So I’ve gone ahead and removed this apology, for the simple reason that it’s pretty much exclusively shared in bad faith by anonymous accounts looking to dunk or whatever. I made a sincere and unqualified apology in this space out of a feeling of intense personal moral necessity, and doing so was important to me if not to anyone else. I have a certain amount of “work” to do regarding my behavior towards Malcolm Harris, and apologizing in a no-bullshit and unqualified way was an important part of that. But the work itself is what matters, not anyone else’s perception of it. The substance of the apology being done, I don’t feel any requirement to keep the form of it up, given that it appears to be invoked only by Twitter NPCs shitposting or pathetic self-appointed hall monitors who want to regulate what other people read.
The apology was the apology. Keeping it up to serve those people is another thing. The basic facts are well understood, and I have accepted those facts as true and acknowledged both my personal culpability and my tremendous shame over them since the beginning. If you would like a fuller exploration that actually engages with the moral complexity of the situation, given my psychotic state, you can read about that stuff here. People don’t share that one, though, precisely because of that complexity - they don’t want to have to engage in anything nuanced because that makes it harder to dunk and complicates the simplistic narrative. And that’s why I don’t want to keep the original post up anymore. Why continue to enable a facile form of non-engagement by people who universally didn’t like me before it all happened and just want a pretext to declare me an untouchable now?
I’m sure you can find the post on the Wayback Machine, if you would like. I really don’t give a shit.
I am actually very vulnerable to criticism about this. I still feel shame about it on a daily basis. People have engaged with me on the incident and my current attitude towards it in a way that has stung me and prompted me to evolve my thinking. But all of them actually engaged, did the work of understanding the situation in the fullness of its complications and extended to me a certain degree of sympathy and understanding. They have particularly acknowledged that while being in the throes of an extreme manic episode does not exonerate me or dismiss my culpability, it is certainly a relevant piece of context for what happened. For that very reason, their critical engagement hurts and affects me deeply in a way that can never happen when @Dick&Balls420 or @MarxLuver1917 tweets this link and says “HE IS BAD AND YOU ARE BAD IF YOU REFERENCE HIM.” (Anonymous criticism is toothless in general.) I would think this would be a very obvious aspect of human psychology: criticism must be accurate and substantive to provoke real self-reflection and potential changes to behavior. The vast majority of the people who access this link do so not knowing even the year in which the events took place. So why leave it up?