All that being said, why am I here kicking his coffin? Why not just let decomposing jerks lie there and rot?

Well, I don’t know. It’s probably not very enlightened of me. But, well, first, apparently Aaron just had to keep talking shit about me behind my back, and if he didn’t want to listen to my responses on the subject of me when he was alive, well, he can put up with them now that he’s dead. And while that doesn’t make any sense, secondly, I find Aaron’s approach to blogging to be instructive and enlightening… if only in teaching me what I should try very hard NOT to do. So, let’s look at what I’ve learned not to do, from Aaron:

What I am mostly interested in here is a couple of Aaron’s admittedly elliptical statements:

Which is the entire problem, really. I keep thinking some things go without saying, and folks keep proving that, no, there must be the saying.

I don't think there should have to be the saying.

Meaning, there won't be. There will just be the deleting if need be.

As I understand it… and Aaron is generally so self referential that he’s often rather obscure, which is never necessary, since he’s a fine and talented writer when he isn’t trying to see just how far up his ass he can wedge his own pointy little head… this is Aaron basically whining because, well, he keeps bitch slapping people around for posting stuff he finds offensive or simply exasperating on his blog… yet he does not want to be troubled to explain to anyone exactly what his standards of judgement are. It’s, you know, just such a bother, having to try to communicate with people on their terms.

In other words, if you want Aaron to make you feel welcome in his cybernetic home, you had better be able to read his mind. And if that’s unfair, and childish, and histrionically absurd, well, he doesn’t care.

Then comes another fascinating couple of lines:

So, short version, anyone can post here, as long as you're doing that "worthwhile contribution to the conversation" thang.

If you're wondering how to determine whether or not something represents a worthwhile contribution in my opinion, that's dead simple. Read the other comments. If, on preview, yours jumps out like a sore thumb, that's a good indication that you maybe don't want to hit the post button.

On the first part: demanding that people ‘make a worthwhile contribution to the conversation’ seems remarkably pissy to me. For one thing, it’s an entirely subjective standard, which I’m sure is why Aaron liked it. For another, Aaron often used to post crap that contributed nothing worthwhile to any conversation, as one can see in this entire narrow minded, brattish, hatefully snide and utterly conceited post by him. If there’s a single ‘worthwhile contribution to the conversation’ in this entire 354 word entry, I can’t find it. It’s pretty much entirely Aaron getting snarky.

Moving on to the second part, where Aaron admonishes people to look hard at their entries, and strongly consider not posting them if they ‘jump out like a sore thumb’, well… hully gee, boss, that sounds a whole lot to ME like ‘be like everybody else or I will shit all over you’. Which is a pretty astonishing sentiment coming from someone as self consciously, and self declaratively, iconoclastic and individualistic as Aaron was.

I suspect Aaron would roll his eyes and say he’s simply asking people to be respectful of each other, and he would be utterly sincere, too. It’s just when someone like Aaron says ‘respectful of each other’, what he means is, ‘sycophantic towards me’. Aaron enjoyed having his ass kissed, and I would be stunned if any of the three ‘white guys’ he threw off his blog got tossed for being too obsequious.

And then we come to my favorite bit in this whole thing:

And yes, some of the regulars violate them etiquette suggestions. You're right, I am hypocritical, play favorites and am generally not a nice person. Which begs the question as to why you'd want to post on the web site of such a person. That's right, you wouldn't. Buh-bye.

Speaking only for myself, I wanted to post on the website of such a person because I’m gullible. Aaron was an extremely intelligent and articulate person who had read and listened to and enjoyed a lot of the same things I have read and listened to and enjoyed, and his coterie of regular commenters were all similarly intelligent and articulate. I have this idiotic bias; I yearn to believe that intelligent, articulate people are high quality human beings. And I enjoy hanging around with high quality human beings, thus, I was delighted to discover Aaron’s blog and start posting there.

I did not want to believe, and was not willing to believe, that Aaron and his orbital array of suck-asses were all fairly reprehensible, mean spirited, shallow, childish, cowardly, and insecure until, well, it turned out that all the female posters on Aaron’s blog were angry at me because I posted so many comments I drew more attention away from them than they felt was acceptable, and Aaron himself wasn’t happy because (I’m guessing, but it’s a guess that is compatible with everything I saw then and have seen since about Aaron) Aaron didn’t like having other males around who are anywhere near as smart and funny as he is.

And, since he brings it up, he especially seemed to find smart funny WHITE guys aggravating.

However, once Aaron did indeed show himself to be a stinking hypocrite and not at all a nice person (or even, in most ways, an actual adult) I did indeed lose all interest in hanging around at his website. And stopped.

Let me sum up, here. Aaron has basically stated three things in this entry:

See, here is where I like to think I differ from Aaron Hawkins (other than in, you know, being a white guy, and not being dead yet):

I don’t casually remove someone’s ability to express themselves, even within a space I am paying for myself (as I am paying for my comment threads) without thinking very hard about it first, and when I do do it (I’ve done it twice now; there are two specific people banned, not from this blog, but from my comment threads), I explain why afterward, in some detail. It’s important to me that I understand why I took that step, and that other people understand why I took it, as well. This wasn’t Aaron’s style; he simply wanted to be a bitch when he wanted to be a bitch, and found it is overly onerous that people would expect him to actually justify such at the very least questionable behavior in a consistent, reasonable and adult fashion.

I also would not suggest to people that if they wish to retain the privilege of posting their thoughts in my comment threads, they should carefully study everyone else’s comments and conform to the styles therein. In fact, I find the notion of trying to enforce anything beyond basic civility to be repugnant. Now, it may be that Aaron was simply asking for the same thing, but I doubt it. My comments are all still available in Aaron’s archives and they were ALL civil, with the exception of one response I made to Aaron after he directly insulted me for absolutely no reason… and I apologized for that one almost immediately, in public. No such apology to me for his many insults at me, public or private, was every forthcoming from Mr. Hawkins.

Lastly, if someone were to suggest to me that I were applying what standards I have inconsistently, and letting people I like more get away with stuff I was slapping, or expelling, people I like less for, I would vociferously deny it. If it were proved, I would hang my head in shame and apologize for it. I do not think I have ever been a hypocrite on this blog, at least, in that context, but if I have been and it were demonstrated to me, I would not puff myself up and brag about being that way, while truculently defying anyone who doesn’t like it to shut the fuck up about it, as Aaron does. I think being a hypocrite is an egregious personal flaw, and I assiduously try to avoid it.

As I recall (and people are welcome to correct me if I am wrong), the two people I have tossed off the blog to date were tossed off for the following reasons:

One of them admitted that he had only been trying to befriend me in hopes of ‘bringing me to my senses’ in regard to some of my viewpoints and opinions that he thought were simply, flatly wrong.

The second of them I simply loathe, based on some personal exchanges of long ago between he and I in which he behaved in a thoroughly despicable manner. (He’s admitted it himself.) What I hated about having him comment on the blog is that he was always extremely polite and supportive (in fact, he was often so fulsome and outright sycophantic that he gave me the willies) and the essential civility and decorum I value so highly demanded that I respond to him in a polite and cordial fashion, and since I simply can’t stand the fucker, this aggravated and exasperated me no end. I believe that some hypocrisy is necessary in any civil society, but being pleasant to that asshole in my own comment threads was just too much stress for me to deal with in any voluntary leisure time activity.

Those were the reasons I banned each of them from my comment threads. I will admit, I also found each of their comments, individually and in aggregate, annoying as hell, for various different reasons… but I wouldn’t ban someone for annoying me unless they had done something I considered to be a clear violation of basic adult codes of behavior. One guy had done exactly that in my comment threads, the other had years before in an APA I used to be a member of; I didn’t want to put up with either of them any further, and I didn’t.

That, however, seems to me to be very different from throwing someone out for reasons I don’t want to be bothered to explain, while admitting that if someone I liked better did exactly the same things, I’d let them get away with it.

However, if I banned people from my comment threads for being smarter and/or funnier than I am, Mike Norton would never post here again. If I banned them for occasionally expressing opinions I personally find onerous and exasperating, my buddy Nate would have been blocked a long time ago. And if I insisted that everybody write exactly like everybody else in order to continue posting, then I don’t think any of my (admittedly few) regular commenters could post here, because none of them can be even remotely mistaken for one another.

And that’s all I have to say about this.

Hey, I can bitch more about the election, if you really want me to…

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, "Wow, I didn't recognize you in men's clothing". According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I'm reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I'd take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here's The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people's blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin's Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron's blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don't really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren't related to me by marriage, I'd most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I've learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don't care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I'd get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don't Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.