Flaming out
Remember that post about anonymous blogging? Now it can be told – the blog in question was called You’re Not Helping, and it has now flamed out – though that of course does not mean that the blogger is not still blogging somewhere else, and in fact I think it is. But it has at least admitted that it was one person and not several, and that many of its “commenters” were sock puppets. It has admitted that much of what it claimed was flatly untrue, which means it has informed us that everything it claimed could be untrue. I know from personal knowledge that a lot of it is – much of what it claimed about me is untrue.
It was weirdly obsessed with me. It called me a liar, repeatedly. I’m not a liar, as a matter of fact. It has just admitted that it is a liar. This is an improvement.
It says it’s 23 years old. If that’s true, I doubt that it’s Kees/Bernie Ranson, because that started too long ago – it seems unlikely that someone that young would spend more than two years dogging me.
It’s interesting that some accommodationists have taken YNH seriously in spite of obvious, not to say glaring, signs of its unreliability, to put it no more strongly. Interesting and not altogether impressive.
I doubt “Will” will helpfully disappear from the blogosphere.
(I’ve had an absolute ball with words lately.)
I wouldn’t give any credence to “Will” or “23.” Even then, I wouldn’t discount “Kees” as a candidate based on that age. Young males are perfectly capable of obsession.
Heh, I just replied to you on Oedipus’s thread. Hmm. Yes but are young males capable of both obsession and dropping the obsession for months and then picking it up again? Kees hasn’t been back as far as I know. Bernie Ranson obsessed and then dropped it for a year and then came back as Kees and then busted himself by emailing commenters here under the Bernie name. That was more than a year ago. I could imagine a grizzled oldy like me returning yet again as YNH…but a very young guy?
Well of course we don’t know that he is 23; it’s just something he said.
Open question.
I don’t think we know enough at this point to discount anything, though I’m sure there are some very internet-savvy folks tracking down all the details as we write. If it can be done, and of course it can be, someone is going to have this guy’s photo, home phone number and street address viralling its way through cyberspace before long. I am not in favour of that level of revenge, but I know we have a few people who think differently on our side.
I’m only 20, but I’ve known lots of guys my age and younger to do similar things, particularly to girls who were not/were no longer interested in them. I also know lots of guys my age who are already obsessed with a political ideology and some with crankery (9/11 conspiracism in particular, even a couple of birthers).
And yes, sometimes it comes back and forth. More likely, it’s a different sockpuppet or they switched to a different target for a while.
Still, it’s too early to tell if “Kees” was back.
I never conversed with Kees, but I argued a lot with Bernie R, and I’m sure that he is over 23. Remember his remark about Sussy, about marrying her and settling down? That was a comment by someone over age 23. Ok, you say, he is 23, but pretended to be older when he played the role of Bernie. I think that is unlikely because Bernie’s answers came back too fast for someone who is deliberately playing a role, in this case, that of a person older than he really is. In my opinion, Bernie is just a character who likes to play with people, to provoke them, and he navegates the internet in search of victims: I would bet that you, Ophelia, are only one of many targets that he has.
OT but is Ms. Benson planning to comment on Chris Mooneys’ latest jeremiad against scientists?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/25/AR2010062502158.html?sub=AR
Oh, blimey, I hadn’t seen it.
[takes a look]
I’m not sure I have much to say about it. It’s numbingly familiar; it’s the same old “scientists gotta lurn to tawk to the publik” magic that he’s been repeating for, what is it now, three years? No othering of atheists this time.
Here’s a better copy of the flameout post: google cache, local copy
The guy banned himself from his own blog for sockpuppeting…If I get a headache from all this meta I’m going to sue.
(Or, heck, her own blog.)
Which is why I always call it “it”!
Well I hope, primarily that this will serve as a wider lesson, to not obsess about individuals. If you have to obsess, do it on a topic, and if so try to be constructive in the process.
Lying, cherry-picking the worst, reading the worst possible interpretation, quote-farming, word-mincing are all bad. But what is the worst is just persistent negative stereotyping. YNH was big on finding some way to rant how “New Atheists” are bad.
If one has an issue with something someone says, just address what someone says! Don’t lump people together and create a negative label.
That was ultimately my gripe with YNH. He/she/it was literally not helping, but making it worse.
Sometimes bad things happen under the guise of a sensible idea. Promoting positive discussion is a good idea. But doing it by mirroring the negative, and in fact go beyond negative into smear land is not OK.
Sad thing about YNH is that it was never honest but it had a facade where it was not trivial to tell. That left us with a few months of a place that perpetuated an image that wasn’t right.
As for him being an atheist, well I don’t know. Some of what he said made sense, but this inner-atheism smearing is weird. And we have people who are half-atheists who, when discussing atheism, do nothing but point out how aggressive they are nowadays. Example being Stephen Prothero. There are also people who claim to want to be cross-cultural bridges such as Eboo Patel (muslim) and Greg Epstein (atheist) who whenever they discuss atheism frequently amplifty very negative interpretations (smiling stick figures are swastikas). Take Wilson (atheist?) attacking the new atheists, by quoting out-of-context to make Hitchens appear as if he is calling for war against believers. There is a whole meme going claiming that Sam Harris wants believers exterminated and hence atheism is the next naziism. Eagleton can write a whole rant against a newly invented negative label “Ditchkins” without ever actually citing directly what they say, just riffing of their negative image. And that gets cheered on as an intellectual critique of the aggressive new atheism by other long time academics such as Stanley Fish.
I wish Eagleton had written a deep critique of Hitchens and Dawkins. I would have absolutely no problem with that. But this is not what we are getting nowadays.
And it doesn’t even require for us to go to the most fervent christan apologetic demagogues to get that image. But of course there is worse. There is indeed also this onslaught of apologetic books that are happy to use unfair representations to make drastic points. If one reads D’Souza, one would believe that the Nazis were in fact closet aggressive atheists. Other apologists have no problem claiming that racism is derived and somehow endorsed by Darwinism, directly contradicting his own quotes and the quotes of the racists (who instead tried to claim that only white races descended from Adam and Eve). We have a new culture of unfair arguing, misrepresentation, distortion of history and so fourth.
Word mincing and quote mining are some of the most successful strategies people use. They quote Hitler out of context to make him into an atheist. And they will not quote the communist manifesto to make it appear that atheism endorses the Stalinist violence.
This culture of context-free, misleading, misrepresenting arguing is what is wrong. And it’s not just YNH. It’s very educated people in prominent positions who are not anonymous at all.
And what we need is really, fair arguing, facts, proper histories and a discussion culture that emphazises understanding not winning (to piggieback on Deborah Tannen’s underread book on discourse culture).
Critique is very important. The more honest and fair the critique, the stronger it is. That’s what we need. How about we get some esteemed tenured long-time professors like Eagleton to follow this!
Yup and sorry for the rant! :)
Do you see that, Ophelia? Do you see how they let themselves go when they know they won’t have their comments edited to make them look like idiots or be threatened with banning and exposure as sock-trolls?
Welcome back to the real world, Hitch.
Without wishing to be too ad hominem, Eagleton is free to write as he chooses. The fact that he chooses to write as he does can lead to some conclusions being drawn about him. Oh, sorry, I misread; you didn’t mean Eagleton, you said “like Eagleton.”
Hitch
Heh. Quite. You’ll find a fair amount about most of the people you named here (via the search engine, in case you want to confirm). Eagleton, Fish, Greg Epstein – check, check, check.
In that sense I do my own obsessing about individuals…but they’re more diversified than YNH’s were, and more mixed in with other subjects, and then I quote them more than I generalize wildly about them, and above all, I do not lie about them. I also respond when and if they respond (not that any of the above three have). Oh and I skip the whole sock puppet thing.
Stewart, I don’t really follow your argument. Yes Eagleton is free to write what he wants. Everybody is. I’m critiquing him for critiquing people out of their own context. I think that’s a problem and it’s lacks scholarship. Now Eagleton is not just some random person holding an opinion. He’s an academic, who, I think, it is not only fair but necessary to hold to scholarly standards. But as said I don’t know what you are even arguing, so you’ll have to elaborate. I said “like Eagleton” because I’m happy to extend this criticism to anyone who is an academic and argues in an academic context, doesn’t matter what issue. Heck I have criticism for some thing Richard Dawkins says. Doesn’t mean I disagree with him broadly. I don’t. And I would never express our disagreement out of context. See if we have small disagreements, lets discuss them as small disagreements.
That pretty much sums up the difference between Eagleton and Dawkins for me. Eagleton in a broad stroke and approach was wrong, never citing sources and talking off stereotypes. I don’t even have grounds to agree or disagree with him on substance because he hasn’t given me that.
Dawkins routinely cites his sources and I can have my minor disagreement because he makes his own context very clear.
It’s form vs substance. The whole Chamberlain/Hitler thing when Dawkins actually talked strategy about how to deal with science education. Rather than discuss his broad point, people pulled essentially one word out of context. Amplified it to it’s worst interpretation and riffed on it for a very long time. In fact the Dawkins things accommodationists are nazi appeasers is alive today.
A culture of argument is just broken if it operates like this. We have to consider opinions that were actually made, not opinions that can be constructed by pulling things out of context, inventing stuff etc. Pretty much exactly why I defended Ophelia on YNH.
Ugh, lots of typos in this one. Replace “thing” with “think” or “thinks” in some unspecified locations (not Dick Cheney’s house).
Hitch,
I wouldn’t say I was offering much of an argument there. It’s just that there has been rather a lot of discussion of Eagleton on this site. I don’t know whether you’ve already done any searching, as Ophelia suggested. Maybe I was giving vent to a gut feeling that you seem to hold out more hope of getting somewhere with Eagleton than some of the regulars here. So, it isn’t that I disagree with you, but it’s gotten so that it’s gotten a bit difficult to take Eagleton seriously at all, because of precisely some of the things you mention.
Stewart, makes sense. I tend to give people benefit of the doubt for very long periods of time. Heck I didn’t give up the idea that YNH might admit he moscharacterized folks. Unfortunately he still didn’t really admit that but it doesn’t matter anymore. For fair minded observers it is pretty clear now.
I do see a place for your attitude. After all, I think it was what got YNH to make his worst mistakes. At no point did I ever consider leaving a comment there (not even after the confession, when even PZ broke his silence), because my feeling that it was all a facade concealing something even nastier than was proven was so strong.
That’s a good point, come to think of it – Oedipus and Greg have gotten a lot of credit for exposing YNH, but Hitch deserves a lot of credit too. That long patient determined attempt to get YNH to admit some things was what led to PollyO agreeing with PollyO.
Mmmmph. Still makes me laugh.
You should have seen me laughing when the two comments popped up. Reaction one, laugh hysterically, reaction two, oh no, screenshot fast. Reaction three, post something to make it explicit.
See I didn’t know Greg and Oedipus were on about them/it. I just knew that the commenters taunted me falsely claiming I said they were sock puppets. Basically they were playing with the concept in the argument. But I don’t tend to accuse folks without good evidence, so I of course never called them sock puppets even though it smelled that they not only agreed with each other but used the same line of arguing…
Really, I think he was looking for a way to ban me, but I wasn’t giving him anything that could be seen as away from the point or impolite. He tried to troll-bait me too, and I just returned the factual challenge from the beginning.
The moment he tried to construct the final case for banning me, he got careless and that’s when we got the Polly-O! thing.
I don’t think he meant to be discovered by his own sock puppets taunts. I think he thought he was safe in what he did and that was a sensible route to get me branded as a troll if I claimed it.
But from Greg and Oedipus now we know that he really was pretty much on thin ice.
In any case, I strongly doubt it was one, but I have no evidence beyond that the volume of postings seem very high to me for just one person.
Yes – the volume of posting gave me serious pause at the beginning. In fact it caused me to dismiss the whole idea at first. “This isn’t ‘we’; this ‘we’ is bogus; there’s fakery here.” [looks around some more] “Nah, there’s too much content here, it is more than one person; never mind.”
But then it started getting careless, and I decided that it might be more than one person but it fer sher was telling a lot of whoppers, and most of the commenters were………………..imaginary friends.
Ophelia: http://thebuddhaisnotserious.wordpress.com/2010/06/19/the-curious-case-of-the-youre-not-helping-blog/#comment-374
and following.
Hitch – I know. I was away, but I’ve caught up now. I’m staggered – and relieved. A much better ending.
Well, there’s nothing I can add. I’m only commenting here now because I’ve done so in so many other places in the last day that you might think I’d forgotten where my home was…
Heh heh. And very helpful commenting it was, too, Stewart.
I hope you have toddled off to bed now – you have to take young Mozart to kindergarten in the morning!
Done. Kindergarten holidays start in a few days, but yesterday afternoon they had a pot-luck picnic to say goodbye to those already leaving (because they weren’t about to pay a whole month for just a few days worth). At one point, all the kids were called up to sing a song. Mine started off shy and wouldn’t go up without his mother. Then, when they’d sung it, he just kept on going and did another loud chorus solo, climaxing with a run around the whole group. We all just gaped.
Just so you don’t think this was off-topic, I do assume that it proves there’s no god.
Heehee. Stage nerves at the beginning, then performance chases them away, and out comes The Star.
Proves whatever is most appropriate.