Merry Christmas, to everyone who celebrates it. To everyone else, Happy Tuesday!
After you’ve finished off your Christmas and/or Tuesday dinner, please nominate your favorite troll(s) for Man Boobz’ Second Annual Troll of the Year competition!
Also, there’s no reason why we can’t have more than one category for the troll awards. Suggest some inventive categories! Most Persistent, perhaps?
I think I understand and sympathize with you here; I’m thinking, for instance, of those pronouncements that tone trolling means that being an asshole is always allowed, but telling someone they’re being an asshole is never allowed. (Correct me if that’s completely not what you’re thinking; don’t want to put words in your mouth.)
That said, I think most troll tools are troll tools because they’re useless. Think of stupid troll logic: Sure, we could use stupid logic, but what would that accomplish?
Actually one of the reasons I like commenting here so much is that most of our trolls aren’t classic lulz trolls, they’re very serious about the things they say. Classic lulz trolls, like the one who was banging on about hirself in the other thread, alternately bore and irritate me, and I don’t feel like there’s any point in engaging them at all.
Well, when reading the whole conversation, she did actually just immediately try to shut him down. Is it because she didn’t immediately block him and threw what he said in his face that bothers you? I’m having trouble with you calling her out for exposing him to the sun.
I don’t know that I’d do the exposing, but I do intend to have it in my response arsenal.
“Wanna be fuck buddies?”
“Have you seen this?” (tinyurl here)
Then, block. The sheer number of likes and reblogs in the notes just may be a deterrent. Heck, someday we may be able to shut the approach down with a “joshbeck44” rather than a “nope.”
It’s the you pissed me off on site X so I decided to go dig up more info about you that doesn’t quite sit right with me. I just don’t understand why people do that, and I have a consistent cringe reaction even when the people it’s being done to are horrible.
I think there’s a risk versus reward element to what I’m feeling too – basically I feel like it’s not going to do much to actually hurt the man who was doing the harassing, given that society is in general just fine with men harassing women, but that it could result in some sexist dude/group of dudes then deciding to persecute the woman in question in much more dangerous ways. It’s her call to make, obviously, but I wouldn’t do it.
(I also feel like the term “calling out” is being misused in this case. Calling her out would be going “you shouldn’t have done that” to her directly, which I have no interest in doing. The idea that it’s not OK for me to go “this makes me uncomfortable” doesn’t sit right with me either. I can shut up about it if people would like me to, but the idea that a feeling of discomfort isn’t OK seems odd to me.)
I feel like part of this conversation is leftover stuff we didn’t talk about from A) the JtO “self-doxing” thing and B) the reddit doxing thing.
Or maybe stuff we didn’t agree on then.
And I just wrote a really long post about it with lots of stuff that is just absolutely ripe for intentional misunderstandings of the troll variety, and re-considered.
I think we haven’t settled the basic premises enough to have this discussion.
And even just trying to write them down in a series of yes/no questions is making me further doubt going any further with this line of thought.
So… I’m uncomfortable the one way, and I’m uncomfortable the other way. I’m uncomfortable with tracking people down to their real-life identities. I’m uncomfortable with judging the victims of harassment for what they felt necessary to do. That leaves quite a bit of ambiguity all around.
That’s all I’ve got.
I seem to fall consistently on the “nope to anything even close to doxxing unless a crime is about to be/has been committed” side of the line, which iirc is kind of an unpopular position. I’m super uncomfortable with outing of gay people too, even if they’re politicians with a horrible track record, so I think maybe the core of the argument here is differing ideas about privacy or the expectation of it that’s reasonable. Although with outing part of my issue is also that I feel like it plays into the idea that gay is a bad thing to be, in terms of how it plays out in the media.
Part of my discomfort in situations like the one we’re talking about here is definitely a concern that it might backfire in the sense of making the guys who go after women’s personal info with the intention of causing them real-life harm feel more justified in doing so. My “nope!” reaction definitely got stronger after one of our more persistent trolls tracked me down on a dating site and attempted to use the info he found there to intimidate me into silence on the topics that he wants me to shut up about.
(Didn’t work.)
I see where you’re coming from, and it is a grey area, but I’m still totally okay with what she did. I think the assumption of anonymity by people who do nothing but spew hate should be called out.
But that’s part of the problem – who defines “spew hate”, and how do we get everyone on the same page about that and prevent that logic being misused to hurt innocent people? Because if you look at something like RegisterHer, Elam and co argue that the women they use it to harass were put on there for “spewing hate”. Basically my concern is that if the idea that it’s OK to dig up info on people who you don’t like and make it public becomes acceptable, then it will end up making it easier for very nasty people to use the internet to hurt people in vulnerable groups.
(And it’s already way too easy.)
^Yeah, that’s the whole problem: As soon as you say “People deserve these basic courtesies unless they do X,” or otherwise reduce inalienable rights to alienable ones, you’re tacitly allowing other people to make the same judgment with their own values of X.
On a lighter note, I’m genuinely surprised that MRAs (or PUAs) haven’t decided that the block option is misandry and should be removed.
*DERAIL ALERT*
The pond at Home is bearing at last and Mr K and I got in our first skating session of the winter!
Memo to self: do not go skating with a dog who does not grasp that banging into the back of one’s knees is not a good idea.
“Memo to self: do not go skating with a dog who does not grasp that banging into the back of one’s knees is not a good idea.”
Dogs generally suck at not sliding on ice, so it might be better to keep the doggie off the ice entirely. I realize that’s about as easy as herding cats!
LOL it was our fault, really. Quadrille came out on the ice for the first time last year, and yeah, was slippy-slidy all over the place. This year he seemed to be much better at it (he must have sneaked in some practice while I wasn’t there!) but he couldn’t resist coming around behind while Mr K and I were doing a sort of psuedo-walz and going WHACK into back of his knees. Result: heap of humans, dog and cat disappearing in high dudgeon. (Katie had been riding on my shoulder). Thank goodness we don’t bruise over There, we’d have been as purple as our knitwear!
Woah, how did I miss this post? BRB diving into all 300+ comments
Lol, the best part of that mental image might be the cat perched on your shoulder, I was unaware they tolerated such things!
emilygoddess – I have no clue how you missed it but the 300+ comments are a laugh a minute. Hope you enjoy steele’s attempts to defend himself against charges of Biggest Abuser of English.
Katie was keen on sitting on shoulders all her earthly life, and still does it now, though if I’d ever gone skating on this side I doubt she’d have wanted to know. When we visited the US last year she popped in while we were at the Milwaukee Museum of Art – it was a cack seeing her riding around on Mr K’s shoulder in a place WHERE CATS AREN’T ALLOWED just because nobody else could see her and she could get away with it. Once a brat, always a brat.
“Once a brat, always a brat.”
Lol, too true!
Since I got woken up by the fish tank lights at fuck-o’clock, I’m calling it a night. Goodnight guys!
Niters Argenti! 🙂
Otis’ enduring obsession with pull-ups was hilarious, but he veered into unfunny territory with the racism. Skyrimjob’s defense of Hitchens was gold, but you need more than one good showing to be a real contender for TOTY, IMO. Initially, I was gonna vote for Doctor Professor Pell Attorney At Law, but Steele had a heck of a showing in this thread. “Toe the dogma” is amazing. Now I don’t know which to choose!
Meller brought the funny with the hard chairs rant, but blaming child prostitutes for victimizing the poor johns was beyond the pale, and if there’s a Worst Person award he gets my vote.
Best FemRA is probably DriverSuz, with the bizarre worship of her son.
Shut Up/Tedious Pontificator Who Can’t Take A Hint Award can go to Diogenes. Ruby’s a pain and she won’t go away, but at least her appearances are brief.
Kittehs’ Help, is the kitteh a Russian Blue? Mine likes to ride on shoulders, too – apparently it’s a breed trait.
Emilygoddess – that was Tom Martin with the chairs and child prostitutes (though I shudder to think what would happen if anyone asked Meller what he thought about either subject).
Katiekins is a common grey tabby, though I suspect she has a dash of Oriental in her, just from her long, lean build and Siaaaaaaameeeeeeeese vooooooiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice and general attitude. Or cattitude, perhaps. 🙂 This is her from about eight years ago. Her tail isn’t naturally stubby, it was amputated after she got into a fight and a bite infected the bone (and the idiot vet kept saying she just had inflammation).
So this has turned into the light relief thread? In that case, check it out – the dumbest professional musician of all time may have identified himself. This guy makes our trolls sound smart. Normally I don’t like to make bass player jokes, but…
http://www.metalsucks.net/2012/12/13/former-attack-attack-bassist-john-holgado-is-the-stupidest-human-being-ever/
The part about the puppy is particularly touching. He tried to train it for 3 days, you guys! How’s that for diligence?
Did Holgado decide to use Steele’s lexical stylings as inspiration? He has so thoroughly channeled him one almost assume direct mentorship.
I think the pupil may even have surpassed the teacher.
Steele, rejoice! We finally found someone who’s a worse writer than you are! Of course he didn’t finish high school, so, um…maybe you shouldn’t celebrate too much.