I did not expect to be perorating about this again so soon.
I don't drunk dial LJ very well when I get home Monday night, post whilst still in sedated post-MRI anxiety-ridden bliss, and then fail to answer all of your questions, do I? Although I'll always treasure frankie23's comment demanding more blogging drunkfail* from me.
Also, all those Atomic Robo icons had me cracking up on Tuesday morning. I clicked through to my journal and ATOMIC ROBO EVERYWHERE.**
This will hopefully be my last peroration on the Peter David vs. scans_daily raging conflagration, although I may, as I wrote last Friday afternoon, before things got really ugly over on PAD's blog and elsewhere, put up a compendium of all the links that I've found to be of interest.
popelizbet has been posting in various places that he/she (?) had screencaps of a big part of what happened. Since popelizbet linked me to them here, I'm putting them up. See, until I looked at this screencap, I had no idea that there was this whole other explosion of wank between PAD and other commenters that continued in that X-Factor #40 post after I backed away from my thread with PAD.
Please note that I still stand by everything that I said here, I'm not abrogating responsibility for my initial outburst or justifying it in any way, but this lends more light to the whole sprawling mess that it became with PAD and all the other commenters involved. (As I started reading different people's takes on what happened, there were some pieces of the puzzle missing from what I'd observed, and this fills in a lot of the gaps.)
Please note that, as I noted on Sunday, there's some very offensive talk from misterandersen about addiction being nothing but a moral weakness and failing, so that may be very triggering for some people. (But then, he's running around calling me a "psycho bitch," which is completely his right to do, of course, but perhaps you can understand why that, coupled with his opinions on addiction, result in me thinking of him as someone who perhaps shouldn't claim moral high ground.)
Anyway!
Okay, here's a MASSIVE screencap showing what happened from start to finish -- I think. Now featuring a cast of thousands!
...Well, I don't feel so alone now. Oy.
Well, there's noscans_daily, although I've already seen wank abrewing there (which...makes me wonder what the modding standard is in this launching of a Kindler, Gentler Comics NoScans/Scans Daily), and Scans Daily 2.0 is up and running over on InsaneJournal.
One thing in the blogsphere did catch my eye. A.V. Club posted a piece on the demise of scans_daily. Like most of the other discussions I've seen, it turned into a minefield of bitterly divisive opinions, flaming, knee jerk dismissals, calls for death and dismemberment, etc., but when Lisa Fortuner's piece on The Death of Scans Daily was referenced, someone going by the peppery sobriquet of "Jorge Von Salsa" posted this:
This is why scans_daily was precious to me. Because, as a female comic book reader, when I surfed over to S_D, I didn't have to see that kind of foul testosterone-laden eructation constantly being posted.
So, switching the subject now, because I need to say a few words about the fallout from RaceFail '09, aka When White Sci-Fi Writers and Editors and Fans Did Their Best to Shout Down PoC and Their Allies.
I haven't written much about RaceFail '09 because 1) so many people who were directly involved wrote about it in ways that dwarf my own ability to comment on it and 2) it made me angrier than a Red Lantern in a rage blackout (or is it a rage redout?). rydra_wong, as always, is a HUGE resource for posts with abundant linkage to the whole ugly and sordid mess. (Ugly and sordid on the part of Elizabeth Bear, Kathryn Cramer, Will Shetterly, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Emma Bull, and not a few other white writers, bloggers, editors, and white fans in the realms of science fiction and fantasy.)
So, after Patrick (pnh) and Teresa Nielsen Hayden (tnh), Elizabeth Bear (matociquala), and others spent day after day derailing the discussions that started Racefail by 1) dismissing the numbers of people who expressed vehement disagreement with their opinions as "trivial," 2) accusing the PoC and their allies involved of conflating, lying, sockpuppeting, and overreacting to the issues and discussions at hand, 3) threatening (in the case of Teresa Nielsen Hayden, her vow to remember every single person who disagreed with her on this had an ugly, ugly subtext of Nixonian retribution) the PoC and their allies involved, and 4) deeming their opponents "anonymous" and accusing them of "hiding" because most of the people who disagreed with them did so on LJ and, in the estimation of this Cabal of White WriterFail, therefore were not to be taken seriously because said people do not necessarily connect their real life identities to their LJs. Apparently some big names in sci fi and fantasy fandom are suddenly playing naive enough to be shocked - SHOCKED, I say - that some people wish to preserve their privacy and wish to divorce their blog identities from their real life identities. (To point out that these selfsame people - Kathryn Cramer, Will Shetterly, et all - are mostly veterans of internet culture would be superfluous, right?)
Which brings me to this: Will Shetterly outed coffeeandink by publishing her first and last name on his blog and his LJ. So did Kathryn Cramer. They did so viciously, vengefully, and as a direct result of her articulate disagreement with the White Cabal of Fail during Racefail '09. So now, when you don't like what's being said to you as a white person when discussions of cultural appropriation and racism come up, it would seem that the latest tactic is to start to publicly out people on LJ by connecting their real life identities with their LJ identities? I'd be willing to lend Kathryn Cramer some goodwill if this was an honest misunderstanding, meaning that if Cramer actually did not know that coffeeandink did not want her LJ name connected with her actual legal name and subsequently redacted it when it was pointed out to her that coffeeandink wished to keep her legal name separate from her LJ name. When someone makes it clear that they wish to divorce the former from the latter, the polite and courteous thing to do is to stop outing them unless you feel that they are a credible and tangible danger to someone else in the real world (meaning, you're ready to call the cops because they're a danger to children or a stalker or similar).
Is this kind of action -- action that is meant punitively -- the new prescribed behavior whenever an anti-racist speaks to people like Shetterly, Elizabeth Bear, etc.?
I've lost any and all lingering filaments of respect that I had for Elizabeth Bear. I'll say it publicly, and I say this after three weeks of reading over and over again what Bear had to say during Racefail: I think she's a mealy-mouthed hypocritical racist who thinks that because she was raised by Ukrainian-Swedish-Lithuanian-Cherokee radical separatist lesbians or whatever she has a Get Out of White Free card and/or I'm An Automatic Ally Because I Understand Your Pain card and/or a Get Out of Privilege Free card. Look at how she shuts down the discussion of the outing here. For all of her self-styled peacemaker posturing during Racefail, she hasn't learned a thing.
Some links discussing this - and these are just a fraction of what's out there:
bossymarmalade weighs in incisively here.
spiralsheep gives a brief overview here, with ETAs that Kathryn Cramer may be deliberately trying to infect people's systems with malware in retribution for the anger directed at her for the outing. So...if you don't shut up, she may try to literally shut down your access to the internet? THAT'S Cramer's strategy? She's sickening. I hope that the malware thing is just rumor.
rydra_wong has the first (of many) link round-ups here regarding the outing.
In light of all of this, like a lot of other people, I'm linking to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's article on proecting yourself online. (I'll be posting lots more links like that tomorrow.)
In summation:
And I feel that this macro nicely sums up the White Writerfail:
* Not really drunkfail since I don't drink alcohol.
** This means that I should post more Atomic Robo, obviously, although atomic_robo needs to weigh in on this.
Edit: As many have pointed out, if you've donated or PLAN to donate to the Shadow Unit project via PayPal, and if you've run afoul of Elizabeth Bear, Emma Bull, or Will Shetterly or anyone else involved therein, they may have your real name and a valid e-mail address for you from the PayPal payment records. Please use caution, and please don't give these assholes any of your money.
Also, all those Atomic Robo icons had me cracking up on Tuesday morning. I clicked through to my journal and ATOMIC ROBO EVERYWHERE.**
This will hopefully be my last peroration on the Peter David vs. scans_daily raging conflagration, although I may, as I wrote last Friday afternoon, before things got really ugly over on PAD's blog and elsewhere, put up a compendium of all the links that I've found to be of interest.
popelizbet has been posting in various places that he/she (?) had screencaps of a big part of what happened. Since popelizbet linked me to them here, I'm putting them up. See, until I looked at this screencap, I had no idea that there was this whole other explosion of wank between PAD and other commenters that continued in that X-Factor #40 post after I backed away from my thread with PAD.
Please note that I still stand by everything that I said here, I'm not abrogating responsibility for my initial outburst or justifying it in any way, but this lends more light to the whole sprawling mess that it became with PAD and all the other commenters involved. (As I started reading different people's takes on what happened, there were some pieces of the puzzle missing from what I'd observed, and this fills in a lot of the gaps.)
Please note that, as I noted on Sunday, there's some very offensive talk from misterandersen about addiction being nothing but a moral weakness and failing, so that may be very triggering for some people. (But then, he's running around calling me a "psycho bitch," which is completely his right to do, of course, but perhaps you can understand why that, coupled with his opinions on addiction, result in me thinking of him as someone who perhaps shouldn't claim moral high ground.)
Anyway!
Okay, here's a MASSIVE screencap showing what happened from start to finish -- I think. Now featuring a cast of thousands!
...Well, I don't feel so alone now. Oy.
Well, there's noscans_daily, although I've already seen wank abrewing there (which...makes me wonder what the modding standard is in this launching of a Kindler, Gentler Comics NoScans/Scans Daily), and Scans Daily 2.0 is up and running over on InsaneJournal.
One thing in the blogsphere did catch my eye. A.V. Club posted a piece on the demise of scans_daily. Like most of the other discussions I've seen, it turned into a minefield of bitterly divisive opinions, flaming, knee jerk dismissals, calls for death and dismemberment, etc., but when Lisa Fortuner's piece on The Death of Scans Daily was referenced, someone going by the peppery sobriquet of "Jorge Von Salsa" posted this:
This is why scans_daily was precious to me. Because, as a female comic book reader, when I surfed over to S_D, I didn't have to see that kind of foul testosterone-laden eructation constantly being posted.
So, switching the subject now, because I need to say a few words about the fallout from RaceFail '09, aka When White Sci-Fi Writers and Editors and Fans Did Their Best to Shout Down PoC and Their Allies.
I haven't written much about RaceFail '09 because 1) so many people who were directly involved wrote about it in ways that dwarf my own ability to comment on it and 2) it made me angrier than a Red Lantern in a rage blackout (or is it a rage redout?). rydra_wong, as always, is a HUGE resource for posts with abundant linkage to the whole ugly and sordid mess. (Ugly and sordid on the part of Elizabeth Bear, Kathryn Cramer, Will Shetterly, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Emma Bull, and not a few other white writers, bloggers, editors, and white fans in the realms of science fiction and fantasy.)
So, after Patrick (pnh) and Teresa Nielsen Hayden (tnh), Elizabeth Bear (matociquala), and others spent day after day derailing the discussions that started Racefail by 1) dismissing the numbers of people who expressed vehement disagreement with their opinions as "trivial," 2) accusing the PoC and their allies involved of conflating, lying, sockpuppeting, and overreacting to the issues and discussions at hand, 3) threatening (in the case of Teresa Nielsen Hayden, her vow to remember every single person who disagreed with her on this had an ugly, ugly subtext of Nixonian retribution) the PoC and their allies involved, and 4) deeming their opponents "anonymous" and accusing them of "hiding" because most of the people who disagreed with them did so on LJ and, in the estimation of this Cabal of White WriterFail, therefore were not to be taken seriously because said people do not necessarily connect their real life identities to their LJs. Apparently some big names in sci fi and fantasy fandom are suddenly playing naive enough to be shocked - SHOCKED, I say - that some people wish to preserve their privacy and wish to divorce their blog identities from their real life identities. (To point out that these selfsame people - Kathryn Cramer, Will Shetterly, et all - are mostly veterans of internet culture would be superfluous, right?)
Which brings me to this: Will Shetterly outed coffeeandink by publishing her first and last name on his blog and his LJ. So did Kathryn Cramer. They did so viciously, vengefully, and as a direct result of her articulate disagreement with the White Cabal of Fail during Racefail '09. So now, when you don't like what's being said to you as a white person when discussions of cultural appropriation and racism come up, it would seem that the latest tactic is to start to publicly out people on LJ by connecting their real life identities with their LJ identities? I'd be willing to lend Kathryn Cramer some goodwill if this was an honest misunderstanding, meaning that if Cramer actually did not know that coffeeandink did not want her LJ name connected with her actual legal name and subsequently redacted it when it was pointed out to her that coffeeandink wished to keep her legal name separate from her LJ name. When someone makes it clear that they wish to divorce the former from the latter, the polite and courteous thing to do is to stop outing them unless you feel that they are a credible and tangible danger to someone else in the real world (meaning, you're ready to call the cops because they're a danger to children or a stalker or similar).
Is this kind of action -- action that is meant punitively -- the new prescribed behavior whenever an anti-racist speaks to people like Shetterly, Elizabeth Bear, etc.?
I've lost any and all lingering filaments of respect that I had for Elizabeth Bear. I'll say it publicly, and I say this after three weeks of reading over and over again what Bear had to say during Racefail: I think she's a mealy-mouthed hypocritical racist who thinks that because she was raised by Ukrainian-Swedish-Lithuanian-Cherokee radical separatist lesbians or whatever she has a Get Out of White Free card and/or I'm An Automatic Ally Because I Understand Your Pain card and/or a Get Out of Privilege Free card. Look at how she shuts down the discussion of the outing here. For all of her self-styled peacemaker posturing during Racefail, she hasn't learned a thing.
Some links discussing this - and these are just a fraction of what's out there:
bossymarmalade weighs in incisively here.
spiralsheep gives a brief overview here, with ETAs that Kathryn Cramer may be deliberately trying to infect people's systems with malware in retribution for the anger directed at her for the outing. So...if you don't shut up, she may try to literally shut down your access to the internet? THAT'S Cramer's strategy? She's sickening. I hope that the malware thing is just rumor.
rydra_wong has the first (of many) link round-ups here regarding the outing.
In light of all of this, like a lot of other people, I'm linking to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's article on proecting yourself online. (I'll be posting lots more links like that tomorrow.)
In summation:
And I feel that this macro nicely sums up the White Writerfail:
* Not really drunkfail since I don't drink alcohol.
** This means that I should post more Atomic Robo, obviously, although atomic_robo needs to weigh in on this.
Edit: As many have pointed out, if you've donated or PLAN to donate to the Shadow Unit project via PayPal, and if you've run afoul of Elizabeth Bear, Emma Bull, or Will Shetterly or anyone else involved therein, they may have your real name and a valid e-mail address for you from the PayPal payment records. Please use caution, and please don't give these assholes any of your money.