End of the “affair”

The VA affair is winding down, as Vanishing American has removed from the Web her entire blog entry and the comments thread that started it all, as well as her subsequent blog entries, thus destroying the very material to which I and others had been replying. It is an unprecedented act. If VA could no longer defend what she and her commenters had written about me, she should have forthrightly admitted it, instead of wiping the statements out of existence as though they had never been, and thus erasing the evidence that was the basis of VFR’s discussions. (Her original, mildly worded blog entry, though not the comments thread that took off from it, which was where the key discussion took place, has been preserved in a google cache.)

For reference, here are the entries that were posted at VFR about this matter. New comments have been added to them over the weekend.

How liberalism reverses legitimate and illegitimate criticism
The “Vanishing American affair” continues
Vanishing American wins the Nancy Hopkins Award
My comments at the Vanishing American blog
And it ain’t over. Here’s a further entry posted after this current entry:
Vanishing American claims she has been “swarmed” by VFR readers

- end of initial entry -

Dimitri K. writes:

Hi Lawrence,

I must admit, you are not an easy-going person. But maybe that’s the kind of people we need. Lots of nice fellows around. But there is a feeling that we are missing some important part of collective brain, which prevents us from functioning.

LA replies:

Come on, Dimitri, I’m not that bad.

But when I’m in the middle of a discussion I stay with it. I guess the difference between me and most people is, I take seriously what people say and I respond to it. Like the guy who wrote to the school massacre thread saying to me that he was “floored” that I “took Laura W.’s ideas seriously.” Maybe some people would have ignored that. But to me he was in effect coming along and canceling out the vast and very useful discussion that had just taken place. I thought that was wrong, and I told him so.

Same with this VA thing. Pretty amazing that VA simply eliminated all the relevant threads. In fact, I refrained from saying about it what I wanted to say. I just called it “an unprecedented act.”

Or a guy who wrote to me over the last few days challenging me on my critique of Darwinism. I responded to his arguments and showed their weakness, and he wrote back, I responded again. Then he responded again, adding, “Not that it matters.” I said to him: “If it doesn’t matter, why are you writing to me?” He answered: “For laughs.” I said he had been having a discussion with me in bad faith and told him not to write to me again.

I take discusion seriously. When people undermine that in various ways (as shown in the above examples), I take that seriously too.

Dimitri replies:

I think she is sorry for having gotten involved into that conflict with you. So she has three choices: 1) insist on her accusations, which she does not want 2) Assume some fault of hers, which is hard and painful 3) forget everything. She seems to have chosen the third variant, which is quite understandable given the weak human’s nature. The problem with this approach is that it does not work: what is said is said.

A reader writes:

I’ve followed your recent relations with VA with some interest. A few months ago I was engaged in a conversation with her about immigration, one of her favorite topics. I thought her views were a little extreme in places—zero immigration legal or otherwise, and, in particular, her insistence that the threat from Mexican/other immigration was no less a threat than that of Islam. On the third go-round in a dialogue that I thought had been mutually stimulating I came up with a few rhetorical questions I thought deserved answering but she deliberately ignored them and after my post responded favorably to someone else about some minor point. I have not gone back since to read or participate. I just went to look for this thread and it looks like all comments have been globally “disappeared.” New posts relegate comments to her forum which apparently requires registration (to post at least).

Your position in this debacle I think has been reasonable. But by now you must be used to the shock that it brings people when you take a stand on something they never gave any thought to as far as its being improper or careless. This seems to me more a sign of our socially dilapidated modern society than of any overwrought defense on your part. The advantages of your system of selectively posting comments are apparent.

LA writes:

In less than one day VA went from charging me with a “Two-Minute Hate,” to throwing the “Two-Minute Hate” charge, along with everything else she had said about me, down the memory hole. An Orwellian bonanza.

LA continues (February 29):

The above comment was written on February 18. Coming upon it now, I realized the references might need to be explained. Both “two-minute hate” (actually, five-minute hate) and throwing something “down the memory hole” come from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. So, to throw a two-minute hate down the memory hole really takes the Orwellian cake, so to speak.

The deliberately mixed metaphors above are themselves a tribute to Orwell, who, in his famous essay on “Politics and the English Language,” attacked the thoughtless use in political speech of clashing images, such as the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot. However, I must say that it seems even worse when a two-minute hate is thrown into the melting pot. In fact, America is becoming a lot like that.

[Back to the Feb.18 thread.]

LA writes:

In order to recall what I’ve written about Vanishing American in the past, I did a Google search and found about 16 VFR entries before last week where VA was mentioned. As far as I can tell, they are all positive or neutral comments about VA. I don’t see a single instance in which I criticized her (who for a long time I mistakenly assumed, in the absence of any correction, was a “he”). The absence of any negative comment by me about VA continued even into the “In praise of brevity” entry which set off the conflict, where two VFR commenters criticized VA over what they saw as the excessive length of her articles, and I did not. The first time I ever personally said anything critical about VA was after she and her commenters launched the personal attack on me in a comments thread at her site last week, calling me all kinds of names, the attack that she has now deleted from the Web.

I repeat that, in the absence of any prior negativity from me about her, it is unfortunate that she did not communicate with me personally about the offending entry in the hope of getting it changed, instead of starting a fight with me over it.

.

Dimitri K. writes:

In general I disagree with the “reader.” Having a blog with open comments sometimes puts you into situation when the best you can do is to ignore a comment, or delete it. That happens when the comment is not to the point, or contrary to your beliefs. It is impossible to get involved in disputes with everyone who contradicts you, especially when people have positions incompatible with yours. Of course, it would be preferrable to answer all opponents in a decent and reasonable form, but it is practically impossible. Every blogger has to decide himself what to answer and what to delete.

I am not talking here about any particular disagreement, or about Vanishing American. What I want to say is that the owner of the blog has the right and responsibility to maintain the blog and the comments. But we can judge him or her basing on those decisions.

A reader writes:

I agree with Dimitri K. that a blogger has the privilege of conducting his site as he sees fit. That is a given precondition. But it is also a privilege to receive thoughtful comments from strangers. My point was to call attention to the peculiarity of a deliberate effort made to disregard a good faith communication following what was (for me) a useful exchange of ideas. Not being able to access that thread in my “defense” weakens my case somewhat, though Dimitri perhaps would say this is irrelevant to his cited principles.

For me this minor episode has relevance to Lawrence’s recent experience and the curious removal of posted material from the VA site.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 18, 2008 11:20 AM | Send