About two months back, through a coincidental slip of the tounge, everyone’s favorite pro-rights-weblog troll made it known that his webpage (and he, by extension of being the author of the webpage in question) endorses the abridgement of basic human rights. Granted, those of us who have had the displeasure of dealing with this particular charlatan for the past year or so already knew that, but it was nice to hear it come out of his own mouth (well, fingers, in that case).
Today, MikeB302000 let loose another one of those slip-ups, and publicly disclosed that he has always been, is, and apparently will always be, nothing more than a spineless bigot:
And, when I’m writing something I just say what I think or what I remember and don’t waste time researching the source.
(Much of the below comes from my comment-response to him, but I have fleshed it out a bit more.)
Damn. That might be the first perfectly-honest thing (if unintentionally so) I have ever read from him.
What if what he thinks is factually wrong?
What if he remembers incorrectly?
What if his memory is not serving him properly?
What if that source he is relying on proves him wrong?
What then? What do he do? How does he handle it? How does he recover? What is his response? How does he reconcile the differences? What happens when people point out that he is wrong? How do he handle the disagreement?
Unfortunately, I already know all the answers to those questions, and none of them are particularly flattering for him.
Worse yet, what if someone believes what he writes, and does not check it? What if someone takes his words at face value (incorrect, dishonest, and fallacious though they may be), and runs with them? How it if he is able to convince someone that his lies are actually truth?
How disgusting would that be, especially since he spreads his perfidy through malicious, willful intent?
Remember, ladies and gentlemen of my readership – these are the kind of people who would strip you of your personal, human rights. These are the people who would leave you defenseless in the face of a criminal population that very much wishes to cause you and yours harm. These are the people who want to turn you into victims, whether you want to be one or not.
People who do not care about facts. People who do not care about figures. People who do not care about reality. People who do not care about your rights. People who do not care about your life.
These people want to force their will upon you, whether you like it or not. Are you going to stand idly by and let them?
[ASIDE]On a related note, due to the above admission, due to Sparky’s hypocritical, outright, and unceasing rudeness to his hosts (Specifically, in this instance, accusing me of lying with nary a whit of evidence, facts, or supporting data. For someone so very concerned about people being polite and respectful to him, he is surely horrid at reciprocating.), and due to a particularly insightful comment from Weer’d Beard, all of MikeB302000‘s future comments at this weblog will be automatically moderated. Any particularly amusing, entertaining, or heinous ones will be considered for publication, and all the rest will be summarily deleted – rest assured, the bar will be set rather high.
This weblog is my intellectual and digital property, and I am under no compunction or requirement to tolerate outright bigotry, prejudice, and baseless accusations against my honor on my own property. My rights reign supreme here, and I join the ranks of at least six other major pro-rights webloggers I can think of off-hand who have effectively banned MikeB302000 from their premises.
Discussions of the facts of reality are quite welcome here, and will always be – baseless personal attacks, spurious affronts, and unending slurs will be abided until such time as I get tired of them (amusingly, this policy is not terribly different than the one Sparky claims to follow – the only difference being, I mean what I say).
And tired of them, I am.[/ASIDE]
Its pretty obvious MikeB302000 doesn’t actually want to discuss anything, he just wants us to pay attention to him, both on his blog and anywhere he feels the need to comment.
Honestly even if this wasn’t a private blog, Its hard to call this a moderation of free speech, given that Sparky doesn’t actually ever SAY ANYTHING. Rather its a slightly more organized variation of the animal howls that arises from a Frontal Lobe Epileptic in the midst of a focal seizure.
Only Epileptics can’t control it.
I think anybody thinking that his standard drivel has any benefit to our side is nothing but naivete on our behalf.
Tho of course the above quote does do a deal of good showing both the foolish roots of anti-rights activism, but also can be used to show the similarity between them.
But I don’t think we should be expected to endure his twisted cries for attention, as well as his emo laments when we call him the disgusting things that he openly admits to being.
He is the proverbial turd in the punchbowl that many of us have long since flushed.
[...] MikeB’s at it again. At this point, the only use MikeB and the rest of his little playgroup have is that every time [...]
I would say he is accurate about the file keeping. You, Weer’d, and Bob take him to task a lot more than anyone else. It appears to those not in the know that it is a personal vendetta against him. That is why I am glad that you continually point out that the reason you do it is so that those who don’t know him don’t take him at face value.
Don’t get me wrong. I understand what is at stake and so many people read the internet and do not look for evidence from other sources backing it up. Case in point. I receive a ton of emails that a quick review of Snopes.com on the subject shows that the email in question is a hoax. People continue to pass them around though with no looking into the matter. I email my friends and family how they quickly could correct their behavior with a simple internet search, to no avail. I think some people got the message but I know that others haven’t.
So when they read Mike, they have you at every turn, calling him out on his bullshit. We should thank you. I honestly don’t know how he thinks he can be taken seriously with the comments he has made. I am to the point now that I’m wondering if he isn’t actually FOR gun owners because he makes our case for us. He actually lives the stereotype of the anti.
If you’re liberal about the definition I DO have a vendetta against him. MikeB302000 is a Scammer. He pretends to be an open-minded blogger who cares about gun laws and gun rights, who wants to respectfully debate the issues.
Instead what we have is a Mentally ill man with Narcissistic Personality disorder who only cares about himself, and the attention he gets, and seems to deeply enjoy people getting angry or paying him negative attention.
He’s a liar, a troll, and a bigot. What’s worse yet is while his individual writing style is unique to him, his overall mental state and end goal is VERY similar to a HUGE population of anti-rights advocates, be they similar trolls like Jadegold, or Laci’s owner, or R. Stanton Scott, or be they paid people like Pety Hamm, or Josh Sugarmann. They are all “Sad But Predictable”
http://anothergunblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/sad-but-predictable.html
And Narcissists
http://weerdbeard.livejournal.com/648568.html
So much like as a species we don’t feel the need to re-invent the wheel, or re-discover conservation of energy, or the acceleration of gravity ect ect, I reference my posts, as well as the very insightful posts by BobS., Linoge, MikeW, Joe Huffman, Sebastian, and others just so people new to the game don’t need to figure out what took the lot of us MONTHS to finally discover.
Also his trash is a pain in the ass (and thanks to the informative nature of pro-gun people, if his posts are ignored, somebody else will feel the need to tear apart the same old arguments he keeps presenting.) and it derails otherwise productive exchanges of ideas and debates, as well as gives a mentally ill man a reward for his antisocial behavior.
So yeah, you COULD call it a Vendetta, but I consider it a justifiable one. And one I take great pleasure at.
@Weer’d Beard – I have to wonder if readership / response at his own particular putrid corner of the cortex is diminishing… It used to be that refusing to grant him the attention of linking back to him would send him scurrying for the safety of familiar, foul shores, but that small gesture appears to have lost its deterrence. Hell, even after making it quite clear in this post, and my previous one regarding him, that his rude, crude, and offensive comments are no longer welcome here, he has already attempted to comment twice now – and the second was after I emailed him to warn him such comments would not see the light of day. Is it desperation, or is it just his psychosis working on to a deeper level?
I do not really care in either case, but it is somewhat interesting to consider.
The real shame of the situation is the number of opportunities he was granted by damned near every participant in this sad saga… Countless individuals have offered him the chance to debate “the issues” on an open, level, unobstructed lpaying field, and every single gorramed time, Sparky turned them down. For someone who made such a big deal proclaiming how he made every effort to only debate the issues, he surely spent a whole lot of time avoiding the issues.
And, in the end, debate is the only way we improve our own argumentative tactics – talking amongst ourselves is all good and well, but having an impartial, if not openly hostile, outside entity come in and question our positions, that is how someone finds their own weaknesses and strengths. At the beginning, I had hoped MikeB302000 was going to provide that kind of sounding board, especially since he initially refrained from hiding behind the shield of Reasoned Discourse, but then he started selective moderation, then he started his personal attacks, and then it went straight in down the oubliette after that.
I will disagree with you about his utility (even though this webpage does not tolerate disagreement, according to Sparky), though – for a while, his rampant bigotry, intolerance, aggressive denial of reality, offensive personal affronts, and consistent avoidance of the issues proved quite useful for exposing those traits throughout the whole of the anti-rights movement… But, then they just started to grate, they started to get more than a little repetitive, and finally they got absurdly and abusively personal, and then it was time to pull the plug.
But, probable psychosis or not, there is simply no excuse for his disgraceful behavior of late, and even if this was not my own personal property, I could not honestly be expected to continue to tolerate it. However, thankfully, it is, and off he goes.
@Patrick – Honestly, the “keep a file” jab would bother me significantly less (as in “not at all”) if it were true… but no such file, document, or folder, digital or carbon, exists. Sure, when I am writing something about Sparky, and one of his previous comments seems relevant, I will flip over to the search engine for this webpage, as well as Google, and see if I can turn up the writing I was thinking of (unlike Sparky, apparently, I check to ensure something factually exists before I go spouting off about it), but if knowing how to efficiently run Google searches constitutes “keeping a file” on someone, then damned near everyone (except the VPC) has files on everyone else.
See, that is a prime example – I do not have some document somewhere chronicling all of the stupid things the VPC has said and done over the course of its existance, but when one uses “Google” and “VPC” in the same sentence, my memory dredges up that particular instance of idiocy. Is that “keeping a file” on the VPC? By a strict definition, it is clearly not – my memory is not equivalent to a documented list of events, writings, and publications. It is close, I will grant you, but close only counts in horeshoes, handgrenades, and nuclear weapons.
And, in reality, I do have a personal vendetta – against falsehoods. They both are becoming rather trite sayings, but there is unmistakeable truth in “a lie repeated often enough becomes truth” and “evil only triumphs when good men do nothing” – hell, New York City had a remake of Kitty Genovese’s last hours just yesterday, because people did nothing. To be certain, correcting lies where I see them is nowhere near as significant or important, on a case-by-case basis, as saving the life of someone attacked on the street… But, that said, how many people’s lives can be destroyed by a lie? How many rights can be infringed by a lie?
In Sparky’s case, I can see how my repeated attention to him could be perceived as a personal vendetta against him as an individual, but the simple truth is that he lies, a lot, and I correct him when I see it. If he would stop lying, I would stop posting about his lies, and life would go back on its merry pace. Maybe one day that will happen. And he is far from the only person I have corrected in this fashion, though he does show a marked propensity for coming back for more…
And no worries – I understand that you are supporting me, just having a difference of opinions over quibbles. My primary objection to the “keeping a file” is, as I said, the lack of existance of such a document/folder, but it also implies a maliciousness that simply is not present in my dealings with Sparky – to be certain, he disgusts me, I despise what he is trying to do to our country and its citizenry, and I am sincerely concerned for his mental stability, but there is no maligning intent in my pointing out his lies, only a quest for the truth.
A fair number of us used to be of the opinion that he might be a pro-rights activist in sheep’s clothing, undermining the anti-rights nuts from the inside with his incessant prevarication, misdirection, insinuation, and whatnot. I would totally encourage you to chase down that rabbit hole as far as you like, but there are probably few of us “first contact” folks who still hold it to be possible.
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Regardless, I am thankful for what you do. I do not know how many times I have looked to something on your site to point out his dispicable behavior. I have used google on your site to bring back these gems. LOL
And no. I am done with him. If he happens to be commenting in a thread I comment on, I might rebut him. Otherwise, he is out of my head. He doesn’t get rent free space there. I was just pointing out that for all the good he does us in his failures, maybe he is actually for our side. No matter. Either way, he’s out of the equation. Nobody can take him seriously if they did any kind of research on who he is.
“The real shame of the situation is the number of opportunities he was granted by damned near every participant in this sad saga… Countless individuals have offered him the chance to debate “the issues” on an open, level, unobstructed lpaying field, and every single gorramed time, Sparky turned them down.”
Of course he does. He’s a US expat living in Italy, and he EXCLUSIVELY blogs about US Gun laws and politics. The key points is he doesn’t actually CARE about these things, but these things drive traffic and get people to pay attention to him in comment threads. Gunnies by nature have been under the boot of lies for so long that a simple open admission of a lie about gun rights will cause half-a-dozen rebuttals with links, references, and personal stories. Look at the Snowflakes in Hell link I supplied earlier. Mike drops a 3 line comment that is simple a repetition of one of his old saws and he gets a page long response with links, references and rebuttals. That’s what he’s going for. He could care less if the whole nation got permit-less conceal carry, or if the NFA was repealed.
Now he WOULD be upset if people stopped pushing stupid laws, or if all gun-deaths stopped, but not because he cares about the laws, nor human life, but because he would have lost a hot-button to push.
I think you have his number here…..
Good for you, although I’d have preferred that you didn’t use the term “moderated”, as it has a quasi-Orwellian tint to it.
“Delete his sorry-ass crap unread” would have covered it.
@Patrick – If his words come back to eternally haunt him, then that is the best I could ever hope for. All men are responsible for the things they say, and while he has attempted to shirk that responsibility at every available opportunity, the world will not allow him to do so.
All the better.
@Weer’d Beard – Hell, I was saying that a year ago when we first stumbled across his sewage-filled corner of the cortex. I found it quite strange that such an individual would talk so incessantly, with such heated interest, about a topic that has absolutely no bearing on him, on laws that will not affect him, on things that he simply has no reason to be so engaged in.
He does it for the attention. He does it for the responses, even though he does not really care about the content of those responses. He does it for the vicious, vindictive, malious satisfaction he gets for getting people all riled up.
As I said before, he disgusts me.
@Peter – True, but that is just me being brutally honest. If he can actually manage to bring himself to post something topical, honest, factual, and devoid of his standard, scurrilous personal attacks, I will actually post it – hence “moderation”, since I am considering each comment he leaves on its own merits or demerits.
I do like “delete his sorry-ass crap” as an alternative, though
… and it may really come to that.