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  1. rapiddominance says

    Its me, again.

    Can threads like this where there really isn’t much to talk about be treated as ‘open’? I guess I’ll find out.

    Because your photo posts don’t draw a lot of comments, they don’t draw a lot of readership, either. Therefore, as I bring up something months old and obviously painful, you can perhaps know that I’m not interested in affecting your readership in any way.

    Some of this I’ve said before, some of this is new:

    You wrote a piece in which a literary device was mistaken as a homophobic act. From there, quite a few people from the ‘special gender issues’ community tore into your ass with no respect or appreciation for the years of support you had given them. They showed no concerns at all for the connection between your heart and the public outreach that you do. They ripped YOU open and hurt you, whether or not you want to admit this.

    Simply saying “I am sorry” to them wouldn’t do because you knew you were in the right. You would have been complicit in your own self-smothering had you done that. And yet, you didn’t want to lose your relationship with your readership/following either; and so it makes all the sense in the world that you tried to hold on to them–through several more blog entries.

    The ‘holding on’ phase saw very little in the way of change of hearts. The truth is, those who turned hard against you were never going to TRY to see things from your perspective or take your personhool into account. Then, there was this: Fellow bloggers jumping in on your case over small issues like your qualms with political correctness. Even if they were right they were ignoring the emotionally damaged mindset you were in at the time. Did they do or say anything that made you feel cared about? Of course, they might have felt the same way as most of the crowd about your original post; I don’t know. BUT, if they DID understand the literary device of your original post and recognize that it wasn’t of a homophobic origin then why was there no evidence of any effort on their part to protect you emotionally from the beating you were taking? Why did we never hear them say, “OK, guys, try to understand . . .”

    There was this Ed Buckner who backed you. There were a couple of lower key personalities. But more or less, your colleagues at the FTB’s stayed the hell away from you. And a couple of them, like Myers and Brayton, are clearly smart enough to understand the true nature of your original post. You’re friends with PZ, right? There’s that picture of you two together. I noticed that!

    Perhaps they tried to help you in other ways. But keep in mind that they did nothing to sooth the flames in your audience and that it was YOU who had to sit there and burn.

    I said to you in a recent comment: “Most of your readers don’t know this, but I do.” I was referring to your ‘loss of heart’ in the culture war.

    Was I wrong?

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