I’m very pleased to have been invited to blog here. Thanks, Adam! I look forward to having stimulating and civil conversations with a number of people of varying views. One of the things I enjoy most about writing online is the exposure to new ideas and new people – ideas and people that I might not meet in my ordinary life.
A few words about myself. (Me me me me me me!) My name is Robert Hayes. I’m 38 years old, married, raising a three-year-old toddler monkey in Colorado Springs. After dropping out of Oberlin College (a course of action I highly recommend), I moved to Washington State and pretended to go to the Evergreen State College, but mainly I was just fooling around. I moved up to Seattle to work for Microsoft, where I was a software design engineer and a software test engineer. I eventually wound up in Colorado, where I continued to work in the commercial software biz, putting in stints at Optika (now Stellent) and Quark. When the dot-com crash came, I was not able to find continued work in the field – ten years of saying “ha, the technical boom will never end so I don’t need to develop good work habits!” came back to bite me, there. So I moved with my family to Colorado Springs and enrolled at the University of Colorado, where I (finally) earned a degree in Business Administration.
I now own a small writing and editing services company called DocRocket, which specializes in quality web content development. I have found that having a payroll to meet adds a certain immediacy and focus to my working life, which has been professionally helpful. I don’t intend on returning to the computer software field; the reasons why are a set of long essays of very little general interest. As part of my work with DocRocket, I have written books on management for entrepreneurial small businesses, futures trading, and franchise management. (It turns out that business degrees have a certain degree of use, after all.)
My politics have arced from center-right during my Oklahoma boyhood, to fairly hard left during my early college days, veering over to the very hard right for a while, and now settling back in around the center-right mark. These labels are of course inadequate, and depending on the issue, you might see my politics vary widely. I am a strong supporter of the war on terror, I believe America is the last best hope of mankind, and I think that people who want to die for their God ought to be given the opportunity. Spiritually, I am a Catholic of honest conviction and poor performance. Ethically, I try to be honest and of good character – mainly because it is not in my nature to be so. Like all of us, I am a fallen man – and thus, “do what comes naturally” and “let it all hang out” are not philosophies which lead to good outcomes for me.
My interests are very eclectic. I am a follower of the partisan slugfest that is American politics. I enjoy history, particularly the history of the classical Mediterranean civilizations and their predecessors. I am a big fan of cryptoarcheology and cryptohistory, and I’ll read any non-mystical book on Atlantis I can get my hands on. (I’m not a “Atlantis had spaceships and grav rays!” fan, I’m a “Atlantis may have been an advanced ancient civilization with navigational and mathematical knowledge that were lost and not rediscovered until the Middle Ages” fan.) I enjoy computer games of the strategic/cerebral variety and board and role playing games of the old school. Most of my free time, however, is spent with my family, or doing blogging.
In addition to blogging here, I have my own site, The Argument Clinic, which is mainly links, pictures of puppies, idle personal thoughts, and amusing things I find online – mixed in with tendentiously unreadable essays about abortion and tax policy, because if there’s one thing that people want to see, it’s novel-length maunderings about abortion. I also run the Blogger News Network, a news-oriented blog site with a number of contributors. I comment regularly at Alas!, Ann Althouse, Protein Wisdom, Feministe, and a few other sites.
In my writing, as in my daily life, I strive to be respectful to other people. This is not an easy or natural direction for me to travel; my basic nature is more along the lines of “I am the king, worship me, and bring me a sandwich.” So if in the course of a discussion, you find that I am not living up to this ideal – and you will – please ding me for it, and I will try to do better. However, I also believe there are limits to civility; people who aggressively don’t want to converse (but instead, to yell, or to evangelize, or to dictate the terms of a conversation) are of very little interest to me, because they don’t advance the dialog, and I won’t continue turning the other cheek indefinitely. (I secretly think there’s a codicil to that Gospel, where Jesus is asked what to do if the adversary hits the newly-turned cheek, and He responded “oh, in that case, kick the **** out of them.”)
I am really looking forward to being a part of this exciting new blog, and I hope that you find what I have to say of interest or of use.
Creative Destruction 
I guess that part of the Sermon of the Mount gets left out of most translations 🙂
welcome aboard
Comment by Adam Gurri — March 20, 2006 @ 3:06 am |
And will ham on rye be ok?
Comment by nobody.really — March 21, 2006 @ 1:34 am |
Oberlin rocks! (Class of ’92). I took the express route, three years, but had a ball while I was there.
Comment by ohwilleke — May 1, 2006 @ 5:57 pm |
Your statement about your politics begins with you are a “strong supporter” of the so-called war on terror. War is your first thought in describing your political philosophy and you don’t just support a highly controversial war but you’re a head cheerleader for it.
Your second thought about your political philosophy could be restated, as you believe that, pretty much, the US is always right. You mention nothing even hinting of compassion or tolerance and seem to imply that the **only** reason you are good is that you fear hell, many big time sinners do or so I’m told:>)
Further you believe that Jesus really WANTED to give the one who called himself Jesus’ enemy only one chance to get it right and then would have rather kicked the shit out of the guy to set him straight.
And yet you also claim to be a Catholic of ****honest**** conviction.
I,…I,…I.
…..
How can you possibly reconcile these principals without exploding???
If I take your statement about your spiritual belief at face value, and I do, you are sure in your belief and trust in the **Catholic** path, not merely the teachings of Jesus or Christianity in general but the Catholic church and believe it is not only the right way but the only true way to god, though you may not always practice so well what you believe. You lose no points in my book for lapses; we are all human.
Being a reverent student of Jesus myself (though not a Catholic and no more a Christian than a Hindi) I find it impossible for a person to logically, honestly, sincerely have the sort of political views that you do and still consider themselves to be a disciple of Christ.
I don’t get it on a massive scale. And I guess what I am asking is for you to tell me how you explain this to yourself.
You don’t have to, of course. I would understand if you would rather not discuss such private debates in public. I only ask because you’ve posted these comments in a very public forum and I am presuming that you are willing to discuss them or at least answer questions about them. If my assumption is wrong, please just tell me so and I will go away. I also realize that my earlier words could be quite offensive.
I almost wrote I don’t mean to be offensive but I suppose there may not be any other way to read what I wrote. All I can do is say that the tone I have attempted is to be incredulous and highly skeptical not mean spirited.
I am also assuming that you may be a person who might appreciate a wildly skeptical attitude from your description of your education and your interests in Atlantis. My interest in Atlantis is identical to yours and while I think it might be fun to make-up **fictional** stories about Atlantis from the other camp you describe, I have no other interest in hearing what they would have to say about historical Atlantis.
I apologize if I’ve intruded. I clicked on your name on a comment you made on Alas and that click eventually led me here. I can easily dismiss the idiotic or conflicting notions or rantings of many rabid, right-wing nutjobs (though I submit that I have not seen YOU either ranting or rabid but I think you can understand why I might put you in their camp) when I find that these same people are Mormons, have not completed high school, have only left their county once to go to church camp and are quite uncomfortable with the rigors of scientific method. I can see the ignorance and brain washing behind their remarks and feel, usually, only pit for them. But, when I find someone who holds these views and yet seems reasonable in all other aspects, I am baffled and too curious not to investigate.
Comment by Jane Doe — June 30, 2006 @ 2:08 am |
No need for apologies, Jane.
How can you possibly reconcile these principals without exploding?
Drinking. Heavy, heavy drinking.
But seriously. I don’t see the conflict in most of what you find contradictory. I’m not a good disciple of Christ; he’s not going to put my name up on the Believer of the Month plaque. That said, soldiers, warriors, kings and murderers, whores and priests and poets have all sworn fealty to Him; I think there’s room there for one quasi-libertarian with a hostile streak.
So I guess my question is, what do you want me to explain?
Comment by Robert — June 30, 2006 @ 2:24 am |
[…] (first time was here). In this case, I do so with permission from the source, Robert Hayes, whose blogging profile at Creative Destruction provides an ample self-description of his focus. I also do this honor to Mr. Hayes (as I’m […]
Pingback by Prescriptions for Partisans « The Spiral Staircase — December 24, 2012 @ 12:18 pm |
Highly energetic post, I liked that a lot. Will
there be a part 2?
Comment by Foster — January 11, 2013 @ 12:48 am |