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Vanishing American claims she has been “swarmed” by VFR readers
(Note 2/29: See further comment indicating VA’s statement that the “particular individual” referred to in her post was not me. I take VA at her word that in that particular sentence she was not referring to me. However, I am not going to re-write the article to delete my references to her complaint about the “particular individual,” as that would make a hash out of the whole entry. My main point in this article stands: VA made absurd charges that VFR readers were “swarming” her and attacking her with nasty comments, and she has neither presented the evidence for these charges nor retracted them. )
I apologize for annoying readers by posting yet again on this matter, which I thought had drawn to a close, but it is regrettably necessary. At Webster’s Blogspot the other day, the host of that site, Terry Morris, who is also a regular VFR commenter, protested the “sycophant” charge that had been leveled by certain commenters at Vanishing American’s blog against VFR readers. Unfortunately, since Vanishing American has deleted all the relevant entries and threads at her site, it is no longer possible to quote these “sycophant” comments directly or even prove their existence. Then, on the 17th, Vanishing American herself replied to Mr. Morris’s post, talking about unspecified people “harassing” her, about VFR readers sending terrible e-mails and comments to her. Yet she said that only she knew the terrible contents of these comments/e-mails, because they were so terrible she had not posted them. She thus made a very damaging-sounding charge, without giving the slightest evidence for it, and, indeed, while suggesting that her refusal to quote these putatively nasty comments was a sign of martyr-like self-restraint on her part.
She wrote:
Terry—I don’t want to bring the ‘blog wars’ here to your blog but ”anonymous’s” account of my closing comments is not complete.
None of my readers knows what comments and/or personal messages I receive. Many of the worst comments have been deleted. I was being harassed by a particular individual. [LA comments: She makes it sound as though she’s been receiving comments that are so hateful that they had to be deleted, and that they have been coming from an unnamed “particular individual.” Further, since this whole supposed attack on her is being carried out by “many, many commenters from VFR” (see below), the implication is that this particular individual, who was either sending lots of comments or orchestrating others’ comments, is myself. And remember also that she sent this comment to Webster’s after I had repeatedly acknowledged that I had made a mistake in not deleting VA’s name from the comment by a VFR reader that had caused the initial offense.]
And yes I do take things personally and yes people do tend to keep bringing that to my attention. It’s rather hard to be picked apart by strangers.
And yes, maybe I am just a weak and emotional female who has no business being in the rough-and-tumble blogging business. [LA comments: The suggestion is that there is something rough-and-tumble about VFR, that VFR readers are like, say, brutal Wall Street traders, indifferent to any rules of decent behavior.]
This latest business involves my being swarmed by many, many commenters from VFR, and believe me there were nasty comments which most of you will not have seen. Worse words than ‘sycophants’ were used. So please be fair and consider that.
“… my being swarmed by many, many commenters from VFR, and believe me there were nasty comments which most of you will not have seen.” What could she be talking about? Again consider her tactic. She charges that “many, many commenters from VFR” were attacking her, whatever that means. But, when we consider her reference to the “particular individual” who was “harassing” her, the implication is that I was orchestrating and generating this attack. She makes highly dramatic charges, while concealing the evidence for them, and insisting that her charges should be believed in the absence of the evidence that she herself has concealed.
I call on Vanishing America either to present the evidence for the “swarms” of “many many … nasty comments” she has received from VFR readers, including the “worst” comments of which she says there were “many,” and also to provide evidence that she was being “harassed by a particular individual”; or else to retract her comment.
If she fails either to present the evidence or to retract her charges, then I say that Vanishing American is a mentally unstable individual and that her writings should be seen in that light. She herself writes that “maybe I am just a weak and emotional female who has no business being in the rough-and-tumble blogging business.” What she really means by the “rough-and-tumble blogging business” is the realm of rational debate and discussion. As she herself suggests, that is an activity for which she is unqualified.
[Note: “mentally unstable” was the wrong expression here, as it suggests mental illness. What I meant to say, as discussed in the comments below, is that VA is living in a fantasy world, not that she is mentally ill or demented. I regret the wrong word choice.]
- end of initial entry -
Laura W. writes:
“If she fails either to present the evidence or to retract her charges, then I say that Vanishing American is a mentally unstable individual … ”
I don’t follow that equation. Oversensitive, yes. Unprepared for “rational discussion and debate,” yes. But, mentally unstable? You can make false or valid charges and then stubbornly withhold evidence for your claims without being nuts. People do it all the time.
LA replies:
A person who says, “Many many people from VFR have sent a swarm of nasty comments to me, so nasty that I’ve concealed them, so I can’t show them to you, and also a particular individual has harassed me, but I can’t give you any evidence of that either, you just have to believe me,” is evidently living in a fantasy world. She is demented. That was the word I was going to use, and I used “mentally unstable” instead.
Remember this was the same person who said my comments responding to the discussions at her thread were a “Two-minute Hate.”
Dennis Mangan writes:
I was one of those “sycophants” who commented on VA’s site. When I saw that she had deleted all comments, I joined her forum, and pointed out to her that, since there are people in this country who literally think of right-wingers people like us as racist scum, that reacting to critical comments like she did is a huge over-reaction. I said that when I get nasty comments on my blog, I merely delete them, I don’t make a federal case about it, and that I’ve been called a lot worse things than “prolix.” She replied that I had “followed” her to her forum, and then she booted me off it. In sum, if she can’t handle mildly critical comments, and needs to accuse people of harassing her when she gets them, she has no business in the blog world (unless she wants to talk recipes or boyfriends).
I don’t get it.
LA replies:
Yes, and the swarm of nasty and harassing comments of which she complains—comments so hateful she had to delete them so that the eyes of the world would not be sullied by them—were undoubtedly comments of the same nature as yours; and they were most likely not anything like a swarm, but a handful.
Laura W. replies:
“Living in a fantasy world” is a much better way of putting it. “Mentally unstable” or “demented?” If somebody was truly that, one could never say that charitably to their face.
LA replies:
If someone is going public with demented charges, and not stopping the charges, and not retracting them, then a point is reached when it’s time to describe the behavior as it is.
Laura W. replies:
There were unsubstantiated charges (of VFR commenters writing rude comments to her) and hysterical reactions (Two-Minute Hate.) But, I don’t see dementia. Maybe someone who supports VFR was vicious. We don’t know.
I also don’t think there was any implication in the comments you quoted that the person besieging VA was you.
VA has behaved unprofessionally and hysterically. Look how Mencius Moldbug reacted to criticism that he was long-winded. He said, “Yeah, you’re right!” What a classy guy. Still, I don’t see evidence that VA’s mentally ill.
LA replies:
I don’t know where the line between persistently and flagrantly irrational behavior and mental illness lies. By “mentally unstable” and “demented” I don’t mean to say that she’s clinically mentally ill and not capable of conducting her own affairs. I mean that in relation to this situation she is acting in a way that is plainly and persistently out of touch with reality. She is forming fantasies of things that are not there. She deletes a “swarm” of “nasty” comments, including from a “particular individual” who has “harassed” her, then she writes publicly that people must “believe” that these comments and this harassement really existed and were as nasty as she says.
However, if it is the case (and I don’t know that it is the case) that “demented” and “mentally unstable” only have the meaning of clinically mentally ill, then those are not the words I mean. I do mean that she is living in a fantasy world and making up things that are not there and doing this publicly, and that even on correction from numerous people she lacks the ability to see that she is doing this and to stop doing it.
Also remember that my statement was conditional on her failure to retract the charges or provide evidence for them. If she retracts the charges or provides evidence for them, I will retract the statement that she’s living in a fantasy world.
Gintas J. writes:
I remember the comments from the first thread over at VA; many were expressing how they liked her style and method and there’s no need to change it to suit someone who didn’t like it. That part of it probably wasn’t that different from what your readers who like your writing would say about VFR, and I’d hardly call it sycophancy. The big difference was the swarming anti-Austerism.
There’s something about the Internet that brings out the unhinged in people. A big part is the anonymity; it’s like the cover of a dark foggy night, and not many good things happen when you’re out at 2am in the dark fog.
LA replies:
Not only was there nothing of an abusive nature directed toward VA, but specifically, my three comments there dealt with what I saw as the philosophical and cultural significance of this sort of attack and barely mentioned VA. My next comment (at VFR) was when I acknowledged that I had erred in failing to edit the original offending comment that had combined praise of me with criticism of her by name. Further, given the fact that she characterized my comments as a “Two-minute hate,” I think we can fairly assume that there were not ANY personally nasty comments sent to her, and that her entire story is a fantasy.
Gintas continues:
I said,
“There’s something about the Internet that brings out the unhinged in people. A big part is the anonymity; it’s like the cover of a dark foggy night, and not many good things happen when you’re out at 2am in the dark fog.”
In my hurry I didn’t elaborate on that as I should have. VA swims in anonymity at her blog. I’m not saying she’s unhinged, or any specific commenters there are unhinged, but the pervasive anonymity of the Internet I find to be an unhinging thing. Participating in makes me feel like I’m walking the street at 2 am on a dark foggy night. We know which of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde prowls around in the night. For that reason I’ve been paring down my participation in anonymous sites. My goal is zero participation, and I’m getting close.
You, on the other hand, use your real name, and your commenters are using real names (even when it’s just a first name, it’s a big step for the Internet). If the names are fake, at least they’re not the bizarre monikers typically found in the geek (technical / computing, gaming, sci-fi) world. It feels like sitting in the open, in the daylight, by comparison.
LA replies:
I’ve never allowed the bizarre, countercultural, self-assertive monikers that are common on the Web. At VFR commenters use their real names, or pen names that sound like real names, or classical pen names, like Thucydides, or pen names that are otherwise pleasant or ordinary or traditional-sounding, like Harry Horse.
Harry Horse writes (Feb 18):
Why are so many of the seemingly reliable Traditionalists (Savage, VA, etc) so easily challenged into self-destruction—in the sense that emotional rantings so characteristic of homo liberalis, always end up betraying a core that is bereft of reason? Criticism is at the very foundation of Western Civilization.
Unfortunately, this worsens our collective prognosis.
LA replies:
A very acute and disturbing point. This is related to the question of whether Americans have lost the ability to think and discuss things rationally.
Vivek G. writes:
I agree with Laura W. I too do not think that VA is mentally ill. And I say this after your reading your responses to her comment. You hold precision, objectivity and rationality as the most important things. However, it may not be possible for people to live up to your standards. I even wonder if there are any “absolute” standards on these. Often human behaviour betrays subjectivity to some or more extent.
I wonder (I am thinking aloud …) if gender reality may be playing a role here. Women may have a different (neither superior nor inferior to how we do so) way of expressing their opinions. It could seem “fantasy” to us, like what we opine could seem “personal attack” to them.
So it appears more to be a question of subjective preferences. She (VA) has the right to be what she is, VFR commenter has a right to opine that he found VA’s writing long-winded, VA has a right to call it “hate speech”, and you are right when you deny any such intentions. But this could become non-terminating sequence.
Is it not possible to understand it as a difference in communication paradigms? And it could be that some times we enter into mutually exclusive paradigms and so cannot have effective communication.
Jeff in England writes:
I just caught up with all the Vanishing American blog entries and replies and comments. As I said about the Crunchy Con-VFR dispute but even much more so this time, I think you are wasting your time and therefore readers’ time on these 3rd rate bloggers who say little and personalise everything.
Please don’t think I am getting at you on this. I do think you were wrongly attacked by VA, ridiculously so. I know you said you need to defend yourself and I do support your position 100 percent in both cases (and of course there was a lunatic commenting on the Dreher site) but when reading the tit for tat e-dialogue I quickly thirst for dialogue about more substantial issues.
Might have it not made more sense to just leave VA sink in her own banality. I know that you were right and she was wrong but do we really need to read about this affair over several blog pages? The VA affair in particular was initially over nothing. Especially when there are so many crucial issues in the political arena.
The cliche “you couldn’t make it up” certainly applies to the VA affair.
LA replies:
There’s no way I’m not going to respond to attacks like this, Jeff. I made a mistake in posting the original McLaughlin comment. I’ve acknowledged that over and over. She launched an all-out attack on me over that, and the things being said about me fit the pattern of previous attacks, and I’m not going to sit still for any of them, and so I responded. Then her subsequent behavior, like the “two-minute hate” comment, and her deletion of all the entries, and her comment at Webster’s charging that unnamed VFR commenters were swarming her with nasty comments, were all remarkable things that required a response.
From: Jeff
Subject: OH JOKERMAN, YOU DEFINITELY SHOW A RESPONSE
OK, I support your response. But I’m not terribly interested in it. Sorry. Nor do the elections interest me much as none of the candidates left remotely are interested in stopping immigration.
Also somewhere in the Vanishing American dialogue Michael Savage was compared to her. That was ridiculous. Savage may take things personal but he is not like some helpless female afraid to fight his callers. He may scream at them in the most base of ways but he won’t run from them. This was an all out retreat by this blogger.
LA replies:
You don’t have to be interested in it! You have my blessing in not being interested in it. It was something I had to deal with.
And you’re right! I’m the opposite of Jokerman. :-)
For those who don’t get the reference:
Oh, Jokerman, you know what he wants.
Oh, Jokerman, you don’t show any response.
LA writes:
A number of people have said to me: “VA is an obscure blogger, why bother responding to her at all?”
But a number of other people have said to me: “This is a very unfortunate argument. VA is a respected blogger. I like you both.”
But if a respected blogger is spreading reports saying that my readers and I have been swarming her with nasty and harassing e-mails, isn’t that (given that she’s a respected blogger) rather damaging to me and don’t I need to say something about that and demand that she either produce the evidence or retract the charge? And if she won’t do either, is she not then revealed as a person living in fantasies and spreading fantasies?
Laura W. writes:
You’ve beaten up someone who is not your equal. No different from a 200-pound body builder thrashing an 80-pound weakling—and kicking his face in too. That’s plain and simply wrong.
KPA (who for the record is a female) writes from Canada:
… By the way, be careful of further hysterics from the femininely insecure VA regarding your critical comments on the vulnerable Lindsay Lohan and your sycophantic ones aimed at Sage McLaughlin.
Who said VFR wasn’t funny!
LA replies:
John Derbyshire said it. But he’s a nihilist materialist.
James W. writes:
“Swarmed.” Well now, let’s see. I will very arbitrarily set swarm at 50. 25 is not a swarm, but an inconvenience.
Now, how many commenters, not readers, does VFR have who are frequent to occasasional posters? Two hundred? I do not remember a single one who would be incivil, much less a swarm of them. So what are the odds?
I haven’t even worked up the interest to go over and look at the fuss on Vanishing American. I can’t be the only one.
On the other hand, if five or six VFR commenters applied a bare modicum of Austeranalysis as would be expected over here, she may have been rattled. It’s been known to happen.
If you don’t leave her alone, she could become a Democrat.
LA writes:
When Laura W. sent her previous comment, around 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday the 19th, it was such a strong condemnation of me that I thought any reply by me would be superfluous. Especially because I respect Laura so much, my feeling was that I should just let her comment stand there and make its point without my disagreeing with it or indeed saying anything about it.
But having digested it for a few hours, I have to say that I think Laura’s characterization of my behavior is very wrong. Laura compares me to a 200 pound body builder who has not only thrashed but has “kicked in the face” of an 80 pound person. In truth, I have replied to VA the same way I would reply to anyone who had made false and damaging reports about me and VFR readers. VA has said outrageous things, and I have exposed the falsity of them. Admittedly, my doing so makes VA look bad. That’s what happens to a person who makes damaging, absurd, and indefensible public attacks on another person. The second person replies to the attacks, and the first person ends up looking absurd.
Laura’s premise is that I should not have replied to VA as I have done because I am smarter and tougher than VA, and so it’s not a fair fight. I’m sorry, maybe I’m being insensitive, maybe I’m not seeing things correctly, but I just don’t see it that way. VA is an adult, a writer making public statements. I also am an adult, a writer making public statements. In that sense VA and I are equals, playing by the same rules. I’ve replied to VA the way I would reply to anyone who had said the things she had said. Further, I think my replies have been fair and square. I do not feel that I have bullied her, or taken unfair advantage of her, or shown any sadistic behavior toward her. That is the way Laura sees it. I do not see it that way. I think my behavior has been fair and square. I cannot gear my responses to fit VA’s supposed inadequacies and frailties. If she makes statements she cannot defend, and ends up looking foolish and hysterical as a result of it, she should stop making such statements. Laura herself has said that VA’s behavior has been unprofessional and hysterical.
LA writes:
As I said at the beginning of this entry, I had thought the matter was winding up, until I saw VA’s provocative charges posted at Webster’s, which in turn set off this current discussion. Ironically, the very people who have wanted the controversy to end or who thought my position was wrong, have actually kept the controversy going by challenging my position, which each time has required me to explain my position yet again.
However, this matter has now truly gone on long enough, and I am not going to say anything more about it. I encourage other people to let it go as well.
In my last comment, posted about 7:30 a.m. on Wednesday, I said I would be saying nothing more publicly about this matter. However, things are still afoot and cannot be closed down instantly. Laura W. has sent me a reply to my last reply to her, along with a follow-up asking that her comment be posted. So, here it is, followed by (naturally and unavoidably) my reply to her.
Laura W. writes:
You seem to believe I am defending VA. In fact, I am defending you. I am not a reader of VA. I am your reader. I am not impartial here, but openly partial.
There are several reasons why I think this exchange does not represent your typical way of engaging in debate.
Most importantly, as I said before, your characterization of another blogger as “mentally unstable” is extreme. Yes, you qualified that statement farther down in the comments. But, the original comment remains prominently displayed on the blog entry. You care so much about the precise meaning of words, why not change these words when they are inaccurate or harsh?
Second, I think your interpolation of bold-faced comments in the remarks of others is unusually aggressive and does not give the commenter’s remarks the chance to be fairly read. You do not usually do that. Why have you done it here?
Third, you have repeatedly called for retractions and recantations from a person whom I think is too emotional to think clearly. She appears too emotional to participate in strenuous debate and to respond to your demands. In other words, she is an unequal opponent and you should let her be. (Looking over the two blogs, I think anybody could see that this was so.)
I feel no sense of female solidarity with VA. Again, all my solidarity goes with you. You represent the very best of Internet debate and the very best of free, unfettered thought in America. I do not want you to give the slightest fuel to people who say you are filled with your own superiority because I do not think it true. You air differing opinions and give conflicting thoughts room to breathe. You open the windows of this stuffy, claustrophobic room in which we all live by asking difficult questions and coming up with difficult answers. You are so committed to open debate you have often printed comments about yourself that are rude and ungracious. Your moral compass is so finely-calibrated people will never tolerate anything but the highest from you. You are a true master at what you do. It hurts to see you depart in any way from your own very high standards.
LA replies:
1. I didn’t feel you were taking anyone’s side against me, not at all. Your comment was a sincere statement that you thought that what I had done was wrong.
2. Though I came to agree with your point that mentally unstable and demented were the wrong words, I couldn’t change the original post without making a hash of our posted exchange about it.
So I’ll tell you what I’ll do: I’ll interpolate in the original post the note that “”mentally unstable” is not the right word, and please see the below discussion.”
3. I commonly interpolate bracketed bolded comments. I often do this because it’s simply easier than going back and quoting each part that I’m replying to. (As an example, see my interpolated replies to the wonderfully named Mencius Moldbug in this entry. Try to imagine my replies to the spectacularly named Mr. Moldbug in a non-interpolated form. The exchange would lose its liveliness and require many more words.) In fact, sometimes I will interpolate my replies in a reader’s comment, and then have a regular reply following the same comment as well.
In this case, it was not a readers’s comment sent to me, but something that had been posted at another website which I was quoting. So it’s not as if I was interrupting a commenter. But perhaps, nevertheless, that method does appear overly aggressive and I may have to re-think that method of posting discussions, though it is very convenient and generally works well IMO.
4. Earlier this morning, in response to an e-mail from a correspondent who had gotten a long e-mail from VA who told him this thing was a “nightmare” to her that she wanted to end, I posted in the current entry saying the matter is closed as far as I’m concerned and I will be saying nothing more about it. At the same time, I wrote back to my correspondent saying, if this thing was a nightmare to VA that she wanted to end, then why the heck did she post those provocative charges at Webster’s Blogspot on the 17th?
5. Thank you for your very complimentary comments. In particular, I share with you an indignant rejection of the notion, spread by certain resentful parties, that what I’m about is asserting my own superiority rather than seeking truth.
Rick Darby writes:
Just to stamp FINIS on the whole VA business, I clicked on her blog this morning and was greeted by a notice saying “This blog is open to invited readers only. If you are a reader of this blog, tell us who you are! Sign in using your Google Account.”
I guess I am not one of the Elect. I logged in with the ID and password I use for Google’s Blogger, but was told, “It doesn’t look like you have been invited to read this blog. If you think this is a mistake, you might want to contact the blog author and request an invitation.” There is no obvious way to contact her.
Add me to the list of disheartened former VA readers and commenters. When she originally jibbed at that now-notorious line from Sage at VFR, I thought she was just stressed out and having a bad day. Without criticizing you or Sage, I sent her a comment that I thought would help her get over it, to the effect that she was entitled to write her own blog in whatever way fit her temperament and style.
She obviously didn’t want to get over it; the big blow-up that followed suggests a paranoid streak in her. So today we have the culmination—she has retreated into the fortress and pulled up the drawbridge.
It’s too bad. She writes extremely well and is a serious traditionalist conservative. Yes, I too found myself skipping or skimming some of her postings because of their length, but I recognized that she had found a format that worked for her and that she was influential in converting people from liberalism and supporting them in their new understanding.
Perhaps she’ll take time off, mellow down, and return with more perspective.
LA replies:
I just went to her main address myself
www.vanishingamerican.blogspot.com
to check it out. I’ve never seen this before. It’s not only that you have to be an invited member in order to post comments at the blog, you have to be an invited member in order to read the blog at all. A blog closed to the world. Vanishing American has, literally, vanished.
Or, rather, it’s become a secret society.
LA writes (2/29):
Terry Morris sent the below comment on February 21. Through oversight on my part it was not posted at the time. It has to do with VA’s statement to him that the “particular individual” referred to in VA’s post at Webster’s was not me. As I told Mr. Morris in e-mails on Feb 20 when he first told me about this, if that was true, I accepted it. But it didn’t change the nature of the rest of VA’s charges that VFR readers were “swarming” her and so forth. However, I was remiss in not posting Mr. Morris’s comment saying that VA had told him that the “particular individual” was not myself.
Further, Mr. Morris has told me in the last couple of days that half of VA’s comment at Webster’s (copied by me at the beginning of this thread) had nothing to do with VFR but with an incident that took place in December. As far as I can remember and discover from e-mails, he did not tell me this in the Feb 17 to Feb 21 period. This was the first time I heard it. But again, even if half the comment was about other people, the part about VFR readers is still there:
This latest business involves my being swarmed by many, many commenters from VFR, and believe me there were nasty comments which most of you will not have seen. Worse words than ‘sycophants’ were used. So please be fair and consider that.
And VA has never retracted this.
Below is Mr. Morris’s 2/21 comment.
Terry Morris writes:
Our mutual correspondent Belanne has been kind enough to keep me updated on how the VFR discussion over VA’s comments at my blog has progressed, since I’m still not able to access your site. In response to Laura W.’s protest (which I find myself in agreement with, by the way) you wrote:
3. I commonly interpolate bracketed bolded comments. I often do this because it’s simply easier than going back and quoting each part that I’m replying to. … In fact, sometimes I will interpolate my replies in a reader’s comment, and then have a regular reply following the same comment as well.
In this case, it was not a readers’s comment sent to me, but something that had been posted at another website which I was quoting. So it’s not as if I was interrupting a commenter. But perhaps, nevertheless, that method does appear overly aggressive and I may have to re-think that method of posting discussions, though it is very convenient and generally works well IMO. (emphasis mine)
As to your first point, anyone who is a regular reader of VFR knows that you are being completely truthful regarding your common usage of this tool of interpolating in bold bracketed comments. In fact, you’re not the first writer I’ve seen who employs this wonderfully useful writing tool, but you’re probably solely responsible for giving me personally a whole new respect for it since you seem to use it so well generally. However, in this case I own that I’m in agreement with Laura W. My general sense is that you’ve deviated from your normal appropriate usage, and turned it, in this case, more into a weapon than a tool. My impression goes beyond merely being overly aggressive, or appearing that way, though. Consider that in this case, at least in one place where this tool is employed, you misrepresent the intent of the writer VA. In that particular instance Laura is right that you’re not allowing your readers to give VA’s comments a fair reading, injecting as you did your interpretation of VA’s sentence referring to the “being harassed by a particular individual” incident, a point she clarified to me as a completely separate issue from “this latest business,” asking that I please pass it on to you, which I did. I have to ask, why did you not make that clarification in your comments to the article?
As Belanne is my witness, I complained to her in an e-mail about this “tactic” before you posted Laura W.’s comments alluding to it, my point being that two distinct VFR readers had noted the exact same problem with this particular usage of the tool completely separated and uninfluenced by the other’s thoughts on the matter. In fact, my comment to Belanne on the subject indicated that it was as if you were exercising a form of mind control over your readers in this case, not that I thought this was your goal or purpose, but that was my impression nonetheless. Sure, your readers can read VA’s comments for themselves and draw their own conclusions, but if they’re reading her comments at your site first, with your bold bracketed interpolation of the meaning of her comments, then they can hardly be uninfluenced by what you’re saying she’s saying.
If you don’t mind my saying so, I think you’re right that you should re-think the way you employ this method in the future. At least in two separate cases, mine and Laura W.’s, it has given the absolute wrong impression in this case I should think.
4. Earlier this morning, in response to an e-mail from a correspondent who had gotten a long e-mail from VA who told him this thing was a “nightmare” to her that she wanted to end, I posted in the current entry saying the matter is closed as far as I’m concerned and I will be saying nothing more about it. At the same time, I wrote back to my correspondent saying, if this thing was a nightmare to VA that she wanted to end, then why the heck did she post those provocative charges at Webster’s Blogspot on the 17th?
Here again, and not to belabor the point, one of these “provocative” charges you allude to had nothing whatsoever to do with you personally or VFR or any VFR reader, as VA explained to me in a private email and I explained to you as per her request. Yet, as I understand it, you’ve allowed this misrepresentation of VA’s comments at my blog to stand uncorrected. Why? (If you have since fixed this, then I retract my complaint and offer my apologies.)
LA replies (2-29):
I want to point out the irony that while VA and Mr. Morris have been understandably concerned about getting me to post her statement that one part of her Webster’s comment was not about VFR, the part of her comment that was about VFR—namely the provocative charge that that “many many” VFR readers were “swarming” her with comments so “nasty” she couldn’t post them—still stands and she has not retracted it or denied it.
It’s as though VA were saying: “It’s unfair for Lawrence Auster to say that I made an irresponsible, untrue smear about VFR commenters, since half of my statement was not about VFR but other people.” She’s missed the fact that she smeared VFR, that she has not retracted the smear, and that she deserved my attack on her for that smear.
Adela Gereth writes:
First, I’m only commenting on the Vanishing American affair now because I was unable to access VFR for nearly two weeks.
VA’s post in Webster’s Blogspot about “being swarmed by many, many commenters from VFR” who made “nasty comments” where “worse words than “sycophant” were used” reminded me of the assertion made by another “weak and emotional female” (VA’s own description of herself, I hasten to add):
“But I do believe that this is a battle. I mean, look at the very people who are involved in this—they have popped up in other settings. This is—the great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy. ”
I see that VA’s blog is now “open to invited readers only,” which reduces it from a blog to a private message board. Despite whatever traditionalist values VA claims (at length) to hold, her actions in creating, distorting and prolonging an unfortunate and risible situation show her acting as a typical liberal in both thought and feeling. She places the onus for her emotional equilibrium on others by demanding that the public sphere be altered to accommodate her personal feelings. Nor does she see anything wrong—or even just plain ludicrous—in this.
How liberal can you get?
KPA writes from Canada:
I know the Vanishing American incident has gone on for a long time, but I think her problem was in the name of her blog. I understand that it probably came about because of her concerns, but Vanishing ultimately became Vanished, and the word fulfilled its role.
Maybe a simpler, humbler name like “Reviving America” might have helped her out of her hubris. A grandiose attempt at prophecy (who is she to make such a prediction?) ultimately did her in.
Names are important. It’s almost as though we live out those names that we give or are given.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 19, 2008 09:05 AM | Send
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