I hadn’t planned on a new installment in the Angry Neighbor Saga this soon, but this comment posted by Mary Arnett convinced me a quick update was warranted.

In it, she requested:

At this time, I have no plans to remove any past posts.

I’ll tell you why. A good place to start is my basic principles for this series.

• The goal of these posts is not to harass or humiliate, but rather to hold people accountable for actions that have persisted away from public scrutiny.
• I will focus on public actions, and avoid discussion of personal issues or peccadilloes.
• When I characterize or report the actions of a person, I will try to provide supporting documentation so its veracity can be ascertained, and endeavor to ensure my posts are accurate.
• I will try to respect privacy, will sometimes obfuscate the identify of people peripherally involved, and try to avoid exposing communications made in confidence.

These principles give me no reason to remove the referenced posts. The messages indicated are not private records, and they accurately document the abusive behavior in question.

The fact that somebody acted like a jerk when they thought when nobody was watching, and now is upset that people know they acted this way is not a reason to remove the documents — it’s the whole purpose of these posts.

Which brings me to another important point. I’m trying to post only that which I can document, which means there isn’t much reason to engage in back-and-forth. Obviously, I think the allegations in the the angry neighbor emails are false. But what’s the sense in refutations? A denial wouldn’t be worth the oxygen molecules it’s written on.

But Mary’s comment does provide keen insight into her process for fabricating facts. She refers to a recent blog post I made, characterizing it as:

Here is what I actually wrote:

As you can see, what I actually said is exactly the opposite of what she claimed I said. I hope you find this little example illustrative of her defective rhetoric and facts.