Yesterday, I posted something about an internet beef between two widely-read Substackers.
As I said, I think internet beefs are asinine. But they’re inevitable. They’re the modern equivalent of literary feuds. Some literary feuds, especially those from 19th century Britain, have been hilarious, a window into the past… nevertheless, to me, engaging would be a drain, especially now.
It’s been said that a writer’s worst fear is not being read, and the second worst is being read. You attract some fruitcakes. Add to that the participatory nature of online communication and you’ve got a lit match in a pile of oily rags. So be it.
But I want to add two things to yesterday’s post, because I didn’t make them clear in the post, which was a hastily-written note.
First, Freddie deBoer has a right to his feelings, even if I disagree with his viewpoint. He runs his own damn ‘Stack where he can say whatever he damn pleases and he opens his comments to free subscribers. He feels that people abused the boundaries of internet discourse and he’s going to rethink allowing comments to freeloaders.
His ‘Stack, his right.
That happened to me today and I won’t allow it.
Someone put a comment on my post about feminism with a condescendingly phrased, a paragraphs-long word salad. I left the comment up but banned the guy indefinitely.
You can get a sense of where someone is coming from in just a few sentences. That comment was a screaming red flag. My ‘Stack, my rules. Same as Freddie.
Here are my rules: if you find my views objectionable, fine. Put a brief comment up, recognizing that you’re in someone else’s internet home, with a link to your own ‘Stack, and amscray. That’s what I meant in my note yesterday about voluntarily fucking off. I’m not going to say on someone else’s ‘Stack what I can say here, or in a note.
I also don’t want personal venting only. Again: do it on your own ‘Stack, or in a note. I understand that these are times that try men and women’s souls, and we get emotional, but if all you have is rage, I don’t want to hear it.
Thank you for your service.
The second thing I wanted to add was a response to Freddie’s reversion to leftist cliches when his ideas come to their conclusion, specifically:
“This stuff is not hard.”
God in heaven, what a groaner! It has 401,000 results on Google, between quotation marks. It’s a dead-certain signal that the person who writes it is fluff.
Freddie, if you’re reading:
“This stuff” IS hard.
Here’s what’s easy: Palestinian kids’ pottery in hospitals. Tell the elderly Jews who complained “no.” Another easy one: Abraham Foxman’s spluttering about pictures of dead Palestinian kids in the NY Times. Rejecting Islamic fundamentalism is easy. No good can come of it. I will take Israel, even with Ben-Gvir and crowd, over Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine any day.
But the Israeli/Palestinian dispute is hard. It’s defeated the efforts of well, everyone. Because it has right and wrong on both sides.
How I would love to wish it away, sign it away, negotiate it away, dream it away. If you think that Israelis, at least the older generation that still carries in its bones the terror and the wonder of the state’s founding, how their parents and grandparents made it to this Ottoman backwater turned British mandate turned fractured state between two peoples, don’t know this, then you’re unreachable.
Maybe one day you’ll take off the Marxist dunce cap and start appreciating people, actual people, not people as they should be, but people as they are.
This stuff is hard. But there’s no escape from it, except in brief respites we call art and religion. Try not to lose your mind in the process, you’ll only have to waste time finding it again.
Everything to do with people is hard.