Sheesh, people, I’ve just come back from holiday, and this is what I have to deal with. Fellow blogger SC is rightly up in arms about the ongoing verbal abuse and more or less veiled threats of violence, not anymore just against Rebecca Watson, but also against anyone supporting her, in particular women.
This has gone on more than long enough. We don’t have immediate influence on those outside our community, but we need to stand together against veiled threats of the sort directed at Ophelia Benson.
What’s happened is that the ERV blog and its owner Abbie Smith is still sheltering a strange melange of women-hating internet losers the likes of one Franc Hoggle, who on that blog gets away with statements like this one about blogger and writer Ophelia Benson :
Ophelia is a poor woman’s Catharine MacKinnon. If I was a girl, I’d kick her in the cunt. Cunt.
Now, it’s academic to speculate whether this is a real threat against Benson, or just a lone woman-hating loser’s bilious and vitriolic fantasies of violence, but this and other comments in that and the previous threads on elevatorgate hosted by Abbie Smith on her blog in the last 3 months seem to be in breach of Scienceblogs’ Code of Conduct :
Do not post anything that:
- slanders, defames, threatens, or harasses another person
- is bigoted, pornographic, hateful, racist, sexist, intolerant, or excessively vulgar
- compromises the confidentiality of the forums or your fellow bloggers’ privacy
National Geographic has recently taken ownership of Scienceblogs. I have my doubts that this company is endorsing the woman-hating, sexist, violent and slanderous comments that have been allowed to be posted on the ERV blog for the last 3 months. Other bloggers, like PZ Myers, or myself, have managed to close comments on threads where these misogynist or hateful views were expressed, why not Abbie Smith ? Well, she has called it her monument, and openly endorses the comments made in the threads :
I love it.
It is a monument to everything I hold dear.
This seems to be in clear violation of Scienceblogs policies, if they in fact mean anything. Do National Geographic or Scienceblogs think the following statements are in their corporate interests, or in any way covered by their Code of Conduct ?
Exhibits 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and I could go on finding examples of breach of SciBlogs CoC in those threads. Then there are those (ERV commenters ?) who impersonate Rebecca Watson on Twitter (the account has been suspended now).
What’s happening here is that a small group of misogynist retards is being given a forum on a popular Scienceblog to express their woman-hating and violence and hate-endorsing fantasies (including links to their own sad pathetic blogs), and those fantasies have long moved on from the initial focus on Rebecca Watson, to now include bloggers like Ophelia Benson, to PZ Myers, to Salty Current, and to anyone else who has the decency to speak out against this bullshit. It has to stop, and if Abbie Smith won’t do it, then hopefully NatGeo will.
As one commenter on Butterflies & Wheels put it :
Does National Geographic really want to have the largest collection of hate-speech this side of FOX News on one of its more visible blogs?
Complaints to Scienceblogs can be sent here, while correspondence to NatGeo is probably best addressed to here.
I don’t like doing this. But it’s gone too far. And it’s time now to finally say No.
Fantastic, Rorschach! Seriously, this is great stuff.
The only criticism is your use of the word “retard.” Many people find it offensive and ablist. You may want to look into that. Otherwise, like I said, wonderful post. And thanks for standing up against misogyny.
SallyStrange,
I know what you mean, but in this instance I chose the term on purpose, because it is the conclusion I arrived at after reading through 6000+ comments on elevatorgate at ERV. It is not so much that these people have below-average intelligence, but their sense of common decency, fairness and equality seems, for lack of a better word, retarded.
Rorschach,
You borked the 2 email addresses at the end of the post. Guess you forgot the mailto:
Thanks, fixed now.
Thanks for being brave enough to wade through all that. May I suggest providing screenshots or quotes of the sample comments, with links to source, rather than linking directly to ERV? I’d rather not be required to go there repeatedly or send anyone else there except as necessary for verification.
IMHO, it’s also worth mentioning to Nat Geo that ERV’s hate threads often are high in the Most Active column, increasing the odds that curious visitors run across them.
I urge you to bring this on. Sincerely. It is high time that you unmask yourselves fully – as authoritarian proto-fascists that are pro-censorship, pro-puritanism, with your own brand of deranged faux morality – and that you are prepared to use any means necessary to impose your own tunnel-visioned version of sharia throughout the entirety of the various secular movements.
Then too, we can see the true extent of your selective quote mining and butchering of reality for what it is – defamatory propaganda that is remarkably substance free once stripped of your poisonous slant – and only really has one motive behind it: your power tripping and malice.
Please, bring it on. Then we can start taking Pharyngula to pieces too. Maybe you should also bring your Baboon Overlord into your grand plan. I am sure he would be very pleased with your grand ambitions for the new world order.
Franc, can you hear that whooshing sound?
No?
I thought not.
keep on hogglin’!
Thanks for putting it together so well – it must have taken a strong stomach to wade through for all the data.
I agree that you should “go for it”!
Verbal abuse is truly disgusting, don’t you agree?
Yep. Because that’s what NatGeo wants to do. Kick out a blogger who exposed a rather massive case of scientific fraud, and post for post, has far more actual you know, science content than PeeZus on his best day.
But she used BAD WERDS in ways YOU DON’T APPROVE OF, (because face it, you love bad werds when they’re used to support your cause. Ten seconds in PeeZus’ comments shows that), so SHE MUST BE BANNED! BAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNED.
You people are the biggest fuckin’ clown collective I’ve ever seen, and I’m including both the slashdot and ars forums in statement.
John Welch: Are you suggesting some form of hypocrisy regarding curse-words?
Please provide examples.
“Please provide examples. Examples.”
No.
When monkeys fly out of my butt, bunghole.
heheheheh…I said “butt”…heheheheh
Wait, wait! Here, PeeZus on people saying MEAN THINGS ON DA INTARWEBS!!!!
http://bynkii.com/bynkiidotcomimages/pzsezgetoverit.png
NO
No!
/yeah
LOL.
No!
“- slanders, defames, threatens, or harasses another person
- is bigoted, pornographic, hateful, racist, sexist, intolerant, or excessively vulgar”
Well, from my experience that looks pretty much like the How-to/Must-do rules for posting at PeeZus’s Joint of Foul Diction and Ophelia Umbridge’s Wheels of Censorship.
Boreshak said:
“Other bloggers, like PZ Myers, or myself, have managed to close comments on threads where these misogynist or hateful views were expressed, why not Abbie Smith?”
And the answer, Dingbat, is because Abbie does not believe in manipulating opinion and creating historical revisionism through censorship, rewriting of other’s posts, and outright banning. Are you really so indoctrinated and whipped that you cannot understand that you are a victim, yes that’s right, a victim of ideological fanaticism?
Rawsnack also said:
“I don’t like doing this. But it’s gone too far. And it’s time now to finally say No.”
Aw, c’mon, quit the lying. You love doing this. It gets your froth mouth flowing like the mighty Mississippi dreaming about silencing and libelling anyone with whom you disagree with.
You and your ilk are really funny. On the one hand you scream bloody dudgeon about how evil ERVites are trying to destroy the career of and silence Watson (misrepresentational falsehood), and then you immediately turn around and try to launch an online smear email campaign to SILENCE someone with whom you disagree. Rarely has the pot been so kettled.
I doubt anything will come of it. Misogyny is still something that’s largely laughed off by most people. (I’m reminded of that young ‘gentleman’ studying to be a nurse who wrote that ‘controversial’ piece on women at the hospital) And Abbie Smith is generating them a lot of traffic. While that keeps up, no one is going to look to deeply or try to shut anything down.
Still, might as well go for it. If nothing comes of it no one is any worse off.
Censorship? Hilarious. This is free speech in action.
I don’t see what the problem is. It’s her monument, let her have it! It’s everything she stands for. So why should anyone saying that fact be upsetting!? You’d think there was something there to be ashamed of, the way some people are acting about it.
I’ve sent a brief email to the people at sciblogs.
Funny how these people still don’t get the distinction between profanity and hate speech. Are they willfully obtuse, or are they actually that stupid? Does anyone really care which?
Rorschach: You are awesome. I’m glad you’re speaking out on this issue.
What the haters don’t seem to understand is that there is a right to free speech, not to hate speech. Hoggle et al are engaging in hate speech. While “Twatson”, “sniffing smelly skepchick snatch”, “baboon”, “Salty cu**nt” etc are infantile and sexist word games, the threat of kicking someone “in the cunt” represents an unacceptable escalation, that we will not tolerate, and that we ask Abbie Smith to not tolerate.
Sup, niggaz?
Gee, John, where did anyone suggest kicking her out of scienceblogs? All anyone has said is that she has things that violate their code of conduct. I assume they would simply ask her to remove those threads and posts.
My favorite phrasing of this issue is that yes, speech is free – but speech is sometimes also action, and while speech is free, action is not. Incitement to violence is an action, and should NOT be free. Some may disagree that the ‘cunt’ remark is in fact incitement. I rather think that it is.
If that thread is what Abbie Smith wants for her ‘Monument’, then so be it. But if I were her? As a scientist, I think I’d want to be remembered for my science – or not, at the very least, my willingness to give rampant misogyny a prominent speaking platform.
(BTW – If you’re about to write a snarky post here about how PZ’s blog is a monument to rampant misandry or something equally moronic, go post it on your monument instead, because you obviously don’t know what you’re talking about and that seems to be the place for it.)
“Censorship? Hilarious. This is free speech in action.”
No.
whoosh!
whoosh!
whoosh!!
whoosh!!!
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/09/crotchkicking_is_always_good_f.php
You have thirty minutes to explain why the headline of PZ’s post is wrong.
Martin:
Stevaricious:
Please tell me you’re joking. Please? Engaging in a bit of hyperbole, perhaps?
Please?
You’re not?
Oh, fuck. I weep for humanity sometimes. We really are still just tribal animals. Fucking monkeys with shoes.
Stevaricious said:
“Some may disagree that the ‘cunt’ remark is in fact incitement. I rather think that it is.”
Then clearly you either do not understand the definition of “incite” or you have chosen to invent a new one.
To incite is to provoke or urge others into some action. So there was, in fact, absoutely no such incitement present in the phrase. However much you may think otherwise, and of course you are free to think whatever make-believe you choose, you would in fact and nonetheless be quite factually wrong.
Once again, you people conflate the issue. We saw the same thing when you were hollering ‘Watson wasn’t actually raped, so what the hell is her problem?’
The problem is not that the statement was actually likely to lead to violence against the genitals in question. The problem is that the statement promotes violence against women in general. Someone out there somewhere is reading that statement and saying ‘Yeah, fuck those bitches!’ and is going to feel justified later tonight when he feels like he needs to punch his girlfriend for getting mouthy. Someone out there is going to feel justified in raping some woman because ‘those cunts deserve to be kicked in the cunt.’ This is the behavior that you promote when you make these sorts of statements. Is there a direct line of cause and effect? Probably not. It’s cumulative, over the course of weeks or months or years – but it’s a cumulative effect that YOU are supporting and promoting when you make and support these comments. And it’s a cumulative effect that you have to remain carefully ignorant of to think it’s okay to continue spewing those noxious emissions on ERV’s little ‘monument’.
Do you actually think that there aren’t actual rapists in the ranks of the MRA’s that are cheering this ridiculous feud on? Are you really more comfortable on their side than on the side of the people calling for this crap to end?
… fuck it. I’m just going to let Sheril Kirshenbaum reply.
I seem to remember there being quite a kerfuffle over that post. Something about “tone trolls”? People (deliberately?) taking words too literally?
Jesus fuck, get a grip.
Stevarious,
Men don’t beat the shit out of women because of some esoteric feud on the Internet, and I would bet my farm that not a single man has decided to because some asshole called a third-rate vaginaed philosopher a cunt on the Internet, you fucking moron.
OMFG, did Gary Hill just say that Ophelia Benson has a third-rate vagina?
Fetch me my fainting couch, stat!
Tristan, tristan, tristan…
Here, lemme mansplain it to you. It’s ONLY bad when an uppity woman like Abbie isn’t listening to her betters, like PZ. It’s ONLY bad when an uppity woman like Sheryl is calling for changes to her betters, like PZ.
When PZ does it, of COURSE it’s okay, because he is an approved feminist®, and therefore ANYTHING said on HIS site is acceptable®.
See? It’s really simple when you have had it properly explained to you.
Gary,
Of COURSE words make people do things. Why, if it weren’t for “nigger”, we’d have no racism. Without “Fag”, homophobia would be naught but a concept for writers of base fiction, and were we to all stop using the words “cunt” and “bitch” tomorrow, we’d usher in a golden age of peace and understanding between the sexes.
Words are indeed the sole source and solution for all society’s ills.
>Ophelia Benson
>third-rate
Sure is generous in here.
Are you FUCKING kidding me? Has anyone ever called you a fag before? With statements like that, I really doubt it. Fag is used to silence and shame gay boys and gay men and even bi and straight boys and men who don’t live up to macho stereotypes all the time in the USA. Eliminating usage of that word in the way that silences and shames males would definitely go a long way toward ending homophobia, especially at the primary school level.
Definitely my experience in Boot Camp.
There they go, Aratina and julian that is, derailing yet again.
And of course completely letting slide the really amazing amount of deeply hateful shit that gets said on Pharyngula where the “calm and rational commentators” (PeeZus quote) don’t just limit it to sarcastic comments on kicking crotches but actually go the full monty and state explicit wishes for people to die, to actually die and die painfully.
Ain’t that just too sweet.
Tristan, can I borrow that fainting couch when you’re done with it? The hypocrisy has given me teh fantods.
Sure.
[stands up]
Oops – wait, no. I think I’ll be needing it for a while yet.
How was that derailing? I thought the impact ‘hate’ words have was a big point of contention. And it directly relates to one of the comments made by someone (assuming here) from your ‘group’ where the commentor denied removing such words would have any impact on soceity.
Did I say I agree with every little thing that gets said on Pharyngula? And please, save your pity party about poor you getting death threats on Pharyngula for Mabus whenever he gets back. Anyway, how does that make what John C. Welch said true? ‘Cause it doesn’t.
John,
But don’t you see, that’s not hypocritical at all. See, all those people they’ve told to die horribly and/or sodomise themselves with the corpses of Erinaceinae – they were all male.
“Are you FUCKING kidding me? Has anyone ever called you a fag before?”
Can’t speak for the other guy, but I’ve been called some variation of “fag” or “homo” plenty of times. The simple existence of the word doesn’t cause homophobia, nor does any particular usage. It’s the mentality being expressed by the speaker that does so. Do you really think Andrew Dice Clay’s infamous gay-bashing routines would have been any less objectionable if he had used more clinical phrases instead of the common epithets?
“Eliminating usage of that word in the way that silences and shames males would definitely go a long way toward ending homophobia, especially at the primary school level.”
Not really, because homophobia would still exist. You’re not changing anybody’s mind by changing the language. It simply becomes taboo to use a certain word or phrase to describe the same idea. This is my primary objection to the PC movement. It’s based around assigning a weird causal realism to sequences of sounds, whereas said sequences are just the particular encoding the message being transmitted from sender to receiver.
I used a naughty word, so my response to John Greg is in moderation. Basically, see julian.
Oops – make that corpses of Hystricomorpha. Porcupine, not hedgehog.
Guess what, TylerD? That’s called language. That’s how we convey our thoughts to others.
What do you mean by “more clinical phrases”? Do you mean, “What if he had used words that are not epithets?” Why don’t you do what you are proposing and let us all see what it looks like?
It’s like you have no clue what language is, yet you are using it right now. Very strange.
HURRRRRR ARGUMENT BY ASSERTION DURRRRRRRR
Why do I even bother with you people?
Aratina Cage: a living breathing example of non sequitur in action and modelled in the physical world … or perhaps just monumentally poor reading comprehension.
Aratina, one of the many other logical fallacies you have presented is called arguing from final consequences: you are putting the cart before the horse in the relationship between words like “gay”, “faggot (fag)”, and so forth — i.e. language, and the phenemonon of homophobic behaviour. The words do not cause the phenomenon; the phenomenon results in / leads to the words.
julian, it is derailing because you are both trying to gradually shift the focus from the original argument/rebuttal sequence onto a new, tangential (not directly or immediately relevant) argument/rebuttal so that you and Aratina can sidestep relevant rebuttal and avoid responding directly to the more important and relevant aguments.
Dumbass is dumb.
Like TylerD, you appear to not have any idea how language works or are pretending really hard not to.
Complete bullshit. You are welcome to ignore me for all I care. John C. Welch implied that eliminating harmful usage of the word fag would not contribute to ending homophobia, which is untrue as I explained.
Care for a pop tart, John?
Wow, you really win the internet with that last insult, Aratard. What’s next, calling me a poopy-head?
Since you want to tell me that I have no idea how language works (without proffering an argument for any position on the ontological status of linguistic entities), why don’t you spend a post telling us what you know about modelling natural languages?
This should be pretty funny.
Ah, I understand Aratina’s approach to language now. I’ll just leave this here:
Watch boys and girls, as a dingaling in a cage gets a lesson:
Snerk. Want a partial list? Here: Fag, gay, homo, cocksucker, little shit, (a favorite of my mother when she had a six of old millworker going), waste, fuckhead, shithead, douche, fat piece of crap, on and on. In english AND spanish. I’d say by the time I hit high school, there really wasn’t a derogatory name I hadn’t been called. Well, “cabron”. No, wait, that too.
You know what really hurt? When instead of calling me names, my classmates would just run me down off of the school bus and line up six deep to beat the fuck out of me. 4-5 days a week.
So yeah. names. I’ll take bad werds over a Nike in the teeth any day. Ever tasted someone else’s nike? Yuck. Oh, and the bleeding sucks too.
They knew I was none of the things they called me. (okay, I’ll cop to fucking smartass, never could keep my mouth shut at that age.) It didn’t matter. It was a time when bullying was thought of as “okay”, and as long as they didn’t do anything that required hospitalization, well, that was okay then.
Shit, I’d love to see you living that unholy war I had to grind through from grades 3 to 12. You’d be in the fucking looney bin, curled in a ball rocking back and forth.
You are so preciously ignorant that I want to just pinch your little cute cheeks, and keep you from ever going out in the real world. You should kiss the fucking GROUND if the worst thing that ever happens to you is some dipshit calls you a fag. Ye Gods, had that been the extent of my high school bullshit, I’d have been happy.
People will call you names. Unless you believe them, unless you choose to give them power, they have nothing over you.
And by your language, you show yourself to be rather fragile and not good at dealing with the fact that no one but you is responsible for your self-esteem. If you need ANYONE but you to feel good about yourself, you’re so thoroughly fucked that sixty meters of ship-quality hemp rope and a professional tug-of-war team couldn’t unfuck you.
Oh bullshit. Homophobia predates the use of the words “fag” and “faggot” as bad names for homosexuals by fucking centuries, if not millenia. For your assertion to be true, homophobia would have had to essentially nonexistent or exceedingly minor prior to the beginning of the 20th century. That is clearly, clearly wrong. You see, for the REMOVAL of fag(got) to essentially eliminate homophobia, it kind of has to have essentially *caused* it. That is patently, and provably untrue.
Also, your “explanation” is neither fact nor truth, but just your opinion. You may wish to remember the difference between the two.
Bit of a sticky wicket you got yourself into. You assert something that didn’t cause homophobia will end it. Fascinating. Tell me, this whole “thinking things through” thing…it’s not a happy place for you, is it.
So, John, if I haven’t been kicked in the teeth like you were then the word fag doesn’t hurt people? People were saying I had pulled a non-sequitur, but it looks like you are the real non-sequitur holder.
And I know atheists often get accused of being emotionless like Vulcans, but you really exemplify it with crap like this: “People will call you names. Unless you believe them, unless you choose to give them power, they have nothing over you.” Oh yeah, language is completely dependent upon how you, John C. Welch, want it to be. Take it like a (str8) man, faggot! And let’s wipe away what the word fag means today and how it is used today to hurt men and how it has been used that way in the past with a magic handwave from John C. Welch and pretend that suppressing its usage won’t make things better. No, nobody should stand up and call out the bullies using the word fag to verbally assault people because that won’t do a lick of good.
That word is reserved for PZ, dumbass. How about doing what you proposed and writing out one of your Andrew Dice Clay fag-bashing sessions with key epithets replaced however you were thinking and quit acting like a dumbass? Let’s see your crazy idea in the wild.
Sorry folks, I’m not having this bullshit in my comments. Closed now. It is however a nice monument in a way, this comment section, to everything decent people hold dear, and to what sets us apart from the ERV crew.