Blog Archives
Reddit Island Redux, or, The Possibly True Saga of Current Island
Dudes, try making a Lego island first, see how that goes.
You remember Reddit Island, right? The utterly serious, unintentionally hilarious project in which a bunch of Redditors attempt to set up a Reddity miniature utopia on some remote island somewhere? They are still trying to find an island, and apparently that process is … not going so swimmingly.
As Adrian Chen of Gawker notes in a nice long piece on the project, a fortysomething IT guy from Virginia names Mark Wells has been telling prospective Reddit Islanders that he may have found the perfect place for them:
Wells, who uses the handle Citizenpolitician, explained in a series of increasingly breathless posts on Reddit Island that he’d been scoping out a tiny tropical splotch called Current Island. Just off the coast of Bahamian island of Eluthera, Current is sparsely inhabited, and could be a possible option for their settlement. He’d cold-called members of the local government about the possibility of having a few hundred internet nerds settle Current Island. And he had been met with a very promising response.
Science proves the Men’s Rights subreddit to be totally not (completely) misogynistic
So apparently I’m way off base with this “misogyny” thing. For example, I have been under the impression that I have been finding misogynistic stuff in the Men’s Rights subreddit, like, all the time. With upvotes, and everything. But evidently I’m wrong.
Because now ignatiusloyola, one of the subreddit mods, has done a very scientific study that proves beyond a reasonable doubt that, well, whatever misogyny is there is officially not a big damn deal.
Men’s Rights Redditors discover a new woman to hate (and it’s one of the ones I wrote about in my last post)
Reading comprehension: a bit of a problem for the angry dude crowd. So in my post earlier today I wrote about a Redditdude who got so angry reading a relatively innocuous Forbes column by a WOMAN ON TEH INTERNET that he called her a “cunt” and threatened to murder people and got more than a thousand net upvotes. All based on a complete misreading of her article, of which he obviously only skimmed the first paragraph.
Well, now the Men’s Rights subreddit has gotten hold of the Forbes column, and they too are pig-biting mad – not so much at the column itself, which it’s clear not many of them have actually read, but at a straw column they’ve written in their heads which is nothing but EEEVIL MISANDRY.
The Internet finds yet more women to hate
Pissed off cats: Much more entertaining than pissed-off dudes on the Internet
So yesterday, I appeared (albeit very briefly) on TheStream on Al Jazeera English along with Helen Lewis of the New Statesman, social media researcher Alice Marwick, Skepchick blogger Rebecca Watson, and others. The topic: online misogyny and harassment of women. No sooner had the show ended than I ran across two perfect examples of precisely the sort of misogynistic harassment we’d just been talking about, courtesy of Reddit and Roosh.
First, Reddit. On Monday, Forbes columnist Kashmir Hill – female, beep boop! – wrote a piece mocking the notion (apparently widespread in some circles) that in these hyper-connected days people without Facebook accounts are a bit suspect. But part way along towards making her point she committed the terrible error of making the following not-to-be-taken-literally remark:
