ISTM that you’re implying that I’ve called you stupid. I don’t know where you could get that from, and I rather incline to think you’ve just adopted that pretense in order to enable this riposte, such as it is.
But it’s worth dwelling on a bit. The fact is that I’ve not called you stupid and I’ve said in an earlier exchange that you’re not stupid, so I wouldn’t call you stupid. There are many people who, when insulting people, just string together a bunch of really nasty terms, in a colorful manner if they can, and let it fly and hope for the best. But that’s not my approach. My own policy if such exchanges should unfortunately become necessary, is to tell the truth, as in all other situations. Partly because this approach conforms to my moral principles, but also partly because I think it’s more effective, as it was here.
The fact is that there are any number of participants in these threads, including some posters on this very page, who are genuinely limited intellectually. Guys who are lucky if they can achieve basic comprehension in the news items that they rush to post here as the latest Big News about Trump’s Impending Downfall. I have no qualms calling these people idiots, because they are. And at some level, they know it. I’m sure they judge themselves favorably on that score, and I wouldn’t be surprised if one reason they post to threads like this is so that they can, in the company of people who strongly agree with them on the key issues, feel a bit smarter than they otherwise do going through life. But people get a lot of feedback on intelligence, even more so than in other matters, whether from school or career or similar, and there’s no doubt that these people have at least a niggling feeling that just maybe they’re not as high up amongst the intelligentsia as they’d like to think.
But you’re a smart guy. It would be silly for me to call you stupid even if my principles allowed for it, and had I done so it would not have provoked the same reaction, because your sense of yourself as a pretty smart guy is solidly grounded, and it would have been a lot easier for you to brush off.
But even smart guys can have issues, as you do. And in your case, as we’ve discussed in the past, one core issue is that your self-esteem is bound up in your image of yourself as an erudite sage. I speculate further (and I emphasize that this part is speculation, though it’s a common basis) that you may have been relatively unsuccessful at other areas of life and at your age you realize that that’s not likely to change, so all your eggs are in the know-it-all basket, so to speak. But it makes no difference what the cause is. It is what it is and at some level you know it. And the irony is that this very fragility of your ego is what makes you so vulnerable. That’s how life works, sometimes. (In the limited time from when I got the email indicating your response to when I previewed my response you had written three substantively different versions of a one-line post, and that’s without even allowing for time for you to clean some spittle off your monitor.)
Hence my earlier advice to you. Stew all you want, but at least don’t show it and make an implicit acknowledgement.
Just advice, of course. You can take it or leave it. 