the point is: by *my* standards, i won fair and square

[bossymarmalade]

So Kathryn Cramer says that all people who use web aliases are criminals, because the only reason to have a pseudonym is to feel more free to act in horrible ways on the internet.

Then she moves her post around, misdirects the links, and posts coffeeandink's full name on her blog. Which is, as we all know, a horrible way to act on the internet.

Then Will Shetterly decides to:
- also out coffeeandink and then demand apologies and praise from her when he does the bare minimum of taking down her surname
- use results from a google search about India to speculate on deepad's life situations, and quotes from Gandhi to supposedly enforce his "point"

Then his wife Emma Bull gets stroppy at somebody who's concerned about Shetterly having access to their personal info and starts lecturing about how it's unfair to judge him only by the horrible way he's acted the internet.

Then Elizabeth Bear runs around telling people (LIKE DEEPA HERSELF, WTF) that Will is actually so nice in real life, it's just ... he feels free to act in horrible ways on the internet.

Somebody is failing hard here.

And please note that Shetterly and Cramer and Co. have now reimagined the entire point of RaceFail 09 to be about internet pseudonymity instead of representations of race. Their insistence on focusing on the activities of white allies, repeatedly attempting to spread the meme that all of their critics are "East-coast upper-class Ivy Leaguers" (read: white), is yet another cowardly and slimy attempt to erase the presence of chromatic people in this discussion. We saw it when mac_stone and medievalist and Bear tried to pretend that there was a "maximum of twenty" disgruntled people, we're seeing it again with this fiction that internet fucking pseudonyms are the crux of the matter. They've realized that they can't attack fen of colour and still look like heroes, so they're trying to find some other way to imagine the Enemy.

Although, if you recall Cramer's original post wherein she posited that using her real name was proof that she indeed was, as she claimed to be, a "slim blonde woman in upstate NY" instead of a "fat black man in the Arizona desert", you'll see that they're still not doing so good at hiding their racism.

spiralsheep's suggestion that as a community we shun them is the one I'm following. I hope never to have cause to mention them in my journal again (and that goes for Elizabeth Bear too, who has often been held up as some sort of "voice of reason" in RaceFail but whose constant apologist behaviour for her douchey friends and false iteration of "bad behaviour on both sides" says something quite different).

Comments

[latxcvi.livejournal.com]

I'm so sick of all of the Will Fuckhead apologists who keep going on about what a raving asshole he is on the internet, but he's *so nice and good in real life*.

This is what absolutely drives me nuts about that particular line of The Apologista Shuffle:

Of course he doesn't act like this off-line. If he acted like this off-line, where there's a potential loss of social currency with people he sees face-to-face on a regular basis, he wouldn't have any friends!! That's my first point. My second is that that line of apologia perpetuates the fallacy that what happens off the Internet is 'real' but what happens on the Internet 'isn't real' and that's a bullshit fallacy. The Internet isn't imaginary and neither are the people WS (or anyone else) interacts with on the Internet. That professional writers keep trying to act as though the written word has no power completely infuriates me.