Rattling the Monkey Cage: A Response to Ron Brynaert

You know, I probably shouldn’t do this.  Bluntly, I strongly suspect that Ron Brynaert is actually a little nuts.  And if anyone out there is a friend of his, see what you can do about getting the guy help.

But he has been going around denouncing me in dubious terms and I feel the need to respond.

Now, for the most part the reaction to my admitting that “Aaron Worthing” was actually a pseudonym has been positive and I have appreciated the support of long-time friends.  Still, if you want to hate me for having told this lie, perhaps calling me a liar, there isn’t much I can do about that, and to some degree I will understand.  In that situation, we aren’t in a factual dispute, just in a dispute over morality.  But I would ask those critics to ask themselves if a person is ever justified in lying and under what circumstances, because I believe there are very few of us who believe that lying is never justified ever.  But that is really a question you have to answer for yourself.

But I can clear up factual misconceptions and distortions, and just plain bad logic.  Which brings me to Brynaert.  I used to be moderately friendly with this guy during Weinergate until he became convinced I was part of some kind of anti-Anthony-Weiner conspiracy or something.  I never could understand what the theory was, given that Weiner confessed to the central allegation—that he was having cybersex with women who was not his wife, and often after he was married.  You know, because you need a conspiracy to explain an event as strange as a man stepping out on his wife.  (Note: sarcasm.)  Somewhere around that time he started coming after me for my twitter avatar pic.  You know, this pic on the side:

He claimed that this was in celebration of the murder of John F. Kennedy.  And I explained at the time that actually what amused me about the picture was the incongruity of the cute kitten doing an evil thing.  I think I have been pretty consistent in my denunciation of using murder to influence policy in a democracy.  And that’s all pretending I disliked Kennedy, and I don’t.  So for a day or so he came after me on twitter over a picture of a kitten with sniper rifle, and then felt so secure in his victory he made the entire thread disappear from my view when he was done.  Believe it or not, all that will be important in a moment, as stupid as that is.

Anyway, at his crappy little blog, he points out that I was anonymous prior to starting the another blog and that I gave a different “excuse” for being anonymous back before I started the blog, so therefore I must necessarily be lying about my reason for being anonymous now.  But in fact there isn’t even a contradiction, there.  This is what I said in revealing that “Aaron Worthing” was a pseudonym:

It all started when I started this [other] blog..., I had planned on releasing my real name when starting this blog as part of my show of solidarity....  But I realized that as a married man, it was not just my life that I would be risking but my wife’s as well.  So I told her what I planned to do and asked for her consent.

And she refused to give it.

(emphasis added.)  So there are two obvious implications from that.  The first is that I felt my indentify should not be revealed without the consent of both myself and my wife.  And the second is that before I started this other blog, I didn’t want to reveal my real name.  And doesn’t that imply that I might’ve a reason for doing so?  Why, yes it does.

So as of January, 2010, I am saying that the reason why I was not giving my name was so that I could speak freely without fear of professional reprisal.  Specifically I said that I was learning disabled, my employers didn’t generally know this, and I feared discrimination if that fact became widely known.  Since Mr. Brynaert has seemed to express some sympathy for gay people, and gay people have been known to be “in the closet” for years, if not their entire life, you would think he would at least understand where I was coming from on that point, even if he disagreed.  I didn’t mention whether my wife consented to this, because it wasn’t relevant; I refused to reveal my name for my own reasons.

Then as suggested in the passage above, I decided that I wanted to reveal my actual name when starting other blog.  So I went and asked my wife for her consent, and she said no, for her own separate reasons.  So the timeline is simple.  First I was refusing to reveal my name; then I decided I was willing to, but my wife was not. You are free to doubt the veracity of those statements, but there is nothing at all inconsistent about it.

And then there are the deliberate, misleading distortions that Brynaert engages in.  None of these quite amount to lying, but you can see for yourself that he is very deliberately giving you a false impression.

For instance, there is the matter of whether I endorsed every single item that appeared on the other blog.  But I think in totality it is pretty clear that I was giving a forum for other persons' freedom of expression.

Anyway, I think the fascinating thing is that for a guy slamming me for telling the lie about my identity, Brynaert seems to engage in a lot of deliberate deception himself.  I suppose he thinks he has a really good reason for that, right?  But I wonder what that reason is.  I mean given his conduct, laid out here, he clearly has no objection to deliberate deceptions, so why is he really angry at me?

Honestly, it beats me.

And remember that silliness about my sniper kitten avatar on Twitter?  Well, we have more comedy on that front.  Apparently he has moved on from the theory that I was pro-presidential-assassination, to a new one.  Apparently I am being anti-gay by using that avatar.

Confused?  Well, let me quote him and then deconstruct the quote:

Worthing had evidently seen the photo at libertarian satirist Frank J. Fleming's IMAO blog where Tim B.'s submission "Oswald was a pussy!" became the "Kitty Sniper Caption Contest Winner" back in September of 2003.

"Yay me!! 'The Usual Suspects' rules...again!" the winner cheered himself in the comments. In a November of 2006 comment, Tim B. wrote that he "work[ed] in the health insurance field."

However, the actual line from the movie is "Oswald was a fag." When asked in July on Twitter, Worthing claimed he only ever used A.W. and Aaron Worthing at the IMAO blog.

Now for a former editor of Raw Story, that is pretty confused writing, so let me de-tangle that for a moment.  What he is saying is that Tim B. claimed to be borrowing or riffing off of a line in “The Usual Suspects” where someone said “Oswald was a fag.”  So therefore I was somehow saying something against gay people, or something.  Which depends on:

1)      Me having read all the comments of that blog post (I hadn’t);

2)      Me having watched The Usual Suspects (I did, but on regular TV—with many lines censored);

3)      Me remembering the correct version of that line (I didn’t, and indeed the version I watched might have had that line censored);

4)      And therefore me deciding to implicitly endorse that anti-gay comment that Tim B. somehow endorsed by using the image as my avatar.

You know as opposed to me finding its randomness kind of funny and quoting IMAO while being unaware of what random line in a movie Tim B was riffing off of.  Indeed, the first time I read that passage from Brynaert, I thought “The Usual Suspects” was a reference to Casablanca.

And you have to enjoy the extra creepiness of him then deciding to investigate Tim B. who did nothing wrong except win a caption contest on a humor blog, ending with his implication that I was really Tim B. But then again this is not the first time he has gone to ridiculous lengths to investigate a mere commenter.  Tell me, Brynaert, were the Free Masons involved?  How about the Saucer People?  Apparently this is a man who thinks there are massive conspiracies afoot to place a comment on a blog.

(This is not a picture of Brynaert.)

But he has even further evidence!  From a recent tweet:

@IMAO_ What do u think chance is 2 of your commenters - Tim B. & liar lawyer @AaronWorthing - would make same misquote? ronbryn.blogspot.com/2011/12/lawyer…

Oh my, logic is not one of your strong suits, is it Brynaert?  I mean there is so much wrong with that, it’s hard to know where to begin.  First, “Oswald was a pussy” is not necessarily a misquote.  More than likely, it was a riff off of the original.  And what are the chances that both Tim B and myself would use the same words?  Well, pretty frakking good, given that the words in question was the phrase that won IMAO’s caption contest connected to that very picture, a fact I was alluding to when I referenced IMAO in my tweet.  In other words, Brynaert, you colossal idiot, I was quoting Tim B.'s winning entry.  It ain't secret knowledge, you twit.  I suppose if I said “Houston, we have a problem” Brynaert will think I am really Tom Hanks.

Now he does correctly note that I forgot several instances where I reprinted emails where I represented myself to be Aaron Worthing, and I did that at Patterico’s.  Which does mean that I was incorrect when I said “[a]s for Patterico’s site, I never said in a post that I was really Aaron Worthing.”  What can I say?  I forgot about them and I apologize for that.  Indeed, I have written around three posts a day at least five days a week for over a year, so we are talking conservatively around 156 posts.  So I forgot about three of them (here, here and here) and who knows if the guy digs around he might find one or more I have also forgotten about.  It’s a big haystack so maybe there is one or two more needles in it.

Or I suppose you could believe I was intentionally lying when I said that.  Which means that I told a lie when I knew the proof that I was lying was just laying around which would mean I was not just telling a lie, but a stupid and pointless one at that.  Indeed, you would have to believe I told this lie and didn’t even bother to cover up the evidence—for I could have gone back and edited those posts to remove the evidence at any time.  You can decide for yourself which theory to believe.

That all being said, I do appreciate him and others ferreting out every single instance where I said I was Aaron Worthing, so I can easily go back and add a correction to those posts as an update.  And that is how it will be handled.  You will see it all laid out there, just as it was, but with an update appended mentioning the truth.  And I think thankfully my plumbing issues are starting to be fixed in such a manner that will allow me to take the time to do that today.  I hope.

And by all means if I have missed any other instances of saying my name was Aaron Worthing, let me know in the comments.

I will say one other thing.  Because I knew it was a lie I didn’t try to overhype my role in the site as a rule.  I didn’t generally say, “yeah, I am awesome for doing this.”  For instance, at one point, I announced a new label: bravest.  You could only earn it if you gave your name and location, to give people mild incentive to do this.  In the post announcing it, I didn’t even mention whether I would qualify, because I knew I didn’t.  Yes, I applied to label to my cartoon so that no obsessive compulsives on the web would notice anything was amiss; it was part of that basic lie about my name.  And of course the moment the truth came out, I took it off the cartoon and gave a sigh of relief.

Now I did occasionally do things that would have the effect of generating admiration in others, as a method of intentionally drawing attention away from real persons and instead toward this phantom, Aaron Worthing.  For example when introducing co-bloggers Dustin and J.D. I wrote this:

They are going to be doing 99% of the heavy lifting but to be blunt, if you terrorists are going to go get mad or kill anyone, come atme. I still insult your prophet on a regular basis and I will continue to do so until this sort of thing stops getting a violent response. And this blog is mine. So if you are feeling like beheading someone, I’m right here. Aaron Worthing of Manassas, Virgina, b*tches.

So I suppose a person reading that might think I was brave, and, well, there was no way to dispel that false impression without letting the terrorists in on the truth.  But for what it’s worth, I never felt any boost to my ego when people said that they admired me based on those false pretenses.  A while back I wrote this to an internet friend on a wholly unrelated topic:

[W]hen you grow up with three learning disabilities, if affects your personality in surprising ways.  One of the ways it affected me is I had people all my life saying to me that I was stupid or lazy or careless or whatever, and I knew that the truth was exactly the opposite of what they were saying.  And when you have people putting you down constantly in ways that you know is just plain wrong... you gain the remarkable ability not to give a f--- what people say about you.  I mean I am nice to people and I make a reasonable attempt to make them understand how they are wrong when they are, but if I do all that and they still say bad things about me, I could give a sh-t.  It literally has no effect.

(curse words censored.)

And it turns out that I am equally unaffected by praise I don’t deserve, which is something I didn’t know about myself.

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Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.