John, John, John...and you complain that Hemingway's review was long and boring? Please.

I certainly haven't gone through and made a thorough research of your posts because frankly I have better things to do. I did a quick scan...but the only places I saw your name were posts where you took to task some teacher who was posting complaints about a school. If I've missed something and maligned your posts, unfairly, then I apologize...but it certainly an easy mistake to make.

Maybe it's the ways you launch into these guys that gets me. The way I see it, you often take really minor or tangential points and use them to "debunk" the complaint, completely missing the main points. Let's look at some, shall we?

Dr. Cross and Gannan: I agree with you that he seems to have stepped out of bounds by moving his girlfriend in. You may notice that I, too, asked him to post more info about this. However, you also assert that Dr. Cross "quite plainly stuffed Gannan Normal College from start to finish" and that he "evidently threw a tantrum or two and then did a runner." I don't know these things for sure, John...and neither do you. You simply don't have this information, at least not from this site; these are the words of a smear campaign. I readily acknowledge that I failed to make an immediate connection on some of the ramifications of his case. But at least I'm making such assumptions for the sole purpose of tearing someone down. So you might want to back off on the "wild accusations" and "pot calling the kettle black" stuff.

Oh, yes...it's claimed that this school confiscated Dr. Cross's belongings for some months, make a lot of pretty dire threats, and so on. And you don't think this is draconian? Wouldn't it have been enough just to fire him or something? If Dr. Cross is telling the truth, then the school's reaction seems way out of line.

And even with Dr. Cross's mistakes: what's it to YOU?

Yi/Nanhai NeuSoft: I had a lot of problems to your treatment of this one. I actually wrote a review at the time, but my computer hiccupped and I lost it before I could post.

First of all, you responded to a pretty nasty situation by throwing the rulebook at the victim. You know as well as I do that most newbies don't bone up on the mysteries of Chinese visa laws before coming here. They don't know the environment and don't even realize that they need to do such defensive research. They tend to do what I did when I first came here long ago, and what I suspect you probably did as a newbie as well: they trust their schools to steer them right on these matters. Yeah, it may be a mistake, but it's a naive and forgiveable one. Their going to trust a year of their lives to these schools, so why shouldn't they tend to believe that the school is at least giving them good advice on these routine adminisrative matters?

You also know as well as I do that coming here on an L or F visa and then converting is extremely common practice. You can find tons of online advice saying that it's OK to do this. And it usually is.

Secondly, you're using this failure to get information to distract the argument away from what it's claimed the school did, which was to lure over a bunch of teachers with contracts signed by both parties and then tell them "No work for you. Sod off." This is weasel behavior in its lowest form, and no amount of after-the-fact armchair quarterbacking is going to alter that. And a failure to independently research the visa laws does not in any way justify or excuse what the school did.

And we still have that same question here: What's it to YOU? Why all this work to try and adjudicate a situation where you had no knowledge and no involvement?

Barry Donnelly/Ruwi: I didn't read much of that series and I certainly didn't know there would be a test. So I'll leave it at saying that I'm surprised to learn that writing badly or being long-winded and boring mean that one is dishonest or has no right to lodge a complaint.

Oh, and yes, What's it to YOU? Why jump in to muddle up a situation that even you admit has some grounds for complaint?

Hemingway: Here's where it all started. Yes, Hemingway is my friend. Yes, I did have considerable knowledge of this situation. No, I am not the one who stirred his review up again; that was done for us by someone with a personal grudge against Hemingway. Yes, I know why this guy felt he had to try and tear Hemingway down. My friend was being slandered and hell, yes, I did jump in to defend him.

So we've looped back to the burning question: What's it to YOU? Why, when this guy was already under serious attack from an envious little a-hole, did you feel compelled to jump in and rip him simply because you felt his account was long, and full of details that YOU didn't think were relevant even though you knew nothing of the incidents and had no apparent involvement with any of the characters in the story?

I do jump in with a lot of opinions, usually based on my own experiences or those of people I know. But if you'll look at my postings you might notice that many of them are, supported or not, justified or not, an attempt to help someone or at least supply an opinion as part of a discussion. This is, as I understand it, kind of what happens on an internet forum, yes? So at least I'm not jumping in to cross-examine other teachers for my own mysterious reasons. Personally, I'd much rather be seen as "foolish" than as "thriving on the misery of others."

And no, I don't think all schools in China are the enemy. Only MOST of them...the longer I'm here the more certain I become that you can count the upright jobs in China on your fingers. But even at that I have no history of jumping in and attacking specific schools about which I have absolutely no knowledge or no connection.

I'm not the only one easy to overturn, John, and all the other foreign teachers in China and myself are not the only ones who can be seen through.

Earthling, you're merely a troll; at least John actually has an opinion about something. All I have for you (Earthling) is the same obscene hand gesture I had for you last time you popped up in here. Not real intellectual, perhaps, but it gets the point across and it's better than you deserve. You're still a punk and I can still take you.

But oh, trolling is such a dazzling display of intellect.