I have to admit, I don’t like Teresa Nielsen Hayden. She has always struck me as a condescending know-it-all, even here on my own blog.

Then there is this shit storm and this utter bullshit of a post explaining what happened:

Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her.

So they deleted unpublished all references to Violet Blue on their site.

On the one hand, they say they don’t want to lend her credibility and on the other they say, innocently, that all sites delete content for various reason, as if they were just doing some regular maintenance.

You can’t have it both ways: did you unpublish because of this credibility thing or did you unpublish because of regular maintenance? Says Hayden: I’m almost impressed by the pretentious meanings people have been reading into “unpublish.”

Speaking of pretentious, do you think unpublish is actually different than delete in any tangible way to visitors on the web? Of course not. So quit this word parsing nonsense please and get your story straight.

I do agree that Boing Boing can do whatever the hell they want. But this looks like a lover’s spat gone public and it makes Boing Boing look like idiots. Their response makes them look even worse.

Just say “she pissed us off so we deleted every mention of her out of spite”. Then we’ll say, OK, fine, you little babies. Instead they pretend they are so above the fray and so mature and get this wordsmith to spin it for them like, what’s the big deal about regular maintenance?

The big deal is it’s fucking lame to unpublish posts about someone for any reason. Yes, you are free to do it, it’s still lame. The reaction you are getting from this, Boing Boing, is because you did something lame. Just admit it.