As I write this edition of the thoughts of me, penned to educate, irritate and amuse, the soon-to-be previous one is somewhere in the middle of the "most commented" table that the Times publishes, presumably to spur us writers on to greater depths of provocativeness, a word which William Gates Esq, assures me does not exist.

My rise to the dizzy heights mentioned owes much to the efforts of some people who I have resolved to ignore, and such was their smugness in the comments section when I mentioned this that I thought I'd better explain why I have decided to ignore them and not comment-in-answer myself.

Incidentally, I will be ignoring them only as long as I feel like: if I feel it would be more conducive to a sense of well-being on my part to expose their logical or intellectual shortcomings, I'll do so. My decisions are not written in stone.

The thing is, these, very often, these people have a personal axe to grind with me. They believe that they have been wronged by me in other areas of my life and, in what I can only describe as a pretty craven manner, they use their right to comment and find fault in my thoughts (not a difficult task, granted) in order, they fondly imagine, to wound me.

Sadly for them, by doing this they only demonstrate to me that I wasn't far wrong in my position towards them in the first place. Not that I had any particular animosity towards them then, it is only in their fevered imagination that whatever it was that brought us to cross-purposes was personal on my part, though of course they will not, even now, believe this. For people like this, as their attitude now confirms, everything is personal and everything that happens to them is a result of other people's hatred of them and in no way are they ever at fault.

Such is life, and it is impossible to convince such people, so the only thing to do is ignore them.

Others who I ignore are those who twist what I may have written or said in the past to justify their criticism of something else I might have written.

This, for instance, is why Dr Francis Saliba finds himself on the "ignore" list: he wrote that I have advocated smoking "as being not so harmful" and that I believe that obscene pornographic "art" should be encouraged on the public stage. Both statements in my regard are utterly inaccurate.

Then there are others who, self-evidently, are beyond redemption and should not be given more oxygen. The racists and bigots that pollute the blogosphere thrive on the "yah boo, sucks to you" manner of dialogue, so the only proper course of action is to starve their ideas and let them stew in their own bile. Luckily, their positions are usually so comically ludicrous that they tend to implode and rid us of their poisonous presence all on their own.

As a side comment, incidental to the main thrust, which is now exhausted anyway, could some psycho-linguistic expert apply himself to determining why most comments and posts by the genus now identified as Lil'Elves are in execrable English? Their grasp of syntax, grammar and vocabulary is - to put it charitably - tenuous in the extreme and the research for the underlying reason for this deserves a doctoral thesis on its own.

Is it, possibly, the fact that it was the Labour Governments of the Seventies and Eighties that raped education in this country, combined with the fact that the Lil'Elves are clearly admirers of that form of Governance, that leads to the result described?

Or is just that, quite simply, many of the Lil'Elves don't have the intellectual capacity to write decent English? Even the ones who think they do?

Nothing to do with anything I've written so far, but I was a bit dubious about the Labour Party's establishment of a LGBT Section, since I tend towards the belief that human beings are individuals whatever their orientation and for a mainstream political party to distinguish between individuals wasn't quite the done thing. The mere fact that a special section was being set up somehow gives credence, perversely, to those who think that gays or lesbians or whatever are somehow lesser mortals.

I didn't feel the same about the General Workers' Union taking a similar route, because it is a fact, sadly, that bigotry at the work-place still exists and more vigorous means of fighting it are still needed.

But from the way the leader, and probably half the membership (work it out) of the Alleanza Nazzjonali came out against the Labour Party's move, it became apparent to me that perhaps there is a need for the Labour Party's position. To put it bluntly, if something irritates Josie Muscat, then it's probably a good idea.

This is a philosophy that I find stands the test of consistency.

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