John Aravosis and the Strangely Missing Post

[Crossposted from Sugar Land is Dreaming]

An unintended subplot to my previous post on the economy detailed the actions of John Aravosis removing a post from his blog. That subplot has now expanded, and even though this is mainly an inter-blog pissing match that is of no real importance to the outside world, I think it still garners its own post.

Here's the story so far: On 1/24/08, Johnny A-List published an idiotic pro-rich/screw the poor rant against the stimulus package that was widely linked and criticized in the blogosphere, and it also amassed a thread of 500+ comments from angry AMERICAblog readers.

The first time Johnny published this post, it was at this URL. It has since been removed.

During the time period when the link to the post died, I'm unsure if Johnny had outright deleted the post or renamed it, but either way I searched AMERICAblog's archives and found out it existed at this new URL. It has since been removed from that URL, and from AMERICAblog's archives entirely as far as I can tell. For the post's brief existence on that new URL, though, Johnny had wiped out the previous 500+ angry comments* and started a new thread -- where the angry comments continued to pour in. Johnny handled these comments by either outright deleting them or editing the comments to add his replies.

Johnny has also removed other comments that question his actions in this matter. For example, I know for a fact that he deleted one of my comments in this thread where I questioned him on his actions.

Johnny has not made a note of any of these administrative actions on AMERICAblog.

You know, I'm pretty sure this breaks a bunch of unspoken ethics rules about blogging. Editing comments, deleting comments simply because they point out your bullshit, changing the URL of a post and then outright removing it when the flame war didn't die down... These are all despicable actions that a respectable blogger would never partake in. I can see instituting censorship if you have some crazy assholes coming to your site, but there's a huge difference between that and not handling the heat generated from one of your own posts. Performing unethical actions like this calls a bloggers honesty into question, and I won't believe that anything coming out of Johnny's mouth is honest until he comes clean about his actions regarding this strangely missing post.

* - Unfortunately for Johnny, the first comment thread still exists on Haloscan's server.