Speaking of harassers, as I was in the previous post, everyone’s favorite PR maven and serial libeller, Janet “Judgy Bitch” Bloomfield, has been suspended from Twitter — this time, one hopes, for good, as she’s a prime example of someone using Twitter as a “hate amplifier,” which she has stoked in the past with deliberate and malicious libel. She also made a second account to get around her previous suspension, which one would think would in itself be enough of a TOS violation to justify permanent suspension. The real question isn’t why she was suspended; it’s why she wasn’t suspended for good a long time ago.
EDIT: Removed portions of this post so as not to further inflame the situation.
*Sits down at laptop with coffee*
*Reads blogpost*
I see.
*Leaves*
*Returns with glo sticks and a light up hula hoop*
I can’t wait for the influx of her American followers irrelevantly citing the First Amendment! (Has anyone ever used it in an argument correctly?)
So most of her twitter followers have been pretty quiet, though one is trying to promote the hashtag #TwitterModsAreFeminisLapDogs, which is just fucking hilarious. The others are most moping.
Woohoo!
What her fans do not seem to understand is that JB gave Twitter no choice in the matter. Libel and slander is considered a criminal activity in some parts of the world including the United States. She consistently used her Twitter account to defame others, if Twitter continues to let her use their service to post libelous and slanderous tweets then they are the publishers of that libel and slander and that makes them liable to any aggrieved parties.
Thunderfart gone too? This is wonderful. When did that happen?
@runsinbackground,
Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure she’d happily learn how to spoof IPs. On the other hand, I doubt she’s likely to conceal her identity, since that undermines the whole idea of “PR” even more than the rest of her career. So I’d expect less of a sockpuppet situation and more of a whack-a-mole.
The decline and fall of thunderfoot has actually changed the way I evaluate people, in that it heightened my sensitivity to aggression. I first heard of him when I stumbled completely by accident on one of his youtube series called something like “why do people laugh at creationists”. I watched probably about 10 minutes of it, learned some interesting facts that were new to me, and moved on thinking this was a pretty reasonable individual. I next heard of him when he debated ray comfort, which was ill-advised but actually kind of endearing. Then I didn’t think about him again until his elevator meltdown.
In retrospect, I realize I should have wondered what kind of person makes dozens of hour-long video lectures out of their contempt for any one group, no matter how foolish that group may be.
Yeah, actually I have no problem with that when the individual in question has made it her business to shout down and silence others.
So… every single tweet by JB is a sign of intellectual weakness? Thanks, but we already knew that.
@Wilson: JB has hardly been silenced, she has been suspended from one platform (Twitter). To my knowledge, no-one here has “lobbied” for that.
But don’t let facts get in the way of your story.
Fabricating tweets to put racist words in the mouth of your opponents is not a difference of opinion, and not wanting someone to use a platform to add to another’s harassment is not simply “not liking what they say.” It’s incredible the lengths people like you will go through to minimize the harm your idols are doing.
These are not options when that person’s words are doing actual harm.
No. “Serious discourse” has been harmed by chucklefucks like you who think pointing out the harmful things a person is doing or saying is an “ad hominem” and refusing to give a voice to harassment is suppression.
Wilson,
Twitter isn’t the government. Free speech rights don’t apply. Thunderfoot and JB violated the policies of Twitter and Twitter has every right to ban them. As we have every right to be happy they are being denied a platform to harass people.
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
“You still wake up sometimes, don’t you? You wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the bigots.”
“Yes.”
“And you think if you save poor Janet, you could make them stop, don’t you? You think if Janet stays on twitter, you won’t wake up in the dark ever again to that awful screaming of the bigots.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“Thank you, Wilson. Thank you.”
I wasn’t aware that calling rape victims whores was serious discourse. Thanks for the valuable knowledge Wilson!
*sarcasm*
Wilson thinks the sky is falling. Just because JB was booted off Twitter for being inappropriate does not mean the end of civilization as we know it.
Society has rules, some of which are enforced by criminal offenses or torts, that are there so living in society has some type of modicum of pleasantness.
What JB does is the written equivalent of pooing on someone’s property and encouraging others to do the same. There are no artistic or scientific merits to what she has done, and so stopping the behaviour is viewed by those of us with ethics and manners in the same light as stopping people pooing on others’ property. If you think that calling people whores is “serious discourse” then you need to do at least one paper on logical thinking. In particular, it might educate you as to what an “ad hominem” is, which is not what you think it is.
I wish all of you who want freeze peach for your MRA ilk would go and fucking live together on an island away from the rest of us and wholeheartedly embrace your libertarian beliefs. And stay there. Because it will be the equivalent of Lord of the Flies. This is what you’re expecting the rest of society to do – just acquiese as it descends into darkness.
And when you chose not to engage them, their response is to engage you, hound you down, post bad memes, invade your chatrooms and comment threads, post links to garbled videoes, reference you, link to you, have a monologue at you and continue to in all ways make a mess of themselves.
What do you do then? You can engage their ideas, as you have, countless times, and point out just how absurd they are, or you can opt not to engage them yet again, only for the hate-train to continue unabated.
After a while, one realizes that there is also a third, perfectly reasonable option: “Not engage with is allowed to mean “You get to shut up now, because fabricating lies and photoshopping other people’s conversations to appear to support murder and hate is wrong”.
Life is not a formal debate. In a formal debate, I engage or I back off. In real life, I also freely exercise my right in the spaces I control or participate in to add my opinion that someone should either be banned, shut up, change discourse, or never be allowed back in. Your stance is useless, because, as it was once put in poetry:
“Sweet polite persuasion here
will bring you no relief
for the kind that yield to reason
aren’t the sort that bring you grief”
Go on, then. Tell me how to “engage with” someone whose idea of “discussion” and “intellectual integrity” is to photoshop fake tweets and fabricate the opinions of others, then treat those fabrications as proof of malicious intent.
Yeah. And you know whose side does that the most? YOURS.
It’s kind of rich that you call for “rational discourse” when your own side is the least capable of summoning up any semblance of it, eh Willy?
Yeah, what Fibi said. Wilson, you seem to be under the misapprehension that none of us have ever tried to have a serious discussion with someone who’s determined to treat us like garbage no matter how rationally or nicely we put our points forward. After a while we stop wasting our time because we get pretty attuned to being able to tell if someone’s interested in a discussion or is ranting at us in a piece of performance art to demonstrate to their followers how Righteous and Awesome they are.
There’s a reason JB engages in atrociously blatant attention-getting acts and then tries to back-pedal when people get pissed at her – it’s because she knows damn well that getting people angry is click-baitier and less likely to get her intellectually skewered than trying to debate her ideas on the merits, which she has no intention of doing.
Wilson: Twitter is under no obligation to provide a platform to someone for their libelous speech. Unless you want to argue that there was no libel in her multiple false and defamatory posts, you’re not going to gain any traction here whining about JB’s spilled frozen peaches.
Hate to break it to you, but, yes, libel and slander are criminal offenses in the US. There may be a higher legal standard for something to count as such in the US vs other nations, but that’s not really the point at the moment.
Yeah, actually I have no problem with that when the individual in question has made it her business to shout down and silence others.
Did Thunderfoot make a point of trying to silence others, or are you only celebrating his silencing because you dislike his opinions?
Yawn. “I don’t have a position but you’re all proving me right in the position I don’t hold” troll. Seen this show before. Wilson, could you at least wait until you’ve gathered up a few thoughts and put them together in one post, instead of flooding the thread with one-sentence replies? It’s okay, we’ll wait.
What… point? What? Sorry, I’m confused now and a little perplexed.
Wilson, I think what several people are trying to say that because JB can’t be reasoned with (debating her is akin to trying to argue with someone who has their fingers in their ears and alternates between yelling I CAN’T HEAR YOU and saying what they think at the top of their lungs) and because ignoring her just causes her and her fans to spew hate speech and nonsense everywhere and so inhibits actual discourse, we should celebrate her being limited in the ability to do that. So that voices that are both more polite and more logical, but less loud and obnoxious, actually have a chance to be heard, and there might be reasonable conversation instead of fake tweets and misinformation.