[This is a follow-on to my post from 2 days ago.]
In the last 2 days I've spent a lot of time researching to try to find the answer to the riddle. While clear and complete answers would never be had without honest testimony from the central character, that's just not forthcoming. So I've had to treat this story as a mystery and piece together what I could. It is unlikely that I will be able to make this interesting to people who've observed or experienced it for themselves. I would nevertheless like to give the exposition as I've seen it and with what I believe is to be learned. Perhaps in all this there is some nugget of perspective that others will find useful. If not, my apologies to you for feeling obliged to navigate through my conceits. I can't promise that there's a prize in the bottom of the package.
For example, I can tell you now that I have clearly not discovered the answer to my main question. Possibly only one person knows that for sure, and among the things I have learned is that his testimony is nevermore to be considered honest.
To minimise the confusion for those who are unfamiliar: the website at the center of this story is one that rhymes with "Spittle-Screen Footfalls". The proprietor of same is the person to whom I will in this post refer as "Rigoletto". The site itself I will refer to as "Palazzo Ducale". To date I have kept a policy of posting nothing anywhere critical of that site and its proprietor, but of course now I am breaking my silence. Everything I do and say in posting this violates some of the myriad of rules Rigoletto now holds for his followers. So I am now unambiguously to be counted among his enemies, but the way he defines "enemies" I couldn't hope to keep off the lists and have apparently been preemptively banned.
One more note: for those of you who would demand a link-fest, sorry no. Among the things I will not do is link to websites which I view as toxic. I will do a little snooping around later to see what I can find archived elsewhere, but I will not be linking to Rigoletto's site ever again1. To see what I have seen you can do the web-searches as I have done. They are terribly easy to do. [You might start by finding a web page about "Rigoletto".]
On to the story then.
I became interested in the blog at Palazzo Ducale just after 9/11. At the time it was a sane, sound and unambiguous chronicle of events. I've been a regular visitor there from that time up until just recently and I have observed the changes although I must admit from a much more stand-off perspective than many who have written about it's evolution over the past eight years.
Similarly, at Palazzo Ducale I found accounts from people much closer to 9/11 than myself. My experience was one of having been at what would become "Ground Zero" only a few days before it would become so. My sense since then is one of having had a near miss. Clearly not so near as those who were in Manhattan on that day and survived or who were booked on certain flights but changed at the last minute that day, but having stood in the south window overlooking the refineries of New Jersey from Windows on the World just a few nights prior, and having stayed in a hotel room that would be apparently gouged out of the structure by falling debris is near enough for my purposes.
I never held any illusions about Rigoletto's politics. While the meme would grow in time that his blog was politically conservative, this was never the case. He was not and his opinions were not. He appeared to be like Ron Silver, a liberal to the core and a patriot. [This I argue is the true "political divide" today: Not liberal vs. conservative but euro-leftist vs. patriot. What the euro-left fails or refuses to recognise is that American Patriotism is love not of soil nor of volk, but of a set of ideas laid down eloquently on paper by our predecessors2.]
For the better part of 5 years Palazzo Ducale would consist mainly of stories gleaned from the news services about jihadists or about unhinged euro-leftists excusing them, often with brief commentary from Rigoletto himself and then with a thread of comments from people who were registered members3. Rigoletto would also post unhinged criticisms of his blog and respond as he saw appropriate. This I suspect is telling: to observe Rigoletto today is to understand that he has become obsessed with criticism, not of his ideas, but of himself. What many of us perhaps did not recognise at the time, was that his posts about his nutty critics were in his mind more about the messenger than the message. At the time however, his responses were easily understood to be [but possibly mistaken as] a clear-headed repudiation of nutty ideas.
Clear, thoughtful and mostly-civil, discussion of issues of the day attracted a large following. Eventually the community at Palazzo Ducale would take on a life of it's own and become the Duke while Rigoletto was relegated to the role of... well... Rigoletto (read a synopsis of the Opera by Verdi if you're lost). This I suggest was the beginning of the end. What was missed then, but what was nevertheless in evidence (I argue) and what is certainly true today is that Rigoletto was sufficiently self-focused that the moment he and the Duke were clearly in disagreement, he would seek the Duke's elimination.
Here's where the metaphor breaks down a little. Verdi's Rigoletto chose physical violence. To my knowledge physical violence has never sincerely been contemplated by any of the parties in this "blogwar". Bet then the opera is a metaphor too, so please don't get too literal with the analogy.
Our 21st-century Rigoletto has instead banished the Duke from the Palazzo and then chosen to follow the Duke anywhere he might retreat and harass him using every method available. That is to say, if you do your research as I have suggested, you will find that it is not enough for Rigoletto to have banned the accounts of a monumental proportion of his previously-loyal readers. Oh no, he visits them at their personal blogs, and various public blogs and in chat rooms wherever they may congregate, takes names and constructs new lists of enemies to ban. His inner-circle also acts as both spies and sock-puppets on many sites around the web where the proprietors have had the nerve to either disagree with him, criticise him, or merely comment on him in any way. Rigoletto has now established in his own words that to post on any blog he does not currently maintain in his blog roll is treason and punishable by banning (and presumably stalking).
The rhetoric on his blog against his perceived enemies has also become shrill to the point of self-satire. To believe him, practically everyone on the web who isn't currently a fan of his is either a white-supremecist4 or a facist.
As for me, I remained oblivious to most of this for quite some time. I did not take his thin-skinned vendettas for what they were. I like many perceived that he had "changed" while I now argue he has always been as he is. When he changed the emphasis of Palazzo Ducale from jihad to creationism I took it as a temporary obsession from which he would eventually return.
As my views on the subject of creationism differ significantly from the two main courses expressed in discussions on that website I had not taken a side in those arguments and thus had not shown myself to be one of those who Rigoletto viewed as enemies. I opted to wait it out and focus my attention on very pleasing community link-aggregation system [Pleasing that is until all the interesting people were banned and in some cases their every posting purged]. I mistakenly surmised that eventually calm would return and an opportunity to patch up differences would come to pass. Instead in this time he gradually purged his rolls of anyone who he even remotely suspected of "disloyalty". Today he even bans people [apparently not just me] who had never once prior to being banned said a thing even remotely critical of him anywhere, anytime but aren't part of the crowd that showers him with complements for his opinions.
What I believe today is that I failed to understand Rigoletto's consistent behaviour over the last eight years. While I don't question the sincerity of his original postings on the topic of 9/11, what I believe is that his passion was ultimately for the adulation he received and not for the ideals they seemed to illustrate. If we understand him as a person hungry for compliments then we must understand that his apparent passion for counter-jihad would inevitably wane and he would necessarily seek another issue for which to receive adulation. His choice of issues from that point is irrelevant, but what is relevant is the illiberal way in which he proceeded to destroy what he had built.
The last 2-3 years of his behaviour represent not a "change" but merely turning the wierd knob up nearly to eleven:"No wierder. No wierder. Wierder... that's good!"
...and with that observation it is my hope to have done with this hunch-backed clown. His act now clearly belongs on the Gong Show.
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1: There are multiple reasons not to do so. Among others he is currently engaged in purging posts by those he has deemed enemies, and that is now a very expansive definition. Hence his archives are no longer a reliable account.
2: I very carefully use the word "predecessors" rather than "ancestors". Ancestry is the source of volk patriotism. American patriotism is not of flesh and blood but of the mind and soul, and the identity "American" is not obtained exclusively by birth nor maintained solely by reason of ancestry.
3: True old-timers recall a day before registration was required. I refrained from comment in those days. Later I would decide I was ready to do so but it took more than a year to find a time when registration was open. Membership was a privilege clearly understood to be maintained by civil behaviour. Eventually "civil" would be replaced by "sychophantic".
4: Per Rigoletto apparently even asian women can be white-supremecists and jewish women can be neo-Nazis. It's an equal opportunity world.
