I started this blog one day while I was the weekend blogger at Echidne of the Snakes where I was asked to fill in weekends. Apparently Echidne who had read the things I posted at my first experimental blog "olvlzl" liked what I wrote enough to ask me. She had several others who did as well, including the wonderful Suzie and the wonderful Phila who seem to have dropped out of blogging entirely, I have no idea where they are now but they, like the still writing Echidne, were very, very good.
Anyway, I wrote there the same kinds of things I write here and they got a strong reaction, quite often negative. Now, I love to argue, I always have loved it, I've learned a lot from arguing, both in how to defend my point of view and how to change it when the person I was arguing with either pointed out mistaken ideas I used or when they had better arguments. I still like that, what's the use of bothering to read stuff if you're just going to stay the same person you were when you were 12? Why go on living or, at least, pretending you have a life of the mind when your mind mummified in adolescence or puberty? As an aside, it's rather remarkable how many pop atheists brag about just having that kind of a mummified mind.
I did, though, find most of the arguments I had with people online weren't those kinds of growth experiences, they were totally futile. I began this blog to post one of the things that got negative reaction with the idea that I was getting tired of that but then let it go for a while.
My time at Echidne's ended one weekend when I wrote something based in my experience as a gay man who came of age in the 60s and whose experience as a gay man has encompassed all of those decades of changes that came after that. You can read it early in my archive, here. It was not well received and I got tons of viciously negative responses and, unusually, inaccurate and negative reactions at a couple of major websites, Salon being one of them. I found that the "journalists" who did that weren't interested in correcting their misrepresentations which surprised me a lot less than it once would have. I'd gotten vicious comments before, one when I wrote about a niece who had died as a result of her mental illness, to put it mildly, a lot of the people who commented on that were total assholes who I wished the worse to. But the comments on the last one were on a whole different order of it.
By the second day of it I was fed up enough that I terminated my participation as a writer in other peoples' blogs though I remained on good terms with Echidne who is a wonderful writer., someone I can't understand hasn't been picked up for paid journalism. She writes English better than most native English speakers and she is one of those rare writers who actually researches what she writes about. Maybe that's it, most journos are lite on the citations when not totally free of them, heavy on the urban myths and click bait.
When I quit the guesting I decided from then on I would handle negative comments on my terms, using what I felt like using and ignoring the rest. I have never posted all of the comments that I've gotten here and over the years the percentage of those I chose to use, on my own terms, has lessened. I don't get all that many useful comments - I have no idea why but choose to believe it's a sign of agreement - and am less and less interested in wasting my time, the negative comments being generally predictable and stupid.
I have used a number of comments that I knew were being cross posted at Duncan Blacks's play-lefty blog but have realized the buffalo-butts who mostly comprise its blog community never read anything, no matter how many citations of evidence you present to back it up. I'll still present citations and evidence and reasoned arguments but I'm doing that entirely on my terms from now on, too. I also knew that they were mostly a self-congratulating and ever more isolated little clique that the general world ignored. They are safely allowed to stew in their prejudice.
As to your question about the name of this place, I am a thought criminal, as I was told over and over again at other blogs over the years, so I went with that name.
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