Last word on Tongue Tied

UPDATED POST HERE

Sorry folks, I've been tied up with the family and just found out that I'll be needed at the homestead longer than expected so I won't be back up to speed for another day or two. I see I've been missing all the fun here.

Thanks for the support friends but you do know old Crumpy is just over here trolling for hits for his own blog - which he appears to need badly. It seems to be working for him as I'm told some of my friends have made a visit to Crumpyland and report that he entertains, among other fantasies, that TT is one of the top ten blogs in Blogville. Hysterical.

I'm sure you realize that Crumpy (and most some of the TT readers) are lost in their own la-la land ideology and will never admit the truth folks. It would require actual critical thinking to move past empty slogans into intelligent analysis. This is how Bush gets away with such criminally negligent policies. Most of these "red-staters" are simply too afraid to disrupt their tiny little sheltered lives of predictable mediocrity outcomes with actual facts and so find their solace in group-mocking those with the courage to look at the big picture and form original opinions.

It's rather pathetic frightening really. They don't care whether it's true or not, just that there's a lot of people that agree with them. The echo chamber gives them the illusion of being in the majority when in fact they are just a handful of really loud bigots who managed to find each other. I feel sorry for them. How horrible it must be to wake up in the morning and have to wait for someone else to tell you what to validate what you think. In any event they are more victims of people like Scott Norvell than I ever was.

I after all expected him to burn me, his fans don't even realize they are being used to reinforce policies that will leave them and their descendants in a miserable state of poverty while Scott and Bush and the rest of the neo-cons take off with their money future and leave them with some useless snake oil.

So this is my final word on the whole TT thing. When I applied for the slot, Scott told me that TongueTied was taking up too much of his time, had reached its plateau of readers and needed a boost to build a bigger audience and thus generate some advertising and some income. He specifically told me he was going to change the format and asked how we thought we could help.

I told him the blog was boring, too one-note and stale and that if he opened up the format to include other views (similar to what we do at the Detroit News) so that the posts would remain fresh, it would generate interest, feedback and potentially income. I explained to him in detail what effect having a leftie on the board would have, which certainly included hate mail. I also stressed the importance of having a balanced team of bloggers in order for the format to succeed.

Scott knew exactly what he was doing when he left Jim and I alone on that board. This was no, as Crumpy keeps calling it "bate [sic] and switch." Scott invited me in to deliver exactly the sort of posts I put up and he deliberately set us up to end up there alone to get his readers all riled up, in order to better wring some cash out of them. He had no intention of changing the format to include a balanced approach, and I believe at this point he never had.

I don't care that he got my advice for free. I don't even care that he may have made money on it. I'm pissed because he excuses dumping us after a week for generating too much hate mail saying his readers don't want to be challenged. I guess he forgot that lefties think for themselves, have an attention span that lasts longer than ten minutes and aren't easily manipulated as [some of] his readers are. Not to mention, the challenge he refers to, is the one I made to him directly so it's not only disingenuous for him to pretend to be surprised by the negative feedback, it's dishonest for him not to admit that he's the one who wasn't up to the challenge of debating us.

Not thanking us for donating our time to keeping the place alive while he was away was just plain bad manners but his rude and tacky post about "cleaning house" cheats his own readers by intimating that they were responsible for getting us off when he clearly never had any intention of keeping us on in the first place. I guess he figured they if they felt empowered, they would give more.

Was he right? I don't know. How about it Crumpy? Care to enlighten us? How much did you give?