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No purges, please

By Michael J. Smith on Thursday May 7, 2009 04:21 PM

I love a grudge match. I love gaudy rhetoric and unscrupulous personal abuse. It reminds me of Smectymnus, and Martin Marprelate, and old Johnny Milton in his unbuttoned polemical mode.

We're seeing a bit of this now, here at dear old SMBIVA, and I couldn't be more pleased.

But I don't love a purge.

This is just a blog. It's not a vanguard party. It's not the sword or shield of anything. It's a place where people can exchange their thoughts, valuable or not as the case may be.

I've never tried to stop anybody participating here, and please God I won't ever have to. And I take a very dim view of suggestions that so-and-so ought to be banished into outer darkness. Old faithful stalwart comrades, in particular, enjoy a halo of immunity.

I've heard suggestions lately that this person or that person ought to go. X is making a pest of himself; Y is turning off potential readers.

There are sites that operate this way. Daily Kos, for example. Ugh.

Let's not go there, as Oprah says. I can't tell you how repellent I find this line of thinking.

Do me a favor, folks: criticize as much as you like, but please, please! Don't tell me to get rid of somebody who rubs you the wrong way.

Comments (38)

hce:

OK, as long as you can assure us the notorious VM isn't actually a creation of OP himself, in order to inject controversy and float some trial baloons.

hce:

I should have said: who else could take OP so seriously as OP himself?

MJS:

Actually -- having known OP for a long time -- I'd'a said he takes himself a lot less seriously than everybody else does.

op:

Gents
Those are the finest complements I've received in public
since I was kicked out of the choate school
For trying to rig a class election

Come. To think of it
A recent denizen of this site
Reminds me some
Of legendary choate Head master scream-more st john

I tried to have myself thrown out for the collective good, but obviously it didn't take. :/

op:

Madame x
I tried to have u removed just out of spite
Because I'm jealous of your
Art

Al Schumann:

MJS, I'm sorry to bring this up again, but as I told you before Owen kidnapped my gila monster and fed the poor thing chicken kiev for six months. He eventually relented to my pleas to return him, but Munger (the gila monster, named after the legendary investor) now weighs eighty pounds and spends the whole day hissing at the library patrons from the roof of my car, which I can no longer drive because he (Munger, not Owen) attempts to bite me every time I open the door. Owen appears to think this is "funny" and routinely taunts me via email.

If this is the kind of left you envision, so be it. However you can't say I haven't tried to alert you.

MJS:

Ms X -- If I should ever get into a throwing-out mood, and I hope I don't -- you'll be the last to go.

MJS:

Al --

In fact it's just the kind of left I envision.

Silly, I know, but a guy can dream.

Actually, Owen lent me the Gila monster for several weeks. Chicken Kiev was the least of it.

I modestly claim that I'm the guy who taught him to hiss at the library patrons. That's my hiss you're hearing.

hce:

OP: you're kidding about Choate? I was there when Seymour Sainted Charlie Rice, and Duncan Fyfed his jolly wyf, and George de Stael glowered in his Sanctum Sanctorum.

Quel coincidence!

op:

shit ear wick
you're really old
steele was stuffed and hanging in the hill house study hall
when i arrived a callow lad in knickers

burgee ayres was dean of hours in my day

op:

can't get a girl get a choatie

op:

the gila monster also went to choate btw

ear ring ole chap

what was the librarian mzz anderson ??
the gila had an affair with her ginger cat

and don;t forget scream more

fucked robert frost
right in the inspiration
thru a wall no less
while the P laureate
was sleeping off a bun
at the lodge
something there is ..indeed

MJS:

Oh can it, please, with all the old-school-butt-plug reminiscences.

You gotta know the type of people who are going to Choate now -- why, I'm surprised you'd admit to any connection with the place.

Al Schumann:

You all are losing sight of the issue. Owen not only ruined my gila monster's digestion, he tricked him into miscegenation with a cat. And with deep regret, I must note that HCE's casual nostalgia is tantamount to approbation. It's bad enough that I already have to endure the smirking sympathy of neighbors, for whom my tragedy and travails are an amusement, but to learn that you too, MJS, have participated... gleefully!


It's not right.

campion:

mjs
for your day, 'my' private prepster scl - rotc impregnated jesuit haven it was - celbrated its post centenary as a medium security prison
a true choatles unattainable desire

MJS:

"Tricked" into miscegenation with a cat? The reptile loved it. You should have seen the look on his lidless face.

The cat wasn't quite so happy. But then, they never are.

Gentlemen, this is all really quite droll, but it's a well-known fact that anyone who claims to remember that year at Choate couldn't possibly have been there.

Anyway, I hear the Gila is highly placed in Summers' staff now, so be careful who you're talking to, eh?

StO:

I'm confused. If I want to be expelled, whose pet do I need to get pregnant?

Al Schumann:

As Ms. Xeno observes, my beloved gila monster has received an invitation to work on restoring prosperity to the country. He will be assisting Larry Summer, whom he met at the library. I find jokes about their possible relationship unfunny and in poor taste. Six months of chicken kiev and deviant sex in the company of unreconstructed Reds leaves very little room for ribaldry. So none those tedious "he'll be happier amongst his own kind" cracks, if you please.

I suppose one could find consolation in this, and thus find it possible to forgive Owen and MJS, but my car has been towed to Washington too. Munger will be chairing meetings from the roof of it. I'm left with a rusty bicycle and a hole in my heart, where an eighty pound gila monster once lived...

StO, your search for a grounds of moral recusal is admirable, as I interpret it and that, but the benedictory opprobrium of expulsion may well come too late to save you. These people will stop at nothing in their efforts to ruin us all. I need only point to Munger's descent into squalor as proof.

Michael Hureaux:

The Gila monster I could live with. It's the herd of ostrichs ALL OF YOU raised that broke loose and have now been terrorizing my favorite row of taverns in White Center. You can't even order a pitcher anymore without a damn ostrich running up, guzzling the contents, and arguing about la crosse scores with Army Eddie, the wino jockey. All ostriches are mean drunks, you might as well know it. The Central Committee will hear of this.

hce:

There's a 12 step program for Wallingford grads, and the first step is to "admit I have no power over my life, and have come to believe a power greater than myself could restore me to sanity." From there, you go on to make amends for all the bad things you've done in your life, and continually take inventory of ongoing examples of false consciousness. As with all such esoteric self-rescue programs, a one-step substitute was eventually introduced -- membership in the SLP.

Al Schumann:

I accept my share of the blame of the blame for the ostrich terrorism, but it's too late to do anything. The ostriches have formed a libertarian pressure group.

op:

Campion
Munger is
A
jesuit plant
In larry ziffle summer's inner circle
His control?

A hooded owl
Named
Warren
Portfolio loyola

Code name tuffet

op:

Mh

Ostrich vanguardists
Bust into a joint
Drink first and ask permission later

Go ahead
Fuzz head
Make my day
Wet your beek

RLaing:

What you ought to do is institute a policy of banning anybody who suggests banning someone else, a suggestion I can safely make because you don't yet have such a policy.

hce:

Is that "RD Laing" of madness is normal fame? I don't think we need you here, yet!

A breath of fresh freedom on the internets. Cowardly, small-minded western self-censoring (kos, bitch phd, etc.) has become more pervasive than Orwell's Thought Police ever were.

dermokrat:


hey in the spirit of the accompanying caption, Happy Victory Day! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Day_(May_9)

op:

the great patriotic war

derm
i spent years
-- ur-luftmensch --
as a pre-ad boy
reading about this epic struggle
our civil war
and
europe's
"class war "
in both cases
siding with the losers

reactionary rebel that i was (am?)

Zhou Enlai has forgiven me
even if mao hasn't

Phillip Allen:

Six months of chicken kiev and deviant sex in the company of unreconstructed Reds leaves very little room for ribaldry.

It's only that unrelieved diet of over-buttered chicken that militates against ribaldry. For nearly forty years I've enjoyed plenty ribaldry as an, and in the company of, unreconstructed Reds, and apart from a very brief 'mistake' in high school have never indulged in other than deviant sex. But given the ravages of time on my metabolism, all that butter would definitely undermine my class consciousness. These days it's low-fat all the way, in the spirit of Lenin, Trotsky, and Sverdlov!

op:

Allen

None of the three are from kiev
Not even smerdy

Vonbronstein

Son of the odessa steps least of all

Though he was as handsome as a rooster

op:

Those gun and dope
Once a great notion of a nation type
Are hobbesian ostrich indeed
After a failed state amerika

brief birdish and flightlessly blightful

Well its for

The Red square

rakes and rifles for me
Come the dawn of stateles amerika

Ahh a trillion
lite beers away that is

op:

So don't I go over
To the nearest SLP
Store front
Asnd get a sock
In the snoot for it

Get out and stay out you
pol pot-lian degenerate
Thanx loads for the bum steer

op:

Viva
The Dictatorship
Of the drollatariat
As mr peabody might say

Al Schumann:

Owen, the Guns'n'Dope ostrich people have a sense of the droll. The writing on the site is heavy-handed, with lotsa romantic rhetoric — looks sadly like it's pitched towards the self-made Babbitts — but representation by 33% ostriches is undeniably an improvement over the present congressional makeup. They could lend the appropriate level of dignity to the gila monster hearings.

I think HCE was alluding to the "frying pan to fire" progression of ontological self-help programs. This, too, shows a fine sense of the droll. I nominate him for the Central Committee, which is rumored to be interested in the revolutionary potential of Ostrich Kiev.

Phillip, thanks for the note of dietary wisdom. Comrades take heed! Especially those who wish to enjoy sex, deviant and otherwise, and thus spite the ravages the of time on their metabolisms.

op:

the system has band me from the prior thread so
the brawl spills over here

sorry
just ignore it unless your name is van

van writes:
"You obsessive loon--you have been patronizing, sneering, attacking other posters out here for years"
patent nonsense

don't judge other folks relationships with me
by your very very special treatment

"liar" tkt called you ...
he knew the skunk by its purfume

you appear to be unwilling or unable to turn off the frantic purge equipment
long enough to actually digest what i write

instead of hunting for passages you can montage into their opposite
why not narrow the differences we discuss to the real differences

purge tactics
are tactics no one uses "seriously"
on a blog lkie this

when in a discussion with
an open supporter of sp
which is a founding plank of this site
and which i always have been
and remain
as i'm sure you well know
in fact i can't imagine
your so wired for purge mode
not notice your own editing process
its possible maybe even likely
this is just a game to u
well good show
that i could get into
but
earnest honest folks here from time to time
might be taken in
by your slime tactics
"hey where there's THAT much smoke... "

show me where beyond name calling
i've distorted the substance of your views
i haven't because i either agree or
say why i don't
your green entry strikes me as naive rationalizing
the type of goof only an amateur at these things would porpose

i can imagine the call for socialist to unite
for the ride into greenville
third party leftist figments
has a long history here in the beasts belly
long and dreadfully counter productive

let the meritoid progs build these electoral
anti gravity machines i say
support em
but use your own limited forces
to go at the lining of the beasts stomach
the corporations the profit nests

or the beast's claws
the armed crusades of empire

------

pressing you to go beyond the rote boiler plate
ought to yield something beyond
just more and different boiler plate
why doesn't it

why are you a cartoon strip ??

let me conclude withy this

any idiot knows sp reduces payment system costs dramatically

any idiot
who doesn't work for an hmo
or a drug company
or a for profit hospital chain
gets it van

you can't possibly believe i don't

pub op is a reform process
maybe we do leap directly to sp
but even if not
one ought to support sp
its the nuclear option
it scares the corporate flacks
the attempt to keep it not marginal but
a taboo subject in public discussion among responsible law makers
is prove the nerve is hoit there and there only

u know i know this

indeed the line that touched off your powder hole
was prolly the one that said
"in the long run "
stark morphs thru stages till we get to sp
why because it is so obviously the optimal basis for a medical sectors fundsing

long run van long run

a notorious time frame
an andrew mellon type time frame

to turn that into a preference for stark
requires malice afore thought as they say

and
as to the silly risk pool side show
you mistake single payer which has npo no pool for the multi payer risk pools
its actually no longer a risk pool if
A its universal
B its compulsory
and
C ts all funded
by
either one premium one co pay level
or funded out of revenues from else where
or any combination of the two

the sp vista when it opens introduces many issues
that are irrelevent now till we arrive at sp

i being the rambling head i am
luftmensched my way
into that future cook shop ...
i guess because pub sec micro is my first love

but as militant activists like u point out
stick to pub op vs sp
push sp till sp gets enacted
or pub op gets enacted instead
all along as part of the sp agit prop
smoke out the traps
hmo's and drug cons will try to set inside any pub op

shooomzz list will be the subject of my next post
in fact

so long as willful wreckers like ...u
don't confuse that for surrender to the other side

crowing here about the superiority of sp is useless we all get it van

lets talk in detail about the pit falls of potential pub ops

i agree complacence is just what the black hats are srtiving for
i hear their flacks now :

"hey you'll get a pub op out of the house ...
and maybe the senate too..
you'll get A pub op.. little ones
so for christ sake
keep your shoit on "


MJS:

And this topic, too, has reached the end of its useful life.

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