Rossputin.com: Rational Thinking About Our World

This note is a bit long, and is personal in the sense that it's about an attack on me by another blogger, rather than me writing about a national or local issue of the day. You may find it interesting, but you may not as well. I leave it to you, as always...

Over at The Colorado Index lives a bitter man who decided to attack me on his web site about my writing style and a presentation I gave in Denver (which he did not attend). I will do him the courtesy of not disclosing his name, as he has requested of me in the past, even though he's been nothing but a son-of-a-bitch to me on his own web site.

The note that I'll post here is the e-mail I sent him after reading his attack. I also submitted it as a comment on his site, but the last time I posted a comment to an outrageous attack on me by him, he refused to post the comment. [For the record, I post all comments to my site that aren't advertisements or spam, even if they disagree with me.]

I would note that another Colorado blogger, Ben DeGrow, who did attend the Samsphere presentation, posted a note on his own site saying that the Colorado Index posting is wrong:
http://bendegrow.com/2008/setting-the-record-straight/

And just for fun, let me share with you a note I received from someone who reads my site and the Colorado Index site. For the record, I haven't spoken or e-mailed with this person in more than a month:

Ross,

I have come to the conclusion that (xxx?) or whatever his name is that writes the Colorado Index, is perhaps bi-polar. He has some kind of mental disorder. He is nuts.

Maybe he has delusions of grandeur, like a "Jesus complex" or something like that. I have followed the hateful things that he not only writes about you, but also of other blog sights as well. It really makes no sense, his writing makes no sense.

Anyway, that's my two cents worth. I am going to show xxxxxxx some of "crazy man's" blogs. I don't think he has ever read any of his stuff. See if I can get my man all worked up to respond to some of it!

Hope your cute little family is doing well!!

Take care,

xxx xxxxx

Of course, I have to tell this person that the bitter guy at Colorado Index will, if history is any guide, refuse to post comments which criticize him. As we used to say, "he can dish it out but he can't take it".

The guy sent me an e-mail after I sent him the note below, saying that he thought I should "examine (my) own style" and "looking down (my) nose at (other Colorado bloggers" (have I ever done that???) and to "decline to participate in panels", and that he plans to "be critical of me" until I do those things. Wow, what an utter ego-maniac!

It was fairly amusing to hear him say that he's "one of the most effective bloggers in Colorado" as, from the data I could find, he has less traffic than most and less traffic than my site, not to mention my outlets beyond these pages.

In any case, I told him to do what he thinks he needs to do, and, in a moment of sarcasm, I suggested he stay on his medication.

He responded that he wrote what he believed to be true, to which I responded that basic integrity required him to do a least a hint of fact-checking before writing such attacks. He just didn't care.

In my final e-mail to him, I said that I hoped he were man/gentleman enough to issue a correction/apology, given that I proved that everything he had said about me, other than the fact that I don't promote a lot of other blogs (so what?) was false. I knew he would not, because he's just too stubborn and pompous to ever admit being wrong, and he proved me right in that assumption.

So, here's the first e-mail I sent him in response to his lunacy:

XXX, what was the point of slamming me on your web site, especially with such a complete absence of facts behind you?

What I talked about at Samsphere is that in my view the conservative blogosphere isn't well enough organized to compete effectively against the left, although the situation has improved somewhat. I talked about the views of a leading leftist blogger commenting on why the conservative blogosphere has trouble having the kind of influence that the left does, and I suggested that his thoughts were fairly accurate and provided an interesting hint of a road map to how the conservative/libertarian movement could improve its effectiveness. All stuff I would have thought you would applaud. In fact, you mentioned that Samsphere taught that effective blogging is a team sport. That was also in my talk, in terms of suggesting (in addition to better organization) that people who want to blog but don't have time to do a good blog by themselves should get together in a small group blog so they can have fresh content more frequently.

I hardly mentioned my blog or anything else I write...I believe they were just mentioned when I was introduced, though maybe I had one sentence about me in my presentation. I also didn't talk about "cross-posting" or anything along those lines; I don't know if anyone else did who spoke when I wasn't there.

It's sort of funny to hear you commenting about Samsphere so repeatedly when you didn't go to it. Why don't you ask XXXX what I said before you start lobbing bombs my way and completely misstating what I talked about? Furthermore, you have no idea what I was supposed to talk about at Samsphere because you weren't copied on the e-mail discussions about that, maybe because I, not you, were invited to speak.

Exactly how am I a "self-promoter"? Is anyone who tries to reach more people with his writing a "self-promoter" by definition? I certainly did not spend more than 10 seconds talking about myself in my Samsphere presentation. In fact, the other two people on my panel spent almost all their time talking about their own sites...but I think that was great. There's nothing wrong with trying to increase your readership, but I would re-emphasize that that's not what I did at this event. I'd bet that I spent less time "self-promoting" than any other blogger who spoke.

Of course, your ignorance is further confirmed by your statement that Samsphere "has come and gone and no one recorded the lessons for your review". That is wrong. The Samsphere video is available on the web. Yet another incorrect assumption from a person who shoots from the hip, and misses wildly.

As far as noting that a piece on the Gang of Four blog is cross-posted with my site, I do that because I was told to by the Gang of Four editor. I would point out to you that the couple essays I've had on the Gang of Four so far are about the same length as everybody else's essays on that site. I would also point out that I frequently have short essays on my site. But most importantly, I'd point out that your blogging "elements of style" critique are the signs of an egomaniac. Why don't you just do your thing the way you want to and leave it at that? There's a reason I didn't ask for your opinion on my writing.

Oh, another reason for the length of some of my essays is that some are written as potential newspaper or other columns, such as my writing for HumanEvents. (Did you see my story on the cover of the current print issue?) In any case, what you call a "long essay" is simply the same length as newspaper opinion columns, which, whether you like it or not, seem obviously to be a fairly successful product for newspapers and probably a reasonable length for some of my content. More of my own writing is much shorter, as they're written frequently as letters to the editor. So, your claim that I'm addicted to long essays is silly, even though I disagree with your fundamental claim that short writings must invariably be better than long.

Didn't it even occur to you to ask me about any of this stuff before making yourself look stupid by writing so many things that are just wrong?

What else?

I read conservative blogs about as much as liberal ones these days. Indeed, I read your blog more often than just about any other Colorado site, believe it or not. The only reason I even knew there was an article about me on ColoradoPols is that a liberal who knows me gave me a heads-up about it.

As far as how to write short versions on one site and long versions on another, I do that on occasion, and I most certainly don't need such lessons from you. But the bottom line is that it's much faster to put the same article in two places, so I do that when my main goal isn't about that one article. For example, even though noting the "cross-posting" on the Gang of Four site wasn't my idea, at this time I expect the benefit not to be that there would be a different version of the same article on my site but that my site has a lot more content. I post only a small part of my Rossputin.com stuff at the Gang of Four, so there's a chance that a link from the latter to the former would bring readers to other content they'd read. Again, you act as if you know everything about my activities without even talking to me, and I still can't believe you spent so much time talking about Samsphere when you weren't there...basically everything you claimed was wrong.

Next...

Of course I knew that some left-wing site would go after my global warming piece. And of course I expect a hostile response on their site. But on an issue like that where conservatives already agree with me (mostly), I think it's more useful to try to get at least a couple of liberals to actually look at the facts which oppose their baseless beliefs. I don't think it was a waste of time to respond to them, though I might have taken slightly less time doing it. Only a "leftie" or a person who's just bitter (like you) would have thought that the liberals got the better of me in that debate. I understand that you for some reason don't like me and don't want me to succeed. I can't help that, but luckily it's not important to me.

Also, I find some benefit to a debate in that sort of leftist blogging environment because it sharpens one's skills for conversations with liberals in real life. I know you think it's stupid to even look at left-leaning sites, but I think it's important to know what and how the enemy thinks.

I should also note that the "Blogger Extraordinaire" tag was added by Samsphere, not me, and that as soon as I saw it in an e-mail, I contacted them immediately and told them to get rid of that wording. Unlike you, I'm not the biggest ego in the room, and I most certainly didn't and don't call myself by terms like "blogger extraordinaire".

XXX, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about yet you speak as if you're omniscient. Half of what you accuse me of is false, and the other half of what you say I do is stuff that it fine to do whether you like it or not. It's not as if you're some grand poobah of blogging, some fount of wisdom whom we should all bow down before. No, you're just another conservative blogger (with a bigger opinion of himself than most of the rest of us) doing what he thinks he needs to do. Stick to your knitting, I'll stick to mine, and with luck at least one of us will be able to make a difference against the liberals. I don't, and never will, assume that you know better than I or other experienced bloggers what "style and tactics" will be most effective (or most fun for the author, a factor which I consider even if you don't.)

I've thought for a while, and now you've absolutely convinced me, of a great parallel between you and a person more well-known: You are a blogging version of Douglas Bruce. Namely, you are smart and have some good ideas, but you're so frequently a bastard, even to people on your side, that you're just intolerable even to people who should be your friends. It's too bad, but there's no way your personality is going to change now, so I guess you're a lost cause. As a friend of mine likes to say, ideas aren't responsible for the people who believe them.