(Update: I suppose I should not have been surprised, but the outpouring of support I recieved after this post left me floored -- again.
Thank you all so very much. You have no idea how much it means to me.
I have been able to download my mail, but I still can not send outgoing mail through ejectejecteject.com. It may have something to do with my ISP, or my Outlook Express settings. Since I owe so many of you replies, is there any one out there who might have a solution? I'd love to hear it. Even better, I'd love to be able to WRITE BACK and thank you for it.)
I am, as usual, short on time, but this seems as good a time as any to tell you a little bit about the kind of person I am.
Several times since I started this project, I have received thoughtful and well-reasoned comments in direct opposition to what I have written. In most of those cases, I have responded personally to the author, and invariably I have learned something. More often than not, they remain friends.
I wish I could say that this was the norm. It is not. Obviously, what I write can generate strong feelings on both sides. I have in the past enabled the comments section because I am in this to say something, and to learn something, too.
But time and time and time again, I see the same pattern emerge, which to me speaks volumes about the nature of the opposition. For every reasoned argument I get I also receive twenty, or fifty people who essentially stick their heads in the door, yell F**K YOU! at the top of their lungs, and then run away.
Now we need to spend a moment to talk about the kind of person I am, and am not.
If I am sitting in a restaurant and someone comes up to me and calls my date a whore and throws a drink in my face, I am not going to use my vast powers of intellect and my deeply refined sense of perspective and history to slash them to metaphorical ribbons. It's not that I don't want to, it's just that I am not capable of making that decision. Because in the time it would take for me to weigh these alternative I will have flown through the air and have my hands around that son of a bitch's throat.
Generally, I am immune to most of these taunts when directed at myself. But I do recall occasions when people have called Abraham Lincoln "the greatest traitor in American History" and called close personal frineds of mine some really foul names, and at that point a switch gets thrown in my head and I want to pound them into purple pulp.
Am I ashamed of this impulse? I am not, although a few people have written that they are shocked -- shocked! -- that "the mask has slipped and the real Bill Whittle is revealed."
So let me say this about the real Bill Whittle...
I stared this weblog in defense of the slanderous charges being leveled against this country. I use fact, reason and history because fact, reason and history are on my side. But for those of you who feel that life is nothing but a very clever, ultimately pointless circle-jerk of rhetorical parry and thrust, you should know this: There are still people (I am one) and there are still nations -- this is one -- that know the meaning of the term "fighting words."
For some people, there are insults that are simply intolerable. Enduring them is inconsistent with one's own honor, integrity and self-respect. I realize, intellectually, that the people who come here and hurl such invective cannot concieve of these qualities.
The one thing these provocateurs have in common -- and this has been universally true -- has been their cowardly and telling refusal to leave an e-mail address. One or two of the Titans of Integrity have had the audacity to say they don't supply an address because they don't want to receive "hatemail."
Translation: I am making this hatemail anonymous because I can't bear to receive hatemail.
If it is true that we can judge ourselves by the quality of the people who oppose us, then let me say my heart is bursting with pride.
I publish my thoughts under my own name. I provide a means of contacting me because I am proud of what I do and who I am. I am confident of my ability to respond to argument and criticism. So when anonymous dipshits whose philosophical underpinnings are so weak and whose moral courage and personal integrity would not dampen the inside of a thimble leave taunting, infantile and imflammatory remarks, I want to do what I have been doing. I want to fight them. I am, in my heart of hearts, a fighter pilot. I aggressively defend the ideas and people close to me.
Of course, the internet is tailor-made for this kind of passive-aggressive bastard. There are untold millions of snivelling cowards who would never dare make such statements to one's face, but who will gleefully sit in the dark basements of their withered souls and throw their incoherent bile at anything they choose.
Just so I am really, really clear on this point: I really wouldn't care what, or how these people write in my comments section, if they only had the basic personal integrity to sign their names so that I could respond. But they don't. In my value system, this makes them reprehensible and vile beyond description, because I admire people who can take a principled, well-informed and well-reasoned opposing viewpoint.
One final observation that I find very, very telling, and that is this: I -- and others -- have found that what these people really want is a soapbox, because what they are, essentially, are contrarian, scared children who like to make a scene in polite company. There are many people who profoundly and passionately disagree with me, and these people publish their own thoughts and arguments and are prepared to take the consequences. I have no quarrel with them whatsoever; indeed, as I said, I admire them and have some appreciation for what that entails. But these pathetic, bitter, and weak little Gollums need to be seen to be standing up to authority, because that is the sum total of who these little trolls are.
What many of us have found is that when you disable comments, these people will NOT take the time and effort they put into writing a comment into a private e-mail. What does that say? To me, it says that rather than writing for some principled opposition to points raised in an essay, they are using my website to broadcast their philosophy.
Unfortunately for them, the philosophy they generally promote has been so widely discredited, and the tenets so thin and unsupportable that an entire blog based on such a worldview would be rather sparse. And, of course, it would require the courage and conviction of signing your name to what you believe, not to mention paying for it.
So I have come to the sad conclusion -- along with Lileks, Den Beste, Rachel Lucas and many others -- that I am unwilling to continue to pay for and promote these unscrupulous and unprincipled cynics. And while I will no longer be allowing public comments for use as a soapbox, I certainly encourage anyone with opposing viewpoints to write me personally.
As for the vast majority of you kind souls who have been so supportive in the past, let me close this diatribe by saying this: drop me a line. You really have no idea how much your words have meant to me, and I look forward to hearing from you as we go forward into brave, new worlds.
Bill -at- ejectejecteject dot com
Posted by Proteus at April 25, 2003 10:45 AM