If you followed the "Faith as ideology" blog thread over the weekend, you might have seen the posts of one Maria Harrington. When one of her postings failed to appear, she wrote me privately to accuse me of silencing her, and revealing myself to be a horrible person, and so forth. When I checked the comments management section of the blog, I saw that for some inexplicable reason the software flagged her comment. As soon as I saw it, I hit "approve," and it posted. I wrote her back to tell her that I hadn't held up her comment, and that she owed me an apology for jumping the gun.
Here is her delicious response:
Oh, please. I'll bet the dog frequently ate your homework in school, too, lol.Or, worse, are you really claiming an "evil spirit" in "the software" is selectively disrupting the posting process, not YOU as YOU yourself announced you would, and then DID...DUH?
If so, Mister, not only is it YOU that is nutty buckets, but a whining, sniveling little coward of a man as well. You're pathetic and disgusting. It's YOU who owe all the good Christian people who post there an apology for orchestrating and manipulating them as puppets in order to further inflate your own creepy, bloated vanity, you empty, hollow little worm of a man.
Maria
Dang, is this chick on to me, or what? Oh well, all I can do is hope that she will mail me a photograph of herself so that I might behold the face of charity and, in turn, repent.
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"Publishing someone's name along with private correspondence from them, especially in such a way as to make them look bad, is unethical in my opinion."
Yes it is. Which is why I refused to give Rod my name - at his request. And then the combox managers let Erin REPEAT her name.
I think I could accept this as a little harmless fun being poked at an overreacting, non-tech-savvy commenter, if Rod hadn't posted her name along with it.
If "Maria Harrington" hadn't used her name on this thread, I wouldn't have published it online. If she had called herself Joan Jacob Jingleheimer Smith, I would have used that. If she had asked me not to post those comments, I wouldn't have posted them. I didn't publish her e-mail address, though I certainly have that. You don't even know that her name is really Maria Harrington. If you write me privately and don't want me to post what you write, say so. Otherwise, I follow the Welborn Protocol: anything you send me in connection with this blog is fair game for republication, unless you explicitly state otherwise. Normally as a courtesy I'll ask you before publishing something that could identify you. But some people don't deserve that courtesy.
Anon from 10:16, please consider the context. I repeated [the correspondent's] name in order to say that I don't know [the correspondent] and am not judging [the correspondent] who might conceivably have had a bad day. (Yes, I wrote "the correspondent" so Beliefnet isn't jumping in here to censor anything.) If repeating [the correspondent's] name in this manner and for this purpose at the end of a lengthy thread in which it had already been repeated several times offends anyone, I apologize. Next time, I'll identify the correspondent this way: "The lady who chose to call Rod an 'empty, hollow little worm of a man' and to attack him personally." That's lengthy, but probably more to the purpose than repeating her mere name.
And YB, think for a moment. If [The lady who chose to call Rod an 'empty, hollow little worm of a man' and to attack him personally] had sent an email like this to a co-worker she probably would have lost her job for unprofessional conduct. It can be a charitable thing to keep someone from repeating such an act of unthinking rage in the future, in my opinion, especially since in the future [The lady who chose to call Rod an 'empty, hollow little worm of a man' and to attack him personally] might have chosen a target who would do far more harm to her than merely laughing at her uncalled-for rage.
"It can be a charitable thing to keep someone from repeating such an act of unthinking rage in the future, [especially since she] might have chosen a target who would do far more harm to her than merely laughing at her uncalled-for rage."
"EM": now I get it! it can be downright charitable to laugh at people. Thank you Baby Jesus.
this blog is so edifying. alas, not intentionally.
"In a time such as this, when we have been seriously and most cruelly hurt by those who hate us, and when we must consider ourselves to be gravely threatened by those same people, it is hard to speak of the ways of peace and to remember that Christ enjoined us to love our enemies, but this is no less necessary for being difficult."
Wendell Berry
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