In “real life” I’m not particularly political. I don’t donate to candidates or political causes, I don’t put signs on my lawn. I’m interested in the discussion of politics in the same way that other people are interested in the discussion of sports.

If you’re come here from a link claiming I’m some sort of political lunatic, a few things to bear in mind:

When JoeUser.com started in 2001, I posted intentionally provocative articles. The idea was to get a discussion going.

As time went on and I became better known, this started to become a problem as people not familiar with JoeUser.com started to link to cherry picked posts and use them as forum fodder for my work as a software developer or business owner.

The analogy I would use is imagine if one of the writers from Cracked.com later became really well known years later and people, not realizing the nature of Cracked.com started using his articles as representative of what that person’s overall views are.

Now, I’m using an extreme example and for the record, I consider myself politically conservative. But hopefully most people reading this are intelligent enough to make the distinction between an article written on a discussion forum for the sake of getting a discussion forum versus a personal blog (JoeUser.com is a community blog site, it’s not my online diary).

Over the years, I’ve had to make private some of the earlier year posts because I got tired of having to explain how much of what I have written is tongue-in-cheek.  Such as…

• No, I don’t support converting homeless people into food for the hungry even if I suggested it in a post back in 2002.
• No, I don’t actually harvest a kidney from each of my children so I can drink poisons safely.
• No, Social Services has never actually visited my house.
• No, I don’t think Obama is Hitler.
• No, I don’t think Bush is Hitler.
• No, I don’t think Hitler is Hitler.
• No, I don’t think liberalism is a disease.
• Etc.

The reality is, there are people out there that are always looking for an excuse to be offended or outraged.  If you post enough things over enough time, you can always cherry pick something that you can use to pain very broad strokes about them.