Raymi,
So some things don’t change. This is Keith from the mini-battle of a few months ago. The mini-battle being a round of emails in which I tried to get you to engage in a conversation about the nature of blogging… which turned into a tiff somehow. After that experience I decide to ignore my blog and other people’s blogs forever, which has ended up being a few months. I have just recently returned to the world of the internet and I decided to visit your blog, I was there none but 15 minutes ago. I couldn’t help but chuckle at your account and commentary, of and on, the insult explosion. It made me think about the conclusions I came to after the pounding i took in your comments and later in my comments. After you posted all the emails and people commented and all that, i got angry, felt betrayed in a sense… for fuck knows what reason because i had no reason to think that trust was established… but ultimately i realized that i was the one in the wrong. Not because i was making bad points… but simply because this isn’t the medium to discuss things like that… this isn’t a medium that lends itself to getting into serious impartial debates… everything is too personally stylized… all content comes from individuals directly, so any hint at a critique will come across as a critique of someone’s style. When I decided to get on your balls about the vapidity of blogging I was wrapped up in the thought of trying to get you to admit that the enterprise was not a genuinely artistic or praiseworthy… but that was simply because i didn’t understand why a person with a seemingly good wit and some literary talent would channel their ability into the creation of a detail, observation, and diary-type blog. My lack of understanding that is what made me the douche in that situation. And it seems that the people that go on trying to insult you and your style are in the same douche boat.
I simply failed to realize that your style of blogging is done to entertain and develop a fan-base. I am sure you put some genuine feeling into it from time to time. But it seems like the goal is to keep people coming to the page. Maybe there is an element of trying to garner respect, respect in the sense that people come to be impressed by your ability to produce engaging material, quality material, etc.
So i apologize for bringing the wrong type of battle to your doorstep. There is simply no reason to try and get you to engage in a serious analysis of your work medium. That would be like me yelling in Lindsey Lohan’s face about Fox news doing special reports about her father getting out of jail. I guess people tend to forget that the products produced in the realm of entertainment are only products of the creative capacities of the people that produce them… meaning that there is no reason to attack that person… because the insults and other garbage that are getting hurled at the individual are based on observations of the material that they have produced, and the material is a creative facet of the individual’s life… so to try and break them down personally is a mistaken leap… to jump from the realm of observing the creative endeavor, into the realm of insulting the baseline existence and character quality of the creator is a fools errand… Another problem with trying to insult an established personality is that the person making the insults is automatically inferior to the person that they are insulting. Just look at the nature of the situation… the insulter took the time to invest personal effort into crafting some form of scathing comment, the comment obviously being based on the creations and presentations of their target… but their target has created those things as part of a project in their life… and projects do not encompass the entirety of a life… so the insulter is putting personal time and effort into crafting an insult that will be aimed at a person that knows nothing about the personal life, or even the existence of the insulter, so the insult that the insulter throws is incapable of penetrating the life of the creator unless the creator chooses to completely let their guard down and unify their notion of self with critiques of their material by strangers.
The people that choose to do public insults will always come out as douchebags in the end… even if their criticisms are on point… because even if they are discerning people, capable of crafting a cogent whatever, they will not have done shit other than use your status to spring board themselves into the realm of discussion.
Back when i sent those emails that you posted I tried to use your status to refine my concepts of what blogging was about… i got a little over zealous with it… slightly confrontational maybe… at the time i thought i was making an interesting point… but the whole thing was gay.
