Outing publius

The National Review's Ed Whelan, scumbucket, outed one of the Obsidian Wings bloggers.

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Humans, why must you FAIL so hard?

I find the objections to pseudonymous blogging from flagrant pseuds hilarious, and will only address them by pointing and laughing.

I have encountered a number of people who use only RL names online and are uncomfortable with people who use pseuds, but this attitude is baffling to me. Pseuds have an extremely long history for fiction writers and political writers, and I see no reason the "nom de net" shouldn't be accepted seemlessly in those fields.

More generally, objecting to pseuds puts you on the losing side of a generation gap. As my children grew up and started going online, I carefully instructed them in the construction of suitable pseuds and in basic techniques of internet compartmentization. For young people in general and women in particular, pseudonymity online is a matter of basic security. Objecting to it marks you as a clueless fogey, or at least as highly privileged.

In another decade, it's possible that the "presumption of online pseud protection" will become a legal principle, as it already is within the "old-growth" parts of the Internet. I do not think we're there yet, and I don't think any suit by publius would have a legal leg to stand on.

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Thanks for the explanation, Slart. I now see what you mean.

I continue to be baffled by the number of people referring to "anonymous bloggers" -- especially while using a pseudonym (LOLZ). *No-one* here is blogging anonymously, we are mostly using *pseudonyms*, which is (a) completely different and (b) part of a very, very old tradition in both politics and fiction.

Here's what an actual experiment in anonymous blogging looked like [details redacted]: a group of several hundred people with a common interest formed a community in which *every member* had admin privileges. Both posts and comments were unsigned and IP addresses were unlogged, so there was no way to connect comments and posts to each other.

I was told that the advantage was:

Because it is detached from our named selves, it allows for fluidity of identity, I think. I can be the person leaving an idiotic comment and the person chiming in against them, and then also someone taking up that comment and rehashing it further in the discussion, all while still supporting an environment where everyone is instantly comfortable with each other.

In the event, as might have been predicted, one member of the community got angry and used hir admin privileges to delete *everything*, and there was much unhappiness. What was truly surprising was that this took *3 years* (a generation in Internet time), so it probably qualified as a remarkably successful experiment.

The point of this story is to make it perfectly clear that we in the political blogosphere are *not* talking about anonymous blogging.

I will assume that anyone who persistently uses the term "anonymous" to describe pseudonymity is part of the problem. That is, people like *you* are the reason fiction and politics have a long tradition of pseuds, of which the nom de net is just the most recent version.

Put Down the Sexism

Cross-posted from DailyKos.

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Just, drop it. Turn around and walk away.

Try going 24 hours while making comments about Sarah Palin that do not reference:

1. her anatomy or physiology

2. her attractiveness

3. her clothing

4. her hair or cosmetics

5. anything that can be abbreviated "I.L.F."

6. any of those qualities with regard to her husband or children

The biggest single danger of Palin's candidacy is that it will bring enough foaming misogyny out of the Democratic side to repel some female voters over to McCain.

The day after the NH primary, kos wrote of Hillary Clinton:

the more assholish her detractors behave, the more you help her. The way she was treated the past few days in New Hampshire was a disgrace, and likely a large reason for her surprise victory. So keep attacking her for bullshit reasons, and you'll be generating more and more sympathy votes for her.

...

The more she's attacked on personal grounds, the more sympathy that real person will generate, the more votes she'll win from people sending a message to the media and her critics that they've gone way over the line of common decency. You underestimate that sympathy at your own peril. If I found myself half-rooting for her given the crap that was being flung at her, is it any wonder that women turned out in droves to send a message that sexist double-standards were unacceptable?

Over at Shakespeare's Sister, the Sarah Palin Sexism Watch is already at Post #3. (#1, #2) They're doing it not because the Shakesvillagers agree with any of Palin's policies, but because that's how feminism works. They're getting too much material from this site. Dry up that well, people.

Thursday night, Barack Obama threw down the gauntlet for us, too:

one of the things that we have to change in our politics is the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other's character

Although Barack referred specifically to accusing your opponents of lack patriotism, I think he's also talking about other "fighting words", as well.

Here's one guideline: if you put your insult about Palin through a couple rounds of babelfish, would the translation be "She is female"? If so, you're doing it wrong. Worse yet, you're *hurting your own side*.

Just Joking about Bitches

wrathfully pointed out that #10 on this list of 10 Common Sense Money Saving Tips For Movie Fans is, "LET HER PAY HER OWN WAY!" -- but was originally, "LET THE BITCH PAY HER OWN WAY!" The blogger says, "It was a joke, thrown in for shock value."

My comment:

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11. Only go to movies that pass the Bechdel test.

12. Never go with anyone who thinks he can call his date "THE BITCH" and then make it all better with "lol jk".

Oddly enough, Michael, some "movie fans" are women. In our own right! Without having a guy take us to the movies! No, really.

I’m not sure where you think the "shock value" of your "joke" comes from. For the female reader, the shock is in realizing that, once more, women aren’t the moviegoers who count. Is that what you intended? I’m honestly curious, because I *don’t know* what your intention was, how you expected your readers to react.

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So far I'm not out of moderation. Surprise, surprise.

Free speech and the Jerkosphere

There's been a wank at BoingBoing, and TNH posts about one of the more accurate takes. My comments don't refer to the wank directly (it's *wank*), but are about free speech and online communities in general:

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Phil@25: Neither option is necessarily "better" than the other.

hmm. I disagree, and I think that in this case quality is actually measurable -- at least in theory.

It's my observation -- and not just mine -- that what you call "the cut & thrust" is especially off-putting to woman, not least because of the way guys will casually insult each other with gendered language. I think this is co-extensive with the real problems with misogyny in tech workplaces.

Now, IIRC if you have a group of people with men and women talking, when women make more than 30% of the comments people (M & F) say that the women are talking "all the time". In other words, unless you have the gut (though mistaken) feeling that the women in your group are talking "all the time", you're not hearing women's voices. And any space that's supposed to be for "free speech" but where only some people's speech is free ... isn't.

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I am pleasantly surprised to hear that MeFi has been discussing the "boyspace" issue. I tend to think of it as the "Jerkosphere" problem, because it's not really about anything particularly XY-like IMHO, it's a part of the general culture that is coded masculine and tends to be amplified online. But holy cats, there are certainly some mostly-female online spaces that are full-fledged parts of the Jerkosphere.

I guess I want to break the association between "acting like a boy" and "acting like a jerk". You can have boyspaces that are not part of the Jerkosphere -- and women shouldn't get complacent, because as the Law of Proctouniversality says, "There's a little asshole in all of us."

For me, though, MeFi will have to change a lot before I stop thinking of it as on the edge of the Jerkosphere.

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alsafi @101: I don't think being deliberately insulting is acceptable discourse or behavior, here or elsewhere.

Whether you consider it acceptable or not, it is empirically true that "being deliberately insulting" *is* considered acceptable in many parts of the Internet and in parts of society as a whole, and if you're witty or transgressive enough it's even considered admirable, a valuable social coin. Saying "this is not acceptable" doesn't work, when the behavior clearly *is* acceptable some of the time.

Leah's story @104 is exactly why I talk about the Jerkosphere, not "boyspace". The problem isn't boys, it's *humans* -- and, as Leah's story illustrates, women have often been trained to be extremely high-level social manipulators. If the MeFi-ers (??) think of their Jerkosphere problem as a "boy" problem, that's a misdiagnosis IMHO.

language hat @111 : I frankly have no idea why you say to Leah, "as for free speech, we'll have to agree to disagree". Leah presented evidence about how "free speech" can lead to unfreedom; what evidence are you presenting to the contrary? Just FYI, in my experience "we'll have to agree to disagree" is a line used by people who are feeling overwhelmed and put upon by the weight of evidence on the other side of an argument.

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albatross @143:
In particular, the only way to stop adolescent males of any age from having the "look at the hooters on that one" or "damn, what a fat cow" sorts of discussions is to ban that sort of discussions from the internet.

Because boys will be boys? Nope, sorry, this argument is made, as they say, of FAIL -- not to mention privilege, double standards, and misogyny.

The way to stop that sort of discussion is to *not accept it* -- for other men, in particular, to say, "no, this is not funny; no, I do not think that way; no, being a jerk does not make you one of the boys, it makes you a jerk."

My best solution is to patronize nice coffee shops, and avoid biker bars.

In Real Life, this is the kind of widely-accepted attitude that leads to women being raped in biker bars -- and then blamed, because what did she expect, asking for a drink in a place like that?

The problem is not that some people say things online that make me uncomfortable or unhappy, the problem is that they make me *unsafe*.

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*staggers in, panting* I made it to the end of the comments posted since the last time I commented! So now I get to do it again! But it'll be the Reader's Digest Condensed Comments.

My opinion, which is mine:

Whoever said above that "free speech" is a poor term to use is IMHO right. My experience is that lightly-moderated, adult fora like ML or Obsidian Wings or Slacktivist or parts of livejournal (esp. many of those likely to be linked from the metafandom community) have the truly freest speech on the Tubes, much free-er than Central Jerkotopia, even though "free speech! free speech!" is much more of a rallying cry in the latter fora.

Part of what I am doing in using the term Jerkosphere is to emphasize that flagrant assholery is part of a whole flowing culture or pattern of behavior, found on many sites and cropping up sporadically all over.

Do the rest of you-all feel that you instinctively recognize what I mean by The Jerkosphere? Does it convey a meaning?

When I eat made chocolates, I get them freshly-made from Munson's if possible. If I'm buy choc for cooking or life-sustaining munching, it's Ghirardelli. hmm. The Guy is heading thataway for the Fencing Nationals -- what should he bring back as loot? Any suggestions?