Honestly! It's pretty sad to see how the original A-list bloggers descend into a continuous round of feuding and childish behavior. Is this the future for all of us in the blogosphere?
Yeah, the Kathy Sierra story is disturbing. Yeah, at the same time, she's probably conflating several different things that should be distinguished. But where's the empathy? The woman's clearly distressed. It's not the time for RageBoy to be quibbling.
Paynter comes out well. But the feminists have the real story.
2 comments:
I'm happy to see you weigh in on this. There's already been a great deal of discussion and it's really great to see that there's an effort to make the discussion broadly engaged.
Liz Henry's post is so good. I particularly liked the idea for a book title: "Gift of Total Rage."
But I don't really agree with you that Rage Boy is quibbling. He denies authorship of any of the threatening posts. The issue of violent threats is clearly something every sane person objects to, but that's not the only issue that's been raised, and the conversation is going to be more wide-ranging. Putting his perspectives out there seems quite legitimate to me.
Rageboy's point about YOYOW (you own your own words) seems a very important part of this.
The complications of online speech are such that the "correction" can can be abuse. That point may be an "apple and oranges" sort of confusion, but separating them in this context doesn't seem so easy to me.
I agree, no-one should have to accept responsibility for something that's not their fault. What I didn't think much of was that as the Mean Kids like RageBoy and Lemur seem to be defending themselves by putting down Sierra : either denying what's an obviously stressful experience for her or blaming her for starting a witch-hunt against them.
I think there's room for saying : "I'm very sorry for what happened to you. But please believe me, it really wasn't me who did the bad stuff. Although I am sorry for any contribution I made to the climate where that became possible."
Right now, only Paynter seems to have come remotely near that. Like I said in my new post, my unfounded suspicion is that they can't do this because they are, in fact, more guilty than they like to admit, even to themselves. So they want to shift the attention elsewhere.
Of course, OTOH I may be completely wrong about this. Welcome to the internet :-)
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