrote about the closing of my neighborhood Round Table Pizza and the comment left by Nicholas Stix. Of all the blogs on our site that a white supremacist could get upset about, he chooses one about pizza? Really? That’s where you’re going to blow your wad? But this doesn’t compare to some of the “mistakes” other negative commenters have made. So let me use Sung’s recent blogs as instructional tools to provide some helpful advice for those of you who plan on writing negative comments:

HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOR

Before you actually write your comment blasting us for some offense or another, really review the blog carefully to check to make you’re not misreading anything—are you missing the satire, are you bringing your own baggage and reading something into the blog that isn’t intended, that sort of thing.

Let’s take Sung’s “Why I’m Afraid of American Women” blog as an example. In the blog, Sung talks about his childhood crush on Shanelle, his best friend’s older sister, and how this made Sung’s immigrant mother warn him against “American” women. The first person to take offense to this blog was a reader named Julia. Here’s an excerpt from her first post:

Now it seems to me that Sung’s post is clearly written in a tongue-in-cheek style and, if anything, he’s poking gentle fun at his immigrant mother and some of the strange ideas immigrant moms—hell, all moms–have when it comes to the welfare of their children. I don’t think it’s necessarily a leap for Julia to assume Sung’s friends are black based on their names, but I think it is a huge leap to assume that “American” in this case equals “African American” in a derogatory sense and that the motivating force behind his mother’s actions is racism AND Sung is in fact agreeing with her opinion.

Not only is there nothing in the text that supports the assertion of anti-black racism (and let’s not forget that Sung’s mother is herself technically an “American”), but there would also be a huge irony at work if this were the case because Sung’s step-dad is black. The man his mother has been married to for decades, the man who raised him since he was a baby, is African American. Now I know that doesn’t necessarily mean his mom or Sung himself doesn’t hate black people, but it does make things less black and white, so to speak. I know Sung’s been ostracized by whites, blacks and Asians because his dad is black and his mom is Korean so I don’t think the issue is as simple as it may appear. And Julia is right in that Asians are not exempt from racism. Some other Asians have stopped speaking to Sung once they learned his father was black, for example.

But as I’ve said, oftentimes these comments say more about the person commenting so if you still feel upset or angry or offended after carefully reviewing the blog in question, by all means, post your feelings. I say this in all sincerity because this blog would be boring if everyone agreed with everything we said. We are the Offenders after all and one of our job functions is to provoke and our readers should respond in kind when called for.

DON’T BE REPETITIVE; MAKE YOUR POINT EFFICIENTLY

But if you do decide to comment, know that your point will hit harder if you make it as efficiently as you can and not belabor what you’re trying to say. Again, let’s once again turn to that blog of Sung’s. Julia continues to go on about why she’s offended and then says she is not going to read this blog anymore:

But at 11:47 AM, Julia comes on again to respond to readers defending Sung:

And then at 7:18 PM, she’s back for another long defensive rant where she reiterates her previous points, even stating again that she will no longer read Sung’s blog:

Look, you don’t have to respond to everyone who responds to you, you don’t have to repeat the same points and certainly you shouldn’t keep saying you’re not going to read but keep coming back and leaving long comments. Again, these are things that will weaken your argument. Make your point and trust that it’s strong enough to stand on its own. But if you feel you need to add to it, make sure you have some new tricks in your arsenal.

Now, Julia is also hinting that there are other people who are offended by Sung’s post but so far, she’s riding solo. Until 7:36 PM and the arrival of Karen:

Even though they don’t know each other, Karen is clearly there to have Julia’s back. Karen writes “Kudos to Julia” for speaking the truth and Julia once again responds at 8:52 PM with this shout out to Karen:

Now we’re cooking, right? Two righteous women on the warpath. But hold on a minute…

DON’T BE SCHIZOPHRENIC

Those of you who have left comments on our blog know that you have to include your email address (though it’s not published) before you can post. The reality is it doesn’t even have to be a real email address—you can make one up and the post will still go through. But here’s something many of you computer savvy folks also probably know…you can fake your email address but you can’t fake your IP address. Let me once again turn to Sung’s recent blogs to illustrate what I mean by this.

Julia and Karen’s comments sounded suspiciously similar—the long-windedness, the particular use of grammar, etc… Their email addresses were different, but when we checked their IP addresses, guess what? Both Julia and Karen had the same IP address!

Does this mean that Julia/Karen is the same person pretending to be two different people to make it appear that there is more public outrage than there might appear to be? Nah, no one would do that, right? That’d be really crazy! I’m sure it’s just a coincidence.

HIDE YOUR PAPER TRAIL

Now about 30 minutes after Julia’s last comment, HisBella makes her first appearance at 9:32 PM. She is a self-proclaimed Italian American woman and she, like Julia and Karen, is outraged at Sung:

Now HisBella does also sound similar to Julia and Karen. However, to be fair, she has a different IP address although she is from the same city which I’m sure is again strictly a coincidence. But here’s what HisBella does that you shouldn’t do in her position. She not only keeps posting on this blog but she also follows Sung over to his next blog and continues the rant there. Her attacks also grow more…colorful. Take this for example:

OK, so racial jokes won’t be tolerated, but then you turn right around and do that very thing you just condemned? Again, these sort of actions raise red flags and might make us do something like perform a simple google search of your email address and, lo and behold, strike gold!

It turns out YOMYOMF isn’t the only site that’s faced the wrath of HisBella. It seems that under the name of Michelle D, our HisBella had also written offensive and racist comments on The Black Conscious Thought blog (“No Bias and No Bull from a Black Woman” is that blog’s credo) including statements like this which forced the blogger to block her IP address:

So the very person who has sided with one two African American woman (Julia/Karen) to protest Sung’s racism against blacks got kicked off a blog written by a black woman for being racist against blacks herself? Damn, you can’t make this shit up! BTW, you can read all about this incident over at Black Conscious Thought.

Now with all this said, I want to mention a comment left by a woman named H.L. who also took offense to Sung’s blog and wrote this:

Like with the other women above, I still think H.L. is reading things into Sung’s blog that aren’t there, but here’s the thing—I really appreciate her comment and the way she made it. This is clearly something she has thought deeply about and even if I disagree, these are the sort of perspectives I hope people will bring to our blog.

So feel free to disagree. And if you can’t make your arguments in the thoughtful way someone like H.L. did, at least make sure your crazy is entertaining. Let’s have some fun and for that I must thank Julia/Karen/HisBella because they did bring an energy and life.

I know this entry is already long, but I want to make one final point. When we started our mailbag section and asked our readers to submit questions, this was one of the first ones that came in (you can see the whole post here):

“you guys should stick to being sneaky little bastards writing about kung fu, hello kitty and complain about white people in your rice paddies like all the other gook sites.”?–Rick

Something like this could be upsetting, but my fellow Offender Justin made the point that it stopped bothering him when he remembered that he wasn’t here alone. He had us—the other Offenders—and this was our online family and because we are here to watch each other’s backs, comments like that don’t have any real strength. I would go even further and say that I think (and I feel confident I can speak for all my fellow Offenders) that our online family extends to all our loyal readers who are as much a part of YOMYOMF as any of us. It’s awesome to see our readers, on Sung’s blogs or others, take up the defense when a particularly offensive offense should arise.

The name of our blog is youoffendmeyouoffendmyfamily, after all. And that’s not a coincidence.