Rurik, If you wish to make comments on a topic, on a blog that allows anonymity, please do comment on the topic. Every posting you comment on shouldn’t become your quarrel with anonymity. Feel free to start a blog for Ridgewood where anonymity is not permitted, and so how many people post on it. It will be more effective to have those 3 people meet you for a discussion over coffee at Raymond’s.
P.S. I remember your comments on the Valley Renewal wanting to know why people opposing it were not blogging under their own names. It didn’t take a lot of courage for you to blog in favor of it, when your wife Cynthia Halaby was a Trustee of the Valley Hospital. Perhaps there are people with opposite opinions to your whose position/relationship to Valley or Village Hall or elsewhere make them feel uncomfortable expressing their opposing opinions very publicly.
We do live in America, and there is a secret ballot. An opinion (as long as non-libelous) is a form of freedom of speech. Prior to about 1890, when people voted, it was a public matter and the community, including factory bosses, knew exactly how their employees voted. I don’t mind an anonymous blog – why are you so opposed to it? Why do you need to identify those who disagree with you?
Rurik, where have you been? Many MANY people are not hiding behind their mothers’ aprons. The ones who go to the meetings and speak up, actually recently they were lined up to speak out against the Mayor’s outrageous behavior. They are not anonymous. And there have been numerous letters bashing the Mayor’s actions, and the letters are singed by citizens. The fact that you choose to post with your name on this BLOG, where most post anonymously, does not make you more bold and does not make your opinion more worthy. And those who post anonymously are not less worthy. This is the 21st century Rurik. This is how BLOGS work.
All politics is local, and this blog, among other essential functions, supports free and open exchanges of information and opinions bearing on the politics of the VOR. Mr. Halaby is willing to put his name behind his opinions. Good for him. But in Ridgewood we suffer from a particularly bad case of the malady some refer to as “the politics of personal destruction”. In most important areas in which Mr. Halaby offers his opinion, it just so happens that the POPD malady typically operates to the detriment of people who hold considered opinions opposite to his. So to rephrase the salient point of an earlier commenter, those who are motivated to express (non-libelous) opinions opposite to that held by Mr. Halaby are to be forgiven for taking advantage of a means of publicly expressing themselves that Mr. Halaby and his like-minded friends, frustrated in their seeming inability to make headway, are determined to brand as the last refuge of the damnably timid.
