Why here?

Those friends of ours who (we hope) will stop by might wonder, "Why here? Why blogger?" Other people probably just wonder, "Who are you dudes?" My response would be, "Who are you and why would you even care? We're all idiots."

The story is a pretty simple one. We're all guys who met in our 20s a couple years ago on a message board and discovered we shared a lot of interests. Sports, politics, history, activism, collecting. We eventually got banned for "causing trouble," which is shorthand for "being irritating to mods who didn't have a reasonable explanation for banning us."

The shorthand version for why we were irritating was "our politics."

The better explanation is: we don't fall easily into groups of liberal or conservative, anarchist or socialist. We distrust, but we're not paranoids (except for maybe one of us *wink*), and we love our country, but we're not patriots. At least not in the "owning a lot of guns kind of way." (Except for one of us. Don't kill me please, EC) For most people, this living outside labels is really really annoying. They don't want to listen to what you have to say: they want to listen until they find something juicy enough to sink teeth into and disagree with.

So when you act like you don't trust your government but also think socialism's not a bad idea, people don't know whether to write you off as a Milita Man Gun Nut or a social revolutionary. They just know they want to write you off. That creates a lot of flame wars and a lot of enemies. People like being able to dismiss you because it makes it easier to reinforce what they think of themselves if they can make you their yin while jerking their own yang.

Eventually, the mods at the board got rid of us. Banning a couple hundred other people who weren't adult enough to have a conversation without freaking out would have been a lot harder than banning the few of us, who were grown up enough to walk away.

Maybe you think that people like us would go apeshit about FREE SPEECH and be outraged at being banned, but those are the breaks. Websites are private things. People pay to put them up and run them; they don't have to pay attention to you. If I ran those websites, I might have banned us too, just because I already have enough headaches.

We thought about starting our own board, but that would have been gay. It's only a few of us, so we could just talk on IM or myspace blogs. That's what we did for a while, but then weird members of the old board tracked down our myspaces and were generally being assholes playing "internet sleuth." It got so we couldn't post a new blog for our friends and comment back and forth on it without seeing a mirror of it appear on the old site, with people tweaking the language and rewriting things to win a flame war we didn't care about anymore.

Because of this, we wanted to talk openly to our friends and allow strangers to read what we had to say (but it's any guess why they'd want to), but we also didn't want to do it with our own names attached anymore. Some people online are malicious, and we all started to worry about maybe losing a job opportunity down the road because somewhere someone was spamming a website with copy-and-paste jobs of our myspace discussions, tweaking the language, making up other stuff and attaching our names to it to make us sound like kooks.

Hence the blogspot. Here we can be anonymous to strangers but also show our friends whatever weird thing is on our minds. Here we can get our ideas out without the burdens of real names and worrying about any consequences. Here we can have fun. We don't expect anyone else to really care about this junk, but if you've stumbled across it, we hope you have fun too.

Thanks!