One of the ongoing risks that one encounters when you get into the business of dealing with a lot of internet assholes that you may or may not have the joyous experience of encountering in person is that you sometimes forget who is who, if your interactions with those people are colored by your own views regarding other people who are involved.

One of the problems of being someone in a position of key leadership is that you aren’t really allowed to make mistakes. People have an unreasonable expectation of their leaders as being pretty damn close to infallible.

I am pleased that I am not only not infallible, but that I am also afflicted with a great deal of passion. And, being human, that means that I sometimes allow myself to make mistakes for which I later have to apologize.

Not intentionally, mind you. But intent is meaningless save as it regards motivation, and even then does not excuse that effect.  I could, with only the best motivations, promote the complete and utter enslavement of the world to my personal whims, but in doing so I would still be doing a horrible thing.

Doing so doesn’t make me comfortable – the affect that I have adopted in order to write this post is part of that, and is generally outside my direct influence without putting out a lot of energy.

I was supposed to write this post his past weekend. The desire to do so was there, the will to do so was there, the awareness of the necessity of doing so was there.

Yet I didn’t, because this online stuff takes a backseat to the personal, painful, crappy stuff that goes on in a far less sterile space of the world offline. People hurt, and I have to put forth energy to see if I can do things.  I have a job, responsibilities, and all the rest.  They take a lot of effort, and more so because there is rarely any money for any of it, and I cannot use the resources I have access to for my own personal benefit, so sometimes even my own needs get in my way.

This generally sucks, is what it comes down to.

However…

here’s the fun thing the less than exciting part.

I owe an apology to Lyndon Evans.

I have given him one privately, and I did so in due course on the realization of my error, but it needs to be public.

I apologize for placing him in the same category as the Cockroach.  That was an uncalled for and inaccurate statement that I made in error, blinded by my own faulted awareness.

I apologize for placing him in the log cabinites — I am aware he is not of such a persuasion, but that the time of writing that knowledge was blocked.  It was uncalled for and I am sorry for having said so.

What precipitated that, however, was the connections between a small blog and my own darkly biased recollections of Ashley Love.  I have no fondness for her, and sometimes the many various situations I have encountered her in blend together.

And this is why I ended up doing this — I confused Lyndon with the asswipe that writes ngblog.

So I have to apologize for doing that to Lyndon, as well — my doing so was not wise or kind.

ngblog is well known for being a troll blog among the lgbt blogosphere.  They actively engage in hit pieces against pretty much everyone that has any influence in the online LGBT community — I am thoroughly convinced that they are scummy slime.

I also owe them a debt of thanks, which galls me.  You see, had they not linked to my blog in commenting on the two posts of note twixt myself and Lyndon, I would not have known that I had made this mistake.

And would not, then, be apologizing to Lyndon for having insulted him so amazingly poorly by confusing him with them.

Now, this apology doesn’t detract from the more substantial points in my posts.  Lyndon is still arguing that the 8th Amendment should be suspended in the case of citizens of the United States who are trans.

He is still arguing that a that was created relatively recently can make someone trans.

He is still not aware of what it is that makes someone trans — and that is, in the end, the crux of the problem.

And with some time and some effort on both our parts we might even get to a point where you can hear he and I discuss these issues (because lyndon does run an incredible podcast show that I do listen to now and then, and which I should have realized was the wiser connection to make instead of leaping to a flawed conclusion and associations him with ngblog in my mind).

But I did say some terrible things about him.  Things I should not have said. My failures that led to my making that mistake don’t reduce the error, they do not make that mistake less of one — indeed, they make it even more critical that I make this apology.

And so I apologize.

Because I do that.

-- Download Mistakes, Passions, & Apologies as PDF --