A Man of Principle

Life is all about the choices we make.  We control the things we can control, we react as well as possible when life's game of golf dumps us in the rough or in the sand trap.  As The Wise and Perspicacious Thomas Jonathan Jackson once put it; "You do the best you can with what you have."

I am a living anachronism.  Like Daschiell Hammett's Sam Spade, I am a thing out of season.  I was created to be someone who doesn't fit the desired template of the society I live in.  This gives me options.  I can submit and cuck quite cuckingly, or I can insist upon myself.  I'll just be me, thank you.  That approach hasn't killed me quite yet.

I insist upon myself and eat my consequences.  In blogging, I've been deplatformed three times*.  Twice when blogs I wrote for were LBO'd by "allies"  who decided that I wasn't their flavor of the month.  In a 3rd incarnation, I was on a platform that got nuked by a well-funded DDoS attack.  Again I find myself with options.  They are what life is all about.

The Casual Observer would remark that banging my head against the censorship wall would get old after a bit, but then again, it's easily the hardest bone in my body.  Quit is a four letter word.  The society I live in is on the glide path to spectacular failure.  If I can't change its course I can perhaps record the path of descent so that future readers can follow the links and see what happened.

Or maybe, just maybe, I'm just too stubborn an asshole not to climb right back up on that pony and ride.  What some call stubbornness, I refer to as principle.  The people who don't carry through get carried off.  I can go away sad and bemoan the state of modern society. That, or I can stay and fight to the best of my ability.  I choose the latter.  I choose to be A Man of Principle.

*-As KoTM, RMJ and JPW all three.