B. U. G. S.

The debate has gotten out of hand and some personal information repeated, so Laura came to me.

I decided that you have to read this statement before anything else is done.

I don’t care whether you call it CENSORSHIP or not, all BUGSERS know better than to carry on a personal fight here.

If I presume to teach you what is important and what is not, I must PRACTICE it as best I can.

I have been insulted hundreds of times.

In these pages, I have apologized well over a hundred times.

On almost every occasion where I apologized, someone here who cared about me wrote me that I should not have.  I appreciated it, but I never withdrew what I had said.

Why?

Because the whole point of BUGS is that we don’t have time or effort to spare.

I never rethought my apology if it took care of the problem at hand.

The problem at hand is clearing the decks for action.

A lot of us blame me for encouraging dispute here.

What these people might not be taking into account is something only a man who has been in this fight for sixty years may be uniquely able to do: Herd tigers.

People are always agreeing with me that this whole BUGS approach has not been undoable, but UNTHINKABLE, for anyone else.

THINK about that, don’t just agree to it.

You are fighters.  I have seen this happen many, many times:

Two guys duke it out, and really HURT each other. Afterwards, the fighters become good buddies. This happens surprisingly often.

In my experience, there is a reason for this.

Those of you who have been out there are well aware that the world is divided into three types of people:

1. Those who take your side;
2. Those who are on the other side; and
3. Those whom I diplomatically refer to as The Chickenshit Majority.

Therefore it is no surprise to me when BUGSERS are astonished by the fact that some of our best people came in making trouble.

This does not mean always or even in a majority of cases. But it happens a lot.

Actually, being surprised at this reality is amateurish, and these disturbances themselves are amateurish IN MANTRA TERMS.

BUGSERS should be able to look back over what they said, as I so often do, and restate it as they should have done in the first place.

Before you say all the noise is my fault, ask yourself:  “Who do I think Bob IS?”

You are BUGSERS now. YOU have to do the correcting and apologizing, not because you were right or wrong, but because our only priority is the CAUSE.

I cannot recall how many times someone has said “why does Bob not impose discipline?” and on the other hand, how many times commenters have declared that they are “independent of Bob.”

I cannot imagine why someone who is familiar with BUGS can STILL say these things.

BUGS is not a Bob Disciplinary Project and if he were thinking properly, any BUGSER would laugh out loud at the idea that I claim to curb your independence.