The fact is, [Melissa McEwan's] time needs to be finished. No more invitations to Femfest. No more quotes in mainstream media. Done. Find something else Melissa. Maybe recaps since that’s the majority of your content when you’re not being snide and nasty.
So I post on tumblr about it, hoping people will take notice and go “well JFC that’s some bullshit.” Or even argue with me. That’s cool too.
Nice that criticism is welcomed, I guess, but when your entire purpose is to make a single person be shut up ... yeah, I don't even know how to end the sentence.E-mail: shakesvillekoolaid@gmail.com
There are messages that need to stop, and there are certainly people who annoy the hell out of me, but setting out to influence a large enough following to alter the mainstream media's tendency as part of a campaign to silence a single person is pretty extreme and pretty extremely assholic.
Of course if it were just Melissa McEwan, founder of Shakesville, then I probably wouldn't even know about it. My connection to Shakesville is via Ana Mardoll. She's a contributor to Shakesville but, more important to me, she runs Ana Mardoll's Ramblings.
She's a friend and she's an inspiration. Her Twilight deconstruction directly led to the various versions of the van scene (I think my favorite is the Physics version) which lead to Snarky Twilight and Edith and Ben. Snarky Twilight, in part, lead to My Zombie Apocalypse Team. Her Narnia deconstruction lead to If the heroes did their jobs. Not to mention all sorts of one offs.
Point is, Ana is my friend, my colleague, and a source of inspiration. She's also "open game" for Drink The Shaker Kool Aid. So, you know, harassment. Fake reviews of books. Talking about her death and the horrible things that will happen to her body afterward. That sort of stuff.
But it's totally for the greater good. It's all to improve feminism and because Ana and Melissa are hurting people. They are hurting people at Drink the Shaker Kool Aid.
And their reactions (Ana, Melissa) are "hilarious" and "hysterical".
Now forget about the derivation of the word "hysterical", the point here is: FUNNY.
When people who have been hurt see their response to that called out as harassment and such instead of legitimate complaints they don't react by laughing. Unless it's the humorless laugh of someone who has had all joy burned out of them.
So, if nothing else made me call bullshit (and pretty much everything else makes me call bullshit) I'd still be calling bullshit on the basis of the situation here being perceived as humorous.
Bounced over here from Ana's page. I appreciate your work as a mod on her site (although I rarely comment) and I think our communities are precious and amazing, and filled with awesome people. All in.
ReplyDelete"I think our communities are precious and amazing,"
DeleteDITTO.
As far as I can tell the "harassment" Ana is claiming she has suffered amounts to saying they don't like her writing and her behaviour as a mod at Shakesville.
ReplyDeleteMM's line is the same - she say she is open to criticism but draws the line at harassment, but all criticism is interpreted as harassment so her being open to criticism is purely nominal.
You seem to be towing the same line. "when your entire purpose is to make a single person be shut up ... yeah, I don't even know how to end the sentence."
Is it harmful or oppressive to want to deny a platform to somebody who is harmful? Leaving the specifics of Melissa aside, but if I started a blog about how, for example, Ron Paul is awful and needs to shut up, would that be harassing Ron Paul?
I would direct you to MM's most recent post at Shakesville for some of these issues.
DeleteThere's criticism, yes. And trolling. And harrassment.
The Ron Paul comparison doesn't stand unless the only platform Ron Paul is using is his personal website and those of some associates, and the only position he's seeking is continuing to do so into the future.
And even so, when you're conflating objections to someone's style or political/social goals with personal attacks, yes I and many in these communities are going to call BULLSHIT. As Melissa has repeatedly done and Ana has supported, pushing back against sexism and other kinds of judgement or bigotry directed at their opponents.
if I started a blog about how, for example, Ron Paul is awful and needs to shut up, would that be harassing Ron Paul?
DeleteDepends on how you go about it, really. If you're trying to ruin Ron Paul by tracking down Ron Paul's friends and family and trying to ruin them while also providing a platform for the happy cheery discussion of his death and subsequent desecration of his corpse (while, of course, carefully making sure that said discussion never crosses into actual threats or other legally actionable things) then yeah, I think you'd be harassing him.
And, of course, if you're targeting Ron Paul, not his message, then we're talking about a very specific thing. It's not about politics or anything like that, it's about who he is as a person. You're saying he's a horrible person. You're trying to convince so many other people that he's a horrible person so as to completely change the discourse in the country in order to deny him a voice.
That is a personal attack. Whether or not it is a justified personal attack is something that I'm setting firmly off topic because this post is not about Ron Paul.
I'm just pointing out that before we even get into methods, what you are talking about is making personal attacks. If you're thinking of doing that, to Ron Paul or anyone else, I'd be very careful about how you go about it because even with the best of intentions and the most stringent fact checking, and even if the person you're attacking is a total monster, you could cross the line very easily without even meaning to.
Based on the way the "Drink the Shaker Kool Aid" has been run I'm really not willing to give out much in the way of benefit of the doubt. Even if I did, the site IS used as a platform for harassment so if it was intended to be something else it has failed at that. I've seen no efforts to correct that failure.
"If you're trying to ruin Ron Paul by tracking down Ron Paul's friends and family and trying to ruin them while also providing a platform for the happy cheery discussion of his death and subsequent desecration of his corpse (while, of course, carefully making sure that said discussion never crosses into actual threats or other legally actionable things) then yeah, I think you'd be harassing him."
DeleteYou see, it's possible that this is happening, but isn't it also possible that some of the OTT stuff that goes on in the comments (and I agree that some of the comments are pretty urgh) is not actually the true intentions of the site's creator shepherded into the comments to avoid legal culpability, but simply the views of some commenters?
I mean, the now infamous "slapping Deeky" thread is a good example. A lot of commenters were very uncomfortable with that, and said so, and the person who made the original comment (Which was actually "Deeky's face looks slappable" - not a direct incitement to violence, but still pretty discomforting) eventually apologised. But this isn't acknowledge - one comment is considered to be representative of the entire site.
In other words, the community correctly rejected this over-the-top attack on Deeky the person (as opposed to Deeky the blogger). The only step they didn't take was that the site owner didn't delete the comment. I don't think you can really hold moderators responsible for every comment they don't delete.
Some people are confused why Ana and Melissa are reading something they don't like. I can't speak for Melissa, but I know that in Ana's case it's that whenever she gets brought up there (in the main post or the comments) a wave of trolling her site and email harassment follows. It helps on both of those points if you have advanced warning, so reading both the main posts and the comments is kind of important if she doesn't want to get hit by the harassment with no warning at all.
DeleteAlso useful to know is that there have been a few times that people over there got Ana and Melissa confused. Since there's an effort to put Melissa's husband out of a job, getting the two confused could result in an effort to put Ana's husband out of a job.
And this ties back into what you're saying about one comment not representing everyone. The gathering of personal information on Melissa's husband is NOT a universal thing because some of the people there already know as much of it as they could ever want. Only some people are trying to gather such information, others already have it but are keeping personal information personal.
Diversity, what a concept.
But here's a simple problem: It's pretty much common knowledge at this point that every time the tumblr commenting community starts discussing Melissa's husband's finances a harassment campaign (online and off) starts with the intent of making him unemployed.
Regardless of the intent behind such discussion, that's what happens. When specific personal details are laid out in the comments, those details are used by the people who are trying to put him out of a job.
Since all of that information is out there, it comes down to a judgement call. Is the discussion of Melissa's husband's personal information important enough to do something that demonstrably encourages and, much worse, assists people attempting to harass him out of a job?
Whether or not discussing Melissa's husband's personal information should continue has recently come up for debate. That it's up for debate and not off limits is a problem. Whether her husband is Bill Gates' alter ego or completely broke has nothing to do with the stated purpose of the site. Discussing his personal information does encourage and assist the very activities that commenters on the site have repeatedly said they consider to be harassment.
So here we have something that gains them nothing and stopping it would stop a certain pernicious subset of harassment. If they were against the harassment, they'd stop. And to the commenters credit, some have said that they think it should stop. But only some.
"Since there's an effort to put Melissa's husband out of a job"
DeleteCitation needed.
You're right. I should only have brought up things I have first hand knowledge of. For me that's the trolling at Ramblings that follows mentions of Ramblings at DSKA.
Delete" when your entire purpose is to make a single person be shut up ..."
ReplyDeletehttp://sweetjesusihatechrismatthews.blogspot.com/
and
"Misogyny lives on in the US media – and it's time old goats like Hardball host Chris Matthews were put out to pasture" ~ Melissa McEwan
pot, kettle, etc.
I don't think much of that site, either. But if you can't see the difference between a woman running a website as a personal business, and someone with a job in at a national media outlet being criticized for not doing said job well, I'm not really sure what to say. It matters who owns the microphone/sandbox etc.
DeleteLonespark's point is a good one, but here's another:
DeleteI don't know Melissa. Not a damned thing about her. I know Ana, I know Ramblings. If you want to have an argument about how what Melissa did *checks your link* six and a half years ago is the same as what is being done to her now then this justifies what's happening to Ana and Ramblings how?
So, what's the over/under on hypocrisy? Five years? Two years?
Delete" But if you can't see the difference between a woman running a website as a personal business, and someone with a job in at a national media outlet being criticized for not doing said job well"
DeleteIt's only a difference of degree, not of kind.
So, what's the over/under on hypocrisy? Five years? Two years?
DeleteI don't give a damn if Melissa is OR was a hypocrite. I'm asking why her doing that years ago would justify what's happening to Ana Mardoll's Ramblings, a site Melissa has no connection to beyond knowing the owner, now.
Even without the difference in time. How how would Melissa being a hypocrite justify what's being done to Ana Mardoll's Ramblings anyway?
Your claim of hypocrisy is based on a site Ana Mardoll has no connection to whatsoever. Melissa wasn't at that site when Ana became a moderator at Shakesville. Unless I'm missing something (and google is too) there's no evidence Ana ever went to the site or knew it existed.
The only page on the entire internet, as indexed by Google, that has both Ana's name and that site on it is THIS ONE. Ana's name never appeared on that site itself.
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And, if you really do want to get into broad generalities, if someone is doing something that's wrong, that doesn't justify other people doing the same wrong thing.
I'm not sure how posting a screen shot of someones public information translates into trying to get them fired. Do you know why it was posted?
ReplyDeleteBecause McEwan is asking for donations So Iain and I don't have to struggle on behalf of the blog. For years I assumed they were working poor, like me, and I (fortunately) couldn't afford to donate to her, although I wanted to.
According to Glassdoor, the average salary of someone in Mr. McEwan's position is $85,000 -$100,000. Yet Melissa McEwan is more then happy to take money from people on disability, unemployment, and infamously, their last 5 bucks from child support (to be fair, the parent shouldn't be donating child support money either)
*That* is the only reason his job was even brought up. She is the 1% for someone (like me) who not too long ago was living in rural poverty, in a depressing trailer, with old clothes, and barely scraping by. I'm tired of the assumption that looking at someones website= stalking and harassment too.
Also, if someone from Drink the Shaker Kool Aid is leaving mean comments/emails, et al, then Ms. Mardoll and Ms.McEwan should share that with the blogmistress so she can ban them from our site.
And Lonespark, McEwan is running what she calls a safe space and it manifestly is NOT safe with the various beat downs the mods give for innocuous, good faith comments. We have ever right to shine a light on it, and not one of you has even bothered to read our Circle Time post, on why we're there.
Instead we're called MRAs (!) by the Dudebros of Pharyngula.
Also I am absolutely baffled at what the Pharyngula connection is. Is there much overlap between Ramblites and folks there? I guess there might be, but there are plenty of us who avoid the place since it kind of glories in being an unsafe space. Not unlike Slacktivist. "Safe space" is a label that gets put on some spaces with certain policies. Which mean censorship of a sort, for sure.
DeleteThat absolutely doesn't feel safe for many people, and isn't optimal under many circumstances. But I thank the gods every day that there are places on the internet like Ana's. In part because there are so, so many places on the opposite end of the spectrum.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/07/29/something-is-wrong-with-siwoti/comment-page-1/#comment-829542
DeleteCGM
The only connection that I know of is that Kristy, who is a much more active Ramblings moderator than I am (she deals with trolls; I deal with formatting errors and watch while other moderators deal with trolls) posted in the thread.
DeleteMy own experiences with PZ Myers have been mixed. The only personal experience I've had with him was when he was being an asshole. On the other hand he has delivered some pretty good commentary at other times.
Oh, ok. My impression has been that Kristy is like Ana's First Officer. "I'm going to the transporter pad/the doctor/etc. Kristy, you have the conn."
DeleteAnd yeah, I have the same personal experience with Dr. Myers... Plenty of cool stuff and good ideas, but I'm seldom up for hanging out in a "rude" space.
Honestly, fuck you for assuming I didn't read the whole Tumblr, which took time and hurt, but I did it for my friend Ana. And to see what a bunch of my other friends and aquaintances from Slacktivist had to say.
ReplyDeleteI am still baffled at the amount of effort y'all are putting in to some of this. I'm still very annoyed at how work and words are being misrepresented.
Y'all totally a billion percent have a right to feel hurt and angry about your experiences. I personally don't see how that translates into wanting to shut someone up, along with their internet community, but I don't have to.
But please don't make like you're trying to protect others. People have a right to decide for themselves. (People, honestly, have a right to decide whether they're going to give money they can't afford to cause they support.)
People have a right to be public figures with strong opinions, and not be considered terrible wives, citizens, leaders, mothers, etc. even if we're not perfect. Even if our disabilities don't manifest in ways that please you. Even if our opinions evolve over time. Even if we reveal different parts of who we are at different times. Even if we fuck up. Even if we get money you don't think we deserve.
Your friend Ana is a big hypocrite. Here she beats down a commentator for objecting to the C word.
ReplyDeleteIs this a "strong opinion"? Was that really needed? Anyone?
http://www.shakesville.com/2013/05/i-get-letters.html#comment-898433403
On the money yes, they can donate, but the "struggling on behalf of the blog" is a lie that is used to hook people into donating.
CGM
I remember that thread! One of the few at Shakesville I've actually read, though possibly long after the fact. ..
DeleteAna writes stuff. Liss does too. They do it on their personal blogs, which have communities of readers and commenters. You can like it, hate it, whatever. You can hate it but keep coming back for the stuff you think is good. You can eventually decide it's not worth it, that the way that space is run (or is being run now, if was different in the past) emphasizes the wrong things, hurts you or people you know, etc.
I completely don't understand how that makes anyone a hypocrite for deciding where they personally draw certain lines. Especially when it comes to self-identification. I know that's a thing Ana is pretty extreme on, and reasonable people can certainly disagree, but it is something that has come up a lot on Ana's blog and in her post on Typepad Slacktiverse and such. And it seems Liss is on board with something similar, but I don't have as clear an idea of her approach.
I don't know what CGM stands for. Maybe I should, but nothing is coming to mind.
DeleteYou know, until I got back online today, the last I'd seen of all this was yesterday morning. There were five comments about me at DSKA. Four were really complimentary. I appreciated that.
ReplyDeleteObviously part of it is that it's nice to know people think I'm a nice person. But another part of it was that the people disagreed with me (all of the comments, as I recall, thought I was wrong about all of this) without being disagreeable.
I'm less appreciative of how this thread is going, as you might imagine.
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Lay the fuck off of Lonespark.
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No one claiming that I mischaracterized things here has responded to the entire point of the main post.
The DSKA admin, along with certain DSKA commenters, has said that DSKA is calling out abuse. That they care about this abuse. That some of them have been victims of it.
The site has been branded a harassment site.
The response of the DSKA admin, along with certain commenters, to this branding has been to find it humorous.
I don't buy it. I don't buy that people who care about abuse victims and are trying to stop the abuse would find it funny that their attempts were labelled harassment instead of taken seriously as reports of horrible behavior.
I can believe all sorts of things, but, "All of our hard efforts at helping victims, some of ourselves amoung them, have just been roundly dismissed as us being assholes. That's so fracking funny," isn't a response I trust.
And I do believe that there are honest to god victims amoung you, and I do believe that some real bullshit has gone down, but this post isn't about that.
The title really sums up the post. The reason I call bullshit has nothing to do with what Melissa or Ana has done, and it has everything to do with what the DSKA admin and certain commenters have said.
And quite frankly, I'd love for there to be a way to separate out the people who find this whole thing fucking funny from the people who are giving some heartbreaking personal testimonies. At the moment there isn't. At least not a way that I know of.
Are people being mean to me elsewhere? This conversation has been ok from my perspective.
DeleteI haven't seen it. I don't want to invade this space anymore tbh. If you want to continue the convo, you'd have to come to DtSKA.
DeleteThanks
CGM (content generating machine)
Funny weird, not funny ha-ha.
DeleteAs has been said many times over there, and elsewhere (probably here but I'm not going to check), words mean things. The words used to indicate the situation was humorous were not "funny weird" and were "funny ha-ha".
DeleteMaybe it's funny because there is no ongoing harassment campaign against Mardoll. I don't find it funny, I find it enraging to be honest.
DeleteAnd Mardoll is a hypocrite. She left a voice recording to our admin asking her to stop harassing her. What harassment? If someone is leaving nasty comments that's from DtSKA, share their IP address with our admin so she can ban them.
What is b.s. is watching Mardoll talk to people like dirt for objecting to the C word, and telling them "If there is something here you find hurtful, don’t fucking visit.",. and then she tells us she "can't help reading us". We did feel bad for her, and then started to smell manipulation, and remembered how nasty she'd been to commentators on Shakesville.
That's why she's a hypocrite. It's ok for her to be verbally violent to people and tell them "off with you now". The "death" comment was by CaryJamesBond who was talking about her collecting social justice causes the way some people hoard animals. He was eventually banned for being a creep. Fake reviews? Where?
Remember none of this started until McEwan was made aware of the Help a Reporter Out query. She left for a week and came back guns ablazing for us. Before that, we were ignored by her. I hope I'm not bugging you, I don't want to invade your space.
And no one was picking on Lonespark. I thought we were having a good conversation.
Content Generating Machine.
I believe what Chris meant was calling me a liar over there where I didn't see it? But yeah, no biggie.
DeleteOn the rest of this comment... There is a fundamental disagreement here. People seem to feel that Ana and Liss are asking to be left alone AT them, as though that sentiment itself means their concerns don't matter, and therefore their pain justifies or necessitates a lot more emotionally-draining interaction for everyone?
So yeah, disagree. We can all feel each other are Wrong on the Internet and still go our separate ways. (At least as far as Ramblings is concerned. We can still have good interactions elsewhere, IMO.)
Re: Lonespark,
DeleteI was mostly thinking of amylsacks comment at DSKA.
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and then she tells us she "can't help reading us".
That's because of the connection between DSKA and trolling.
You, personally, don't approve of trolling, I get that.
It doesn't change the fact that when Ana is mentioned at DSKA it is shortly followed by a spike in trolling at Ana Mardoll's Ramblings. Unlike a lot of trolling this is predictable. It follows a specific pattern. First A, then B. It's also very consistent to the point of if A then B.
Getting early warning that trolls are coming is an incredibly useful thing when moderating and, in this case, it can be done. But the only way to do that is to read DSKA.
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Fake reviews? Where?
Amazon. Not a lot to see there now though, this happened almost three months ago, remember.
It was nothing big. Just people making reviews that consisted of stuff said at DSKA about the transcript project (repeated verbatim) and listing it as a review. Of course the stuff was things that DSKA had posted before the transcript was released and thus could in no way be considered an actual review of the product on the page.
Looks like Amazon did some house cleaning, as they are known to do at times, but why they left the copyright question is beyond me. It's not a review and by Amazon policy it belongs in the forums, not the review section.
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Remember none of this started until McEwan was made aware of the Help a Reporter Out query.
None of it started for you. We've been dealing with the whole "DSKA mentions Ana and then Ramblings gets trolled" thing for a while. I can't speak to Melissa, I don't know her, but I do know that there was a period where Ana intentionally cut down on content to see if that would make it stop. It didn't. DSKA kept on pointing our way, trolls kept on coming each time it did. (And not when it didn't.)
That was well before the query you're talking about. The decision to come out and publicly address DSKA was in part to make absolutely sure that DSKA knew about the connection between posts pointing to things on Ramblings and the trolls that didn't otherwise show up coming to Ramblings.
Good god, given that Lonespark's comment wasn't there when I started typing the above took me an hour.
DeleteThing the first: I am not under the impression that the people at DSKA are a monolith. I've said it's a varied community and I stand by that. When I say something like, "The DSKA admin, along with certain commenters," the entire point is to limit whatever I'm saying to that group and NOT make a blanket statement about everyone.
ReplyDeleteI also know that the content is not a monolith. It seems to work well enough for the DSKA crowd, but I'd love it if posts of personal testimonies of people who have been hurt were separated from things like saying that Ana Mardoll is saying the wrong something in Twilight is wrong.
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Thing the second: The original post was worded badly. Really fucking badly. The repetition of the point in comments, however, I think was better, which brings me to:
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Thing the third: It has been said, "the new argument is that people are not acting in the proper (and thus, believable) way that victims should act."
No. If you want to divide things into "new argument" and "old argument" (which are supposed to be the same argument) then I can totally see how you would get that from the old argument (the one in the original post.) Like I said: worded really fucking badly.
I don't see how you get that from the "new argument."
The point, distilled into the simplest possible words in hopes of no misinterpretation, is that actions haven't been consistent with those of an advocate.
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From the beginning the DSKA admin has said the site is because people are victims of abuse at the hands of Shakesville and the site was set up to do her(?) part to work against this. (See: "Stop Listening to Melissa McEwan" on the sidebar)
Which is to say that the DSKA admin has claimed to be an advocate of the victims, and that the site's purpose (though it's only one of multiple stated purposes) is to help them and stop more people from becoming victims.
Assume that's completely True with a captial T.
In that case the response from Shakesville, Ramblings, Pharyngula, and so forth is horrible. It's disheartening.
All of the victims have been victimized again because their completely legitimate (remember the assumption) response to being victimized has been attacked. Instead of being recognized as victims they've been labeled harassers. They've been worse than ignored.
Any given victim has the right to feel any given way about this second victimization.
An advocate has the same right with regard to feeling, but things are different with regard to acting. Advocates, even ones who are themselves victims, have to act to bring no further harm upon the people they are advocating for.
The DSKA admin responded by publicly finding the matter humorous in a space where she knew victims would be reading. She turned their suffering and the fact that it was harshly dismissed into a joke so she could publicly be amused about it.
That's making them victims again. First whatever Shakesville did, then being condemned rather than helped, and finally having their plights made into a joke.
That's not what an advocate does. So the DSKA admin is not an advocate. But this entire chain of reasoning started by assuming she was. Thus there must be bullshit somewhere. And so I called bullshit.
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Content Generating Machine said, "I don't find it funny, I find it enraging to be honest."
That difference of how CGM finds it versus how the DSKA admin publicly says she finds it means that I can believe CGM is an advocate where I can't for DSKA. I'm not saying Content Generating Machine is an advocate. The truth is I have no idea. But I've seen nothing that screams, "Not an advocate!"
Hey. I just gave a very quick glance at all your comments, Lonespark and Chris, so forgive me if I don't answer everything.
ReplyDeleteI just want to say real quick: I'm wondering if some of the trolling is coming from MRA jerks, using this whole kerfuffle as a cover. That's been a worry, that the fedora wearing brigade, would latch on to us and use this as an excuse. "See, even other feminists think they're bad!"
What happened to McEwan during the Edwards campaign was horrible, and none of us want any type of harassment against her or Mardoll. I wish they'd share info with DtSKA admin if any of the DtSKA people are leaving comments, nasty emails, et al. I *did* leave a mild comment, and I know Safer Midwifery Utah did, but they weren't trolly afaik.
.
CaryJamesBond was the one who made the "cat lady" remarks, ( he said also said some gross stuff about Ms.McEwan) and was banned from commenting. I hope I'm not bugging you by being here, I really appreciate you letting me comment here,
I've always enjoyed reading Ramblings (yes really) I like reading your comments, and Trig's comments and some of the fan fic that pops up in the comment section.
We do try to self govern ourselves, no gender/sexist/fat hating/** et al. Yes, it's not perfect, I'm not sure about the whole Visual Process Disorder discussion. I wish it'd go away tbh.
Right now we're looking for some of the best of McEwans writings. Believe it or not, she helped shape my thinking as a feminist, way back when she was Shakesville Sister. She's a scrappy fighter too.
It looks like DtSKA, unfortunate name and all, maybe taking the place where Shakesville used to be for us. I hope so! There are two old mods on there, including LilBrit
Anyway, Chris and Lonespark, please come over and comment if you want, I can understand why you might not want to, because of loyalty to your friend, among other reasons. You'd be welcome though!
(I use their last names because it feels too chummy to call them by their first names.)
**(The heifer remark? I don't think -it was fat shaming. I've heard it used in Southern Vernacular before. I apologize for it even if I didn't leave it.)
Content Generating Machine.
The first and most important thing to be aware of is that what's going on isn't new. If some group is using DSKA for cover they've been doing it since long before Shakesville and Ramblings ever mentioned DSKA.
DeleteThe second thing is that, since I'm not one of the Ramblings moderators who deals directly with trolling problems I'm not one of the people who looks into the history and origin of any given troll. I could. The information is there on disqus and I could totally dive in and start pulling names, IP addresses, and emails.
I'm not going to, I'll get to why in a little bit.
The information that I do have is that trolls are being dealt with when they are being dealt with and that is enough to tell that there's a connection to DSKA. It's actually more useful to look at it in terms of numbers than individuals. If one person were doing stuff then it wouldn't be that big of a deal unless they were spectacularly horrible. It's the numbers that matters.
Its entirely possible that they are MRAs who have never left a single comment on DSKA but simply restrict themselves to reading it so they can troll Ana Mardoll's Ramblings only when you mention Ana and then blame it on you.
It's entirely possible that they're not.
With the exception of people using the same disqus account at both places the only way to really sort out who is doing what is to have the administrations from both sites compare ip addresses. That's not going to happen.
That's not going to happen largely because privacy is sacrosanct there. That may seem odd to an outsider, but --trust me on this-- when you've had to scrub all mentions of a friend from your site because the stalker who raped her has somehow made significant headway in tracking her down in spite of her leaving the continent (not moving to a nearby country, either, actually switching hemispheres) and changing her name and there's a possibility, however slim, that something she said on your site might allow the stalker-rapist to track her down completely because she could have let a personal detail slip... well then privacy becomes a much bigger concern.
As much as possible her entire internet footprint had to be erased before the stalker could track it all down. Multiple sites had to, basically, erase her from their history. This was one.
My favorite comment to ever be posted on this blog will never be seen again because of that episode. It has been erased from existence. I didn't want it to go, but of all the comments that person left here that was the one with the most personal info so it had to.
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It looks like DtSKA, unfortunate name and all, maybe taking the place where Shakesville used to be for us. I hope so!
I hope so too. Quite sincerely.
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Yes, it's not perfect, I'm not sure about the whole Visual Process Disorder discussion. I wish it'd go away tbh.
You're not alone in that.
Of course I wish all posts pointing to Ramblings would go away, so I'm biased, but the visual processing disorder discussion does really stand out.
But back to taking the place where Shakesville used to be for you. I'd really like that. There's been a lot of talk about endgames. Given a choice between "DSKA shuts up" and "DSKA becomes a site that takes the place of Shakesville for those who weren't safe at Shakesville (or just wanted something else)," I totally go for option B.
Of course option B isn't really an endgame. It would mean that the site goes on and on and on. But it would presumably mean an end to a lot of the more superfluous posts pointing to Ana Mardoll's Ramblings. (The one that stands out most to me is the one where it only criticized Ana because McEwan didn't produce enough content to criticize that week.)
Good for you (you get something to replace Shakesville that will be safe for you), good for me Good for everyone.
If you ever do realize that dream then I'll try to come over and see what it's like.
Hey. :) That's not going to happen largely because privacy is sacrosanct there. That may seem odd to an outsider, but --trust me on this-- when you've had to scrub all mentions of a friend from your site because the stalker who raped her has somehow made significant headway in tracking her down in spite of her leaving the continent (not moving to a nearby country, either, actually switching hemispheres) and changing her name and there's a possibility, however slim, that something she said on your site might allow the stalker-rapist to track her down completely because she could have let a personal detail slip... well then privacy becomes a much bigger concern.
DeleteIt's not odd at all. My god that's just evil.
There was someone who hijacked one of our regulars, Tinfoil Hattie, and left a comment on Ramblings. If the Disqus name is greyed out, that means it's a temporary account, and we've had one persistent fool, with an Indian Proxy, imitate some of the regulars. Matter of fact, here is a link showing who has been banned, with IP addresses too. Maybe this will help.
http://shakesvillekoolaid.tumblr.com/post/93620626134/site-note-this-is-what-disqus-looks-like#disqus_thread
Hey thanks both of you for being so nice. :)
CGM