Seriously, what's changed? Yeah, this is technically news, but nothing more. Thank ghod for the other letter writers here, because I was starting to feel like the only liberal who didn't live in some kind of rarified Jeffersonian dreamland. "We've caught you, you scoundrel, and now will place a black mark against your name. Let this be a lesson!"

This means nothing in the current climate, not with Il Dunce still calling the shots. You're celebrating having cut a head off the Hydra at long last. But you've got to apply fire to the wound or the Hydra just grows another head.

I'd love for this to actual mean something, but I don't expect it to. All that's happened is we're now able to stamp "confirmed" under another picture in the Rogues Gallery. Until we do more than that the status quo rolls on, and a symbolic victory remains all symbol and no victory.

Okay, I'm past polite now. After the nth Secret Shithead has posted their little automaton comments which demonstrate their utter lack of knowledge about science, reality, or genuine spirituality, I'm calling time on them.

For your information, we don't disagree with The Secret because we lack spirituality. In fact, most of use have wrestled with the complexities of many different forms of spirituality, as opposed to just buying one off the shelf as you have done.

We don't oppose The Secret because it's too complex for us, because it's not. Rather it's too freaking simple, to the point of being baseless, substanceless, and self-contradicting. Seriously, it takes about five seconds to punch huge holes in it. "If it works for everyone, then who's going to grow the corn and pave the roads when we're all sitting on our golden thrones?" "If spirituality equates to materiality, then why aren't becoming immortal, because you can't take it with you?" "If this system works, why are you still such an unhappy, insufferable dick?"

And lastly we don't oppose The Secret because it tosses some token sops to good ideas like maintaining a positive attitude. We oppose it because it perverts good ideas into a system for creating callous, selfish, insular people who would rather fuck the world for their own comfort than live in a society that tries to provide for all.

Your Secret is no secret, at least not to anyone with a modicum of awareness. You'll find it recurrent through human history in many guises, but underneath it remains the same pyramid scheme. And like any pyramid scheme, it's sustained by a few people at the top promulgating it to the seething mass below, promising that out of the millions striving they'll be the ones to sit by their side.

It's self-delusion. And I know you can't hear that, but I have to say it anyway.

Presuming that you are responding to me, let me say that I have no desire to write a self-help book, or indeed any book that dictates spirituality and ethics to people. I am constantly exploring and refining my own sense of these, and readily admit that I should (and could) never state with authority how others should act.

However, I do have sufficient experience and perspicacity to call out a sham, a false science, a pseudophilosophy, when I see it, and in this case I see it. You can ascribe whatever motives to me you need to from your fluffy cloud perch, and you will because you positively need to believe in this system at any cost. But it doesn't make you right, or reasonable, or aware. It makes you a dupe, regardless of the nature or emotion of my comments.

You can continue in your auto-opiated state if you wish. You can also continue to pout and frown and wonder why I'm so mean and angry and hateful and full of darkness. And you can even pretend you know why, and that you're achieving something by playing the schoolyard game of "if you're so right than why don't you...".

None of these matter to me, because as I've said before, they have no impact on the real world. Staying in your dreamy cocoon and thinking of your selfish nirvana will not bring about any change in the actual world, even if you fool yourself that it does.

But I've also said this whole system is self-delusion, and the deluded won't hear. Thanks for proving me right.