Prelude to a flamewar

[fpb]

A few months ago, I suffered the atrocious insult of having a long comment screened - that is, kept from other readers - by inverarity, who then added insult to injury by lying about the circumstances in which he had done it. The incredible thing is that he seriously seemed to consider his behaviour reasonable and decent; and concluded the exchange with the patronizing statement: "Feel free to come back after you calm down."

What makes this painful from my point of view is that inverarity is a great writer. I do not intend to deprive myself of his forthcoming novel Alexandra Quick and the Stars Above, although I will probably not deliver reviews which, even if positive, would not be welcome. inverarity's prejudices, and even worse his convinction that he is open-minded when he is incapable of reacting to disagreement except with contempt and mockery, made any kind of debate impossible. It is diagnostic of the man that he thinks highly of Richard Dawkins. But if he were Berthold Brecht and Ezra Pound wrapped up in one, I would still be anxiously waiting for the new Alexandra Quick.

Alas, to know how it is coming along, I have to read inverarity's blog. And now he has produced a revolting review of what seems to be a revolting book; a review so revolting that I can't, for decency's sake, keep silent - not without feeling that I have left the field, by default, to something despicable.

It is at this point, upset and revolted as I was, that I came across, quite by chance, johncwright delivering a well-deserved spanking to some jerk who had been offended at a perfectly reasonable historical statement. My relationship with johncwright is peculiar, and in some ways mirrors that with inverarity. I tend to agree with many of his views, though by no means all; I appreciate his learning and his ability to defend his position; but I am unhappy about his manners, and especially about the way he tends to dump on anyone who disagrees with him from a great height. I wish he realized that to use such words as "pervert" when the other person does not even agree that such a thing as perversion exists is question-begging, and that a sentence built up of nothing but such unargued assertions is a sentence built of nothing but question-begging.

I mentioned to Wright, half in jest, that as he was in the mood to bash a bit of history in unperceptive heads, he might want to try it with the review in question. He looked at it and was even more horrified than I was, though he told me that I would have to "fight that dragon myself". In a brief exchange, we agreed that the review basically represents the worst kind of relativism, the kind that, by refusing a priori to distinguish between right and wrong, effectively gives wrong equal citizenship.

Word of this reached inverarity, probably through a trackback bot. He didn't like it - I don't suppose anybody would - and took a step I wouldn't have, trying to involve his friends in the row. As a by-product of this, I got the most stunning display of unselfconscious, rampant bigotry ever: one of inverarity's friends informed me that anyone who frequented the likes of johncwright was ipso facto condemned, since Wright was the sort whom no decent man would associate with. Take a bow, tealterror0; it's not often that someone manages to give such a bold, unselfconscious display of intolerance.

There is something highly ironical in all this. Only a few days ago, I raved on this LJ about Mark Twain's "critical annihilation" of a professor who had written a stupid and misconceived book about Shelley. Now I am called to do the same. The difference is that there is no space for enjoyment: the opposing thesis is too monstrous, the way in which it is deployed is too prejudicial, and last but not least, the utter unwillingness to learn of someone I still regard as a great writer means that at best - even if it wasn't the case that I am arguing against the zeitgeist, and that half my readers will probably find something excusable in his deplorable views - I will be left with nothing but a strong taste of ashes in my mouth.

Comments

An immature display

[fpb.livejournal.com]

inverarity has delivered something which is not exactly a response - since it has nothing to do with the facts - but more like a kind of public breakdown, an abandoned and undignified display of spite with strong features of projection. Here it is :

Subject: Good-bye
I suppose "a son of the father of lies" might not have been intended literally, but frankly, I think it was, and the discussion about how I have no morals certainly was.

Let's review.

You've abused me repeatedly for years. I've indulged you and allowed you to spit venom and emotional incontinence all over my blog, when you go into a shrieking rage if someone mildly disagrees with you on yours. And you dare whine that I "abused" you.

You went to infamous polemicist and bigot John C. Wright, who has a very large, belligerent following, and asked him to perform a "strafing run" on my blog. (You did not merely "mention" my review - talk about dishonest!) You tried to stir up a dogpile on me (based on a typically dishonest misstatement of my views), and dare to come back here and call me a coward. I never even mentioned you and have never, ever encouraged anyone to cause you grief.

You snivel, whine and cry every time you can't get your way, every time people don't agree with you, every time you're not getting enough attention, every time you get attention but it's not enough or not the right kind of attention, and when I make an amused, indirect, tongue-in-cheek reference to you and Wright's frankly appalling character assassination of me, you say I'm "whining."

Your racism, misogyny, bigotry, and general failure to comprehend anyone who isn't you is pretty well documented all over the Internet. And you dare to call me racist and classless.

You consistently misrepresent and lie about people, and you dare to call me a liar.

In every single altercation we've had, I've been in the right, you've been in the wrong. I've let it go over and over again because I liked you and I pitied you. And you want an apology from me. You owe me (and just about everyone you've ever interacted with) a freaking Wagnerian opera of an apology.

Score: Me - aggravated. You - liar, hypocrite, and coward.

I have suffered your bad behavior, your abuse, your dishonesty, your attempts to bully me and other people on my blog, your irrational screaming tantrums that are sometimes triggered for literally unfathomable reasons, because I thought you were fundamentally a good person with some serious issues, and occasionally you made worthy contributions to the discussion.

Re: An immature display

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

Fabio, no matter how stormy our relationship may get, I hope I do not lose my temper with you as this poor fellow has done.

My attention was drawn to this line, because it concerned me: "infamous polemicist ... John C. Wright, who has a very large, belligerent following..."

Infamous? Who in the world knows my name outside of a few readers?

I have a following? A large following? Not just a large but a VERY large and belligerent following? Me? I cannot even get my Mom to read my books.

I am not sure where Inverarity would have ever heard of me (or who he is) of why he could come to such strange conclusions about how fearsome I am.

An immature display, part deux

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, those worthy contributions are far outweighed by the fact that you've become an irritating malignant presence who makes me groan every time I post because I never know what word or comment might trigger your rage and feed your sense of entitlement to fling poo like a unhousetrained baboon all over my blog. You make writing less pleasant. You make me not want to have any kind of public presence. Right now, you are pissing me off (and I am reluctant to admit that because it will give you a measure of satisfaction you don't deserve) when all I wanted to do when I came home today was sit down to do some writing, and instead of writing the last chapter of AQATSA I have to deal with yet another FPB-instigated trainwreck because you don't know how to behave like a functional adult human being.

I'd say I pity you, because ye gads, I can't imagine how much it must suck to wake up every morning and be you, but you finally pushed me past pity and into contempt, dislike, and resentment.

So congratulations, you got to me. You finally wore away my last shred of patience and forbearance. I don't like making enemies, and I tried not to think of you as mine. But you were determined to be one, weren't you? Feel proud, asshole? Go back to your blog and whine and cry about how you've been done wrong. I don't care. I stopped reading your LJ quite a while ago, and I'm sure as hell not going to engage you there.

If you had any perspective, sense, or the slightest capacity for honest self-examination, you would realize that when you've failed at everything you've ever done in life and every one of your relationships inevitably implodes in mutual recrimination, the single point of failure, the unvarying constant in the equation, is you. But I do not hold out much hope for enlightenment.

So go be a self-righteous prick somewhere else, and tell Jesus how proud you are of your behavior. You're banned. Good-bye.

Just one question. Just how incapable of self-criticism can a person be, to state as a fact (if, of course, public screeching is stating) that he has never been wrong? Never once? Never in the tiniest amount? That alone should give you a notion of how difficult it is to deal with inverarity.

This of course, does not change my unhappy resolution to write a review of the review - something to which I am being dragged while there are a dozen things I would rather do. But as for being banned from commenting in his LJ, please don't throw me in the briar patch, Br'er Bear!

[fadad3eafadsf.livejournal.com]

Since you were banned from Inverarity's LJ, I have to post this here:

For Fpb's context:

I was the Anon who posted asking Inverarity for a Dawkins recommendations, the one you jumped on as a "prospective Dawkins groupie." I figure I will address the personal insult before actually moving on to the substance of my post.

I'm not a "Dawkins groupie" anymore than any other writer's "groupie" (Except for perhaps GEM Anscombe and Bernard Williams. They are amazing.) I was asking for recommendations because he has been referenced in so many textbooks, and is largely respected in the Atheist community. As I said on Inverarity's LJ, I found TGD to be less than pleasing(my exact statement was that he addressed the book to the "talk-show audience." You know, a polite way of saying "He was a purile, inane, historically-citation-less crank with extremely weak arguments fueled more by emotion than logic.") and don't understand the acclaim the man has. Rather than pass him off as the Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck of the Atheist movement, I wanted to educate myself. I figured Inverarity, as someone I respect and see as a highly intelligent individual, may have read some books worth reading; so asking him for a recommendation on the subject seemed like a worthwhile first post.

Now for the substance:

You annoy me. Not because you attacked the character of my intellect on a baseless assumption, I've been on the internet too long for that. Not because you are uneducated, unintelligent, or illiterate, in the way most posters on the internet are; on the contrary, you annoy me for the opposite reason. You are clearly an intelligent, well informed person... But you can't convey that worth shit.

You are an erudite toddler. If someone disagrees with you, you throw a temper tantrum. For example, you addressed the Hitler's Pope idiocy and then had a hissy-fit when that Virginia person asked for citations. In fact, you went off on the tangent about modern day sex abuse without addressing the citations problem; or indeed, addressing the scandal in an appropriate manner ("You are a shareholder in the lie factory" is not an adequate response in any context.).

Honestly, this is the internet and I normally wouldn't care. But this is a personal issue to me. I'm a person who has, for the 20 years of his life, been consistently on the fence concerning his own Catholicism. My intellectual integrity is far more important to me than my faith, but there are some cases where those go hand in hand. For instance, historically inaccurate readings of the Church's behaviour. To see someone intelligently argue a position I would (mostly) defend, then have them undercut that with obnoxious personal attacks and a refusal to share sources is infuriating. This is acutely annoying because of the lack of intelligent Catholic writers on the internet.

This is also indicative of your behaviour on Inverarity's journal. You blow up over nothing, attack people rather than their ideas, and mope around about being victimized and misunderstood. Certainly, there have been times when TealTerror and others argue passed you, but do you honestly think you are the blameless incarnation of Christ on the internet? Inverarity has, in fact, addressed why he doesn't directly debate you. Because, simply put, he didn't believe you could do so reasonably. His assumption is a valid one. Your posts are consistently filled with self-righteous martyr-complex induced vitriol. If you want him to respond with something other than "mockery" give him a reason to think it will be worthwhile.

As a fellow Catholic, I implore you: grow up, or shut up. As someone who has posted on LJ only once (twice with this post) I hope you will take what I have said into consideration. It's easy to pass over the words of people you have been at odds with for three years, but you don't really have the "You're biased against me!" excuse with my writing.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You are under the impression that I have any obligation to trolls. That Virginia person was a troll. Anyone who writes as follows: "It is one thing to look at the rampant callous and indeed criminal behavior of the Catholic Church where ordained pedophiles are concerned and say They are fucking up, but this is a symptom of a broader cultural problem that they are both a result of and perpetuating," and quite another to say, "The Catholic Church has some problems, okay, but overall they're a good organization and if they become an international pedophile cartel, well I think we should consider how that might be everybody else's fault," which is what this really comes off as - has made up her mind, period. She DOES NOT WANT TO BE TOLD that the Church is basically a good organization; she wanted - and that is where the insanity lies - to discuss with me the "religiously-based" depravity of the Church. For her, that was a given. The list of sources she gave - including schismatic Jew-bashing sites I would not touch with a barge-pole - only bore that out further. She had trawled the Internet for anything, anything at all, that could be used to tar the Church as black as she possibly could. And after that, mind you, she expected me to treat her views as if they were responsible, sensible and worth arguing. Sorry, life's too short. If that is the best you can come up with, I would suggest you read with a bit more care.

As for inverarity, you did not answer the question: what is the point of arguing with someone who, like Mussolini, is always right?

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

"I appreciate his learning and his ability to defend his position; but I am unhappy about his manners, and especially about the way he tends to dump on anyone who disagrees with him from a great height."

If it is any comfort, I am also unhappy about my manners, and my condescending style, and I trying my best to correct it. Bad habits are hard to break.

Defense of inverarity

[joetexx.livejournal.com]

Mr Barbieri,

Just as I was about to write congratulating you for introducing me to that magnificent piece of Twain's... egad.

I have now read inverarity's review of Bradley's book three times, trying desperately to see the basis for your savage indictment of moral equivalence, relatavism, and so forth, as though any decent person with a knowledge of the historical period in question would be revolted by both reviewer and book. I can't see it. Actually I suspect I would find the book well worth reading.

My only objection to the review centers on the last paragraph, where
inverarity indulges in babble about 'just how incredibly fucked up and horrible war is' and compliments Mr Bradley on 'a brutal deconstruction of everything "glorious" about war.' This is nonsense, of course - though war is always horrible, how does it follow that it is never glorious?- but is it particularly pernicious nonsense? I don't think so - it could be matched, except of course for the word 'deconstruction', in the scribblings of any number of writers and journalists from, say, the time of Voltaire forwards. You might very fruitfully have had at this absurd notion. You chose, rather, to spit venom and emit rage over the entire review.

inverarity does not conclude that no war is ever just, nor that the Pacific war in particular was not so. Certainly Mr Bradley cannot be so accused. Since he is willing to defend the nukings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki he must perforce accept that the war which they ended was justified. (inverarity has of course actually read Bradley which you and I have not).

inverarity does say that "no war is moral" by which he clearly intends to refer to the means used to wage war. Again it does not follow that because both sides commit atrocities that the victory of one should not be preffered. I think he is wrong here but it is the wrongness of mudleheadedness, not malice.

Again the atrocities detailed by Mr Bradley, against Indians, Filipinos, and shipwrecked Japanese soldiers and airmen, actually happened. I first heard of Sand Creek from an aunt, who grew up with my mother on the Fort Sill reservation, major staging area for the Indian wars. They went to Sunday school with gray braided braves who had taken scalps in their youth. My aunt never doubted that the cavalry's supression of Indian raids was necessary. Nor did she doubt that Sand Creek was an atrocity. I don't see even the ghost of an
implication that describing these things constitutes ascribing moral
equivalence to all actors in the drama. It's simply historical honesty. As for moral relativism Mr Bradley seems almost painfully determined to apply the same standards to everybody. The review notes that he specifically regards the Japanese treatment of POWs as worse than that of the Allies. This would not be true were he adopting a 'plague on all houses' attitude.

continued

Re: Defense of inverarity

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Wait for my review. You are writing under a mistaken premise.

Defense of inverarity 2

[joetexx.livejournal.com]

Perhaps inverarity gives offense by his description of the Japanese justification of their wartime actions, as though to describe it were to endorse it. Rather than quote the review I will give a paraphrased capsule summary of the Japanese POV:

The American imperialists, heeding the lessons of their depraved European mentors, have built a colonial empire in the Pacific and on the periphery of Asia, using the most cynical commercial and military means, and have not hesitated to mistreat their subject populations. Upbraiding us on our actions in China is a serious piece of impudence, considering. In addition they seek to strangle Japan's legitimate expansion and access to resources. By banning our purchase of scrap metal in 1941 Americans moved from insult to irreparable injury. Pearl Harbor was too good for the sanctiminious Yankee roundeyes..

Where, you may ask, did I first hear this monstrous apologia for Japan's unjustifiable agression and treacherous attack on our forces? (And I absolutely do, BTW, regard Japan's actions as monstrous, unjustifiable, treacherous)

Well - I heard it from the lips of my father when I was about 11 years of age. He had served a long tour of continous infantry combat duty in New Guinea and repeated the experience in the Phillipines. He never doubted the justice of the Pacific war. He greeted the news of the Enola Gay with a boilermaker toast, joined in spirit by every GI in the theater. Now they wouldn't have to invade Japan.

Postwar he served as an intelligence officer. In 1949 he argued the merits of the war with a Japanese merchant and air force veteran in Hokkaido. This fellow was the origin of the quote about Pearl Harbor being too good for us. 'You are occupying my country, and this will anger you,' he told my father, 'but this is what most Japanese think.' Dad said, 'The SOB didn't convince me but I was impressed by his honesty.' Later, as every American staff officer must, Dad of course studied the Japaese justifications for their actions in school, because if you are to gauge the actions of present or future enemies it helps to understand the motives if past ones.

I don't think it would have been safe to accuse my old man of moral
equivalence.

Re: Defense of inverarity 2

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Sorry that this is personal to you. Perhaps this explains your rush to judgment. I want you to wait till I have published my review of this piece of crap of inverarity's before you reply. It will not satisfy you - because I will be dealing with the views of your father, whom I did not know from Adam, but which are neither new to me nor well thought out - but at present you simply have no idea of my real grounds to find inverarity fraudulent, self-regarding, racist, culturally imperialistic, historically ignorant and morally vicious. If you have anything to say, you can wait for a couple of days; the review of the review is already half ready.

Re: Defense of inverarity 2

[joetexx.livejournal.com]

I should have started out expressing a desire to see a complete review of the review; it was not clear to me that you actually intended to post it.

You would be mistaken to suppose that I hold my views out of filal respect solely - though I dis rspect my father deeply we disagreEd on many things. Just not on WWII.

Re: Defense of inverarity 2

[joetexx.livejournal.com]

That should be of course 'did respect'. To read my typo as 'disrespect' would not merely distort but actually reverse my meaning.

Re: Defense of inverarity 2

[fpb.livejournal.com]

It's up now. Have fun.