Pirate Jenny's anonymous backstabbers
I do not want to return to this disgusting topic again, except to answer any question, but I am in this whether I like it or not. The storm of insults allowed and encouraged by the contemptible Pirate Jenny, she who is neither a Nazi nor a Communist, continues unabated; most of them, with the classic moral courage of these creatures, being anonymous - while our non-Nazi friend continues to allow them and not to allow me to answer.
Now the point is not so much that this stuff is repulsive - of course it is; but that some people on my f-list seem under the impression that I have done something to deserve it, or that there is something to be said for the trash concerned. So I will publish, behind a cut, a representative letter, from a typical anonymous backstabber. You may judge whether this sort of nonsense can be explained by anything except mental problems on the part of the coward concerned.
This was my comment:
I once wrote a fic called GAY BAR, which featured a strangely subdued bar populated mostly by middle-aged or elderly gays, into which a drunk and unhappy post-war Harry Potter barges in to make trouble. Believe it or not, hundreds of people THINK they have read it and THINK that it features a nasty gaggle of threatening sexual predators endangering a virginal Draco Malfoy. They were told what to think, you see, and they would rather believe their friends than their own lying eyes.
This is the Nameless Wonder's response.
Subject: *hands you a clue*
How about you have a look at this sentence, and then claim you weren't actively trying to piss people off?
Draco could not know that Harry, who did not ordinarily drink to excess, had just been dumped by a boyfriend.
This manages to offend on two levels. First of all, there's the sudden, clunky change of perspective halfway through the narrative, which is one of the FIRST things the "How to Write" books tell you not to do (you've never read a "How To Write" book? Why is this not news to me?)
More importantly there's the use of the phrase "just been dumped by a boyfriend". It's highly offensive in its implications that gay men have nameless "boyfriends", not relationships, and that such relationships are casual throwaway affairs whose end merits no more serious description than the word "dumping".
And how about your statement that gays are fundamentally unhappy in the line "Millicent was telling me about the people who come into her counselling service, and a lot of the gay men either have no fathers or some sort of tragedy in their family history"? Or that disgusting "We'll have your children yet!" stuff, showing beyond all doubt that you believe gay = paedophile?
You write this shit, and then you stand there with your index finger to your lip like a five-year-old and say "Who, ME give offence? ME?"
We laugh at you, you pathetic, silly little man. Now go find something better to do with your time.
Let us assume that this rant is intended as an argument. The Nameless Wonder seems to imagine that to say that someone has "just been dumped by a boyfriend" implies an endles series of promiscuous relationships. Well, even if it did, the Nameless Wonder knows as well as I do that this is a pretty good description of the lifestyles of a fair few male homosexuals, especially when young. Yet the Nameless Wonder takes offence. The point however is that to anyone whose eyes are not glazed over by hatred, the expression means nothing of the kind. As if I could not say, as I indeed do say, "At the time I had just been dumped by a girlfriend" or "once I was betrayed by a friend." Does this imply that I would regard either girlfriends or friends as nameless and expendable? Anyone with the slightest notion of how human beings speak would say no. But our friend the Nameless Wonder is vigilant: he goes out searching for the tiniest little statement that may give offence, even if he has to deafen himself to every natural content and shape of the English language. And this person has the sheer chutzpah to lecture me about style! Vanity certainly rears its ugly children in strange places.
His folly unsatisfied by this display of aesthetic incompetence, he takes words which I had put in the mouth of Draco and his wife - when the ending of the story proves abundantly that they are unreformed criminals with a hankering for Dark Lords and mass murder - and assumes that they represent my position. As well imagine (si parua licet componere magnis) that Iago is the vehicle for Shakespeare's views. He then proceeds to do the same with a character who is raging drunk and desperately unhappy, and who is saying the worst things he can in order to spread around some of his own unhappiness - an unhappiness caused not, as the Nameless Wonder seems to imagine, by being homosexual, but by just having been dumped by someone he loved. All that the Nameless Wonder has managed by this attempt at a reading is to show that he has never in his life been in love, that he has no idea that being dumped can hurt, and that he has no notion that people in pain do strange things - especially if they are drunk.
And so, the Nameless Wonder, without the courage to sign his name, without the life experience to know love and loss, without the aesthetic understanding to tell the difference between the character and the author, and with less manners than a monkey, concluding his display of ignorance, folly, persecution-mindedness, and yelping stupidity, with a closing rant of which a Neapolitan street kid would be ashamed - pretending at some sort of superiority even as his shrill tone and empty verbiage condemns him to the dustcart of near-illiterates - and wanders off, his folly unpunished and his rants undisturbed, because his enabler, Pirate Jenny, wants this sort of behaviour to go on. And on. And on. This is what I am meeting, and while it would be nice to believe that the sheer meanness of these creatures would condemn them, I would remind anyone willing to take that easy way out that these are the same people and methods who produced Charitygate and the rest.
Now the point is not so much that this stuff is repulsive - of course it is; but that some people on my f-list seem under the impression that I have done something to deserve it, or that there is something to be said for the trash concerned. So I will publish, behind a cut, a representative letter, from a typical anonymous backstabber. You may judge whether this sort of nonsense can be explained by anything except mental problems on the part of the coward concerned.
This was my comment:
I once wrote a fic called GAY BAR, which featured a strangely subdued bar populated mostly by middle-aged or elderly gays, into which a drunk and unhappy post-war Harry Potter barges in to make trouble. Believe it or not, hundreds of people THINK they have read it and THINK that it features a nasty gaggle of threatening sexual predators endangering a virginal Draco Malfoy. They were told what to think, you see, and they would rather believe their friends than their own lying eyes.
This is the Nameless Wonder's response.
Subject: *hands you a clue*
How about you have a look at this sentence, and then claim you weren't actively trying to piss people off?
Draco could not know that Harry, who did not ordinarily drink to excess, had just been dumped by a boyfriend.
This manages to offend on two levels. First of all, there's the sudden, clunky change of perspective halfway through the narrative, which is one of the FIRST things the "How to Write" books tell you not to do (you've never read a "How To Write" book? Why is this not news to me?)
More importantly there's the use of the phrase "just been dumped by a boyfriend". It's highly offensive in its implications that gay men have nameless "boyfriends", not relationships, and that such relationships are casual throwaway affairs whose end merits no more serious description than the word "dumping".
And how about your statement that gays are fundamentally unhappy in the line "Millicent was telling me about the people who come into her counselling service, and a lot of the gay men either have no fathers or some sort of tragedy in their family history"? Or that disgusting "We'll have your children yet!" stuff, showing beyond all doubt that you believe gay = paedophile?
You write this shit, and then you stand there with your index finger to your lip like a five-year-old and say "Who, ME give offence? ME?"
We laugh at you, you pathetic, silly little man. Now go find something better to do with your time.
Let us assume that this rant is intended as an argument. The Nameless Wonder seems to imagine that to say that someone has "just been dumped by a boyfriend" implies an endles series of promiscuous relationships. Well, even if it did, the Nameless Wonder knows as well as I do that this is a pretty good description of the lifestyles of a fair few male homosexuals, especially when young. Yet the Nameless Wonder takes offence. The point however is that to anyone whose eyes are not glazed over by hatred, the expression means nothing of the kind. As if I could not say, as I indeed do say, "At the time I had just been dumped by a girlfriend" or "once I was betrayed by a friend." Does this imply that I would regard either girlfriends or friends as nameless and expendable? Anyone with the slightest notion of how human beings speak would say no. But our friend the Nameless Wonder is vigilant: he goes out searching for the tiniest little statement that may give offence, even if he has to deafen himself to every natural content and shape of the English language. And this person has the sheer chutzpah to lecture me about style! Vanity certainly rears its ugly children in strange places.
His folly unsatisfied by this display of aesthetic incompetence, he takes words which I had put in the mouth of Draco and his wife - when the ending of the story proves abundantly that they are unreformed criminals with a hankering for Dark Lords and mass murder - and assumes that they represent my position. As well imagine (si parua licet componere magnis) that Iago is the vehicle for Shakespeare's views. He then proceeds to do the same with a character who is raging drunk and desperately unhappy, and who is saying the worst things he can in order to spread around some of his own unhappiness - an unhappiness caused not, as the Nameless Wonder seems to imagine, by being homosexual, but by just having been dumped by someone he loved. All that the Nameless Wonder has managed by this attempt at a reading is to show that he has never in his life been in love, that he has no idea that being dumped can hurt, and that he has no notion that people in pain do strange things - especially if they are drunk.
And so, the Nameless Wonder, without the courage to sign his name, without the life experience to know love and loss, without the aesthetic understanding to tell the difference between the character and the author, and with less manners than a monkey, concluding his display of ignorance, folly, persecution-mindedness, and yelping stupidity, with a closing rant of which a Neapolitan street kid would be ashamed - pretending at some sort of superiority even as his shrill tone and empty verbiage condemns him to the dustcart of near-illiterates - and wanders off, his folly unpunished and his rants undisturbed, because his enabler, Pirate Jenny, wants this sort of behaviour to go on. And on. And on. This is what I am meeting, and while it would be nice to believe that the sheer meanness of these creatures would condemn them, I would remind anyone willing to take that easy way out that these are the same people and methods who produced Charitygate and the rest.