3. 'Hamas' Jenkins
I apologize in advance. This is going to be another non-roast, but since my Talking Can one went over fairly well, I'm going to do it for Hamas as well. If you don't like it, I invite you to voluntarily ban yourself for a year.
Do you know what makes me smile the most about this place? When you get a new member who's been a Chiefs fan for years, and he gets really super excited that he found such an active and fun forum for Chiefs talk. He eagerly starts gabbing away various platitudes about supporting Alex (or Cassel if you're going back several years) and how the Sea of Red is the best fan experience in the NFL. The guy seems nice, and he thinks everybody on here is just as supportive, because we're all Chiefs fans. But he's not met with supportive or polite discourse. He gets inane comments about his mother and family, suggestions of ways he could kill himself, and nothing but shame and vitriol for his small-minded thinking. The new member says something like, "This forum is a hell hole. What the hell is wrong with you guys?" and is never heard from again.
That is perhaps my favorite part of Chiefs Planet. That notorious reputation among the other Chiefs fan sites is what makes this place so great. It's the toughest saloon this side of Mitch Holthus' disgusting mole on his face.
We have people like Hamas to thank for that. Sure, we've had trolls and dumbasses like Mecca doing that shit for years, but Hamas is much different. I think more than any other member, he has demanded a higher level of posting excellence from this community. And he didn't just do it by storming in and shoving his opinion down everybody's throats as soon as he got here. He didn't act smarter than he really is; he posts intelligent things because he IS that smart. He led by example in showing us what the discourse on this forum was capable of being.
On the internet (and in life for that matter) everybody tends to not listen to new ideas. It could make total sense to them, but if it's not explained in such a way that will soothe a person's ego and convince them that this new idea was something individually researched or realized through intuition, that person probably isn't going to change his or her mind. Very rarely does a person come around that can pull off change in a person's mindset. Especially on the internet, where the absence of pathos can really limit the tools of rhetoric.
Hamas was unique. He would treat you with respect, but he simply wouldn't tolerate stupidity. And it was everywhere. People liked Tyler ****ing Thigpen, for crying out loud. Telling people to go kill themselves was an unconventional way of winning people over to your view of the situation, but when you're as organized and precise of a thinker as Hamas is, the combination of reasoned discourse and offensive insult was quite a lethal 1-2 punch.
There are a handful of brilliant Hamasisms that I've picked up over the years and reframed to fit real conversations. I've been using a lot of metaphor and satire in these roasts, and I've definitely gotten better at it, but I've only been digging them out because I've seen the elegance and grace that can result from their proper and effective use. For instance, when he wrote something like, "Hester Pioli should be forced to wear Cassel's $60 million contract as a scarlet ****ing letter," that opened a new world for me. My Phobia roast would not be here if Hamas had not dared to mix literature with football operations.
The Gang of 14 treatise should be required reading in all Kansas City public schools. Just imagine. The Chiefs Kingdom would be far more representational of CP's attitudes. Mitch Holthus would stop talking about Alex Smith's toughness when he struggles in a game and instead would make a plea for somebody to pour antifreeze into Smith's Gatorade bottle. The next time the Chiefs have the #1 overall pick and draft a MAC conference OT, the NFL Network wouldn't see a room full of cheering drunk assholes. They would see a bunch of signs telling them to go hang themselves from an AIDS tree.
That's why Hamas is #3.