Burn ‘em – Not the Akashic Record part 2

In my relentless, tho inconsistent quest for more readers of this blog i have started posting “to everyone” on FB when i have a new blog post.  Because a bunch of my posts are about nuclear, i occasionally draw some folx with contrarian views.  Mostly this is not a problem, i find most pro-nuke folx thoughtful and respectful.  So our wrestling makes me stronger and hopefully us both wiser.

Of course there are some whack jobs out there.  And i picked up one the other day on a repost of an article on ill treatment of whistle blowers in Japan.  This guy was all over the place, Madam Curie’s poisoning, radium worse than plutonium, radioactivity in sea water, lectures on particles.  So i pulled the plug.  it was my thread, i blocked him.  I explained to the others on the FB thread why and they seemed to agree that he was unresponsive to questions and his arguments were not in context or especially important.

I did learn that when you block someone in Facebook, you block yourself to their pages (which seems fair, but i did not know this).  Facebook has a “no bad news” policy so when you defriend someone (this guy was not my friend) or block someone, they never are informed of it.  But he will figure it our soon enuf when he tries to return to this thread he was actively ranting on and cant get there.

A couple of years back when (on my previous blog) when i posted a story about Willow wanting to bust me out of jail for our arrest action at North Anna, i got a flood of pro-nuke folx commenting on the blog post.  I heard about the miracle of Thorium reactors [Thorium reactor proponents are a bit like Lyndon Larouche disciples - what they lack in logic they make up for in enthusiasm] about how i was a bad dad and on and on.  I blasted much of it.  It is my blog, i control the content.  Then i got a whole slew of “freedom of speech” objections.  People were upset that i had erased their comments, i blasted most of these comments as well.

Blogs, Facebook threads and the like are not the Akashic record, they are more like graffiti.  If someone tags over you, tough.  I reminded my pro-nuke friends that they can always write on the NEI blog and they seemed unexcited about that alternative.

Just like spam in your inbox, one key to successfully navigating the world of social media and self published journalism is to keep your finger ever ready on the delete key.

[Curious note:  For reasons i dont understand well, the post i wrote called "Not the Akashic Record" is one of my most popular posts ever, apparently because of peoples searching for "Akashic Record" and apparently not finding much.]