Looking through the window into Dante's Hell.

Gawker has a fascinating dissection of the life and psychology of an internet troll who exploited the dynamics of Reddit to become one of the most influential Reddit users based on child porn.

This guy seems to have a fairly conventional non-internet life, but his internet personna is the "creepy uncle of the internet." Twenty years ago, a guy like this would never have been able to live out his fantasies.

He seems to be as proud of his "trolling" - taking some kind of pleasure in the discomfort that his sick interests inflict on others - as he is of his sick interests.

How do people like this come to be?

PSA/FYI - Free Stuff!

Catholic Courses has an introductory offer which allows you to download one free audio course for FREE. (Or you get $30 off a DVD or video download.)

Right now the course selection is limited, but there are some interesting courses by some leading scholars.

I downloaded the one on Shakespeare.

Check it thou out.

6 Ways to Cultivate Civility on the Net.

Because gentlemen should be civil, according to the Art of Manliness.

One way is really simple - use your real name.

At some point, people are going to wake up and realize that narcissism is not one of the cardinal virtues.

Susannah Breslin on "why blogs for women are bad."

The fact of the matter is that blogs for women do more harm than good.


TIP #1: They’re limiting.

Blogs that focus solely on women’s issues are one-trick ponies. They don’t challenge you; they appease you. They don’t ask you to think; they tell you what you want to hear. They are an island, a fantasy; they are not the real world.

Feeling disempowered? Great. There’s a blog for that. They will tell you that it’s not you. It’s the patriarchy. Didn’t get that raise, make less than your male coworkers, can’t figure out how to negotiate your way into the salary you want? Don’t worry. There’s a blog that will explain to you this is due to male sexism, that it has nothing to do with you, that there are other sisters here who have gone through what you’ve gone through, and, (wo)man, do they feel you.

The idea is that this sort of sympathetic, female circle-jerk will make everyone feel better. That if women are told enough times whatever bad thing happened isn’t their fault, from this they will rise from the ashes and overthrow the terrible men who are keeping them down. This is a lie.

And:

TIP #3: They have nothing to do with reality.


If blogs for women existed in the real world, rather than a virtual one, what would they look like? Giant pink bubbles in which women floated through life, peering through the see-through pink walls at the big, bad confusing world out there in which men exist, things are complex, and not everything has to do with whether or not you have a pair of ovaries.

You don’t learn how to live in the world by withdrawing from it. You learn how to deal with the world by living in it. You don’t become empowered by talking about how disempowered you are. You become empowered by getting over whatever gender your parents’ biological sperm-and-egg cocktail gave you and getting on with it already. You don’t become someone new by pretending to be someone else. You reinvent yourself by letting go of who you wish you could be and figuring out who you really are.

What has segregation done for you lately?

There are a lot of single topic blogs that are written for a particular perspective, but only certain kinds of blogs are designed to be "safe havens."  The people who insist on having "safe havens" simply aren't engaging with the world.  They insist on their right to be critics but be safe from criticism in return.  That is just a delusional approach to reality.

I seem to attract the "Tail-eating snake."

These are the people in your blogohood.

The Tail-Eating Snake


This is the guy who strongly criticizes you for strongly criticizing someone. Because strongly criticizing is wrong. Unless you're strongly criticizing strong criticism. Wait. What?

But that's probably because the people I hang out with tend to be ironically post-modern.

Sad News

Mark Shea advises:

Michael Spencer, the Internet Monk...


...is on his final journey. His cancer is terminal and, barring a miracle, he is estimated to have between six months and year to live.

Your prayers for him would be appreciated.

Father, give Michael the grace to endure what is yet to come and to open his heart to cooperate as fully as he can with the grace of your Son Jesus Christ. Grant his family strength and grace and provide for their needs in this hard time. Mother Mary, St. Luke and St. Peregrine, pray for Michael and all who love and care for him. Grant him the grace of a happy death, Lord.

The internet is such a mixed bag.  Without it, I would never have read the wise and irenic writings of an obscure pastor/teacher in Kentucky, but without it, again, I wouldn't have read that a person near my own age was tragically dying of terminal brain cancer at a time when it seemed that his talents were gaining recognition in the wider world.

"Nescio ergo blogo"

"I do not know, therefore I blog"

William Vallicella explains why he is not ready to pack it in:

Blogging is an excellent tool for the assembly, preliminary refinement, and presentation of one’s thoughts on any topic that turns one’s crank. One e-jaculates them into the 'sphere, and on an auspicious day one snags a worthwile comment or stimulating e-mail response. Fellow mortals can hinder, but they can also help. This medium allows one to interact with them without having them in one’s face. Some of us like that. It is community without physical proximity, a disembodied community, a meeting of minds without a collision of bodies. "Hell is other people" said Sartre famously, but he was thinking of them all assembled in one physical place. Heaven is having your interlocutor at a safe distance, like Thoreau and his vis-à-vis at opposite ends of his Walden pond cabin.

Blogging is a learning tool. Sure, there is hereabouts a bit of pontificatory rant, and ranting pontification, not to mention some necessary smiting of ideological enemies who are sorely in need of smiting; but mainly I blog to learn, and I learn because I don’t know. Nescio ergo blogo, with apologies to those who want Latin to stay good and dead. I do not know, so I blog.

I blog for the same reason that I write: to know my mind, to actualize my mind, and to hook a few like-minded people to myself. When mind-actualization becomes a chore, then it will be time to pack it in. But when that time comes, it will be time to pack it in all the way.

Many are the reasons to blog. To develop a thicker skin is another of them. A thick skin is an attribute conducive to negotiating this world with equanimity. Since I've taken up blogging, I have noticed a definite uptick in the fitness of my psycho-armor. Nasty e-mails and the like roll off me. The scum of humanity offend me less. And one day, to cop a line from Nietzsche, "my only negation shall be to look away."

Good points all, although doing what I do for a living, the last tends not to be much of a problem for me.

Actually, if anything, blogging has made me realize that there are real people out there behind the ideological mask; which realization has tended to make me relatively more charitable to the person writing what I consider to be errant nonsense. There is - as Mark Byron points out - nothing more "cringe-inducing" than to be contacted by the real person that you have just used as a foil or a type.

It's like telling an ethnic joke about Burgundians and then having someone say, "You know, my mother was Burgundian."

Update: I ran across a post of mine from 2006 which quotes Rod Dreher describing how he has come to regret the nasty movie reviews that he wrote in an earlier part of his life:

It's been seven years since I reviewed for a daily paper, and I look back now on that aspect of my work with what you might call ... shame. It's not that some, and maybe most, of these turkeys didn't deserve carving. It's that I took pleasure in my own cruelty. Maybe it was becoming a father, maybe it was 9/11, maybe it was writing a book, or maybe it was all of these things, as well as beginning to mature in my Christian faith, that made me realize how -- how to put this? -- fragile all things human are. It didn't make me any less critical, I don't think, but it did make me think about how to criticize. It is insufficient to hate the bad; we must also love the good...

Certainly, and what we write can live on forever to the embarrassment of our future selves.

Chesteron Blog

Chesterton and Friends.

To my small but brilliant readership.

Cash Advance Loans

In the future, I'm going to up my hit count by running smutty pictures.

Things not to do with your blog if you're an attorney.

Blog about jury deliberations after failing to reveal in voir dire that you are an attorney.

Here is another post on the case with excerpts from the blog.

Reminders to self:

Ask directly if anyone has or has ever had a law degree.

Ask if anyone has a blog.