Welcome, Hordes of Misinformed Kool-Aid-sotted Zealots!

Eva Young's blog is called "Dump Bachmann", but it should be at least subtitled "Blather about Blogger Berg"; I seem to be the subject of half of the "writing" on the blog. This material may not be quoted without my written permission.
Cue Walter Winchell Drudge; she thinks she's onto something:

I thought Blogger Berg didn't read Dump Bachmann any more. As he stated over on Whine in the Dark...

"Whine in the Dark". "Blogger Berg".

Sigh. All these years of taking the high road - and for what?This material may not be quoted without my written permission.
Lying Ethically-Retarded Stalker Young then goes on to quote something I wrote in, I think, my own comment section a week or so ago.This material may not be quoted without my written permission.

But it's not Eva Young. I haven't read any of her blogs in a while.

She notes:

But he keeps on showing up in the comments. Perhaps he's over here trolling for hits.

[sarcasm on]No, I don't think my server could handle an Evalanche. [/sarcasm off]This material may not be quoted without my written permission.

This time he's mad that I mentioned that I thought we'd be seeing Michele Bachmann at the upcoming Vision America conference - a gathering for Leviticus Crowd types. Major Bachmann contributor Phyllis Schlafly was going to be one of the special guests.

"Mad". This material may not be quoted without my written permission.
Mad?

Let's start at the top. I go to blogs. If they interest me, I come back. Sometimes the interest is positive. Sometimes - like, when a buffoon like Young is saying something really stupid, it's a negative interest. If I lose interest, I don't go back. I occasionally read the Dump for the same reason I read Nick Coleman. Hint: I don't read Coleman because he's a great journalist.

And, like Coleman, sometimes the endless miasma of breathless innuendo and frantic self-aggrandizement bores me. This material may not be quoted without my written permission.
The Dump is, of course, a joke; I used to suspect that it will actually help rather than harm Bachmann's campaign in whatever jurisdiction; now, I've gone beyond suspicion, and firmly believe it will be a net benefit to Bachmann. (She even claims, repeatedly, that I "support" Senator Bachmann, which is curious, since I don't live in the Sixth District, and if I did I'd be equally as likely to support Phil Krinkie. Young's claims of clairvoyance are, to say the least, exaggerated).

But hey, I welcome the flood of traffic that her blog (141 visits a day) will no doubt send my way. Note to Dump readers: "Rediculous" is usually spelled "Ridiculous" in English, and if someone loses, they are called a "loser", not a "looser", unless they took too much ex-laxThis material may not be quoted without my written permission..

WARNING: Ancient squabble that most of you know nothing about settled in great detail below. You've been warned.

You might say "Gosh, Blogger Berg - why whine in the dark and call her a Lying Ethically-Challenged Stalker?" Well, that's quite simple: She lies, she is ethically-retarded, and she approaches these sorts of things with a sort of monomaniacal obsession that is, to say the least, off-putting.

You reply "notify the media! someone on the Internet lacks social skills and plays fast and loose with the truth!". Well, I am notifying the media; there are a number of reporters in the Twin Cities who seem to eat up Young's coverage of Bachmann without knowing the type of "source" they're dealing with. Knowledge is power.

In order:

Lying: Two years ago, there was a fight at Lucy's Bar in Saint Paul. The bar is a toilet, and was when it was the Blues Saloon. The fight involved the son of Saint Paul's then-chief-of-police, Bill Finney. I noted (in an email forum on Saint Paul, not on my blog) that in my experience working in bars that some of the knee-jerk condemnation of the officers involved may have been premature (as, indeed, the investigation proved); that eyewitness accounts in fights are frequently inaccurate and self-serving (especially when alcohol is involved) and that, sometimes, lesbians aren't averse to violence (according to both an article I had read about a book on the subject, and according again to my own experiences in bars). Young has repeatedly said in several forums that I said that meant "the lesbians had it coming". This is a lie. I challenge Young to come up with this nonexistant quote showing that I believed anyone had any violence "coming to them", or to apologize for her defamatory fabrication. Now. In the meantime - all you reporters out there who give "Dump Bachmann" such breathless credulity need to realize the kind of source you're so guilelessly quoting!
• After making this statement, Young posted my private email to a number of gay-themed email discussion groups. Her posting was accompanied by her warped, false, defamatory interpretation of my statement. I was quickly overwhelmed with spam and quite a bit of hate mail. Since these were all members-only forums, I couldn't defend myself from her defamation (had I been inclined to, or had the time to; I have two kids and I was working two jobs at the time). I stress; this was my personal email address. Eva Young has repeatedly tried to rationalize this by saying that
  • If I put my email address on an email discussion group, it's not private. I subscribed to the Saint Paul discussion group using a private email address because the Yahoogroups system they used at the time hides email addresses from non-members of the group. Young responds to that by saying...
  • But the group involved was not a Yahoo Group!: Right. It was a mailing list started by someone else, who - and this was controversial - took the email addresses of a number of the Yahoo Group subscribers, and started a new discussion group without telling the people involved. It was (if memory serves, and it has to, since I believe the group is long-defunct and I doubt the archives still exist) controversial at the time - but the discussion broke out anyway. The point being, the email was intended to be private - and whatever the technology involved, it's incredibly poor ethics to divulge someone's email address when you get it from an email discussion group under any circumstances. Most people know this - but most people don't put their squabbles above their ethics like Eva Young does.
  Eva Young continues to rationalize this action. Her rationalization is long-winded and self-indulgent and at the end of the day completely worthless - there is no ethical excuse for circulating someone's email from within a group of people who are having a discussion at all, much less for purposes of injecting it into other discussions (to which my input was off-topic, and to which I was, again, not subscribed to carry out my end of the discussion)! It is just plain bad etiquette.
• A few weeks back, I attended a birthday party at the home of a long-time friend (I won't name the friend - he didn't ask to be included in this squabble), who I know from back when "blog" was something that happened after burritos and cheap beer. Lying Ethically-challenged Stalker Young was there. As I was trying to get some food, she came over. There were a few awkward jokes (from others) about the situation: I responded with a laugh "It's only business; nothing personal". That was intended both to defuse the situation and to make it clear that I wanted nothing to do with politics or blog squabbling; it was neither the time nor the place. A few weeks ago, Young snarked at me in a comment, something (I'm not going to go look it up, because who fucking cares?) about me not "having the balls" to discuss the issue then and there. This material may not be quoted without my written permission.
  In other words, criticizing me for not turning a friend's birthday party into an excuse to hash out a tired, dull, stupid argument. It would have been a gaffe (as indeed was criticizing me after the fact for it!) and an imposition (it was a friend's fecking birthday party!) and it related to an argument that in any case needn't exist, since any person with a functioning ethical compass can tell that Young is irredeemably wrong anyway. What would be the point?

That is, in fact, the final word on the subject.

People ask me "why don't you ban Eva from your comment section?" For the same reason that I read Nick Coleman; it's easy material. Too easy, usually. It's worth noting, though, that the only two people I've ever banned from my site were referred by Ms. Young.

Let me be perfectly clear about this: if I were Michele Bachmann, the presence of the Dump would delight me. If I were an opponent of Bachmann, I'd be scared shitless; the Dump is such a defamatory, dubious, misconceived joke that it would be child's play to use it was a caricature of all opposition to Bachmann; having the Dump on your side would be about as useful as being endorsed by Al Sharpton or David Duke. This material may not be quoted without my written permission.
And that, as they say, is all.

(I reserve the right to browse anywhere I want even though I said "that is all" without having to explain myself, by the way. Deal with it).

Posted by Mitch at September 14, 2005 04:22 AM | TrackBack