where community support officers fear to tread

This was originally posted on the evening of Wednesday 27/08/2008 with the title above, the tags beneath and the following entry-text:

"Due to an unfortunate scheduling mix-up I spent half an hour waiting unnecessarily in the car park outside a converted school in Craigmillar this evening as the sky darkened and the number of caravans and vans parked around a bonfire in the adjacent field increased. At least I was equipped with a bicycle to escape if things turned nasty; hopefully the learner drivers crawling around the nearby roads would have drawn off some of the attack though the blockage of the straightest route to the cycle path by construction work might have resulted in entrapment in the warren of roads in the nearby estate."

The following comments were then made; please note that italicised text indicates a direct quote and does not reflect my views or opinions. Comments in normal font are mine.

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Now, what have you got against caravaners?

~ ##########
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?

There were several large and bounding dogs in the vicinity of the caravans and vans on which I was keeping an eye and both ears as I both fear and despise dogs, especially dogs which occasionally bound slavering (and largely) out of the bushes to the side of the nearby cycle path with no lead.
~ wingpig
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i belong to a caravan club and certain members have dogs, one member has 4 dogs, what reason are you caravan phobic? Is that the right word?
~ ##########
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I wouldn't really describe myself as caniphobic as I consider my deep mistrust of dogs entirely rational.
~ wingpig
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I think wingpig is either assuming these people are illegal travellers, "squatting" on this land... or he knows this and is disparaging the entire livelyhood of these people in a sweeping, yet convoluted paragraph.
~ #####
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i feel it should be a deep mistrust of the f**kwit owners.

i'm with ##### though. it does seem like a rather harsh and sweeping generalisation you have made.
~ ######
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Again, italicised text isn't me.
It is most unfortunate that people have attempted to assume that they know my thoughts and have (creatively or otherwise) misinterpreted. If they'd maybe asked before steaming in with both feet blazing it could have been clarified without the need to remove the post but it was late at night and I didn't fancy leaving it there overnight for more people to grab the wrong end of. As it was a follow-up comment from one of the authors of one of the original comments (following the comments' removal) indicated that the commenters were (surprisingly in this particular case) tracking the entry so I took the whole thing down in the morning.
To reiterate: the comments made assumptions about my opinions. These assumptions are incorrect. Interesting to note from whom they came, though.