Some Have Gone…and Some Remain.
We read today that Mean Mr. Mustard, the ass-kicking, non-liberal who is being held hostage in Berkeley, is calling it quits, having decided to devote his blogging time to the study of law at Boalt School of Law, to which he was recently accepted. Recently we also learned that Gary at Life After Fifty has taken down his blog, having been hounded from the blogosphere by trolls

While we will miss them both and wish them the best, the contrast surrounding the circumstances of their decisions to cease blogging is painfully obvious. One voluntarily departed to explore new intellectual challenges, but the other was – to use an employment law analogy – an “involuntary quit,” which was caused by a “hostile blog environment.”

Rita, in her usual no-baloney fashion, has lamented the negative effect that trolls have had on the blogosphere, and there is no better example of that than the case of Gary at Life after Fifty. The vast majority of Gary’s recent posts were anything but controversial or confrontational (the kind that are most likely to attract the attention of trolls). Rather, they were deeply personal and moving observations – the kind that, some might say, reflect the wisdom and sensitivity born of the author’s having spent five decades on the planet. Gary wrote about his bittersweet re-acquaintance with any Army buddy who was terminally ill. He shared with us his devastation following the recent death of his handicapped son. He let us look in regularly on his wonderful grandchildren and made no bones about how much he loved them.

Nevertheless, he was targeted for harassment by a couple hate-spewing trolls. For the life of me, I cannot fathom how cowardly and evil one would have to be to get some sort of gratification from leaving mean-spirited and hateful comments in Gary’s blog. Did these wastes of oxygen celebrate when they learned that they drove this man off the internet? Could it possibly have made them feel good about themselves? Can we chalk it up to the foolishness and insensitivity of youth? I don’t know, because we have no way of knowing their ages. We do know that, whatever their ages, they are genuinely evil.

And, the thing I know for sure is that not one of them is worth the sweat off Gary’s ass.