There’s always something to howl about.

Attention Brad Inman: I don’t want your dipshit “most influential” citation again this year, either, but it is beyond obvious that I am by far the most influential voice in the on-line world of real estate.

Let’s start with some music, just to set the mood:

So: If you run in the wrong circles, these are the kind of “arguments” you can expect to hear about me:

  • Greg Swann is mean.
  • Greg Swann is rude.
  • Greg Swann is vulgar.
  • Greg Swann is angry.
  • Greg Swann is cynical.

Here is an argument you won’t hear anywhere, except possibly at BloodhoundBlog:

  • Greg Swann is wrong, and here’s why…

You won’t hear the latter argument for two reasons: I don’t take positions I can’t defend with an impervious impenetrable invulnerability. And: If I should happen to discover that I have been wrong, generally I will be the first person to figure that out and I will announce my error to the world immediately.

What explains all the ad hominem arguments cited among the first set? You figure it out.

These are the kinds of games that some folks are running while making these persuasively useless claims about my character:

  • They piss and moan to each other about me behind my back.
  • They campaign with each other to try to damage my interests.
  • They pester contributors here to try get them to abandon BloodhoundBlog.

In each of these cases, I think they’re doing me favors — which assertion will probably just piss them off more. People who run in mobs don’t like me, and I don’t like them. Anything dominating personalities can do to recruit those folks to their own side of the table can only save me time in the long run.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this song summarizes my position on this kind of behavior — along with every other kind of behavior:

Recent events have made it more than obvious that I am by far the most influential person in the wired world of real estate. People are wasting irreplaceable hours and days of their lives obsessing over me, topping each other with tales of how ardently they don’t pay any attention to me.

Why would this be so? Again, you have to figure this out on your own, but my take is that they know I’m right and yet they don’t want to be right.

Witness:

What does hating Greg Swann pay? It pays just as much as every other form of TwitBook time-wasting, as it happens, but it may turn out to be even less beneficial in the long run. There’s no destruction like self-destruction.

Just so you know: All of this means this much to me: It is instructive and eye-opening to me to watch these displays of mass cowardice, and commenting in this way affords me an opportunity to help other people learn how to resist what they might think would be an intolerable social pressure but which is, in fact, about as interesting and threatening as a cloud of gnats. To that extent, at least someone is getting something out of this mishegoss.

Meanwhile, the bald-headed big baby of real estate, Brad Inman, is putting together another list of “real estate’s most influential people,” a list I have been cited on before — which citation I always renounce.

How much more rust can collect on the irony? This year’s “most influential” will consist mainly of TwitBook time-wasters — self-anointed, self-promoting “leaders” of the TwitBook time-wasting fad. In consequence, Brad Inman will be just that much closer to destroying real estate representation. This may not be his goal — what conscious goals do big babies have? — but this is the end of his road, even so.

Which is just that much more reason to denounce the list now, and to renounce any mention of me made on it later.

What does it actually mean to be “influential” in an endeavor run by a criminal cartel? Ask Frank Serpico. Ask Galileo. Ask Socrates.

Am I claiming a false grandeur for myself by comparison? Perhaps so. But it sure looks to me like I’m earning it.

But don’t ever forget the Unchained Manifesto: You never have to take shit from morons.

And just so there’s no doubt, let’s get Tom Petty to remind us, once again, what it means to be Unchained: