Thanks for breaking that down!
That's the problem, who knows how much the insane e-mailer knows, what kind of ability they have to track you.
This incivility kick is interesting for a few reasons. It's been my experience that you get the e-mails even when you try to not engage in incivility to individuals, and you get attacked as much for what someone thinks you said as for what you did say. Sometimes you are attacked for people thinking you said something even if you have a record of saying exactly the opposite of what they assume you meant. And, a lot of times even then, they accuse you of trying to hide what you really intended. Just why someone who writes on politics and social life would try to hide what they really mean would seem to be kind of futile.
All that said, blaming the victims of flames and slanders and slurs would rather seem to miss the point. They're not the ones doing it. And women will be targeted more often than males, that's clear.
Markos is being a jerk, but it's been clear for a long time that women's issue are a big blind spot for him.
Sierra's home address and SSN were posted online along with the threats. If nothing else, that shows that people are willing to go to some significant effort in their intimidation -- or worse, that the people making the threats are already a part of her life and therefore have even more ability to act against her.
I am so pissed at Markos I can hardly see straight. What will be important, though, is what's going on in the comments to his post and any other posts that show up on dailykos, and I haven't had the time & fortitude to read them all.
Have any of you done my homework for me?
Doctor Science, when I read through the comments (which was some hours ago), the majority were taking him to task.
It never ceases to irritate me when people dismiss other peoples judgement. Particularly when proven misogynists like Markos dismiss a womans judgement of her own experience.
If they kill you, your judgement was bad because you should have known they would kill you. If they don't kill you the precautions you took to prevent it were unnecessary.
Shorter Markos: If women don't want to be killed for speaking they should shut up.
That gives me hope, because I think he (and others at the site) *can* be taught. And, yeah, I'm cutting him slack because his baby was born this week, and so he probably isn't sleeping more than 2 hours at a stretch.
I'm cutting him slack because his baby was born this week
I admit I took this into account in picking my tone for the post.
This is the problem with the "netroots" model of activism: you develop blind spots if you don't work in a real life social environment. You don't associate with your real life allies.
I could see this coming a mile (or a few years) away. When Kos rails at and dismisses the previous generation of activists, most of whom were actually knocking on doors while Kos was a Republican, he's dismissing the actual caucuses of the Dem Party, and we see here, he's dismissing feminism as a movement. He may not be doing it on purpose, but he's too fucking ignorant to know better.
What this tells me is simple: Kos doesn't know any feminist activists, not well enough to socialize with.
Next up: Kos shows his ignorance of labor, environmentalists, teachers....
Markos just had a daughter,that has made more than one clueless guy a bit more sensitive. Give him some years,about the time his baby girl hits middle school those "silly" things he dismisses now won't seem quite so trivial.
I'm unwilling to give him slack, as he used one of his site's posters and contributed to her being outed and being stalked and hunted and who knows what else. Much of her personal information is posted permanently on the site, and he wrote a false flag diary about privacy which whipped the readers into a further frenzy. His ultimate response was that she deserved whatever she got because SHE didn't stop it. He got site traffic and literally profited at her expense. Then he banned her.
Unh. Unh.
Is his new baby a girl-child? That might change his point of view. Well, that and a baseball bat.
I fail to see how a daughter will change his POV when a successful marriage has not.
when a successful marriage has not.
You assume he has a successful marriage based on what?
Markos apparently didn't bother to read the blog entry where Sierra put up some of the threats and other stuff she'd been getting. Either that, or he doesn't consider, "fuck off you boring slut... i hope someone slits your throat and cums down your gob" to be a threat. That one's going to stay with me for a long time... I already blogged about this, since as a female who has done a fair amount of techblogging (on my Slashdot journal, and I've had a Slashdot account for almost ten years now!), this pisses me off to no end.
Can we vote him off the island?
I posted something similar to this over on Feministe, but this tendency to "cut the poor guy some slack because he just had a baby" is just bullshit.
You probably don't remember this, Echidne, but back in the day when we were both posting on the Ms. boards I gave birth to Christopher, and posted there quite frequently in the first couple of weeks after we got home from the hospital. During that time, I don't remember dismissing or mocking someone who was afraid because she received death threats, and I think I avoided being a sexist ass, too.
Is it harder for a man to have a newborn in the house than it is for a woman? Do you think he's more tired and stressed than I was? Do you think his stitches hurt? Because I don't.
[Shorter Kos:] "If you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen"
Don't you mean: Shorter Kos: "If you can't take the heat, stay in the kitchen?"
SF
flea, what you say is quite true, but I didn't cut Markos slack in my post because of his new daughter. I chose a certain style of writing, a more neutral one, because of the possibility that he just wasn't thinking straight. I would have probably done that to anyone who I know has some private problems. That may not have been such a good idea, but it was my first instinct.
That my tone is different doesn't change the basic message, which is that he is wrong in his arguments.
Gah. Must go to bed myself.
I'm sorry. Didn't mean to come across as that bitchy.
Maybe a little bit bitchy.
It's just that I don't actually see any change in his behavior that might merit taking the precaution that he wasn't thinking straight. He's always been contemptuous of women and dismissive of women's problems. Having a baby in the house has altered nothing about his behavior, yet I keep seeing people giving him yet another out for more of his woman-hating crap.
I don't usually get pissy in comments, but for whatever reason this has really crawled up my butt.
No problem at all, flea. I get your point. I may be overly optimistic about Markos because he promoted so many women to the frontpage after the year before saying that he doesn't care about gender balance at all, which usually is code for hiring just white guys. Of course the women he promoted are all great writers and thinkers, but I was expecting something different from him because of the way the code works.
Forgive this very long quote, and from a long-time lurker, first-time commenter, but this all sounds so familiar, and I'm so grateful to you and all of the feminists who refuse to be silenced by political "allies." This is from an interview with Heather Booth:
"My start in the women's movement began after a national SDS meeting in Champaign-Urbana in 1965. I went to the meeting because they were going to discuss the woman question. One of my teachers, Dick FlackS, an SDS member who had been at Port Huron, told me about it. And I knew about SDS because it was allied with our political party on campus.
"At first, men and women contributed to the discussion. It was very large, but it was clear that men were denying the women's experiences. The women would say, "We're made to feel that we're not equal partners, or we?re not given a chance to be leaders.? And someone would say, "Oh no, of course you're given a chance." It was ridiculous. But initially, I said, "Let's keep talking together. We can work this out." Just as I didn't want the civil rights movement to divide black/white, I didn't want this movement to divide men/women. We needed to deal with our common problem.
"But then a guy named Jimmy Garrett, an SNCC and African American organizer and a boyfriend of one of the people I lived with in Mississippi, said, "Look, you women are never gonna get this together unless you just go off and talk by yourselves. You just have to do this." And he walked out. Later that evening, I realized he was exactly right. A number of us went off and talked alone. We committed that we would go and pursue these kinds of discussions
"I went back to Chicago, and I set about and formed a group on campus for a year called WRAP--Women's Radical Action Program. One of the women in it was the assistant head of student affairs and government activities. Then we formed another group for a year called the Center City group that included not only people on campus but also people with campus connections who were organizing in the city. The campus group began as discussion. We did this study of significant response, looking at how often men or women teachers responded to students depending on whether they were men or women. The comment back was either that's stupid or that's wonderful, let's discuss it. It was like four to one more significant responses to men than to women students. The woman student would say her comment and then it was just passed over as if it never happened.
"Then we tried to go to classes and discuss it as part of the subject. It needed to be discussed in sociology, but this was before there was a language--before women's liberation. I remind people it's when "chauvinism" meant intense national feeling. We put radical into our title because in the Movement, you were radicals because you tried to get at the root of the problem. But we didn't have a language. We were just figuring it out. I started WRAP because at an SDS meeting, I was talking and one of the guys yelled at me to shut up. And I was a really, really nice kid. And I stopped talking. I went around and tapped the shoulder of every woman in the group and we went upstairs and made a separate group. We basically pulled out half the numbers."
The interview in its entirety is here
Guess I shoulda known you'd have something on this (sorry, I read it at feministing first). My take.
I read through part of the Kos comments and it
was heartening that so many people were coming
to Kathy Sierra's defense. And yes, it does seem
that more women "get it" while more men don't.
One commenter made a particularly salient point
that many abortion doctors have been targeted
online (in a similar fashion to Sierra) and then
lo and behold were actually killed.
Someone else pointed out that Chris Locke,
who had provided 2 forums for the death threatener
and Frank Paynter, Jeneane Sessum, and Allen Herrel
(prominent tech bloggers) who took part in both
of these forums, were all colleagues of
hers. They were colleagues in the sense of
writing on similar tech issues and going to
the same conferences, etc. It would not be
unreasonable for her to believe that one or more
of them would be at the ETech conference. so purely
as a matter of safety it was a smart idea not
to attend the ETech conference.
Note Chris Locke started the meankids.org blog
as a forum for attacking people he didn't like.
After the death threat to Sierra was published
and she complained vociferously to him, he took
down the whole blog as he didn't want to just
take down the death threats since that would
be *censorship*. Then he started a new blog
on the same day called unclebobism.wordpress.com
with the same people. Then lo and behold
there were more death threats published,
what a shock.
"controversial shit"
It's 2007 and the guy is calling women's issues "controversial" - perhaps he could drag his sorry backside out of the dark and into the right century.
It doesn't matter how cool they** seem, how lefty or liberal, certain things stay the same. In fact, some lefties are the worst case offenders; old fashioned wolves dressed in modern liberal clothes...
** yep, "they" means the male of the species
Markos is openly misogynist:
Go back and look at his posts during the Pie Fights.
In fact, he provoked the fights to get women off his blog. Mostly, it worked--it takes too much energy to fight off the harrassment to be worth posting there. He is one of the people working to get civil rights--in all its forms--OUT of the Democratic Party.
He is not to be trusted on general blog etiquette, either: He keeps a retinue of bullies who harass anyone who blogs on topics he does not like. Now there is a fair range of topics he accepts, but when you cross the line, you get harrassed or you get bounced.
Quality of thought or quality of argument has no import.
That was a cringe-worthy post by Kos. It was one of those times you're thinking "stop before you really embarrass yourself worse than you have!"
NTodd, Arguing civility might be unnecessary, it is certainly futile. There is no way to enforce a code of any kind on blogging so what's the point?
Anyone who wants to can opt out of incivility, you will get noticed if you stop using fifth-grade level invective but it has the added advantage that the hopelessly childish among the adults on the blog will find you boooorrrrrriinng and so stop bothering you. Of course, your comment rate will fall to zero but at least those you get will stand a better chance of actually being the kind of people who do something instead of just yacking. At least that's what I keep telling myself.
Good points - It's such a continuing example of Male-Generated-Brain-Death for them to either understand concepts that have never occurred to them precisely because they ARE male (or white, or wealthy, or any other biased category they fall into against another group).
Too much to expect that they should recognize the actual Stats and Data that conflict with their *What's-the-big-deal happy talk* and blithe dismissals OR that they should EVER have to empathize - even if this would never happen to them!
Great post, Echidne.
Somebody give me a link to this Chris jerki blog.
I'll just slip into my jackboots... there's a certain type of asshole who doesn't understand anything else.
I sent a email to http://www.mothertalkers.com/contactus
asking them why they support misogynists through advertising. Why don't you do the same? 
I sent the following to:
editor1@freedomtomarry.org
info@protectpolice.org
http://www.dailykos.com/story/20...4/12/22533/
9224
People who encourage a hostile attitude toward women, indirectly support violence toward woman. Why are YOU supporting misogyny at Daily Kos through your advertising?
http://www.enre.umd.edu/content/...r-
assessing.pdf
In internet chat rooms, these are the results of a "person" who didn't say a word:
Female names receive 100 malicious private messages a day,
Ambiguous names receive 25 malicious private messages a day
Male names receive 4 malicious private messages a day
McFall (1990 p.318 ) has stated in his information processing model of rape:"This evidence paints the following portrait of sexually aggressive men. They enter heterosexual relationships holding distorted cognitive schemata that predispose them to sexual misunderstandings and misguided actions.
Descriptive studies show that compared to their less aggressive peers, sexually aggressive men typically view relationships with women as hostile and adversarial, have a more promiscuous and impersonal orientation toward sex (Malamuth, Linz, Heavy, & Acker, 1995), and show greater arousal to depictions of forced intercourse (Bernat, 1997; Lohr, Adams, & Davis, 1997). Social information processing and judgments of sexual interactions are further influenced by aggressive men's rape supportive cognitions (e.g., Bernat, Wilson, & Calhoun, 1997).
Rape is an everyday occurrence. Research published yesterday by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and Home Office Inspectorates estimates that of the 50,000 rapes thought to occur each year, between 75% and 95% are never reported. And almost a third of reported cases recorded by police as "no crime" should have been properly investigated as rape.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
gender...2003228,00.html
---------
Fuck DailyKos. Why do YOU have a link?
(changing my tag a little because I am not the same person as Cass who also writes here)
While I have not extensively followed the specifics about Sierra's harassment let me say that I know that women don't need to be controversial or sexual at all to be harrassed, and from my personal experience it may be that she was targeted because she came across as authoritative, as knowing things. Some years ago I used to participate in an online board that was on all kinds of topics, but most of us just chatted about personal experiences and general life observations etc. And you will just have to trust me that I never tried to come across as an expert or to brag on my knowledge about anything, but really I did not. I am not sure I mentioned there that I have a PhD and am a research scientist, it was not relevant to the general nature of the board really. But I accumulated over time a group of trolls, and I would say that most of the time it seemed in response to my being knowledgeable about something, stating some set of facts in support of an idea, etc. Such as during the time my daughter was starting out in college she had a problem getting her new computer to hook up to the campus system and I managed to solve it where the campus IT people didn't, I related the tale there as a little anecdote... and for some reason got a fresh barrage of trolling. One guy used to use the name "your black grandson" because he knew I had a young daughter and (I suppose) assumed that her having sex with a black guy would be the ultimate insult to me. I mean I didn't generally go around there saying "hey I am so great at things!" but if ever I did tell a little story where I seemed smart I got trashed in crude ways. Not by most people of course but there were always some. There just seems to be a subset of guys who have a big problem with women seeming smart or "uppity". It doesn't have to have anything to do with sex per se, the sexual taunts and such were plainly used as a weapon toward me, I doubt these guys wanted any action with someone my age. Not sure if this was what the Sierra abuse was about but it could have been.
tho i have my own issues w/markos, i am well aware of his mysogeny (does it count if i misspell it?), as well as his issues w/gay/lesbian as well as minorities.
he's a prick, for all those reasons and more.
i agree w/feminazi, we should organize a letter-writing campaign to his advertisers asking why they support such an obviously mysogynystyc (spelling?) blogger.
also, echidne, i agree w/feminazi, why do you link to him?
i suggest any female blogger and supportive male blogger (sogynistyc?) remove the dkos link from their blogroll, until and unless he apologizes, or pigs fly, whichever comes first.
What I miss about all this "bloggger code of conduct" business is... does anyone see that this won't actually be helpful? And does anyone but me see that this is a *law enforcement issue*
I mean, if, on the street, or at work, or in my home, someone said to me that they were going to rape/torture/kill me, and began to take steps to try to do so (for instance, at work, looking up my address in my personnel file)... POLICE would be called about that. Police would react to that. That isn't legal. I don't see why it's somehow legal online, and if it is, why aren't we addressing the legality of harassment and threats rather than taking (what seems to me to be silly, ineffective) steps to try to regulate it, ourselves?
I agree that Markos is a tool. Sorry to be somewhat off-topic in my response, but I've been fairly regularly boggling at how ... off the mark so many of the responses to this harassment have been, to my mind. Death threats are not legal. We should be reacting as though, you know, death threats are not legal.
divabeq, I mentioned the need for clearer laws and clearer law-inforcement in the post. My own experiences have been with cases where the threatener was abroad, and I was told that there is nothing I can do, not even about the fact that the threatener also threatened his own sister at home and I took the trouble of contacting the local police force there.
also, echidne, i agree w/feminazi, why do you link to him?
Oooh! I'm being held to some standards! Love it.
I hadn't even thought about that yet. I link to his site as one of the largest liberal/progressive blogs, and because I often read the diaries there for a slightly different take on issues.
But the question feminazi asked will make me think about what it is that I do with the blogroll. It is not just feminist blogs, in the first place, or even just blogs (I should rearrange the information sites into their own category, but I hate the work). In some ways it is right now a combination of the blogs I read and the blogs that I think people who read my blog might like to read and the blogs that most people on my side of the aisle read.
I didn't delete some other blogs for controversies for the reason that the blogroll is not necessarily my approved blogs, and those other blogs still had useful things to convey.
But I really have to think about this more. For instance, how important is Markos personally compared to the other people on Daily Kos? Because there are feminist diaries on the site, good ones, too.
I just found this
http://www.dailykos.com/story/20...4/5/12151/
28456
absolutely beautiful, a keeper.
But. I now have ZERO tolerance for misogyny. I read a few studies, one in particular, -should have saved it grrr- it made the point very clearly that BEFORE violence against women and other minorities occurs, an environment of pro-hate must be established. An environment which encourages, excepts, or tolerates less-respect-for-X influences every person who is exposed to that environment.
Environment comes before attitude. Attitude comes before the action. Stop the attitude, stop the violence. Stop the environment FIRST. Anybody who tolerates haters gets the same treatment as if they are the ones spewing filth.
As long as Kos continues to support Markos, the DailyKos endorses violences against women and minorites. I cannot put a link to DK on my blog as long as Markos is there. I would probably "viewsource" and put the whole thing without any reference to DK on my blog, with attribute to author ONLY, and explain why I did it that way.
I don't want a "worship the woman" attitude, but insisting on respect and being satisfied with nothing less, doesn't seem to be an outrageous requirement.
Misogyny is going STOP, damnit!
well, echidne, tho admittedly i have my own twisted personal reasons for seeing markos' blog becoming devaluled in google ranking, i would posit that markos = dailykos, in the eyes of the non-blogging world.
so even tho you enjoy, say, mcjoan's writing, your linkage to dkos supports and enriches markos more than mcjoan (whom i think is a great writer and nice person).
besides, if i may snark a bit here, any dkos writer worth their salt goes on to write their own blog, or take over jeralyn merritt's.
Skippy, I'm a regular reader and fan of your blog
(tho not a commenter) and I rarely read DailyKos,
but I do want to come to Markos' defense.
I'm sure you're right that he is an misogynist
a**hole, but he has been a very effective force in
going after the Republican Party and in stiffening
the spine of the Democratic Party.
In his book, I thought he made a valid point about
the ineffectiveness of supporting a pro-choice
Republican (who will help vote in anti-choice judges)
over an anti-choice Democrat. In fact the main
point of "Crashing the Gates" was that to be effective
we have to learn to compromise and work with people
we don't like. That it's more important to win
some fights and make some progress than it is
to be ideologically pure.
So Echidnes, for what it is worth, I would support
your decision (to link or not link) either way.
I suspect that Kos didn't consider that Sierra was being threatened because of her gender. He also didn't realize that the world of tech blogging is much, much different than political blogging. If you blog politics, you're going to get people's blood boiling. Not so with blogging technology.
Moreover, Kos is an Army veteran, an activist, and a political campaigner. I'm sure he has learned to use firearms at some point in his life. Kathy Sierra is a former game developer. Kos has developed a very thick skin. But that doesn't justify his "what's the big deal" response. Nobody should have to live with death threats. Criticism, angry replies, heated discussion, yes. But whoever threatened Kathy Sierra crossed over the line. Even a veteran political blogger needs to realize that some things are just beyond the pale and can't be shrugged off.
Yes, Echidne, you did. hehe. Sorry not to be more clear. I was reacting more to the comments, but also to what a couple friends have told me about articles they've seen about the whole code of conduct thing. I am bad and have not read the articles, myself, so I'm only going on what my friends have told me (Primarily Chris at Deeply Blasphemous) In my defense, I'm a single, working mother of two, so I don't always have a lot of blog-reading time. hehe. Definitely, thank you for addressing that point. I do, so enjoy your blog. Love the economics posts, and your ability to explain complicated issues in a way that they're understandable to me without talking down to your readers.
Chris Clarke's Pandagon post has been cross-posted at dailykos, and got to the Recs list. At least we seem to have pushed it a bit harder onto the radar screen.
Okay, so I came over from Atrios' place for the story on Plan B and then moved on to this story. I just added this blog to my favorites, so I'll come visiting more often.
Kos, from what I've read of his posts, puts me in the mindset of my brother, who is also former military and about the same age. The things they say about any subject, really are sometimes obnoxious, but when you question them further, you realize that it's not malice, just simplistic thinking. They tend to go for the obvious and easiest answer no matter what the subject. His statements show that his focus was on the issue of civility, and male or female, you should suck it up. There was no attempt to even visit the nuances of being a female blogger and the types of threats and "offers" one may receive. Hopefully the comments section will give him another perspective, much like I try to give my brother some home schooling.
So, has Kos apologized yet? I never read him, and I don't care what he thinks, but given how much energy has gone into discussing his little post, he should have the decency to at least address it. Even if he's short on sleep and busy at the moment, it's become a big enough internet issue that he ought to say something about the matter. Hopefully it's "Sorry, I wasn't clear enough on the details and I was a jerk", but how he responds will go a long way to figuring out what he meant by it in the first place.
Re: the Kathy Sierra case -
I've been reading about this since it first hit the blogs. The day I first heard of it I spent a good amount of time reading Ms. Sierra's archives and the thing that has been bothering me all this time is this - what on earth did she say that enraged the fools to reply with all their hideous comments? Nothing I saw there could even come close to being controversial (in the words of another, Ms. Sierra seems "harmless as a kitten") and I've been on the web since '94 or so, BBS since '86. If anyone can enlighten me as to why this started I'd really appreciate it. Was this perhaps a personal thing that happened f2f and not online? I mean, I'd read a post of hers about some new software and in the midst of "normal" comments I'd see some rubbish like "I'll kill you bitch". Yeah, I saw the ugly ones, too. But what on earth started this? Or is this something along the lines of Glenn Greenwald's Salon blog being called a "hate site" by some fool at Red State? Please don't get me wrong, I am fully in support of Ms. Sierra and have no patience for threats, none at all - all I want is some possible reason those assh*l*s made their threats in the first place.
darms, I know no backstory. The only thing I've read somewhere is that Ms. Sierra decided to delete some posts from her blog for being rude and that this caused some ill-will against her. But it seems such an odd thing to get angry over. I delete spam almost daily here, for instance.
Echidne OTS,
Thank you so much for your response. I am very familiar with the delusion of anonominity that email and the internet imparts to its users and the ugliness it can engender. (should have seen the email I sent one night to a C++ teacher who disagreed with the prerequisites to his class - still got a B however...) It's difficult, however, for me to accept that Ms. Sierra got that level of ugliness solely as she is a female and I read a number of female bloggers on a daily basis. IMHO, I think it might be valuable to research this story a bit more, get a bit more of the backstory. As a male and a 'nobody' I do not feel qualified. Care to try? I for one would really like to to understand this, the really ugly stuff could not possibly (again, IMHO) have come from merely deleting some comments. And I know what MAC vs. PC flame wars look like....
(feel free to delete this if it sounds more like a personal email then a comment)
darms
The issue isn't so much whether or not she got them because and only because she is a women but that
a) women get harassed online* more than men do
b) this harassment is more often of a sexual nature
c) women are more often the victims of sexual violence in "the real world"
d) since the intent of this violence is often intimidation, such violence is often preceded by threats (you leave me, I'll kill you)
e) online harassers of other women have recently taken the harassment into "real life"
f) Sierra's harassers included people from the very industry she worked in
So, in light of all these well known facts, it's well, beyond patronizing for Kos to dismiss Sierra's fears as ungrounded and hysterical.
Normally, one might simply say that he was clueless rather than willfully dismissive of women's experiences, but well, this isn't the first time he's pulled shit like this.
*I suspect irl too, but I don't know any studies other than those that limit the scope to sexual harassment
I'm in no mood to cut him slack because his baby was born. What -- did he push the thing out himself or what?
If a woman had done this, they would have told her she had no business blogging at all while under the insanity-producing influence of her girly-hormones. Kos blogs after "having" a baby and we EXCUSE him because he hasn't had sleep (and someone else had the baby).
I'm sick and fucking tired of the same excuses being used to invalidate women, and to cut men slack.
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