If you have middle-aged eyes like mine, click to enlarge.
When previous incidents erupted - and when the supposed Online Integritude project was launched - ARA was still on hiatus. However, via their blogs, I was still keeping track of my blog buddies from four years ago. So I remember these "incidents" well, and my palpable sense of outrage at the time.
Since relaunching ARA, I’ve stayed away from blogfights generally, and I’ve avoided Tacky and Pasty like the plague, because, well, really, who would want to read these guys voluntarily? Pompous-ass prose used to make veiled and unveiled threats against people who disagree with them or who call bullshit on their lack of logic, all underlaid with a tone of smarmy self-righteousness leavened with more than a dash of persecution complex - these types are everywhere. Tacky and Pasty are neither new nor original, and they don’t even do it particularly well.
But this is ridiculous.
Now, I don’t know The Boyz from S,N!; I have never so much as corresponded with one of them, including HTML Mencken, who is the target of their psychopathy. But I do know good writing when I see it, and Mencken’s one of the better ones in the blogosphere. (The entire S,N! stable is brimming with talent and wit, but Mencken has an unusual ability to combine deadly serious subject matter, a solid grounding in facts, and razor-sharp snarkability into something not only readable but immensely entertaining.) Which, frankly, is probably the root of the problem, considering the stilted, turgid crap churned out by T & P.
This has gone way beyond the pale. T & P (Tacky particularly, it seems) have an unhealthy obsession with outing liberal bloggers. Anything’s an excuse to indulge in this favorite of pastimes: Tacky’s current pretensions to purpose have to do with Mencken’s supposed theft posting of his precious wedding photos. First, it was one photo - one. Second, no one would ever have known it was a wedding photo if Tacky didn’t keep reminding us - I have to admit that I’ve never been to a wedding where the groom, in silky blue open-necked shirt, enthusiastically channeled Han Solo with a light sabre. (And I gotta tell ya, if I were the groom in question, I sure as hell wouldn’t admit that it was me.) Third, it’s way past time for some sense of proportion here. Posting a Photoshopped image of a publicly-available photo becomes grounds for outing a pseudonymous blogger for the sole purpose of attempting to damage him in some way? Please.
Take a look at the slide above; it lists defining characteristics of psychopathy. Pay special attention to items 5 through 9, 11, and 13.
S,N! has now been hijacked for two days because of this bullshit. T & P are apparently furiously Googling their names and hitting refresh every few seconds, trying to find every new blog post about this mess and hump the comments threads with spurious defenses and new threats. Ordinarily, I’d assume that this isn’t a big enough blog to catch anyhone’s attention, but with this kind of obsessiveness, who knows? So, a warning: Troll the comments threads all you want. There, your words will be held up for all to see, and subject to the derision, scorn, ridicule, pick-your-poison that they so richly deserve. There will be no engagement, no response (except to delete identifying information of anyone either chooses to out, which Tacky, at least, has been doing wholesale in other people’s comment threads).
And that, my dears, is the key: Ignore these spoiled childish fucks. Quit giving them what they want. Post your criticism of them and/or your support of their targets. And then let them rail in the comments to their little blackened hearts’ content . . . to be roundly ignored. If they don’t have anything better to do with their lives than piss into the wind - well, let ‘em. This behavior should be condemned. It should never be engaged.
