September 1, 2005

• Spammers and Flamers and Nitwits, OH MY!

  I tend to get euphoric recall.  Let’s rephrase that.  I
  practice euphoric recall, I cultivate it.  I try not to remember
  the things that distress me, to focus on the happy parts.  It
  helps me in my “Bushido” (ala Sutphen) practice, makes it easier to
  cycle from positive to neutral and leave out the negative slump below
  the baseline.  That’s the way Sutphen phrases it:  “positive
  to neutral,” but he and I don’t see eye to eye on all things. 
  Instead of focusing on dualities such as positive versus negative, I’m
  tending more and more to see things as relative.  Since I’m
  relatively bipolar, positively obsessive/compulsive, and somewhat
  paranoid — and all of those much less than I used to be — it’s all very challenging and therefore quite interesting to
  me.

  Greyfox and I have been discussing a new FAQ for KaiOaty,
  on dualism.  He quoted something to me from Sandra Ingerman to the
  effect that at the highest metaphysical level, there is no difference
  between good and evil.  I know the truth of this, and so does
  Greyfox, but we’re not getting very far very fast at expressing it any
  better or in any more detail than Ingerman did.  I’m beginning to
  think that it doesn’t really matter, anyway, whether we write the FAQ
  or not.  Who reads the FAQs?  Certainly not the people who
  need the info the most.

  I had conveniently forgotten during that hiatus when KaiOaty was out of
  business, that along with the legitimate clients over there, we get a
  few spammers and flamers and twits.  I’d like to find a filter of
  some sort that would only let in readers
  who have the time and are willing to spend the time finding out what
  the site is about before they leave comments.  Yeah, right. 
  I told you I’m the bastard child of Candide and
  Pollyanna.    But I’m learning.  I have gone from a
  welcoming, all-inclusive stance when I opened the site, to a
  one-strike-you’re-out position now.  I go in every day and clean
  house.  Spam comments are deleted and the spammers blocked
  immediately.  Same with flames.

  I got a question in comments last night that was more of a WTF than
  anything.  It didn’t make sense, didn’t seem to relate to the
  reading to which it had been appended, but repeated some of the words
  from its first lines.  I turned that one over to the oracle: 
  block or not.  Oracle said block the nitwit, so I blocked the
  nitwit.  To my chagrin, before I thought to ask the oracle about
  it, I  had gone to the nitwit’s site and left a question for him,
  asking if he would care to rephrase his question.

  I see several deficiencies in that idea, now that I’ve had time to
  think about it.  Say the guy has his own WTF moment over my
  question, comes back and actually reads and finally grasps what’s going
  on there, and wants to clear up the matter.  He’s blocked
  now.  Of course he could always come over here to straighten
  things out.  I have left more than a faint trail of crumbs leading
  from that site to this one.

  Say rather that his apparently irrelevant question was actually just a
  provocative shot across the bows, a hostile first strike meant to
  incite some comeback from me.  In truth, my feeling is that this
  is what it was, and that he did it because
  he hadn’t read enough over there to understand what the site is all
  about.  I’ll discuss it with him openly here if he wants to, as
  long as we can keep the dialogue civil — not “nice” or “polite” mind
  you (I enjoy a good battle of wits if my opponent has any), just not
  devolving into threats or ad hominem insult.  But I intend to keep
  that sort of discussions off the KaiOaty site.  It’s where I work,
  and my work is… I hesitate to say, “sacred,” but I can’t think of a
  more fitting term.

  Later last night, as I was rethinking my little venture into the
  nitwit’s xangaworld asking him to rephrase his question, it occurred to
  me that the tone of my question was smugly superior.  I recognize
  in that attitude of self-satisfied superiority a grave character
  defect.  I learned more than thirty years ago, in the therapy
  group with the Family House junkies, that it was a pathetic defense
  mechanism I’d picked up in elementary school.  The dim-witted
  bullies would pick on me and tease me, calling me “Egghead” or “Brain,”
  and I’d stand my ground, lift my chin in the air, plant my fists on my
  hips, and face them down with sesquipedalian demonstrations of the
  aptness of their antonomasia.

  As soon last night as it occurred to me what I was doing, it also
  occurred to me to do a Tenth Step on it.  If there is anything at
  all that I take seriously about the Twelve Step programs it’s the
  steps, and especially the tenth one at this stage of my life.

  10.  We continued to take personal
  inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

  Since such admissions are to be made, “to God, to ourselves, and to
  another human being,” and since the only human within the sound of my
  voice was The Kid, I told Doug that one of my most enduring and
  persistent character flaws is that tendency to try and make stupid
  people feel stupid.  He thought a moment, chuckled, and said,
  “Well, it’s a victimless crime.”  **sigh**  The kid has his
  own case of smugness, I guess.  It is, I suppose, a near-universal
  human trait to play up our strengths, denigrate our weaknesses and
  deride other people’s weaknesses.

  I’m currently thinking about making the readings on KaiOaty protected
  posts, just so we stop getting those irrelevant spammy flaming
  comments.  The people who would be included on the protected list
  would be the clients, other metaphysicians and oracle readers with an
  academic interest in my work, and interested others who ask to be
  included.  The FAQs would remain public, with comments disabled
  except for those where I take requests for readings.  I haven’t
  decided whether to just make future readings protected, or to go back
  and protect them all.  The latter makes more sense, but it’s going
  to be a lot of work and I still haven’t gotten all of 2005′s readings
  indexed yet.  I can’ t justify to myself taking the time for that
  as long as AuWay’s website is still hanging in limbo.  Another me,
  with another computer and another internet connection, would be handy
  to have right now.  As long as I’m wishing, make her healthier,
  too, physically and mentally.
  
  
  

  • 3:21 pm
  • 4 Comments