Cue Twilight Zone music

Remember Kees? I mean “Kees”? The troll who appeared in February-March 2009 pretending to be a naive observer who had just discovered moral relativism by watching a tv documentary about a South Pacific island where the men (prepare for a shock) ran everything?

Who then revealed himself (by emailing a lot of commenters here to urge them to escape my dictatorship, and using a revealing email address) to be the same as one “Bernie Ranson” who had staged a similar extended charade at Talking Philosophy more than a year earlier, in January 2008?

Remember him? (He claimed to be male, and I think that particular claim is true.)

I’ve been reading some of his comments from those two encounters. They’re very interesting, in a way, though in a more usual way they’re utterly boring. They betray an odd and inexplicable (from a stranger) obsession with me. Obsession and hatred, of course – people don’t do this kind of thing out of friendship. He makes much of my putative lying and hypocrisy, my censorship and dominance, my evasiveness and general shiftiness – all this after days and days, and thousands of words, trying to argue him into reasonableness. All very odd. Remember?

I was reading through his comments because I was reminded of him. I was reminded of him by a newish blog that made its debut a couple of months ago and has made a specialty of (cough) criticizing four bloggers in particular. I’m one of them; the others are far more illustrious than I am. The language and mood of this blog is very reminiscent of “Kees”/”Bernie Ranson” – though it could just be the language and mood that are common to all enterprises of this kind. Then again, I’m not familiar with enterprises of this kind, so I don’t know. It seems very eccentric, because it’s time-consuming without really being rewarding. B&W is time-consuming too, but it’s rewarding. A blog that does almost nothing but shout at four bloggers in increasingly obscene terms seems as unrewarding as it could be.

This blog is anonymous of course. You may have seen another anonymous troll who turned up here on Monday. I was suspicious of it because it had just started a blog two days before it turned up; because the new blog sounded a good deal like the above-mentioned anonymous blog; because this troll seemed peculiarly interested in B&W and me for someone who appeared from nowhere. Within about three days the troll had done quite a few things to confirm my suspicions.

I don’t know that any of this has anything to do with “Kees” and “Bernie Ranson” but I think it might. I think that, for one thing, because I find it hard to believe that there are all that many people who are weirdly obsessed with me. Why would there be? I’m a very small player, after all; why would guy after guy after guy after guy work up a foaming hatred of me? I know of a couple of others (non-anonymous) as it is; I think it’s far more likely that there’s one more rather than two or three or five more. Still – it’s a very busy blogger/troll, I must say. Full marks for industriousness!

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