Echopraxia

There are a number of anonymous academics in this harsh, damp, endless world of blogs, virtually all of whom update more often than I do. I can certainly understand why the practice is so widespread: even when there's no particularly good reason to blog anonymously, there's still an undeniable sense that you don't want a collection of personal nonsense showing up on page one when your students Google you. It'd be even worse than that awkward feeling you get when you run into them in bars.

Anyway, that's off the point. The reason I'm typing this is to say that, no matter how you feel about anonymity, avoiding your students in bars, and so forth, one thing's for sure: doing this is a really, really terrible idea.

UPDATE: In response, a constructive outlook on the world is proposed:

Deb, these right-wing terrorists will never, ever stop attacking you; you don't talk nicely to rabid animals or ask them to please stop biting you, you execute the damned things.

They're hate junkies, and the best way to deal with them -- other than taking a baseball bat to their heads -- is to overdose them with hate.

(Incidentally, the folks who are determined to interpret Frisch's original comments as a serious threat against the life of Goldstein's kid are milking this one way too hard. "Gotcha" doesn't take long to become a fairly tedious game, especially when you're playing it with someone who clearly has very serious problems interacting with other people. The woman is deranged: how much outrage is it really possible to feel about this fact?)