No precedent
There’s a lot to be disgusted at in Richard Carrier’s inaccurate, patronizing, mental-illness-attributing post about me, but I’ll spare us all and just address one ridiculous assertion.
No one here called for her to depart. She chose to on her own. We all maintain many disagreements with each other at FreethoughBlogs, and criticize each other often, without this result. It appears Benson didn’t think colleagues should publicly criticize each other, particularly in ways she saw as paranoid for some reason. I hope at least she enjoys less stress in her new home.
That’s grotesque. This was not just “disagreement” and it was not just “criticism” – it was vehement moral condemnation and shunning, aided by much misrepresentation.
That is not something that routinely happened on the network. As far as I know it never happened on the network before it happened to me. I’ve been trying to remember, I’ve done some searching – I can neither recall nor find anything like it in the network’s history.
The closest comparison would be to Phil Mason aka Thunderf00t. (Yes, that’s right, they treated me as if I were another Thunderf00t.) But that didn’t happen on the blogs – he was expelled before it could happen on the blogs. There were other behind the scenes tensions at various times, but they didn’t make it onto the blogs…presumably because of that unconscious assumption I’ve mentioned, that we didn’t do that on the blogs. That’s the assumption I didn’t realize I had until people started doing it to me on the blogs, and I was surprised, because I had always assumed we didn’t do that, for obvious reasons.
So, no – Carrier is full of shit about that. (He’s also full of shit about almost everything else in that post.) He’s completely full of shit to imply that the shunning of me was just another disagreement, totally normal, entirely routine. It wasn’t. I can’t think of a single precedent for it.
But hey, if you can, by all means point it out in comments. I’d be interested to know about it.
(There was one incident that, if other bloggers had participated, could have developed into the same kind of thing, but we didn’t. Greta Christina disagreed with Taslima on sex trafficking in what I thought was an excessively heated way. But it ended there, as far as I remember. That’s the difference.)
You might think this was just my personal reaction which is naturally biased in my favor…but I’ve heard privately from a lot of respected people who are horrified by what happened, so no, it’s not just my reaction.
And once again, I am reminded of that line from one of my favorite movies, ‘Repo Man’:
“I remember when I used to like these guys.”
Shorter Richard Carrier: Ophelia is guilty of something because of her refusal to condemn and her refusal to dissociate. Brilliant.
Oh, and to get back to the subject of your post, Richard Carrier should look into a concept called “hostile workplace environment.” How totally disingenuous to say “golly, no one expressly asked her to leave.”
All they did was pour out their venomous hatred in super-long posts. Why would anyone mind working with colleagues like that? I just can’t imagine.
One could note that, when the protagonist Otto says that line referenced above, he is in a club listening to a lounge lizard band who happen to be…
…The Circle Jerks.
As I say, one COULD note that, and one COULD, just possibly, draw a parallel…but that would be wrong.
Clamboy – you had me momentarily confused. I watched Repo Men a couple of weeks back…
I like Richard Carrier, mostly within his area of expertise, I love Greta, once again mostly within her area of expertise.I love Ophelia for her fight for social justice. I could foresee Carrier’s position would be this, due to his MO in the past. I hope he keeps writing about what he knows how. I’m a reader, I’m in no hurry to break up with anyone, but in this case I had to show my solidarity with Ophelia, because I think she is the victim of a gross case of persecution.
Lest we forget, the comment threads on those posts were full of Melby-style “GTFO NOW!” comments, completely uncurated by the blog owners, and hence implicitly approved and promoted by said bloggers. And these were the same people who condemned Michael Nugent for allowing his comment threads to be a sewer spash-pool for Pitters. So yeah, Richard Carrier, you guys DID tell Ophelia to leave, even if you disingenuously hide behind the simplistic rationalization that you didn’t actually say it yourself.
Thank you, Carlos.
Mr FP @ 8 –
The commenters were very helpful that way.
But anyway a high enough level of anger and hostility and shoutiness obviously amounts to saying GTFO. That’s why I thought we had that implicit rule that we don’t do that on the blogs. I was very pissed off at Justin Griffith when he got all pallsy with the slime pit, but I’m pretty sure I never said so on the blog, because…I just assumed we weren’t supposed to brawl with each other on our blogs.
One blogger did say about me “I’m so glad you’re gone!” I don’t know which one though – I saw a screenshot with the name redacted.
Ophelia in OP:
Yep. And Carrier was just the latest of the lot of them, each of them happily self-righteous-in-a-condemny-sort-of-way … and ultimately detestable. That includes many of their singing-from-the-same-songbook commenters that provided cover to our heroic bloggers mentioned in this thread. “Must not diverge in thought. Must not explore my own thoughts. Must not understand why I am reciting others’ thoughts. Peace be with us.”
clamboy @1, that’s a great “Repo Man” quote. But while I remember liking these guys, I can’t remember why. Somehow I didn’t realize they were the smug fucks they are. Now that I see it, how could I ever have missed it?
Ophelia @10:
Yet another brave hero.
Richard Carrier: ‘No one here called for her to depart.’
That’s not true. I saw several comments from long term commenters at FTB asking Ophelia to leave.
I wrote a comment beneath the Carrier article, which is in moderation so I’ll just republish it here.
@”the people she was affiliating with are the enemies of trans people”
An unvarnished attempt to apply Guilt By Association. Shameful, ridiculous and anti-intellectual.
Ophelia Benson and others are right. This is Shunning of the lowest order. You sound like a Scientologist. Yuk.
Arthur@13:
This is a good example of how they very subtly twisted the narrative to take something that was true and turn it into a lie suitable for repetition and ammunition for harassment.
To wit: while it is true that Ophelia commented on the gender critical facebook group, it is a lie that she was or is affiliated with the people in the group. She did what she always does: she asked questions. As has been pointed out to them repeatedly, asking a question of someone does not mean that you endorse them, or that you agree with them, or even that you tolerate them. Once again, Carrier is being disingenuous and purposely deceptive. All the better to show his Good Ally bona fides, strutting about like a male peafowl on full display.
It will cheer you to know that accusing people of mental illness is Carrier’s default position towards his enemies. Dickie takes it for granted that anyone who disagrees with him is crazy as a March hare. He has said he has proof of my imbalance when I skewered his essay in a book I edited a few years ago. When he engaged Bart Ehrman on the topic of the historical Jesus the good professor was dutifully pronounced mad. I know he likes to tout his PhD but the sad truth is this tantrum throwing self-promoting pedantic lacks the temperament to be a scholar. I do not know why. Maybe he’s crazy.
MrFancyPants above, I note much was made of her ‘liking’ of comments there, and of her
jocularitynon-condemnatory interaction. I assure you that is considered to be affiliation by those who did so, they made it most emphatically clear to me in multiple places.They are, in short, not lying, for true values of ‘lying’.
What is with the guilt by association on That Group? Some people I find interesting, some people I find mostly abhorrent. What I do like, very very much, is a willingness to discuss gender as a social phenomenon, enforced on individuals without their consent, and how this echoes through the current trans discussions in feminism.
It’s almost like talking to people one disagrees with is forbidden.
John Morales@15:
While I agree with your assessment vis a vis their mindset, that simply underscores the childish simplicity of their worldview. I would add that, although there are true values of ‘lying’ that might do not match their intentions, there are also true values that do. I choose to interpret them according to the latter due to the sheer number of misrepresentations that they’ve made about her.
Regarding “liking” comments on facebook, I find it remarkable that they interpret that so shallowly. Anyone who has used facebook for any length of time knows that the “like” button is really nothing more than an indicator that you’ve noted the post. In some instances, it can surely really mean appreciation, to be sure, but that is not the totality of how it is used. Like twitter, where “RT does not imply endorsement” is a common caveat, “LIKE means I saw what you said there” is a common usage, albeit implied rather than expressed.
That concept has been available to many of the principals in this duck-mass-measuring festival for a couple of years. The majority of them seem unwilling to admit that it’s a thing.
Funny, that: The people who insist that it’s unreasonable for Ophelia to persist in her opinions after having been informed of Da Troof did precisely the same thing when I brought up the notion that Pharyngula’s commentariat created a hostile workplace environment for me. By their own logic they should be sending me settlement checks right about now.
Adding to Arthur @12:
A long time commenter:
That’s to PZ, and I can’t read that as anything but “I’m not calling for her to be cast out, but if you don’t…” I mean, jeez. I was gobsmacked by that at the time to the extent of bookmarking it, because at the time people were saying that nobody was calling for FTB to expel Benson.
Look, I’m on the record elsewhere as saying that Ophelia Benson handled this situation really badly. I’m also on the record as saying she’s not the only one to do so. Talk about lost opportunities…
Ophelia, I want to clarify that I think you handled things badly in a really stressful situation with people vehemently attacking you.
PatrickG@19:
I think this depends on your perspective and hopes. If your hope was that Ophelia would stay on the network, placate the various haters, and diplomatically pursue some notion of FtB-network peace at the expense of herself as a thinker, then sure, she handled it badly.
On the other hand, if you hoped that she would stay true to her personal sense of right and wrong and intellectual honesty, then she handled it the only way that she could. (And that is very, very far removed from “badly”).
To be honest, I learned a lot from the way she handled this situation. In an extremely good way. Had it been me, in her place, I probably would have buckled to their demands, at a loss of my integrity, then. I’ve avoided speaking out in the past precisely because it might expose me to unfair criticism, but I’m avoiding no longer. Fuck the unfair critics.
That wasn’t my hope. My hope (as a third party) was that, what, a space could be delineated between actual TERFs (which I don’t consider OB to be) and trans activists, and between gender essentialism and identity. From my poorly informed perspective, there’s a great deal of space there, and instead, we’ve seen a hardening of camps that to some degree simply baffles me.
I guess I’m just saying I think the unfair critics won the day, and the unfair critics are still driving the conversation*. My comments about Ophelia Benson were not intended to denigrate, just to say that fuck, I don’t know anyone who would have handled such an awful situation well.
The whole thing has just been shit.
* Missing asterisk comments: I do think OB needs to answer some questions forthrightly, but as I said a few weeks ago, I’m not quite willing to demand answers when she was — and is — being vilified past the level of people who are actually and demonstrably transphobic. She might be quite wrong, in the final analysis, but I’m in the spectators’ stands at the moment.
All hail Ophelia Huckabee! /snort
Such as? She’s already answered every single one of their questions, definitively. What else is there to answer?
To be very clear, in no way am I attempting to imply (directly or indirectly) that OB is responsible for those positions I’m requesting clarification on. To me, at least, it feels that positions regarding, e.g. Cathy Brennan have been limited to responses to accusations of guilt-by-Facebook, and not directly addressing the positions of Brennan.
But, really, I keep imagining how I would feel under such an onslaught, right or wrong. None of us are perfectly rational, particularly when discussing issues of such import (gender issues, gender identity issues, trans issues). I’m also a social media recluse, and even I’ve seen the bombardment on Twitter and Facebook.
I’m quite confident that OB will continue to think about, write about, and make clear her positions on this subject, and I’m quite willing to wait — and argue! Frankly, I’m reluctant to even comment along these lines, since I know I’m not particularly good at internet commenting. Keep working on that, but don’t seem to get much better!
Guess I’ll just close by saying that I said I’d continue reading OB after all of this, and hey, here I am!
That’s pretty unfair, PatrickG. You’re doing right now what they did over at FtB. You’re implying some kind of questions that must be answered, but not taking the step of saying what those might be. Alex Gabriel spent an entire blog post of several hundred words to say, basically, “I can’t point to anything wrong that Ophelia has said or done, but I really think she’s up to something *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*”.
Be better than that. Be direct. Be FORTHRIGHT. If you truly think that there are “questions that Ophelia should answer” then just ask them, already.
You may count me as among the horrified.
I’ve written bits here and there on the dynamics of this. That’s because that’s always been one of my interests. A primary one, even. Ostracisation, the threat thereof, social pressure to conform, how people deal with that, how it shapes even our perceptions, geez, were I taking notes on all of this, I’d be through a few keyboards by now.
And I’ve written also broadly sympathetic stuff, here and there. There are a mix of reasons people have come to this pass. And many of them are far from venal. Moustache-twirling villains are staples of fiction, not of life.
… but: the sum of the result is still really damned nasty. You can be disgusted and fascinated and even in part sympathetic at the same time. I find I’m several of those a lot. And, broadly, I’d say over very similar things.
Speaking of: one of the ethical questions in the middle of this is around individual responsibility for what the groups you participate in collectively do. And this has always been complicated, too. There are limits to this, by no means absolute. But, then, I also generally think we should hold people responsible far war crimes, even when they do so under orders. More specifically, I’ll tell you this about where my judgement on this stands now:
1) I don’t actually know if I’d have been comfortable in the FB group that’s now become infamous through this. Might have depended on my level of engagement, I’d expect. Hard to say. I’m kind assuming I’ve seen the worst of it from what’s been dredged up as evidence*, and I figure if there was a lot more signal against that noise…. Maybe?I have, for the record, walked away from a number of groups over time over the general feeling I don’t want my name near this crowd, or there’s just too many present I figure are too much poison. But I dunno. Unfortunately, if I walked out of every situation that contained an outright bigot, I’d probably get out even less than I do now, probably talk to almost no one. And if I tirelessly hunted and critiqued and disavowed every damned one I walked past in the street, I’d probably get very little else done. Against the prescriptions of the presumably well-meaning there are the messy realities of life, and you can’t realistically always be telling everyone else why they’re wrong all the time. The critical thing being: it seems to me there was still tonnes of space for Ophelia to make her own call, even if I might have walked. This judgement being the critical one in opposition to her critics: they do not have enough to assume what they did, not to have done what they have done. Not. Even. Fucking. Close.
… but, oh, speaking of individual responsibility for collective behaviour, one decision is actually pretty easy, here, as of now. That being:
2) I sure as hell will never be comfortable being in any way associated with the horde again any time soon.
For several reasons. But a few particularly. These being certain in my view grossly presumptuous assumptions of authority and of ownership. The very idea certain of them seem to assume that they could command anyone to answer that specific question (!), and command how (!), and when (!), and the frankly bizarrely backwards assumption and assertion thereafter some of them made it was somehow an act of provocation on Ophelia’s part to refuse (also !). The idea they could demand their space be ‘cleansed’ of the same, when Ophelia (wisely, I think, and absolutely appropriately given that rather stunning set of presumptions) told them to take a flying leap (my words, granted, not hers).
I’m a bit touchy about how people choose to wield what power they have. And even what power they ever assume. You may have noticed. I mentioned epistemological lines I don’t want crossed. That one, nothing much to do with epistemology, it’s a much bigger deal of a no go zone, for me.
I don’t know, MyFancyPants, what I would have done, either. More craven than you fear you would have been? More fuck you than Ophelia was? Regardless, my respect for Ophelia through this has generally only increased, taking into account what a siege it must have felt like (and on the heels of a previous one, from other quarters, not so long ago) or not. I could second guess and armchair quarterback any number of the individual reactions to epistle X on how she’d sinned if I at all wanted to add at this point to the voices on the web telling her what she got wrong, but, seriously, no. Not even. Not gonna. Because the sum of where she went with it? The big calls? I think it’s the right place. And little to do with the ads**. Better to try to stay honest than to try to placate the (I increasingly suspect) ultimately implacable. Maybe there will be a time to rebuild some bridges, quite possibly some time from now, if I see people eyeing the charred piers on the far side, too. But right now, I’d rather there were a nice, really, really wide river between me and that attitude.
* I’m not on FB, unlikely ever to go back now, honestly… Another thing I increasingly do not want to be a part of, more generally, let’s just say.
** I had a subscription, and enough browser-fu I rarely saw them anyway… Whether I am likely to renew that subscription? My judgement right now says: no, regrettably, as there are those still there I do respect, and whose work I think is important.
Meh… 2) should be ‘or any time soon’. As in: okay, maybe not quite ‘never’. Who knows how long I’ll live?
If we’re playing the “how I would have handled things in Ophelia’s position” game, my only contribution is to say that I would have called Jason Thibault’s bluff on his offer to martyr himself and quit FTB if he was making Ophelia feel unwelcome.
Which I admit is a little petty of me, but I like seeing bullshitters called out on stunts like that.
Anyway, I’ve always taken it for granted that, whether they chose to say so or not, there were ALWAYS boundaries that could get someone booted off of a blog network. Like, if some FTB blogger suddenly found Jesus and was promoting Christian fundamentalism, of course they would have been told to take a hike if they didn’t leave voluntarily first. I was a little amused at the declarations post-Thunderfoot that gosh, we never planned for this.
But I really thought it would take more than guilt by association. Indeed, given that some FTB blogs seem to tolerate known slymepitters, it’s an … interesting…. choice of hill on which to die.
I don’t really know what Patrick’s intentions are, but what he is writing is making me feel a bit queasy. Like he’s trying to insinuate things without ever seeming hostile. I guess I’m getting a Grima Wormtongue vibe, never crossing a line but trying to make Ophelia feel bad or to make more people distrust her.
Just come out and say whatever it is you’re trying to say, and don’t hide behind difficulties writing. The thing about writing is that you can go through several drafts, show it to friends, and edit it all you like before you have to put it out there. It is a CLEARER and better medium for communication than speech, unless you are the kind of person who needs to use your body language to persuade people not to argue with you, by trying to intimidate them or trying to make it seem like a joke, or acting too vulnerable to face an honest evaluation of the things you say. Adult up and write what you mean.
Jamila Bey (see here and here). This – not Thunderf00t – is the closest comparison to your case which I can think of.
I was also wondering about Richard’s “we criticize each other often”. I agree with you that a vehement moral criticism has been a very rare bird. Criticism (between the bloggers, in public) does happen indeed but sometimes it’s not that easy to notice. Like: sometimes you can see that given views are criticized, you guess easily whose views they are, but no name is provided by the critic.
I used to think that an occasional direct confrontation would be a good idea. But I probably underestimated the dangers.
Oh, that was to keep the blogger “safe.”
Ah yes, Jamila! Quite right, and I’d forgotten about that. Thank you.
I agree, that’s a pretty good parallel.
And, after a search at the network B&W, I find that I did weigh in on it once, rather cautiously. Rather cautiously but maybe not cautiously enough…maybe I should have just stfu, when so many others were weighing in.
I think, if I remember correctly, I was torn – I wanted to stay out of it, because I like Jamila a lot, and she had only just arrived here, and if we hadn’t known she was a Republican whose fault was that? I wanted not to pile on – I do remember that pretty clearly.
But – and maybe this explains some of what I’m finding so inexplicable – I also felt it was somewhat cowardly of me to say nothing at all, somewhat unfair to colleagues. I felt as if I were letting them take the heat while I just ducked from it.
So I did cautiously address what I took (and take) it to mean to reach out to CPAC. I confined it to the substance of the issue, but…
…well I’m not sure what I think of that now. Mixed.
Well, I see you mentioning succinctly and matter-of-factly the ways in which you disagreed with Jamila and agreed with someone else.
I can’t speak for the degree to which that may well have added to a pile-on or siege mentality or those other wonderful potentials.
But you notably did not engage in acronymized name-calling, dehumanizing, or calls for ousters — or refraining from calling for an ouster but saying you “understood” such calls.
True, I didn’t, but just as you say – that may well have added to a pile-on or siege mentality or those other wonderful potentials. I now have very direct experience of how that can happen, from the FTB posts by Heina and Dana. Those didn’t bash me directly, but they did perform loyalty to the apparent Network Consensus on Trans Issues that I had violated, so it certainly did feel like an addition to the pile-on to me.
Then again I think the preceding network posts that disagreed with Jamila about CPAC did it without hostility, so it’s possible that she felt disagreed with but not badgered or piled on. Or not. I don’t know.
It helps that Jamila is highly charismatic. I’m not. If I were someone else I would probably hate me too.
Thanks, slime pitters, but I already know you hate me too; no need to come here to tell me so.
Also – ewwwwww, the speed with which they pounce. That one took 12 minutes, and it was longish so it took a few minutes to write – so it was almost instantaneous. More than four years, and they’re still non-stop monitoring. It’s great being that important, but ewwwwww it’s also creepy.
@MrFancyPants: Well, since I’m apparently being read in a way I’m totally not intending, that’s obviously on me.I guess I’ll just try once more and then give up. I was really tired last night and probably just shouldn’t have commented at all (and no, Samantha, that’s not me trying to cover my ass, that’s me admitting fault).
I’ll give it one last stab to try and convey where I’m coming from, then I’m pretty much just giving up and going away. Here are my thoughts, as clear as I can make em:
* people are attacking OB for participation in the infamous Facebook group (as prima facie evidence of evil, which I disagree with)
* OB has, to my knowledge, made several posts about how guilt-by-association from being a member of that group is ridiculous. However, without directly referencing the fact of (extremely minor) participation
* this is being seen as a sign of great evil (“would she do this with Stormfront?” and the like)
* a clearer declaration of refutation might have/could head off further unpleasantness (this is what I mean by “needs to answer”). Shit, I’m not even advocating a particular answer, I’m just saying that not directly engaging provides unnecessary fodder.
So you know, maybe that’s completely wrong, maybe I missed a post where she did exactly that (though a recent comment by John Morales led me to conclude not, which is why I posted at all!), maybe it’s not desirable, maybe (probably) it wouldn’t work anyway. This whole situation, after all, involves some people who are accusing OB of actively contributing to the death of trans people BECAUSE OMG A FACEBOOK POST AND THOSE QUESTIONABLE COMMENTS FROM BACK IN THE DAY. I’m not sure there’s really much to do about that. :/
But does that at all help with clearing up what I was trying to say? I’m trying to drive at tactics with regards to one particular sideshow in this debacle, not content.
By the way, Samantha: instead of being forced to speculate as to my motives and leaping to the worst possible conclusion, you could “adult up”, take 30 seconds to find out if I have any history wrt this subject, and realize that I was and have been actively defending OB since the FTB shitshow, and while that doesn’t give me the right to be unclear and certainly doesn’t make me automatically right, it does give me the right to tell you to fuck right off with your insinuations that I’m here deliberately trying to stir up mischief. Grima fucking Wormtongue? Asshole.
It’s a moot point anyway. I’m not going to comment on this topic in future at all because I keep failing, so you don’t have to worry about me nauseating you further.
Sorry, it was not my intention to add to the turmoil! When writing my comment, I didn’t even know about your old post.
This is a preposterous claim. Just forget it. Every commenter here is a clear counterexample.
Ariel, oh, you didn’t! I meant it when I said thank you – I really did want to know if there were precedents.
Patrick G, sorry. I appreciate your comments. (I know you’re not mad at me, just a general hostly sorry.)
@ OB:
I’m very sorry that I contributed to a sense of hostility. I mean hell, I’m offering mild criticism of you for not being A+/110% perfect in the midst of a shitstorm, and I can’t even read my own comments carefully enough to realize how they can be misread!
I’m also really sorry for violating my own personal commandment of not commenting after extremely long work days. It never ends well. :/
Fwiw, I finally got off my ass and pledged to your Patreon, because you’ve given me a lot of stuff to chew on over the years, whether or not I agree with you. I guess I should thank being accused of being a Slymepit-like troll/Grima Wormtongue for crossing that off my to-do list. :D
Thank you for clarifying, Patrick. I’ve been in places where I have seen Ophelia talking about her participation in those groups. I have not been in places where I saw you talking about Ophelia. Ergo, we came to this with different sets of background knowledge and no awareness of what the other didn’t know.
I’m sorry it never occurred to me to spend my time running some kind of blog comment background check on you rather than asking you why you were phrasing things in a manner that seemed loaded. I always thought asking a person what they mean is the best way to find out, although admittedly, I chose a metaphor for the emotional impression I was getting that was rather strong for someone I was unfamiliar with. I apologize for not taking your feelings into consideration when I did that.
I’ve been more or less keeping up with what FtB bloggers have been saying about this, to my utter disappointment. But fuck this, I’m not reading Carrier’s piece. I’m already aware of what a snivelling lickspittle he is, and the single paragraph that you focus on is enough to invalidate his entire piece.
As for FtB Network, I’m down to checking only Pharyngula, not as often as I used to, and avoiding the comments section entirely. But in spite of Carrier’s chirpy little wish for your happiness here, Ophelia, I’ve personally found this new/old place of yours refreshing and – it seems to me – possessing a newly invigorated commentariat. I can’t answer for you, Ophelia, but I’m happier and less stressed out here.
Haha Nan, yes, that passive-aggressive last sentence of Carrier’s was so annoying…especially since he’s clueless enough to call it my “new” place. This “new” place has been here since September 2002.
Anyway yes, I love it here, and I love being back. NO ADS NO ADS NO ADS. And no shitty treacherous colleagues.
Thank you everyone who makes NO ADS possible via the Patreon. Thank you Patrick.