I don't like that we can't question this story because it's fictional. It has legs because of the way it is written, but no one can jab or poke at it without the obvious "well, it's just a story, man" line. I hate outs like that. It's been mentioned that there is an overall religious feel to these articles. I think it's because religion always has an out when it needs to explain something using evidence. Then there is the article title, "I don't hire unlucky people" with "raganwald's posterous" as the header. Not sure how someone could glance at this and determine it was fictional - but I think you know that.

> The fact that such people are in a minority doesn’t invalidate their (or your) feelings

Well, we don't know if they are the minority or not. No one has really taken a poll. I'll say I've found the same lineage in your articles. They tend to play on the emotionally-binding do the right thing narrative - which is fine, but the articles always conclude with this overall "so that's why you have to do it this way" feeling. Morals aside, there's really no validation to these ideas. It's one thing to tell a story and have a happy ending, but the subject matter is often timely and succinct to current events - making it (in perspective of the moment) newsworthy. I understand it is easy to talk around that, so I guess one would have to ask "Why do you write in this way?". If your articles are politically-driven, then why write fiction? If story-telling is your angle, why the call to arms narrative?

This isn't to say your writing isn't good - to the contrary. But if we're talking about whether your articles could be confusing to some – I'd say I agree.

I found the style grating as well, but not because I thought it might have happened or even that you intended for me to think so. It was more that I found the parable style condescending. Heavy-handed and self-indulgent are a couple of hyphenated terms that might apply to some small extent.

I probably wouldn't have copped to it quite as fast if you hadn't named one of the characters Bertie Wooster, which was a lovely bit of signaling. Good job there.

Saying that I think the story really happened is an exaggeration in my case. Obviously I recognized that the story was false strongly enough for me to know that I should put my skepticism filters on. I knew intellectually the story didn't happen soon after starting reading, from the style of writing. But it took extra, conscious effort to ensure that that understanding was shared by my more base word-understanding mind, too. Basically, I read in words as truth, and have to manually tag each thought as "dubious" after reading them. Or perhaps I would still disbelieve what I read even if I didn't consciously attempt to disbelieve it, but consciously disbelieving what I read is a much-practiced habit that I would find hard to stop, so I still prefer straightforwardly-presented arguments to fictional-story arguments.

Apart from that misunderstanding, I do find it plausible that, as you hypothesize, most people need less effort to disbelieve what they read than me.

Further reinforced by your choice of names: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertie_Wooster