🐱 Interesting clickbait, op-eds, fluff pieces and other smaller stories

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/24/caitlyn-jenner-halloween-costume-sparks-social-media-outrage-.html

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ne...een-costume-labeled-817515?utm_source=twitter

It's nowhere near October, but one ensemble is already on track to be named the most controversial Halloween costume of 2015.

Social media users were out in full force on Monday criticizing several Halloween retailers for offering a Caitlyn Jenner costume reminiscent of the former-athlete's Vanity Fair cover earlier this year.

While Jenner's supporters condemned the costume as "transphobic" and "disgusting" on Twitter, Spirit Halloween, a retailer that carries the costume, defended the getup.

"At Spirit Halloween, we create a wide range of costumes that are often based upon celebrities, public figures, heroes and superheroes," said Lisa Barr, senior director of marking at Spirit Halloween. "We feel that Caitlyn Jenner is all of the above and that she should be celebrated. The Caitlyn Jenner costume reflects just that."

 

[AnOminous]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-alt-right-is-taking-over-renaissance-fairs?via=FB_Page&source=TDB

The Alt-Right is Taking Over Renaissance Fairs

[a bunch of tl;dr bullshit]

Remember when it was fundamentalist Christians who babbled idiotically about Satanic Ritual Abuse, backwards masking Satanic lyrics, how every single random bit of imagery in media was secret code to Satanists, how vidya would magically turn you into a mass murderer, and other similar delusional bullshit?

 

[Bugaboo]

I think on the topic of teaching kids that racsim is a thing, I literally had no idea that some people didn't like black people or Chinese people or whatever. I just assumed that people came in different colors because animals come in different colors and all the other animals are fine with it (eg. You don't see the black goldfish hating the orange goldfish or the goldfish with calico patterns) and I was shocked when I learned about racism. I think all children will eventually learn about racism but the vast majority of children don't question why people come in different colors or really care about it so you don't have to teach them about it until they encounter it because it's not something they should be worried about.
But I ain't no child physiologist so perhaps I am the fool

 

[Snuckening]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-alt-right-is-taking-over-renaissance-fairs?via=FB_Page&source=TDB

The Alt-Right is Taking Over Renaissance Fairs

Spoiler

Ten days before the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville last year, Paul Walsh was telling fellow neo-Nazis how to build and carry shields. “Carrying it like that it will flop around and be a pain in the ass,” Walsh scolded a member of his chat group, who suggested a hands-free shield modification.

How did Walsh know how a shield would work in action? “I do a lot of nerdy LARP [live action role play] shit with shields,” he explained.

He wasn’t kidding. Before Unite the Right, Walsh was an active participant in Dagorhir, a medieval fantasy role-playing game in which players dress as knights or orcs (one of Walsh’s preferred costumes) and bash the hell out of each other with foam swords. Nor was he alone. Since the 19th Century, white supremacists have bought into a fictionalized vision of medieval Europe, which they interpret—incorrectly, according to medieval scholars—as an all-white world. Now, with white supremacist extremism on the rise, those medievalist influences are leaking into the real world, from allegations of neo-Nazism in the LARPing community and the professional sword-fighting realm, to Renaissance Faire-loving bombers and fascist cults who encourage recruits to read Lord of the Rings.

appeared in Old Norse and Celtic societies. Even a seasoned medievalist would have struggled to prove them wrong.

A member of LARPing scene familiar with one of the men carrying a Black Sun shield told The Daily Beast the man had no known connections to the alt-right, that his costume has a historical Germanic theme, and that, in all likelihood, the man didn't know the Black Sun's Nazi tie-in.

The significant overlap between Nazi fans and European history fans has led to a phenomenon medieval scholar Paul Sturtevant calls “Schrödinger’s Medievalism”: “a piece of medieval culture found in the wild that you know has been appropriated as a symbol by right-wing nationalists or racists ... You can’t tell which is it until you get more information—and sometimes doing so is impossible. So, sometimes you are left in the uncomfortable position of having to treat it as both benign and hostile at the same time.”

White supremacists have good reason to turn to medieval culture for validation, Cord Whitaker, an associate professor of English at Wellesley College, told The Daily Beast.

the Anti-Defamation League.

But that Europe didn’t exist outside novels, medievalist Dorothy Kim told The Daily Beast.

“This medieval ‘white utopia’ is entirely false. In fact, the medieval past was multiracial, multifaith, and multicultural,” Kim, an associate professor of English at Brandeis University said, pointing to Indian and African immigration pre-1500, and to recent genetic testing that suggests the earliest known British skeleton had dark skin. “It's rather difficult to find a ‘pure white’ utopia anytime in the pre-modern, let alone ancient historical records,” she said.


None of these findings have done much to deter white supremacists, many of whom still adopt medieval symbols like the Black Sun, which is just historical enough for neo-Nazis to describe it as a Norse symbol when confronted. But come on. When the singer Shakirareleased a gold necklace with a Black Sun pattern (overlaid with the ahistorical inscription “Shakira El Dorado World Tour”), fans and German news outlets quickly noted its similarity to the Nazi symbol, and Shakira’s promotion company pulled the necklace from its store.

If Shakira fans are already wise to popular Nazi symbols, what excuse do amateur European historians have?

“A lot of these symbols are dog whistles,” Ken Mondschein, a history professor and fencing master, told The Daily Beast. His own area of expertise, Historical European Medieval Arts, has its own admirers on the far-right. “For example, a Thor’s Hammer. Someone could simply like the Marvel character Thor and wear it. They could be a non-racist member of Asatru, a neo-heathen movement. Or they could be a white supremacist.”

In Walsh’s case, the answer was white supremacy.


“Despite a self-proclaimed love for 'painting up' before battles (orc players often paint themselves green), Walsh believed whites were superior.”

Walsh, a Michigan man, was a fixture of Dagorhir tournaments, where he LARPed as an orc called Kromkar Da Yooper since at least 2011, the blog Alt-Right Already reported last August. But despite a self-proclaimed love for “painting up” before battles (orc players often paint themselves green), Walsh believed whites were superior. A member of Walsh’s Dagorhir group told Alt-Right Already that members quit over Walsh’s comments defending slavery and white supremacy.

In spring 2017, Walsh joined a different niche social club: the Traditionalist Worker Party, a neo-Nazi movement that imploded less than a year later, after its leader was arrested in a trailer brawl over an intra-family love triangle.

GET THE BEAST IN YOUR INBOX!


“Going to produce some training videos about basic shield line tactics and organization as well, after the TWP event kicks off,” Walsh wrote in an alt-right chat group in April 2017, according to chat logs leaked by the media nonprofit Unicorn Riot. “I know what I’m doing.”

Elsewhere in the logs, Walsh references his roommate pitching in to plan the TWP’s shield wall. That person’s identity is unclear, although at least one of Walsh’s Michigan LARPing friends was at Unite the Right, according to Alt-Right Already. That LARPer, Anthony Overway, roleplayed as a character called Heinz the Barbarian. A person with the username “Heinz-MI” appears repeatedly in chat logs for the TWP and a Unite the Right planning group, where he gives instructions on building shields and forming a shield wall.

The image could almost be funny—members of the self-proclaimed master race studying shields with a medieval orc LARPer!—if not for the TWP’s actions at Unite the Right. Using hard plastic shields as battering rams, the group charged into a crowd of unarmed counter-protesters, shoving them on the pavement and stabbing them with flagpoles.


A lawsuit against a hoard of far-right groups, including the TWP, accuses them of using their shields like weapons. In order to escape litigation, a number of the groups in the lawsuit have agreed not to return to Charlottesville with weapons, including shields.

Meanwhile, other medievalist communities have also struggled with alt-right incursion—and in the case of the Historical European Medieval Arts (HEMA) community, those unwelcome factions have more deadly weapons.

Mondschein, the history professor and HEMA instructor, said the community is overwhelmingly a tolerant one. But over the past several years, he has catalogued a far-right fascination with the field, which includes fencing and dueling with very real, very sharp swords.

“Is anyones else besides me into [HEMA]?” a person with a swastika avatar asked in Iron March, a now-defunct Nazi forum. Mondschein included the post in a presentation at last year’s International Congress on Medieval Studies, where he gave a talk on white supremacist trends in his sport. He also conducted a survey (which, he stresses, is not peer-reviewed) of more than 300 HEMA participants, in which 10 to 15 percent of respondents indicated that they held far-right views.



“Using hard plastic shields as battering rams, the group charged into a crowd of unarmed counter-protesters, shoving them on the pavement and stabbing them with flagpoles.”
Radix Journal, a white supremacist site published by Richard Spencer, has run multiple pieces promoting HEMA, selling it as a more authentic medieval experience than games like Dagorhir. “This ain’t LARPing,” one Radix article reads.

Larry McQuilliams, a Texas man who attempted to destroy Austin’s Mexican Consulate with bullets and bottles of propane in 2014, was described by neighbors as being into “martial arts swords” and Renaissance Faires. McQuilliams, who was killed in a firefight with police after firing more than 100 shots in downtown Austin, was reportedly affiliated with the Phineas Priesthood, a Christian identity hate group that advocates violence against people of color.

And just months ago, the HEMA community erupted in controversy after some of its best-known Swedish fighters were revealed to have liked or shared historical Nazi propaganda, or other racist imagery. In a long statement, the most prominent of the fencers, Axel Pettersson, denounced his old “Nazi jokes” as the product of a dark period in his life, for which he apologized. Pettersson said he was not a white supremacist and had friends of many races, but went on to describe views similar to that of the identitarian movement, warning that immigrants are “replacing” white Swedes, who “have the right to our own country.”

“A lot of people are drawn to HEMA and other medievalist subcultures like the Society for Creative Anachronism because it fits into their overall Identitarian worldview, their ideas of European culture,” Mondschein said of the incident. “Particularly, these people in Sweden who attempted to hide their participation in some white supremacist websites, but if you read their various blogs and writings, you see it that it fits into an overall worldview that romanticizes an imagined homogeneous past.”


In this “imagined past,” as medievalists describe it, historical accuracy often takes a backseat to fantasy.

Neo-Nazis and European nationalists have laid claim to Beowulf, an Old English epic poem about a Norse warrior, which they interpret as a vision of an all-white warrior society. When a charity group produced a low-budget Beowulfadaptation starring a black actor in 2007, they received death threats from self-proclaimed “aryans”. On the recommended reading page of one of its websites, the murderous neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen lists the medievalist fantasy series Lord of the Rings alongside Hitler’s writing and texts that advocate terrorism.


“You often had white southerners after the Civil War imagining themselves as characters in Ivanhoe and holding medieval-style tournaments as public recreation.”
Also on the Atomwaffen-approved reading list are three books by Varg Vikernes, a Norwegian musician who, in between prison and probation stints for murder, church-burning, and inciting racial hatred, has promoted his own brand of pagan white supremacy. Vikernes’ profile picture on his Amazon page shows him wearing a chainmail shirt. He describes himself as being interested in “tabletop role-playing games, HEMA, archaeology, pre-history, pre-Christian European religion and survivalism.”

Historically questionable fiction about medieval Europe has been fueling white supremacist fantasies for the past 150 years, Whitaker, the Wellesley College professor said.


“In the 19th Century, it was largely through medievalizing novels like Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, which was probably the biggest and most well-known example,” he said. “That novel played a big role in racial politics in the mid-19th Century, before, during, and after the Civil War.”

The result, particularly after the Civil War, was its own brand of LARPing.

“You often had white southerners after the Civil War imagining themselves as characters in Ivanhoe and holding medieval-style tournaments as public recreation,” Whitaker said. “This was a way of recuperating their experience in the American Civil War as the medieval experience of Norman versus Franc. That is one instance of a way in which this narrative of an all-white Middle Ages has been important to white supremacy for a long time.”

Much in the way that would-be Confederates leaned on the “imagined past” of medieval England, modern racists have poured millions into an imagined Confederacy. Most of the Confederate flags and statues that dot the U.S.’s southern states did not appear during or immediately after the Civil War, but a century later, during the Civil Rights Movement. Though the statues’ advocates defend them as a symbol of pride and heritage, the construction of new Confederate sites has spiked during racialized conflicts, the Atlantic previously reported.

That LARPing lineage came full circle at Unite the Right, which was initially described as a rally in defense of a Confederate statue in Charlottesville.


Now, with members of their communities marching among fascists at Charlottesville or sharing Nazi pictures, some anti-racist medievalists are fighting back.

“It is safe to say that there are white supremacists and Nazis who are ACTIVELY using Dag as a personal and organizational training ground to give them an edge in premeditated race riots,” one Dagorhir participant wrote on Facebook after Walsh was revealed to have marched at Unite the Right.

Dagorhir Battle Games, the sport’s organizing body, soon banned Walsh from future competitions. But in HEMA, weeding out white supremacy can be more complicated.

“The difficulty is that this idea of aboriginal European martial arts works very well as a dog whistle,” Mondschein said. “It’s very hard to detoxify that. We have people who are interested in this, and we have overt political statements.”

Debates over the sport’s next steps have led to a “real split. I got challenged to a duel with sharp weapons” over his stance, Mondschein said.


Even medievalist academics are torn on how to address their field’s unwanted fanbase on the far-right. The rift turned bitter ahead of this year’s International Conference on Medieval Studies. Kim, the Brandeis professor, had previously called on her colleagues to condemn white supremacy. Some, including a University of Chicago medievalist who contributes to Breitbart, refused, resulting in a flame war against Kim and colleagues, Inside Higher Ed reported.

Whitaker said the recent tensions in his field haven’t surprised him.

“The field propagated this idea, relevant since the 19th Century, of a homogeneously white Middle Ages and attracted people into the field—obviously not everyone, but some people—who thought ‘okay, I can deal with literature or history and not deal with these knotty modern problems of race,’” he said

Kim told The Daily Beast she’s still calling on colleagues to address their field’s white supremacy problem head-on.

“I think academics must counter academic white supremacy by calling it what it is and resisting it,” she said. “In other words, this is not a both-sides debate, this is about genocidal fascism that wants to harm the most vulnerable bodies in our society—Jews, Muslims, women, BIPOC, LGBTQIA, immigrants, refugees, etc.”


As for the white supremacists LARPing alongside non-Nazis, their medieval enthusiast peers want them to drop the foam swords and step into reality.

“In many ways, it’s a reaction to the current state of the world. This is their answer to it, by going back to the imagined past, which is of course futile, because you can’t turn back the clock,” Mondschein said. “You’ve got to learn to live in the world we’re in.”

Kekistani white-genocide-preventing tiki-torch enthusiasts have a predilection for larping? I find that pretty hard to believe, tbh.

 

[CWCchange]

Nah, that’s before the renaissance. It’s more Italy getting into pissing matches with everybody including itself, and Shakespeare in England.

The ones I'm familiar with are usually medieval-themed, making its name misleading, but yeah...

 

[CWCissey]

Dynastia's been burglin' again.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-45001939

 

[ICametoLurk]

https://www.inquisitr.com/5007425/noam-chomsky-israeli-intervention-in-u-s-elections-vastly-overwhelms-anything-the-russians-may-have-done/

Noam Chomsky: ‘Israeli Intervention In U.S. Elections Vastly Overwhelms Anything The Russians May Have Done’

Unlike Putin, Netanyahu gave an address to the joint sessions of Congress in an attempt to reverse U.S. policy and that the famous social critic’s claims are merely just the tip of the iceberg, “a tiny bit of this overwhelming influence” Israel has on the United States.

I mean, if Noam "Pol Pot did nothing wrong" Chomsky says it...

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

I mean, yeah, he's not wrong, but it's because the Russian influence has been insanely wildly overblown. Mr. Chomsky does remember that the address to congress wasn't a secret, doesn't he?

 

[millais]

https://www.inquisitr.com/5007425/noam-chomsky-israeli-intervention-in-u-s-elections-vastly-overwhelms-anything-the-russians-may-have-done/




I mean, if Noam "Pol Pot did nothing wrong" Chomsky says it...

wtf now i love Noam Chomsky

 

[Tookie]

Pretty interesting read about how the McDonald's Monopoly contest was an inside job for years.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-a...s-monopoly-game-and-stole-millions?ref=scroll

Inside Hoover’s home, Amy Murray, a loyal McDonald’s spokesperson, encouraged him to tell the camera about the luckiest moment of his life. Nervously clutching his massive check, Hoover said he’d fallen asleep on the beach. When he bent over to wash off the sand, his People magazine fell into the sea. He bought another copy from a grocery store, he said, and inside was an advertising insert with the “Instant Win” game piece. The camera crew listened patiently to his rambling story, silently recognizing the inconsequential details found in stories told by liars. They suspected that Hoover was not a lucky winner, but part of a major criminal conspiracy to defraud the fast food chain of millions of dollars. The two men behind the camera were not from McDonald’s. They were undercover agents from the FBI.

This was a McSting.

 

[PS1gamenwatch]

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong...hong-kongs-revered-feng-shui-master-choi-park

Respects paid to Hong Kong’s revered feng shui master Choi Park-lai

Master died peacefully at age of 96, surrounded by his family at Hong Kong Sanatorium and Hospital


PUBLISHED : Monday, 30 July, 2018, 11:08pm
UPDATED : Monday, 30 July, 2018, 11:09pm

26 Jul 2018
Top Hong Kong officials were among those who paid their respects at a vigil for revered feng shui master Choi Park-lai on Monday night, with business heavyweights and local governments in mainland China sending wreaths and condolences.
Choi died peacefully at the age of 96 last Thursday, surrounded by his family at the Hong Kong Sanatorium and Hospital. His family said he died of an illness but did not give details.

The author of the Choi Gen Po Tong Chinese Almanac, or “Tung Shing” in Cantonese, Choi provided feng shui guidance to leading businesses and political figures in the city, as well as offering advice on the planning of local landmarks.

The vigil at the Hong Kong Funeral Home in North Point was not open to the public. Dozens of wreaths lined the funeral hall with more than 150 placed outside.

Choi is to be buried at Chai Wan Chinese Permanent Cemetery following a funeral ceremony on Tuesday morning.

His daughter, Choi Hing-wah, earlier told the media that it was her father’s wish to “keep things simple and private”.

Feng shui master Choi Park-lai, who helped promote Chinese culture, dies at 96
Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor and the city’s No 2 official Matthew Cheung Kin-chung paid their respects at the vigil.

Among those who sent flowers were Secretary for Justice Teresa Cheng Yeuk-wah, Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po, tycoon Li Ka-shing, as well as the Dongguan and Foshan governments on the mainland.

Home affairs minister Lau Kong-wah, lawmaker Alice Mak Mei-kuen of the Federation of Trade Unions, Director of Broadcasting Leung Ka-wing and University of Hong Kong governing council member Leonie Ki Man-fung were also among those who attended the vigil.

The almanac is based on the Chinese lunar year and used by many locals to pick dates for important events. It was first published by his grandfather Choi Chui-ba and then his father Choi Lim-fong.

Although banned in the mainland, the almanac was named intangible cultural heritage in 2013 by the Guangdong government.

Master calls for almanac to be given protection
The Hong Kong government also awarded Choi the Gold Bauhinia Star medal in 2015 for his contributions to Chinese culture and charity.

Hong Kong’s last governor Chris Patten, billionaire Li and late tycoon Henry Fok Ying-tung were among those Choi offered advice to. He helped pick the opening date for Hong Kong’s Tsing Ma bridge while the location of the two bronze lions at the HSBC headquarters in Central was also chosen with the help of his astrological calculations.

 

[BILLY MAYS]

Trigger warning: please note that this is a blog post about online abuse, and includes screen caps of tweets sent to me. Graphic threats and abusive, hateful language toward women appear therein.

A few weeks ago, I gave a keynote talk at World Domination Summit in Portland. The thesis: while we regard online misogyny and abuse of women as something wholly separate and different from its so-called “real-world” counterparts, these are all components of the same system. We dismiss sexual harassment that happens on the internet in the exact same way that we dismiss sexual harassment that happens face-to-face, even though these experiences are often just as bad – if not worse – for the victim, often due to the mechanics of the anonymity of the internet.

Women – both online and off – are told that we are overreacting, that we brought this abuse upon ourselves, that we can just leave the platform or get a new job, that the threats aren’t real, and a litany of other arguments meant to cause us to question our own realities and experiences. Teach a woman that she can’t trust herself and she becomes infinitely easier to abuse. Those of us who do speak up are labeled difficult, humorless, shrill, caustic; not only are women mistreated, but a system is in place to ensure that they can’t call out that abuse without doing more damage to themselves.

I can give talks to large crowds – I just spend way too much time preparing for them; this was no exception. For months leading up to the talk, I frantically worked on slides, I created and scrapped outline after outline, I poured through academic journals, and – most harrowing of all – I spent time talking to online abusers on Twitter.

It was illuminating, though perhaps not for the reasons one would think. There was no common ground reached, no epiphanies that we were all just people with different views. Quite the opposite, really: I realized that these individuals did not and would not care about my feelings, no matter how long we talked.

As I told the audience of WDS, I do not recommend this exercise. “Don’t feed the trolls” is an oft-quoted refrain whenever online abuse comes up, but it is far too simple, and as the (anonymous) writer of this brilliant piece notes, it is hardly effective. We now are so disinclined to feed “trolls” (a term that I reject in this instance – these are abusers, pure and simple, not trolls) that we’ve created a strange system where we don’t even acknowledge the pain of their victims, or, if we are the victims, where we fail to acknowledge the pain that they have caused us. But the root of the argument holds true: online abusers feed off attention and the knowledge that they’ve caused their victims pain.

This individual noted that they had no ideal outcome in mind for their tweet – they just wanted to be sure I saw it.

One tactic I’ve often seen people take (which I’ve also tried) is to reason with online attackers, to make them acutely aware of the fact that there is a human at the other end of their attacks to whom they are causing pain. This rarely works because, as one study found, individuals who were more likely to engage in “trolling” behaviors were more likely to have psychopathic and sadistic traits. By telling them about the pain they were experiencing, their victims had given the trolls precisely what they wanted.

I realized I had to tread carefully – I needed to not get upset by their words (or if I did, not let it show), and not give them any kind of reaction they might find gratifying. Fighting back, making arguments, disagreeing – all of this would simply feed into their goals or incite their wrath. Instead I found myself almost numbly engaging them, in the way I do with volatile people I’ve encountered in real life. Anyone who argues that online abuse feels different than in-person abuse is kidding themselves.

The vast majority of my interactions were frustrating. Some didn’t reply at all, or disappeared instantly the moment I engaged them – blocking me, even though they were the ones who had attacked me initially.

With others, it was like trying to converse with a piercing alarm. Once they realized a live human being had seen their initial tweet, they unleashed a torrent of insults, in a sort of frenzied, rapid-fire slew of hate and misogyny. This wasn’t about conversation. This wasn’t about intelligent debate. This wasn’t even really about me. This was about unleashing all of the hate they’d accrued for women over the years.

Like, what is this guy even talking about? WHO IS HE TALKING TO? Because I don’t think this had to do with me.



I also learned – rather quickly, though not quickly enough – to only engage people in my mentions. I had started trying to talk to people who were harassing my friends or prominent women, but soon found that my engagement galvanized their hate against their initial target. The safer option was to talk to my own abusers, ensuring that I would be the recipient of such a reaction. (I’m a white, able-bodied, cis-gendered woman. There’s a lot of privilege that comes with that.)

It should be noted that the people I chose to speak to were not the authors of the most vitriolic hate in my mentions. At the request of several people who care about my well-being, I didn’t speak to anyone who’d threatened anything too graphic or terrifying. For example, per Rand’s request, I didn’t talk to this guy:

I reported this to Twitter. They made him delete the tweet but his account is still active.

–
And after more than a dozen of these conversations, I found some commonalities with the individuals I spoke to.

1. None of these people considered themselves misogynists. I asked them directly, and the responses to this (and to whether or not they considered themselves to be abusers) was a resounding “no.” Many of them made arguments that they treated men and women equally (something that they repeated to me ad nauseum, along with, rather inexplicably, their military service, and the fact that they were fathers). One guy told me that he wasn’t a misogynist or an abuser of women, and literally three minutes later he tweeted this to a woman (in purple below) who called him out:
   
   
   –
   While this level of cognitive dissonance is jarring, it’s not that unusual when it comes to how people regard their own hateful beliefs. Think about many times someone has been caught on video verbally abusing a person of color, only to immediately release a statement saying, “I am not a racist.” Because the sort of self-scrutiny that allows a person to see their own capacity for hate usually also means they are working on that hate.
   –
2. They later doubled-down on the sexist insults. When I asked them about their behavior, almost all of these individuals immediately got defensive, tried to obfuscate the issue, and when none of that worked, they doubled down on their attacks. And the way in which they did so revealed that their initial sexist or misogynist tweet to me was probably not a fluke. I was told that I’d turned to feminism because of some pitiful insult that I couldn’t handle (like someone had told me that I “threw like a girl” – thereby mitigating the scope of sexism that women deal with every day and framing feminism as something reactionary and vengeful), that I was profoundly unhappy with how I looked, that I was angry at men and if only I’d had a couple of children, all of that would change.
   
   –
   
   And lest anyone forget, they are not misogynists:
   
   –
3. According to them, all of this was my fault. I was told repeatedly that my choice to be vocal on issues of politics and feminism opened me up to the bevy of insults that I’d received, and if I hadn’t chosen to talk about those issues, then this wouldn’t have happened. I’d expressed my views in a public forum, and now I couldn’t handle a little criticism that resulted from that.
   
   
   
   This guy has called women the c-word and the b-word, sent a photo of a crack pipe to a black woman whose views he disagreed with, regularly threatens people on Twitter, and has since blocked me. But apparently he is not abusive and I am thin-skinned.
   
   –
   The thing is, as a writer, I canhandle criticism. Most writers can, because (and many of us will tell you this) even the most scathing Kirkus review isn’t quite as awful as what goes on in our heads.
   –
   But this isn’t criticism:
   
   
   
   Telling a woman that she’s ugly and repellent and that she holds her beliefs because she’s angry that she’s barren doesn’t actually indict or refute her arguments in any way. It doesn’t create a dialogue. It’s just designed to silence women they disagree with, and doing that doesn’t mean that they’ve won the debate or proved their point. That isn’t criticism or debate. It’s just abuse.
   –
   
   
4. This wasn’t harassment; I’m just too sensitive. As I noted above, women who call out harassment are often told that their situation isn’t abusive or problematic – they’re just perceiving it the wrong way. It’s gaslighting at it’s finest, because it means that victims often don’t even realize that we’re victims – we’re just left feeling terrible, and wondering how or why we provoked the reaction that we did. Because women are so often blamed for their own harassment, and those that speak out against it are often vilified more than their harassers, most of this abuse goes unreported. What’s amazing is to be told that we’re fabricating sexism and abuse by people who, in that very same breath, abuse us.
   
   –
5. They accused me of harassing them. As I noted above, I didn’t fight back or disagree once the individuals agreed to talk to me. But when they strayed from the questions, or failed to answer them, I steered them back to my initial query, and I suspect that even that sort of minimal pushback was new to them (most abusers aren’t used to any sort of resistance). They’d agreed to answer a couple of questions from me, but once those questions made them uncomfortable, they became really, really angry. They asked me why I wasn’t answering their questions (more on that below), and became hostile.
   
   
   
   This dude used the c-word repeatedly (claiming it wasn’t a bigger insult than calling a woman “a smelly bag of potatoes”, told a woman to violate herself with a cheese wheel (see above) and then said I was harassing him for asking this question.
   
   –
   
   
6. This was about power. I suppose I should have realized from the start that anyone who appears in your Twitter mentions to tell you that you’re fat, ugly, old and barren (“Who among us is NOT?” is my unanswerable reply) isn’t trying to have a conversation. They are simply trying to chase you off the platform, so your voice won’t be heard anymore. This dynamic became so apparent that I was actually able to predict when they would double-down on their insults, based on when I felt the power dynamic shift. A large number of them, perhaps in some effort to save face and regain a semblance of control, told me how excited they were about the project. Others tried to turn the tables on me, and tried asking mequestions (most of them of the same insulting nature – asking who radicalized me to feminism, etc.).
   
   
   
   (This was the same guy who accused me of harassing him above.)
   
   Because their attempts to push me out of the space had failed, they were trying to gain control in another way. And when that, too, failed, they either turned to more insults, dismissed me, or blocked me.
   

—————

Since this experiment took place, many of the accounts I interacted with have been permanently suspended. Most of the others have blocked me after the fact (remember: I was simply asking them questions which they agreed to answer after they had initially insulted me. But that sort of thing can be scary, I guess.) Of all the conversations I had, exactly one left me feeling a modicum of hope. It was short lived. The individual I was talking to had been leaving insulting replies in Emma Gonzalez’s Twitter feed (this was before I realized I should probably only be engaging my own haters). Many of his comments included references to how ugly she was, and when I asked him about it, he seemed pretty embarrassed. He noted that she wasn’t actually ugly.

–

And that his personal attacks were not the best approach.

–

And while we disagree hugely on the gun control issue, I felt like our discussion made him realize that attacking a young woman who’d survived a mass shooting while at school was perhaps not conducive to his goals. I left our exchange feeling a little … optimistic?

Today, I checked his Twitter feed.

It’s a bunch of personal, vicious attacks about her appearance directed at her.

So, yeah.


–

There’s a lot of discussion about how we need to reach out and talk to people who disagree with us – how we need to extend an olive branch and find common ground – and that’s a lovely sentiment, but in order for that to work, the other party needs to be … well, not a raging asshole. Insisting that people continue to reach out to their abusers in hopes that they will change suggests that the abuse is somehow in the victim’s hands to control. This puts a ridiculously unfair onus on marginalized groups – in particular, women of color, who are the group most likely to be harassed online. (For more on this topic, read about how Ijeoma Oluo spent a day replying to the racists in her feed with MLK quotes – and after enduring hideous insults and threats, she finally got exactly one apology from a 14-year-old kid. People later pointed to the exercise as proof that victims of racism just need to try harder to get white people to like them. Which is some serious bullshit.)

I spent days trying to talk to the people in my mentions who insulted and attacked me. I’d have been better off just remembering that when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first tweet.

http://www.everywhereist.com/what-happened-when-i-tried-talking-to-twitter-abusers/

 

[vhstape]

She does seem to be a cunt

 

[IV 445]

The comments are pretty funny, too

 

[tumblrkek]

Today, I checked his Twitter feed.

bloody kek
I mean what was she expecting

 

[D.Va]

This was a big waste of time on her part. If she wanted to know why people get into slapfights on Twitter she could have looked around her own friend circles because there's bound to be at least of one of them who makes angry blumpf tweets all the time. The same principles are at work here, really.

 

[Ruin]

Has anyone else noticed "social justice" is increasingly meaning "we must expend tons of time and effort to make sure upper middle class white women don't feel uncomfortable for a single second?"

 

[Keystone]

I like how a significant number of those "abusive" tweets were more rational than the tripe she was writing and reeee'ing about.

 

[Positron]

Has anyone else noticed "social justice" is increasingly meaning "we must expend tons of time and effort to make sure upper middle class white women don't feel uncomfortable for a single second?"

This is how their parents treat them. This is how their teachers treat them. How dare anyone treat them differently?!

 

[killmeme]

She has this strange kind of autism where (at least acts as if) absolutely normal behaviours(like not caring about complete stranger's feelings when said stranger is talking nonsense on a public platform) that are not polite or nice are a complete mystery to her. Maybe in her little world everyone is absolutely polite to one another all the time.

Also

b-word c-word

 

[RG 448]

Succesful trolling is determined by the inverse relationship between effort and payoff. Look at that fucking essay caused by a few single-sentence tweets lol