Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Russell Brown,
I’d appreciate it if anyone who felt moved to take it up with him was polite.
Honestly, I don’t know what the hell Philip’s issue with David’s piece is so what’s the point of taking it up with him? He’s explicitly stated that he’s got no interest in explaining himself (which he doesn’t have to, just because I’d like it) or engaging here. I’m happy to respect that and respond in kind - because I sure don't feel comfortable dropping into someone else's space and requiring they explain themselves.
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If that was Mr Herkt in bilious mode, I really really want to be him when I grow up and find my bliss.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Emma Hart,
Intent matters very much, but it doesn’t make your face, or your heart, stop bleeding.
THIS - and if you've just broken someone's nose, perhaps this would be the ideal moment to NOT make your intent the centre of attention. Effect trumps intent.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to giovanni tiso,
By countering that it wasn’t her intention to offend, she thought that this was sufficient to change the meaning of what she has said. And I find this deeply problematic.
And maybe it wasn’t a certain person's intent to be hideously offensive by opining that rapes wouldn’t happen if women just stayed out of places like Albert Park after dark, but here’s a not so modest proposition. There might just be a rape victim in the room who’s too fucking busy crying and reliving the worse day (and week and years) in their life to parse his intent, or really give a shit about it. Especially when he'd been asked repeatedly by the site owner (that would be you, Russell) to let it go and move on.
Yes, Emma, is totally right about “reading kindly”. But there’s a point where intent ends up being a lot less important than context. I’d probably have been a lot less spiky towards Deborah Coddington in the wake of that story if she hadn’t been expended so much time and effort imputing epic bad faith (and a not so small dollop of flat out personal malice) to Keith and Tse Ming’s patient and detailed critique of what was a pretty shabby piece of work published in a mass market magazine. My tipping point was when she used her Herald on Sunday column to well and truly jump a very ugly shark and land face-first in a bucket of manure. (I’m not going to link to it directly, but Russell’s take down is here.)
I am genuinely sorry for offending those members of the Asian community who are not engaged in criminal activity and who felt discriminated by the same stereotypical brush.
I never set out to upset them and I can’t undo that hurt. I’ve been reminded of the salutary lesson – words have consequences and you can’t take them back.
So far so good, but she just couldn’t leave well-enough alone…
But my apology doesn’t extend to those bandwagon jumpers who used the article to excuse their media equivalent of gang rape. These sadists, I suspect, will never be happy.
Perhaps I’m a terrible human being, but I still can't find a kind reading for that.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Stephen Judd,
And while I try to be better, it’s inevitable that sometimes I won’t. I don’t believe I deserve to be punished or judged too harshly for it either
Sure, we all fuck up, get up and all too often do it all over again. And all of us hope that our darkest days and worse moments aren't what survives us.
But too often I think that very human need to be forgiven can go into a really bad place where we demand people we've wronged give us what we want and "get over it, and move on." A really good principle of recovery is "make direct amends to those you have wronged, except when to do so would injure them or others." While it might salve my conscience, it's actually pretty abusive to impose myself on people who've made it clear they want no contact of any kind -- and have perfectly good reason to do so, considering what a nasty piece of work I used to be when drunk.
And yes, there's people I've really harmed with my behaviour online. It's way above my pay grade to tell then when, or even if, their pain goes away or how they view me as a result. And it works both ways -- I'm never going to get over the resident Kiwibog troll who repeatedly accused me of condoning paedophilia, and Farrar's complete inaction. Yeah, it was seven years ago and I'm probably the only person on earth who remembers (let alone cares). It didn't harm my reputation with anyone whose esteem I'd care to have. But it still makes me sick to recall, and it's not going away no matter who else thinks it should.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to giovanni tiso,
That’s several steps beyond “rude”.
Couldn’t agree more, but it’s a not-so-fine distinction some people find hard to draw.
And before anyone calls me a hypocrite -- I've definitely been on the wrong side of that line, and am thankful to some people around here who "piled on" and expected me to be better. Hope I've turned out to be worth the effort. :)
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Stephen Judd,
I want to preserve my right to be rude to the deserving
I assert my right to snark, rant and be downright rancid about bad arguments and crappy attitudes contained therein. That far, no further. If I consider Gerry Brownlee a terrible minister who had bungled the Christchurch recovery (IMHO & YMMV, of course), that point can be made without slighting references to his weight or appearance, calling him a fag or wishing a painful and violent death upon his head. I'm a lot more interested in Judith Collins and Metiria Turei's policies than who'd make a better personal shopper.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Andre Alessi,
Online modes of communication are so uniquely filtered by individual experience, preferences and asymmetries that there’s genuinely no way to tell how someone else is experiencing that communication unless they tell you.
Another thing about online communication (especially Twitter) is that I don't have comprehensive personal dossiers on everyone who can see what I put out there. And do I really need to to get, say, that further RTing "Gerry Brownlee's a fat cunt - someone should shoot him in the face" would be seriously out of line on every level, no matter what you think of his politics?
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
However, the bikini models in the new Air NZ safety video – well, that got a few tweets.
And thank heavens our dear old friend Bob Jones was around to put those uppity faux-raged university feminist types like Deborah firmly in their place!
Deborah added: "I want to be taken seriously (this is a helluva way to go about it) but it seems that suddenly they are saying my sexuality is all that matters about me." For God's sake, Deborah, the video's not about you. But if you're genuinely offended, which I don't for a minute believe, then don't watch.
Deborah aspires to become an MP and will be an exceptionally good one. But coming across as a prude, which she is not, will kill off any political career.
Ugh... Of course, if Deborah becomes an MP she also better learn not to come across as "shrill" or "extremist" by betraying the slightest hint of irritation, no matter how dire the provocation, or expressing much of an opinion on anything at all. Be especially careful about the other F-word, "feminist". Don't want to be a divisive splitter, talking about irrelevant issues to the likes of Bomber and Chris Trotter and harming your own cause by being all angry and shit.
Amirite, Bob?
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Really don’t want to reopen the whole discussion on Golberg’s piece, which I found very poor, but the reaction proves no such thing, insofar as a lot of people felt vilified and demonised by her framing of the issue, and were entitled to say so.
And in the story itself (on the last page, BTW), African-American feminist blogger Mikki Kendall made this point that gets lost an awful lot in these kind of discussions:
“If you look at the mentions for me, for @BlackAmazon, for @FeministaJones, for a lot of other black feminists, it’s hard for us to see this other stuff as bullying, I’ll be honest with you,” she says. “Because we are getting so much more than ‘I don’t like your article.’ And we’re getting it all day. I had someone who spent four hours last week dumping porn images into my mentions. I’ve had people send me pictures of lynchings. So then when somebody says, ‘Oh, this article is terrible,’ and a bunch of people talk about how terrible an article was, and you say that’s bullying—I’m going to side-eye your definition of bullying.”
So, yeah, I’ve learned the hard way that if I fling myself into a Twitter convo or a discussion thread on a blog without getting myself up to speed on where the discussion is at, or “taking the temperature” of the room, perhaps it’s not all about me when I raise someone’s hackles. And it’s entirely possible that it is all on me if I’ve been tone-deaf or flat out arseholy, so take the ticking off and try to learn something from it rather than demanding everyone else parse my intent and educate me!
That’s still a work in progress from a human being who still fucks up with monotonous regularity, but I’d like to think I’m getting better at it.