Lifting The Manhole Cover – the origin of a smearblogger Part I

Events of recent weeks have dimly called to my mind a science fiction episode of some sort I saw on TV in recent years. (Now there's an inauspicious opening sentence if ever I've written one, but please bear with me for a while). In this story individuals aged backwards, they died looking like human children, but were born appearing to our eyes as old people. In effect their teenagers, sulky, spoilt, irrational, immature, in some ways practically amoral, would have looked to us like retirement age folk. Someone who looked like my grandfather might have had no more emotional and intellectual maturity than a 13 year old boy.

It was while perusing the Usenet group soc.retirement that I began to reflect on this story. For it is here, that Troy, the riverSbend smear-blogger, a 70 year old man remember, apparently draws the support which allows him to exist in the denial required for someone who likes to think of themselves as an American patriot, to act in ways which are absolutely in contradiction with all the best things that that country stands for. Troy is incapable of grasping the fact that freedom means allowing everyone to speak their mind, without, by all manner of underhand and deceitful means, smearing them, censoring them, or trying to shut down their email accounts. But I suspect that Troy is highly intellectually dependent on a small crowd of cheerleading blinkered fantasists who, although advanced in age, share his immature and brattish outlook. It is this peergroup that emboldens him and blinds him to the shame he ought to feel for his behaviour, in the same way as a teenage gang can provide a moral blindfold for people of much younger years.

A glance on any given day over the Usenet group soc.retirement is likely to give pause for thought to anyone who believes that a grandparent is a safe bet repository of wisdom, and hard-earned understanding of what our society, and life, is all about. This is not to say that soc.retirement is by any means the worst place on Usenet, which has become an oft-used outlet for undirected rage for many, and perhaps it just shows my innate bias that I might have expected it to be any better than elsewhere. Nor do I intend to suggest that every poster here, as opposed to a small, afflicted subgroup is apparently affected by this apparent outbreak of arrested development. But since this blog is directed at shining a light on the murky moves of Troy, the riverSbend smearblogger, I think it is perhaps beholden on me to lift the manhole cover and shine a torch into the sewer from which he emerged.

I've said elsewhere that soc.retirement seems to be perhaps the only place online where individuals can be found suggesting either:

(a) Troy is not the riverSbend smearblogger
(b) the actions of the riverSbend smearblogger are in some way laudable

Now I should state here for the record I have my doubts that anyone here really does not believe that Troy is responsible for the smearblog. I suspect some of these individuals know well that Troy is the culprit. Some may even be actively assisting him. In this blog I'll exhume some of the statements made by Troy's apologistic faux-juvenile brat-pack, and hold them to the spotlight to be exposed in all their moral and intellectual vacuity. What follows may be considered quite a chilling testament to the emptiness of the notion of “a lifetime of accumulated wisdom”.

To be continued…