22 March 2007
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I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatiguability
The tributes from those who did know her, even those who had vehement disagreements with her, put her solidly on the list of people I wish I could have met. I first started reading her blog because her daughter's blog was mentioned by Samizdata and then discovered that amongst the blogs and bloggers she discussed and liked and disliked were many from people I knew over the Internet in one form or another from Joeseph Mailander aka the Motley Fool's jeanpaulsartre to Patterico. Talking of which the latter has one of the better obituries including this bit which I think will be seen as the basic wisdom of the internet age:She was always very forthright with her opinions, and blunt in the way she expressed them. A theme that she came back to again and again was that people must be accountable for the things that they say.
For example, I talked to Cathy at length at a Yamashiro gathering held shortly after I had posted that the L.A. Times seemed poised to “push back” against its critics — including, possibly, me. Cathy told me that of course I should expect them to do that (and, basically, I shouldn’t whine about it). She was not mollified by my point that I had only a few hundred readers, while the paper commands a circulation of nearly a million, and has the power to seriously affect people’s reputations. Cathy’s feeling was, basically: tough. I was the one who chose to take on this powerful newspaper — and that’s all well and good, but I shouldn’t expect them not to fight back! [...]
The unifying theme of those conversations was that you have to be held accountable for what you say. Cathy believed strongly in that principle.
We need more like her.