Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Sacha,
intent does matter.
It tends to be a hallmark of performative pile-ons to disqualify intent as a factor.
A phrase that Emma uses here -- "read kindly" -- seems important to me. Reading what the subject has said in the worst possible light rarely ends well. Assuming good faith is better.
Another characteristic is the narrowing of terms of an acceptable apology. Sometimes this is a reasonable expectation. Sometimes it's just laying bear traps for the subject who offers the wrong apology.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Barnard,
Certainly his & Russell’s response to the WJ JT thing was a world away from the kinds of shouting down via various ists, isms & phobes you often see.
Yes. Gio was calmer than I was. Which is why all the shouting-down stuff that was pinned on him was so odd. He was just measured and effective.
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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
Yes, I was trying to get that across in the post.
But look at the stupid Polly Gillespie pile-on recently. Her dumb comment about the danger for foreign tourists of NZ beaches was stripped of its context (the Piha Rescue TV show) and people went nuts about it. After about two hours of it, someone I regard as quite sensible was calling her “scum”. It went way beyond “rude”.
but deny anyone a right to issue death threats. The pileon is a nuanced phenomenon that in some cases is a legit protest campaign and in others a nasty exercise in ostracism and shame.
I’ve seen friends hurt in the latter – sometimes by other friends, which I find particularly disconcerting.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Andre Alessi,
Sometimes, yes it is. Having one person reply to you with “You’re wrong!” might be no big deal to most people. Having a thousand, or ten thousand, people say it all at the same time, and for days and weeks afterwards, is potentially emotionally devastating. Especially when each one of those replies is from someone who thinks that they, uniquely, have a duty to say so, and a right to be responded to in return.
Yes, this. Which is why I've been quite surprised to see it rationalised away here.
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Hmm. This isn't the only place this is going on.
Interesting follow-up to Goldberg on TheWire, including the tweets. Kendall speculates that Brittney Cooper was misrepresented, Cooper says she wasn't.
On NPR, Kendall says that while she might "be someone's bully in their mind" she's not a bully because she doesn't dox them them or call their employers.
And Suey Park is just a jerk on Twitter.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Emma Hart,
Perhaps it might be better to say “undesirable things that are sometimes said and done in the name of intersectionality.”
Or we could say “call-out culture” and stop pretending it goes one way.
Let's say that, then.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Danielle,
Again, let’s not rationalise one form of bullying by citing another.
There is a pretty big qualitative difference between sending a bunch of “you’re a crappy feminist” tweets and *sending a black person pictures of lynchings*. Holy shit.
People in Goldberg’s story talked to her about being scared to say anything, for fear of ostracisation. Kendall seemed to relish her own reputation as a bully.
It’s not saying they’re the same thing, or equivalent, to feel that one does not warrant the other. Or that one does not matter because the other does.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to giovanni tiso,
And I know she makes those points in that column, but she goes on calling it “intersectionality”.
The attacks on intersectionality for what it never was – including from my political corner – are increasing at an alarming rate.
Perhaps it might be better to say "undesirable things that are sometimes said and done in the name of intersectionality."
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
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:
Again, let's not rationalise one form of bullying by citing another.
As much as Kendall is keen to wave it away, shitty and damaging things happened to women on the other side of those battles too.
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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. We should be careful not to excise the right of criticism when expressing our distaste for pile-ons, nor to lump all reactions to the lowest trolling denominator.
Yeah, it's perhaps not the time to go over it all again, but I was surprised you had such a low opinion of the Goldberg essay, which I thought took on a difficult topic pretty well, but directed me to two responses to it which I felt verged on the despicable.