A futile wish

I must say, I wish Mooney would not be at it again. I wish Mooney would go do other things now. I wish he would find other despised minorities to smear with accusations of aggression and assault and bashing and other forms of wickedness. I wish he would do that so that I could go back to ignoring him (also of course because then he wouldn’t be doing the thing which I resent his doing and thus feel compelled to rebuke him for doing). Of course, I could go on ignoring him, speaking literally – I’m not forced to retort to his manipulative campaign against overt atheists. But I think his campaign ought to be rebuked, so in that sense I can’t ignore new instantiations of it. I don’t think it’s enough to deliver one overall rebuke of his campaign and leave it at that, because he keeps on. I could ignore his blog with no trouble, but items in major media, which includes Huffington, I can’t.

That’s the main reason a critic told me I’m a nasty mean aggressive bully last week – because I was ‘relentless’ about Mooney. It’s true, I was. I didn’t like being so relentless myself – not least because I think all the repetition is just boring – but also because yes, it did feel too aggressive. Not, I’m afraid, in the sense of being unfair to Mooney and Kirshenbaum – because I thought then and still think that they needed to be persuaded to stop – to stop at least using violent rhetoric and other scapegoating tactics, and I thought there was some chance, however tiny, that persuasion would work. More in the sense of being ugly. More an egoistic concern than an altruistic one. No maybe that’s not quite it – because being ugly is harmful in its own way. Yes that’s it. I didn’t like being as ugly as I thought M&K were being. I didn’t like debasing the discourse that way, so often and so ‘relentlessly.’ But but but – there they were – in one national media outlet after another. It was a relief when they’d done all the media they could do, and I could shut up about it. So…I wish Mooney would shut up, or get a different subject. I would like nothing better than to ignore him.

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