I owe some commentor a hat tip on this, seriously, because I don’t read Sullivan but I do love Tom Scocca. At Gawker:
Self-employed former Gap spokesmodel Andrew Sullivan has been typing about the Gamergate movement again. Previously, when he weighed in, he began by telling his readers that they knew gamer culture “far, far better than I.”
But ignorance, even admitted ignorance, has never inhibited Sullivan in pursuing his multifarious career as an amateur race scientist, forensic doula, or endocrinologist. “[P]art of my job is to write and think about burning current web discussions – and add maybe two cents, even as an outsider,” he explained.
So the latest investment of his well-worn tuppence is a blog post headlined “The SJWs Now Get to Police Speech on Twitter.” Quite a headline! The event to which it refers is Twitter’s announcement that it had agreed to receive—though not necessarily to act on—reports from a new harassment-tracking tool developed by the group Women, Action, and the Media…
…[T]he stock figures in Sullivan’s mind are more compelling to him than the people and events in the real world. He is aware, or has previously expressed awareness, that Gamergate has involved hideous harassment of its targets, including rape and murder threats. But that doesn’t mean now is the time to talk about new approaches to preventing harassment.
No, those things are a distraction from the valid points the movement makes about “creeping misandry” and “an atmosphere in which it has somehow become problematic to have a classic white, straight male identity.” …
Sullivan’s Dish should have a tag for “Show us on the doll where Margaret Thatcher touched you”. Ever since he fled the unsympathetic shores of Thatcherite London to preach its underappreciated Oakeshottian glory to us simple colonials, he’s been acting out his “good mommy, mean mommy” psychodrama in every media he can monetize.
Felonius Monk
Once again his royal lowness, king sully, has showered us with his vapid drivel. Bring out the Chem-wipes, please.
MobiusKlein
Fuck Andrew Sully. (Figuratively, please).
We’re landing on a m-fing comet tomorrow morning! (or this morning, for those not in PST)
http://www.space.com/17933-nasa-television-webcasts-live-space-tv.html
Omnes Omnibus
He really is rather scared of women, isn’t he?
MobiusKlein
And also this has some stunning pics of the comet.
like http://www.csmonitor.com/var/ezflow_site/storage/images/media/content/2014/1110-rosetta-comet/19259774-1-eng-US/1110-rosetta-comet_full_600.jpg
cckids
Sully is ridiculous, as always, on any subject relating to women.
He redeemed himself, a bit today, with this:(his quote for the day)
“I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky,” – Flannery O’Connor.
Anyone who enjoys knocking Ayn Rand isn’t completely lost.
Omnes Omnibus
@cckids: Oh fuck him. He is always redeeming himself a bit. He never really manages it. “Fifth columns?” The Bell Curve? Let him dig his way out of those holes or else he can go fuck himself. I am not ordinarily a person who holds a grudge but for Sully, I will make an exception.
SRW1
@Omnes Omnibus:
I am absolutely convinced that the stark difference in Sullivan’s reaction to Maggy Thatcher and Sarah Palin is all about the different politics of the two ladies. There’s no way the possibility of him perceiving wimmins mainly at the level of whether they threaten his male self image or not comes into it.
Steeplejack
@SRW1:
What exactly are the “different politics of the two ladies”? They both seem to be right-wing assholes; Thatcher was just much more successful at it.
Omnes Omnibus
@SRW1: No, Maggie seemed masculine to him… No other women can compare.
Morzer
@Omnes Omnibus:
Sullivan is scared of life in the real, modern world. That’s why he’s just another fantasy league conservative who pretends that the collection of links curated by his staff plus an occasional foray of his own into dribbling inanity adds up to a coherent vision of the world.
SRW1
@Steeplejack:
Right! And what does that suggest for politics as the driver for Sullivan’s reaction towards them?
Morzer
@Steeplejack:
Palin was unlucky enough to catch Sullivan at a period when he had fallen for a smooth-talking black man and was pretending that Whackjob Andy never existed. The Andrew Sullivan of the hardcore Bushporn years would have adored Palin and denounced “the Left” for all sorts of imagined crimes against her.
SRW1
@Omnes Omnibus:
I guess the hour is early enough so that we can put the general family friendliness of this blog to the side for a moment and state this in somewhat crude terms: When it comes to women, Sullivan’s perception of the male perception of their fu*kability always appears to rear its head.
waspuppet
I have a classic white, straight male identity. I’m doing just fine. I don’t harass or threaten women, though – that might be the thing.
NotMax
Andrew Sullivan threads, frankly, leave this codger stone cold.
? Martin
I swear Obama is going to troll the GOP constantly for the next 2 years. This announcement with China is pretty fucking big:
The GOP complained about any climate action because China. Well, China is cutting same as us, and the GOP are all of course losing their shit because Obama.
Morzer
@? Martin:
From “Yes, we can” to “Yes, we should”. I don’t think I’ve ever despised any group or corporation as much as I despise the GOP.
opiejeanne
@MobiusKlein: wow!
Bobby B.
All the Brit transplants I’ve run into this decade are right wing exiles, apparently arrived on these shores with a dream of freedom from health insurance.
OldDave
‘xkcd’ is tracking the comet landing mission live: http://xkcd.com/1446/
BethanyAnne
My favorite bit about Sully’s take on #gamergate was the appearance of CH Sommers, “The Factual Feminist”. His favorite feminist, cause she knows what’s important for feminism to focus on: those poor menz.
Schlemazel
The juxtaposition between the turd in the punchbowl and the amazing thing about to happen in space made me think of this bit from H2G2 – it goes on but I am already probably posting to large a chunck:
COMPU-TEACH:
Good. Posit: you are living in an exciting, go-ahead civilisation. Where are you looking?
PUPIL:
Up.
COMPU-TEACH:
What do you see?
PUPIL:
The open sky. The stars. An infinite horizon.
COMPU-TEACH:
Correct! You may press the button.
PUPIL:
Thank you.
PUPIL:
Wow! That feels nice.
COMPU-TEACH:
Posit: you are living in a stagnant, declining civilisation. Where are you looking?
PUPIL:
Down.
COMPU-TEACH:
What do you see?
PUPIL:
My shoes.
COMPU-TEACH:
Correct! What do you do to cheer yourself up?
PUPIL:
Uhm… press the button?
COMPU-TEACH:
Incorrect! Think again. Your world is a depressing place; you are looking at your shoes. How do you cheer yourself up?
PUPIL:
I buy a new pair.
COMPU-TEACH:
Correct!
PUPIL:
Can I press the button?
COMPU-TEACH:
All right.
PUPIL:
Wa-ho! So nice.
COMPU-TEACH:
Now, imagine everyone does the same thing. What happens?
PUPIL:
Everyone feels nice?
COMPU-TEACH:
Ah, forget the button! Concentrate! Everyone buys new shoes. What happens?
PUPIL:
More shoes.
COMPU-TEACH:
And?
PUPIL:
More shoe shops.
COMPU-TEACH:
Correct.
PUPIL:
Can I – ?
COMPU-TEACH:
No, no.
PUPIL:
Oh-oooo.
COMPU-TEACH:
And in order to support all these extra shoe shops, what must happen?
PUPIL:
Everyone… must keep buying shoes.
Nicole
I guess
is Britishese for “white men are the most discriminated against group in this country”?
Admittedly, were it not for Andrew Sullivan, I’d never have found Balloon-juice, as he used to occasionally link to one of John’s posts back in the day, but that’s the only positive thing I got out of my relationship with the Daily Dish.
He really hates women. No wonder Bill Maher likes to have him on his show as a guest.
Splitting Image
@Steeplejack:
Thatcher’s regime continued the current status quo within the Conservative Party, and kicked a lot of people Sullivan didn’t like in the head. Sullivan’s social position was not threatened.
Sarah Palin’s ascent threatened the current status quo within the Republican Party, and promoted a lot of people who would be happy to kick Andrew Sullivan in the head. Sullivan’s position was tangibly threatened.
Therefore: Thatcher good. Palin bad.
VidaLoca
@Splitting Image: Hm. All anyone would ever need to know about Sullivan, summed up in 4 sentences.
Well done.
ETA: [counts again…] OK, 5 sentences. Still well done.
300baud
I am fascinated by the notions of “creeping misandry” and “easy prejudices that define white and male and young as suspect identities”. As far as I can tell the only thing that is changing is that now those identities are being evaluated in the same light as other identities. If the right doesn’t like it, maybe they shouldn’t have spent several centuries demonstrating exactly how to be suspicious of people based on gender and race.
Schlemazel
@Splitting Image:
Sully only cares if its his ox that might be gored. If lynchings started up again he would stoutly defend them, unless a gay man were lynched. He is a fool without empathy, as long as he cannot see it happening to him it just does not matter to him & he will come down on the wrong side.
The only thing surprising is that he waded in, ignorant, so late to the debate. He should have gotten there much earlier when there was still more heat on the subject. His “not my fault; previous statements are now inoperative” column is about 4-6 months away.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Because a bunch of young men spending most of their time with on-line personas of futah-My Little Poney- robot-wolves and having cyber sex with each other are just a typical bunch of normal boys feeling their oats?
JPL
@? Martin: MItch says it’s all about coal. Coal will save us.
BillinGlendaleCA
@JPL: Coal and the Keystone pipeline.
Baud
@300baud:
QFT
Lit3Bolt
If privileged upper class white twits were forced to think before speaking, Andrew Sullivan would cease to exist.
How many Andrew Sullivans does it take to screw in a light bulb? None because the intern would do it.
Stayed tuned for Sullivan Trek III: The Search for Daddy
Why did Sully fall in love with Margaret Thatcher? She was man enough for both of them.
Why did Sully get angry about the United States using torture? Because it was upstaging the Catholic Church.
How do you know Andrew Sullivan still reads fairy tales? Because he believes in the existence of the Left-wing in US politics.
All collegiate math students are required to know about the irrational numbers pi, the square root of 2, and the number of imaginary hippies in Andrew Sullivan’s brain.
What do Sully and Sgt. Schultz have in common? They’ve both made a career for themselves by saying “I know nothing.”
Sullivan wowed the intellectual right-wing in the United States with his exotic English accent.
But honestly, we all under appreciate the genius of Sully. The man’s business model is getting people to pay him for the privilege of taking their pictures from outside their window, and selling it back to them in the form of a coffee table book. Or what about the T-shirts? Hey, you know what’s “hip” with the kids? Marijuana! And Burning Man! That’ll get you invited to the “cool” table on the DC circuit! Marketing brilliance! Toss in the occasional, “Hey, I’m sad about torture and the environment too,” and “I’m scared of vagina-beasts wanting bodily autonomy and those husky young bucks shouting something about voting” and you’ve got a sustainable business model of selling intellectual cover for white male privilege.
JPL
@BillinGlendaleCA: Neither of those industries employ a lot of people. In Kentucky according to the google, 18,000 people are employed by the coal industry.
gelfling545
@waspuppet: What is actually problamatic, and should be, is having a “classic” (really?) straight, white male identity and feeling, even implicitly, that it gives one the right to claim superiority and privileges beyond those afforded to the rest of the population. The straight, white males I know who have avoided this attitude seem to be doing fine as well.
Lurking Canadian
@? Martin: well, sure. The People have Spoken, and now Obama must spend the next two years rubber stamping whatever lunacy Congress proposes. The People did not speak in 2008, those were just dusky-hued Morlocks, against whom McConnell stood like horatius.
The are probably feeling magnanous that they haven’t yet passed a law requiring the president to call all white Republicans “boss”.
Svensker
@Splitting Image:
By Jove, I think he’s got it.
Kay
Walmart stores are dirty and disorganized and that is affecting sales.
However, retail analysts have discovered the problem:
They don’t have the people to do “many activities” :)
I can’t believe Walmart had to test their theory out. Do we need just enough people to do all this work, or…not? Let’s go with fewer than enough and see if something magical happens and the work gets done anyway. Elves. It’s the elves theory of management.
chopper
don’t give the CSI franchise any ideas.
debbie
@Steeplejack:
Thatcher at least was smart enough not to want to meet with Palin.
scav
They do rather keep insisting themseves that the classic straight male white identity is rude, unthinking, uncaring, entirely unfettered and moreover incapable of learning, growth or change. All hail the permanently stunted toddlers?
Ramalama
@Lit3Bolt: OMG Yes!
Also it seems that #GamerGate was preceded by OperationLollipop where irate (presumably) white dudes assembled on chat forums, namely 4chan, to create fake twitter handles of made up black women, and then to tweet against Father’s Day. The sole purpose being to troll.
Savvy black women on twitter started noticing. They compiled a bunch of handles they thought were not really black women, just from the language they used, and then more people jumped in and confirmed that yes, this one belongs to a dude who posts in white supremacy forums, and hey look, here’s another. That ball rolled downhill and wouldn’t you know it, a conspiracy was discovered. The hashtag #yourslipisshowing was used to great effect to get the dudes to pivot away from Father’s Day.
People started using or applying the hashtag #HowMediaWritesWOC to this. Since few MSM peeps report on black women, other than supposed welfare cheats or extreme child abusers or supposed child abusers, these white dudes went on to join in, or orchestrate (hard for me to tell from the tweets I’d come across), #GamerGate against women in….gaming.
A decent run-down can be found here.
Way back when I was still kind of looking at Sully’s blog, one of the things he railed on about (one of scores) was how Obama took a new approach to dealing with issues, whereas Hillary was all about fighting old fights. Yet Sully uses #GamerGate to illustrate that he himself is stuck to fighting old fights that many people of good will and especially Millennials, don’t think is acceptable. More and more people think it’s not ok to stalk and terrorize someone using words.
Ruckus
@Kay:
It’s the rich idiot elves theory of management.
Fixit for you. And then for me.
Someguy
@300baud: If the right doesn’t like it, maybe they shouldn’t have spent several centuries demonstrating exactly how to be suspicious of people based on gender and race.
Indeed. Perhaps several centuries of retributive oppression is in order here. Y’know, just to deliver that level playing surface that straight white males fondly discuss.
Boots Day
It’s hilarious that Sully sees the need to warn us that these radical feminists are “bent on social transformation.” Why, they might even start agitating for gay marriage!
Lurking Canadian
@Kay: It’s the same experiment the airlines are running:
– Hmm, if we took away the peanuts, will they still fly…
– Ok, no more peanuts. Well, what i we took away food entirely…
-Ok, no more meals…Let’s cut their legroom in half…
– Huh, still flying… Ok, what if we start charging them for luggage…
-By God is there no end? What if we start charging a nickel for each sip of water…
Same principle at Walmart:
– If we stop dressing the shelves, will they still buy…
– Ok, well, what if we stop mopping the floor…
– Ok, we what if we only restock every other day…
– Huh. Well, what if we only restock Thursdays…
Kay
@Ruckus:
It’s what I always think about when they insist they’re going to fire people if the minimum wage goes up.
They want us to believe they had spare workers hanging around. I don’t hire any more people than I need. We don’t have any spares here, and I don’t think McDonalds does either. If they do they aren’t very good managers :)
Every time I hear it I think “you’ll get rid of those people you’re paying 8 dollars an hour who have no work to do, now?”
I mean, come on. I’m willing to bet they have just enough 8 dollar an hour employees. No spares. Walmart actually believed their own bullshit, I guess.
Ella in New Mexico
@Omnes Omnibus:
Part of why I will still read some of Sullivan’s posts is that he reminds me so much of one of my now closest, dearest friends. She is now a married lesbian “old lady”, but when we were young and first met, she had a tendency to blurt out stupid and completely unformed thoughts on the political and social issues of the day as truth in a blink of an eye. We had many a heated back and forth in those days, usually along the lines of “Listen, you are talking out your ass and you don’t know a thing about what you’re saying”. Sometimes, because she knew she was losing the argument, she’d drag in some meta issue that was only tangentially related to the original issue and try to pretend she was REALLY worried about some Big Thot issue, like “Freedom of Speech Trumps a Teacher’s Right to Tell Your Kid he’s a Liberal Baby Killer if His Parents Vote for Obama” with no punishment. But with the reality check of the difference between things in an ivory tower and things on the ground, you know what, she’d actually listen and learn and modify her thinking from our friendship. As I did from her.
Andrew Sullivan is a wounded, damaged and not fully formed human who I sense is basically in the right zone with most issues, but who has a tendency in certain “scary” situations, to revert to a pre-enlightened subroutine of fear-based gibberish. He also likes to do the tangential argument thing in those situations, like with this one. But I love how after people call him out he ends up coming crawling back, kind of apologizing for his stupidity, even if he does still try to keep one last shriveled rationalization of his previous stupid remarks just to save his pride.
Maybe I am a loser, but I still read his site for a lot of reasons, including this one.
Tara the Antisocial Social Worker
@gelfling545: What exactly is the difference between a “classic” straight white male identity and a” non-classic” one? what kind of Coke they drink?
Tenar Darell
@Boots Day: Been thinking about this lately, not sure why — at a very basic, simplistic level, the very definition of feminism (that men and women are equal beings) has and will lead to radical transformation in our society, law, and social interactions. It’s why men like Sullivan, who closely identify with existing power structures and hierarchies, aren’t ever allies in this struggle. Once he succeeds in getting what he wants, in this case marriage, he goes reflexively back to “I got mine Jack.”
IIRC he wanted marriage via legislation, not the courts, so for all his celebration of the spreading acceptance for marriage rights, he was never on board with the state by state court cases. He’s very triumphant about the changing environment, but if marriage via referendum or legislature had been the focus, this ten year turnaround in polling would never has happened.
Somehow other people always seem to do the heavy lifting for him, including filtering his email once he turned off his comments because they were so vile. Where’s his support for free speech when he had to actually deal with trolls? Yet he now wants to deny women on twitter and elsewhere on the web the technical tools to do the same. Simply a way to filter out the sh*t, as he has been able to do! Just more of Sullivan’s SOP IGMJ.
NonyNony
@Kay:
I guarantee you that there is a whole chain of executives at WalMart whose compensation bonuses are tied to labor costs that the company incurs – with no adjustment for potential losses that the store incurs due to understaffing. Meaning that they have every incentive in the world to cut staffing slightly more than they need to – though not so much that it becomes obvious to a chimp that the store couldn’t operate with staffing that low.
After spending 2+ decades working in both corporate america and academic america, I’ve become convinced that 99% of every stupid decision made by our brilliant jerb-creating class of elites is due to a complete misalignment of incentives and outcomes.
drkrick
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Hey, leave the Bronies out of this. They’re not a pro-GG constituency on any level.
I have a kid’s honor to protect here. I was a deadhead, he’s a Brony. My dad is laughing his ass off.
Hillary Rettig
>Sullivan’s Dish should have a tag for “Show us on the doll where Margaret Thatcher touched you”. Ever since he fled the unsympathetic shores of Thatcherite London to preach its underappreciated Oakeshottian glory to us simple colonials, he’s been acting out his “good mommy, mean mommy” psychodrama in every media he can monetize.
Very nice, AL, very nice. That “monetize” bit was the cherry on the sundae.
Boots Day
@Tenar Darell: Very good points. Sullivan knew, back at the beginning of his crusade, that gay marriage was considered by many a radical social transformation – but it was also the right thing to do. He won’t give the same consideration to social transformation desired by others (especially women). If it’s radical (in his definition), it’s bad, whether or not it’s the right thing to do.
It’s all of a piece with Sullivan’s constant attempts to redefine anything he is in favor of as “conservative.”
Calouste
@Tara the Antisocial Social Worker:
As far as I understand “classic straight white male identity” means inconsiderate asshole.
And I say that as a (hopefully non-classic) straight white male.
MaxL
When I was in college in ’89, a student group invited Adolfo Calero to speak on campus. He was a spokesman for the Contras, Ronald Reagan’s favorite revolutionaries. I had spent time in Nicaragua and was deeply opposed to both US funding for them and the ugly consequences of that filthy war, but was interested to hear what the man had to say.
He was shouted down by hecklers and not allowed to say a word. A couple years earlier, at the height of the war in Nica, Northwestern students and faculty had rushed the stage and poured blood on him.
The man should have been allowed to say his piece. The only way to get rid of bad ideas and hateful speech is to have it exposed and countered – vehemently – in the public forum. Conservatives mistakenly label this public disagreement as “political correctness.” It is in fact the definition of free speech. If one’s ideas are crap, they should and will be mocked. Sara Palin, for example,will never ever understand this distinction, apparently.
Preventing Calero from speaking at all – now THAT is PC. I don’t understand why we wouldn’t trust our own ideas, in the open, to be better than his. By 1989, pretty much everyone hated Nicaragua policy under Reagan and there were officials in jail for conducting it. The process had worked, it will keep working. Not confronting stupid in the open, having it delteed before it can hurt our fee fees just drives the hate underground and keeps it inside a bubble.
The alternative is fraught with bad alternatives:
What is a definition of hate speech that can be applied evenly and fairly? Death threats are definitely hate speech and already have consequences, but the rest of it seems a lot like the wobbly definition of porn “I know it when I see it.”
Is criticizing a religion hate speech? Here in the Bay Area, Bill Maher just got himself in trouble for that. Is being homophobic hate speech? Sully’s example is pretty apt: Say I were to criticize Islam for being murderously homophobic. Would I be in more trouble than the Imam who indicated in public that he had no issue with the Taliban’s treatment of homosexuals?
Who gets to decide what crosses the line? Is it retroactive to, say, prop 8 days? What is the punishment? Truly awful crap is said on the internets and I would love it if there were a price for the trolls and dipsh*ts.
But I don’t trust anyone to monitor speech in a way that wouldn’t make the world suck even more.
David Rickard
I have a pet theory that Sully is still consumed with Catholic guilt about being gay, and that he latches onto every theory of gender essentialism or genetic determinism that crosses his screen as part of his desperate effort to convince himself that his sexual orientation isn’t his fault. Thus he lashes out at people who suggest that gender identity is fluid and constructed because such theories exacerbate his guilt.
Of course, I could be over thinking this: Sully could just be an asshole who hates liberals.
Betsy
@Nicole: thank you. I can’t stand the misogynistic little fucker.
Betsy
@David Rickard: I don’t think it’s either/or.
Tenar Darell
@MaxL: So when Sullivan insists on real names, no nyms, shuts off comments, and filters his emails through interns, isn’t that suppressing speech? He gets to decide to stop letting people call him names and shout at him multiple times, every single day, for years? Isn’t that Sullivan refusing to stand up for what he believes? If we continue using your comparison, essentially, he un-invited/barred the protestors from inside and outside his venue, including those who held up signs, those who refused to let him be heard by shouting him down, and those who were throwing buckets of blood on him. Explain why it’s okay for him to filter his blog with the techniques and tools he has, but not okay for women and non-conforming men to ask for the same consideration and tools on Twitter and other social media.
Morzer
@Tenar Darell:
It’s much easier to rig the debate when you control who gets to speak – and whether you will quote them in full or not. I just don’t trust a self-serving exhibitionist like Sullivan to be honest with anyone else, given that he obviously isn’t being honest with himself.
MaxL
@Tenar Darell: I honestly hadn’t thought about any of that, and am still sort of scratching my head to see how it applies. After thinking about it for a moment, my initial reaction is that I don’t see a free speech issue regarding the way he handles comments.
What would be the same thing as speech monitoring would be if, say, yahoo stopped delivering certain emails to a blogger because someone there thought he/she would find them offensive.
FWIW, I don’t see how having a comment thread for each post changes anything. Sullivan publishes his opinions in the public forum via his blog and is often criticized. As far as I can tell, he engages comments, whether they are emails or other writers/bloggers frequently. Are you saying that a Disqus thread exclusively = free speech? Public speech is not limited to comment threads after each post. But maybe I misunderstand your point.
Hmm, I also can’t think of any reason why using real names is a problem. Does Sullivan do that? I suppose Dish Staff is anonymous, but so is mistermix, right? Either way, most every blogger does use his/her real name. Why do only commenters need anonymity? FWIW, I would sign my name to any opinion I posted on the internet. I might take a little more care with the privacy of my phone number or address, but why the need for anonymity? Of course, I also don’t bother with facebook because it is soul crushingly banal and I assume even interesting people are dull there precisely because it isn’t anonymous. It also seems the comments on Charlie Pierce’s posts are very polite and funny – and not anonymous. As opposed to the anonymous garbage and trolling on Jonathan Chait’s posts.
I mean, the issue here is that hate speech would be directed at the person stating a strong opinion. I imagine Sullivan gets some ugly crap in his inbox. So how would that garbage being invisible to other anonymous commenters change anything? It is all direct at Sullivan, right?
I just checked, and Sullivan responded to your point (and a reader’s email) about no comment threads himself in the last few minutes. Not sure if I can post a link, but it is just a post or 2 down in his site now.
Bob In Portland
Recruitment drive for the Azov Battalion.
MaxL
It occurs that to me that perhaps Sullivan should post any threats he receives -email, txt message, snail mail etc… – publicly? I guess that would move the debate forward. OK, if that is the point, and as a sort of categorical imperative derived from my first post, I concede it. But it would be weird. And melodramatic.
Another Holocene Human
@? Martin: This is genuinely great news.
Keep fucking with the GOP, POTUS!
Another Holocene Human
@Kay: This disaster couldn’t have happened to a better gang of capitalists.
Another Holocene Human
@NonyNony:
DING DING DING!!
What business is going through right now with the MBA mentality is the same shit that happened to government. You bean count like a motherfucker where employees are concerned but totally ignore that your service/product has gone to shit and that you are piling up not-so-hidden costs on other ledgers due to turnover and other issues.
If anybody brings up these other costs, bullshit that “everybody has these problems” and argue counterfactuals like paying people more will lead to more turnover and hence more overtime costs or whatever dumb thing you think will fly so you can keep your job.
Tenar Darell
@Morzer: Yes. He certainly is good at cherry picking. I of wonder how many of his readers actively challenged him to follow any woman of color’s twitter feed for a week or month. Or ask any activist woman blogger if he can read all her comments before moderation.
Tara the Antisocial Social Worker
@Calouste: Upon reflection, I think a great deal of these clowns’ rage springs from the fact that “white male identity” is not longer being treated as interchangeable with “classic human identity”, with the rest of us deemed non-classic exceptions. Like so much of our culture, the video game industry has treated white males as the standard-issue human, with women and people of color as Other. Now there have been a few steps toward change.
When you’ve spent your life being treated as better than other people, mere equality can feel like a step down. Those with a healthy sense of empathy can deal with it.
Tenar Darell
@MaxL: I should stop dragging Anne Laurie’s thread into 12-24 hours. But, I’ll go one more long comment for my part, since this remains clarifying. I noticed two things to respond to which I thought were important.
Anonymity or alternate names is useful for
1) anyone who cannot post publicly about certain subjects because of their job
2) anyone whose friends or family members and their associated jobs might be hurt by their online public profile
3) domestic violence survivors with restraining orders and/or hiding from their abusers
4) outspoken women who are public about their activism who get doxxed, threatened, stalked etc. (also makes other women (and men) wish to remain anonymous)
5) anyone who has multiple accounts who at minimum wishes to distinguish between professional, personal, and spam accounts, might also wish to have a nym or nyms so that their 18 year old or 22 year old or 29 year old opinions or mistakes don’t follow them forever under their real name
6) people who are transgender whose real names don’t match their names on their birth certificates.
7) drag queens or other actors and artists who create a professional persona under a different name
8) probably more reasons I can’t think of
As for Sully’s reply, he blames his readers for voting he should shut off comments, but that was one of a few pre-defined options. When he did use them they were much worse than Chait’s, with trolls shouting him and the other readers and posters down. He’s not particularly honest or forthcoming about how bad it was until he started to use his current system.
Do you believe he reads every nasty or threatening email himself? He has people to filter the “fa***t” and “f*ck you” mails for him. Why can’t outspoken women have “people” filter the “n***er and/or c**t” tweets escalating all the way to “kill yourself,” doxxing, rape threats, and so forth too? I just don’t buy how what WAM will be doing on Twitter is all that different from what Sullivan’s interns do for his email stream, and by curating his Facebook page. He’s basically got bodyguards to protect him on the internet, why can’t women and people of color have the equivalent? Why shouldn’t I consider him a complete hypocrite for assuming that this protection from vile insult is okay for him, but not for everyone?
Stretching a bit, but trying to work within the lecture framework you suggested…it feels like Twitter’s “connecting the world” is the school administrator, triumphant at snagging a controversial speaker for a Q&A, but then is blindsided at the controversy. Plus, the administrator hasn’t bothered to consult with students (who weren’t involved in the invitation) or even add security. Then the administrator acts terribly surprised and hurt when some respond by protesting, shouting, with some even rushing the stage and throwing blood. But somehow it’s the students’ who point out the systemic flaw in choosing speakers and selling tickets who are at fault.
I just don’t think this is a free speech issue. Why do I think this isn’t about speech but a serious problem? Because I read about just a few of those experiments where a straight white guy replaces his profile picture with his African American woman friend’s profile picture. That’s all that was required to convince me that the default person in the internet, straight white guys, may get called nasty things, but everyone else outside that paradigm gets called much worse, and it happens more often. In the end, to me, it just looks like we’re suppressing the voices we most need to hear.
Another Holocene Human
@MaxL: You make a very good point, however Maher was invited by a student group to be commencement speaker and after his last chain of derp they decided they wished to uninvite him. It’s not an academic forum or a discussion panel, it’s a commencement speech. The University said ha ha, you didn’t think “input” meant you had real power, right? So he will be there.
Now if you want to argue the tactics by students of harassing and shouting down establishment figures they don’t like that admins keep foisting on them that’s a great discussion to have but that’s not specifically what the Maher thing is about.
Another Holocene Human
@Tenar Darell: It’s typical libertarian bullshit, you should have to listen to ME as I shout you down but I can filter out exactly what I want because I’m a rich guy in a gated world and obviously I deserve all of this because I’m rich and successful and ever thought that flits across my mind is pure gold so you OWE me silence and no dissenting troubling comments.
Another Holocene Human
@Tenar Darell: I completely cosign your list of valid reasons for anonymity.
I read something recently that suggested that it was not anonymity but the overall attitude that the virtual world isn’t real, so criminal threats made online aren’t real either, that is driving the ugliness, not so much whether you can identify who sent them.
After all, site owners can usually identify trolls right back to their ISP but we have a real problem with police departments failing to act on credible online threats by disturbed people, angry exes, straight up criminals motivated by monetary gain, etc.
Another Holocene Human
@Tenar Darell:
This.
MaxL
@Tenar Darell: I don’t think Anne Laurie will mind, considering your very thoughtful reply.
Regarding non-anonymous comments, agreed: there are any number of good reasons to want to be anonymous and I am entirely sympathetic to those who need that protection for a good reason. ie: Digby.
Anonymous speech is uglier, but several orders of magnitude safer than stepping in front of a crowd. Anonymity removes the risk of speaking out. Trying to then put the filter back on to delete not just threatening statements (these should absolutely be banned) but also offensive ones is, to me, too expensive a cost for that last mile. I am not trying to persuade anyone but it would likewise take a lot more than gamergaterz trolling to move me on this.
As far as Sullivan replying only to a curated set of emails, I would think that the act of choosing what to reply to is by definition also a choice to ignore others. Very few bloggers (Krugman?) reply to readers comments, but Sullivan does. Jonathan Chait doesn’t, but he does write epic takedowns of other bloggers criticizing his posts. That is a much stricter standard for who is engaged in the debate. I’d think either satisfies the requirement, though.
I completely agree that at any given time the voices we need to hear most are always the ones that are pushed to the side, hectored and insulted. But I don’t think it is always the same groups pushed aside, or the same voices that are hectored moving forward. There has been great change in just my middle aged puff. But some of what has changed too is our tolerance for the remnants of the system that was in place before. For example, I saw an author on Colbert talking about “micro-aggressions” a few weeks ago and it (inappropriately?) made me smile – micro-aggressions are a long way from Jim Crow. And that is a good thing.
MaxL
@Another Holocene Human: I worate a reply to Tenar a moment ago and I think some of that applies to Maher as well.
Commencement speakers are indeed foisted on graduating students and I have no issue at all with students protesting against that. Forced attendance is a very important distinction. It was a bad example. Condoleeza Rice had something similar happen, IIRC, where she withdrew. I believe it was also a paid engagement.
I wonder if there is any commencement speaker that no student would have an issue with – except maybe Jeter at NYU.
As far as the Calero lecture goes, I was at the one at University of Chicago a couple years after N’western. There were protests outside (which is pretty amazing considering how conservative and apathetic the U of C was then). I can’t imagine I’d have paid to see Calero and I don’t think he was paid from student funds either. I believe he was engaged by a student political group, a conservative group I am sure. It was a long time ago and no amount of googling will bring back details like that.
Ramalama
@MaxL:
No it’s not. PC is about policing your own comments yourself. Preventing people from sharing whatever ideas they have is called fascism or authoritarianism or….