On honesty

It's sometimes interesting to reflect on how other people see you, so I took a look back recently at a post Tim Ireland wrote last November.

http://www.bloggerheads.com/archives/2008/11/martin_wiesner.asp

Most of the biographical information is surprisingly accurate, but Tim gets into a complete muddle about how to spell my surname by the end. The various accusations he makes are mostly bonkers. Clearly I am an unapologetic user of sock puppets, but it now emerges that Tim maybe is too (see item 19. here). The picture Tim refers to as NSFW was taken by my wife whilst on holiday in Italy last year, and showed me lying on a bed, naked, but with my modesty covered by a paperback book. Jennie Rigg got the "no socks" joke, put poor old Tim didn't. Sorry if you want a peek, I took the picture down not long after Tim saw it, but at least several days before his post.

Tim refers to my ribbing of him as "bizarre". Here's an extract of an e-mail exchange that followed:

Tim: Oh, really? Got any more naked pictures that 'prove' how open you are about your identity? Rhetorical question. Please don't send me any.

Martin: Pervert!

I think I riled him. The following day Tim published his main post and demanded that I respond to it. I don't take kindly to people writing a lot of nonsense about me and then demanding answers, so I declined.

In the post, Tim calls me a coward and a bully. I can't really make sense of much of the "evidence" that Tim produces, so I took this as water off a duck's back. However the day before I had challenged Tim to debate the merits of sock-puppetry under a relevant post at Hack's Cartoon Diary.

http://hackcartoonsdiary.com/2008/11/25/of-socks-puppets-and-free-socks/

Tim has never responded to this, and for this reason I accuse him of intellectual cowardice.

Having got my own accusation out of the way, I wanted to close by saying overall I find most of the exchanges between Tim and I as quite humorous. He seems so eager to cast me in a bad light he inflates his charges and lets his anger show through. Whether enjoying this is a good trait in myself is open to question. However, I won't let it worry me. I have no idea if Tim followed through with a threat to dob me in with the Green Party (I suspect they would have politely ignored his nutty accusations, as many others seem to do), but it does expose his tendency to expect others to fight his battles for him. If I get amusement by goading him along the way I suspect this is not an altogether bad thing.