No, I don't know what he's doing. Don't read this for some sort of revelation.
This is just about what I've seen in him, as a blogger here who has paid a fair amount of attention to him over the last three years.
What is Meteor Blades Doing? What is all of this about?
Well, either he planned it, or it was related to something sudden and unexpected.
I doubt it was some kind of reactive response to this blog, because he's had eight years to do that. No, things are not suddenly worse here; that's a canard.
I am pattern-oriented. I always look for patterns. I do it without thinking. It's one of the main jobs of my brain.
The pattern I've seen with Meteor Blades is that he consistently sacrifices himself for others. He went to jail to keep from being forced to participate in the Viet Nam War; he risked himself working for AIM, he went to jail during the civil rights protests in the south. He spent all of this time here, who knows how many hours every week, trying to work with us, trying to help make this into a more productive and kinder place.
He helped his wife get her daughter out of a dangerous situation in Libya. He carried the passport in his boot on the plane.
&&&
He had a rough childhood, was physically abused by a relative, went to kid prison and was sexually abused there.
That's a terribly difficult card to draw. People who go through that kind of trauma tend to go in extreme directions.
Meteor Blades could have gone to the bad. He had the blessing and luck to get some good intervention after he got out of kid prison.
Again, he sacrificed himself here to some extent. Kos said he didn't leave because of the community mod thing; and I believe that. But he tried for a long time. He didn't have to do that. I believe that he wanted to do it, that he believed, at least initially, that he really could help the blog by doing so.
I think he turned out to be wrong about that, in some expected ways, and right in other unexpected ways.
I see him as a very religious person.
What I believe is that this is yet another act of self-sacrifice on Tim's part, whatever it is he's doing.
Because that's who he is. That is how he has been shaped by his life.
Whatever it is, it's something he HAS to do. He would never have left us in the lurch like this unless it was something he HAD to do.
Because that's what he does, sacrifices himself for others. People get old, they don't change all that easily.
Many of us are worried. But he's a tough guy with a lot of experience with evil.
I think we should just trust him on this. Not because "if we trust him he'll come back to us."
Maybe he will, maybe he won't.
But if we can't trust him to know what he's doing, how can we trust our own selves, should we get caught between rocks and hard places?