As some readers may know, recently FreethoughtBlogs called for people who were interested in blogging for the site to apply. As a result we have a crop of interesting new people (see the sidebar) and Marcus Ranum’s Stderr is one such addition. But this week there was an interesting development. Someone sent in an application yesterday but less than ten hours later followed up with another email:
“I retract this application. Your blog is not nearly worthy of my ideas. You represent nothing remotely resembling freethinking. Instead, you are sentinels of a particular and fascist-leaning form of “leftist” “thinking.” I want nothing to do with you or your readers. You wouldn’t understand my ideas anyway.”
I found this highly amusing. There is nothing wrong with changing one’s mind about joining this group. He could have simply said that on reflection he felt that it would not be a good fit for him. I was curious about why the writer felt he had to go out of his way to be so insulting and dismissive and contemptuous, not just of the bloggers here but of the readership as well. After all, his extremely quick reversal clearly suggests that he had not spent much time on the FtB site before applying. How could he know from such a brief acquaintance that the readers here would not be able to understand his ideas and were not worthy of them? And what does not being ‘worthy’ of one’s ideas mean anyway? That one’s ideas are extremely valuable and that these pearls get somehow devalued by being offered to the swine?
Saying that one’s opinions are far above the heads of others is quite odd, the product of a curious mixture of arrogance and condescension and gratuitous rudeness. His strong statement suggests that he felt somehow soiled by his brief attraction to FtB and had to strongly disavow it in order to rid himself of the taint.
Perhaps it is also symptomatic of the way that the asynchronous nature on internet communication, coupled with the lack of any personal connection, lends itself to rudeness.
Mano
Was it this person?
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2016/08/26/university-of-chicago-dean-declares-war-on-student-autonomy/comment-page-1/#comment-1037058
Oink?
Oook.
Oh!
I am bereaved.
It’s nice when assholes are self-censoring.
What a nice man.
And yet you, Prof. Mano Singham, have deprived us of clues to this genius’s identity, so that we might make individual pilgrimages to see who, if any, among us has the capacity and depth to admire even a portion of such mighty insights!
I never realized how much all of you hated all of us!!!
Totally shattered. May have to take a spa day to recover.
*shrug* His loss…
I have a suspicion that this person applied just so that they could retract it with these insults. Probably thought this would get more attention to their insults than if they had just emailed someone or left an insulting comment on someone’s blog.
chigau, #1
Reading the linked-to comment section, I guess the answer to my question is, “no.”
All I can say about that comment thread is…wow!
The only thing that surprises is me is that you’ve given this dolt the oxygen of publicity in responding. Don’t, please, identify them, that would just make it worse, and please, nobody speculate publicly. Just let them go.
Instead, you are sentinels of a particular and fascist-leaning form of “leftist” “thinking.”
I imagine we would have understood the author’s ideas. Probably as boring as any other mad “right-wing’ nutcase ravings but unless totally incoherent we’d probably grasped them that one time we looked at the new blog.
Chirptera @9
I suspect that may be him after all. His comment at 102 in that thread…
Tabby Lavalamp #12
To me, this is even more obvious -- he said in that thread:
The “sentinels of leftist” affectation is too specific and odd of a try-hard phrase to be coincidental.
Tabby Lavalamp, #12:
Yeah, that’s what I meant to say. I had thought that this person just submitted an application just so that he could make a big deal in withdrawing it, but after reading that comment section I decided that, no, he probably was willing to give use the benefit of his Deep Wisdom but was shocked at how the unwashed masses stubbornly insist on remaining mired in their ignorance.
After reading the comments section on PZ’s blog, it looks like he thought Freethought meant believing the moon walks were hoax, and every conspiracy theory since.