One of the fun things about having a popular web site is watching one’s enemies scurry in fear at your presence (really, I’m not kidding).
An animal rights activist took it upon himself to lift the full text of one of my articles and posted it on a popular animal rights/vegan site, VegSource.Com.
Another activist replied to that message with a post claiming that I was trying to deceive people into thinking my anti-animal rights site was really a pro-animal rights site and had some other criticisms of my site.
So I posted (the first time I’ve posted there in more than a year) that the main difference between my site and VegSource.Com was that I don’t ban people who dare disagree with me (which VegSource.Com is notorious for).
In less than an hour or so I was IP banned completely from VegSource.Com — a site which, ironically, has as its tagline “All Are Welcome At VegSource.Com”. The site’s owner, Jeff Nelson’s, probably afraid I’m going to post links to articles like this or this or even even this.
Far from bugging me, I think it’s kind of cool that a site with the budget and traffic that VegSource.Com has (which certainly dwarf the traffic I receive) is apparently deathly afraid of exposing its users to me. That’s how I measure effectiveness.
It is interesting, though, that no major animal rights group I can think of has an open discussion area. In fact, very few have any sort of discussion forum at all. Personally I’ve always thought it was important to let even people I think wholly irrational to speak their mind.
Then again, I don’t have to defend ridiculous propositions such that animals have rights. Maybe I’d feel differently if I was stuck with that position.