Another day, another LJ meme

Stealthily nicked from evawhitley:

>>If there is one or more people on your friends list who makes your world a better place just because they exist and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the Internet, then post this same sentence in your journal.<<

There are several such people on mine, actually; some of them I probably would have run into at a con eventually (and did), but I met them first through a chat room (Hi, the_sheryl!), Usenet, LJ or some other permutation of the Net. Go and do thou likewise.

The better-dead list

madfilkentist has banned me from posting comments to his journal on the grounds that he thinks I wish him dead. This is abso-frelling-lutely untrue and an unfair inference from my comment that I did wish California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) dead for his asinine policies with regard to his gay/lesbian constituents, as noted in MF's journal (whether "Ahh-nuld" is acting out of sincere belief or simply pandering to his party's conservative base makes no nevermind to me). If I want someone to disappear because they are doing something that hurts people I am one of/care about, it is a wish only unto that specific person, and my wishes toward anyone else cannot and should not be inferred from it.

If you think I'm wrong in saying this, feel free to post (including you, MF). I hereby publicly apologize to MF for giving the wrong impression, and hope my friend will rescind this ban, but it's his LJ and he can make the rules. Same applies to me and this one...but I will not return a ban for a ban. I will acknowledge that perhaps mine was an extreme reaction, but I am heartily sick and tired of people trying to legislate (their idiotic notions of) morality on me and mine, at all levels of government.

And in regard to the specific policy under discussion, I firmly believe that the teacher is the only one who ought to have any veto power over what is said in the classroom -- not the school board, not the government, not the students and certainly not any of the kids' parents. If any parents object to what their child hears there, it's their business to respond at home with their own views on the matter, not to try and censor everyone else's kids from hearing it. (The only exceptions to this I can think of are advocating violent crime or child molestation, and even then I would argue for a full investigation and due process before shutting/stringing the teacher up.) Not that I expect this will ever be the case in reality; guess I should resign myself to the eternal rule of Lazarus Long's that teaching kids the bald truth is a capital offense in any society.

"The trouble with truth is that it almost always destroys someone's cherished falsehood." -- Lazarus Long, as told to R. A. Heinlein

What are the rules? And have I broken them once too often?

A member of my friends list whose opinion I respect and value greatly has, in the immediately previous thread, rendered his blunt opinion on my behavior in the LJ community. I will not risk harming/annoying him somehow by reposting it here; suffice it to say that he sees me as lacking respect for the boundaries of others (never mind that I'm not always aware they even exist, much less where they are), posting before thinking about the consequences, not learning from my errors, and being generally loud and brash and inconsiderate. Another person whose opinion also matters to me has characterized me as "volatile." And I see where this can well be the impression others reading this blog, and my posts to those of others, have of me.

Thing is, though I have no desire whatsoever to be thought of this way, or to harm or annoy or upset anyone else, I'm by no means sure I can fix it. I'm 43 years old, people, and pretty damned set in my ways by now. I've long been aware that I suffer from foot-in-mouth disease in my meatspace relations as well, and have tried often to stop myself from repeating mistakes with little to no success. It may very well be that giving me an LJ account at all is like giving a 16-year-old the keys to a gassed-up Escalade and a fifth of Jack Daniel's to gas him up first.

So I'm now taking a good, hard look at myself and wondering whether the answer is to just shut this thing down altogether before I piss off the rest of the people who have liked me up to now (they say), or just to find some way of filtering what I think before I spew it here. And I am thinking about what apparently are a very real and established set of Rules for LJ Etiquette. What are they? One seems to be "Don't use anyone's real name unless they say you can." This one I think I get; I can understand not wanting to be, say, outed as gay or poly or (FITB) in a prospective employer's Google search on you. I fully realize that while handles are merely a fun personality-indicator for some, they are a vital means of self-protection for others, and I'm not always sure who belongs in which camp. "Don't wash your relationship's dirty linen in public" is another one I've had stomped into my forehead in the last week (see previous posts). Is it really as simple as "don't say anything on your LJ you wouldn't say to someone's face"? Or "in Grand Central Station"? Or "on CBS News?"

All of which brings me to you, dear readers. Should this blog be put out of your misery or not? Does anyone actually enjoy reading this thing at all? And what other Rules do you think there are that can be codified in words of 2-3 syllables or less? Your posts here will decide this page's life or death.