Our lovely anonymous friend is complaining that there are "personal attacks" on him on this blog, which he proclaims are the reason for his defiance of the banning. Since he (a) hasn't linked to them and (b) is, um, anonymous, I have no way of verifying what those posts are or what their content is. I can't commit to taking any action with respect to those posts until I know what they are.
My email address is listed in the comments policy. Let me know what posts are so offensive as to grate you so, and I'll see what I can do.
Actually I prefer you contact me, with the understanding that said contact and any subsequent discussion remain off the record. I believe you have a pretty good idea who I am, but on the off chance that you do not, I value anonymity above all else and cannot illuminate the matter further.
ReplyDeleteI have a strong suspicion regarding who you are, but I don't know for sure, and don't want to email someone about it and find out that I'm wrong. That's particularly so given that the person who would seem to be the top candidate isn't someone I recall making "personal attacks" on -- aside from those after they begun commenting and in reference to those comments (whereas you're telling me there are attacks that predate their presence on this site -- which leaves me flummoxed. It's a big archive, so I might have missed something, but I did do a quick check and came up dry).
ReplyDeleteI can't cut a deal if you won't tell me the demands. If you're superconcerned about anonymity (which -- at least with respect to me -- you didn't think you have in the first place, so I confess confusion), though, you should be able to go through an intermediary -- (since apparently you know me) there has to be someone whom we both know who can relay your requests without telling me who you are.
You can also anonymously leave the links in a comment. Since I still have a comment moderation on, I just won't approve them, and nobody will see the comment (or the links) but me.
Shrug. However strong your suspicions, if you're not willing to even contact someone based on them (at worst getting it wrong and feeling some momentary embarassment), I'm not going to potentially out myself based on them. The first mover disadvantage seems greater for me in this situation.
ReplyDeleteSo, I'm willing to deal fair, but part of my "demands" as you call them is that the onus of contact rests on you.
Shrug yourself. I have a strong suspicion you're just game-playing at this point (and a very strong suspicion that these alleged "attack" posts don't actually exist).
ReplyDeleteThe reason I'm not willing to contact the prime candidate and just flatly ask is that, if I'm wrong, I imagine it would be quite humiliating to him that I thought he would do something like this. And part of my hesitation is that I have difficulty believing the prime candidate would behave in this way in the first place. The fact that my suspicions are "strong" means that I'm partially resigned to the possibility, but I'd still rather believe better of this person.
Particularly since I've offered two different ways for you to identify the supposedly problematic posts that don't require any decloaking at all (go through an intermediary or just leave an anonymous comment linking to the posts); and since you can't care about anonymity that much since you think I already know who you are and are encouraging me to take more steps to confirm it, it's hard for me to take this charade seriously.
It costs me absolutely nothing to leave comment moderation on in perpetuity -- it annoys my readers, of course, because they have to wait for their comments to be approved, but from my vantage point it only makes my life easier. You want to "deal fairly", you have plenty of routes to state your terms without compromising your precious anonymity. You want to keep dicking around, I'm happy to spend the 1.5 seconds it takes to click the delete button.