Hate mail

[pecunium]

Amanda Marcotte, and Melissa McEwan have both quit the Edwards campaign.

This saddens me, because it will embolden those who wish to 1:stifle the free market of ideas and 2: place the political aspects of religion into the realm of the unspeakable.

But that's not what I'm writing about. Among the reasons they quit, was the hate mail.

Hate mail. Teresa, at Making Light discusses it, and she points out, correctly, that words do hurt, and that those who engage in hate mail mean it it to.

She's right. Back when I was reporting, I got some hate mail. I also got a couple of death threats.

The hate mail wasn't much, and it was something that, in the comfort of the newsroom was survivable, because we all got some of it.

The death threats though... they made you take notice. None of them were ever signed (funny that) and you knew that someone who wanted to kill you, could.

That's a simple fact of life. All of us are vulnerable. We have homes to go to. We have offices to leave. We can all be gotten to.

But that's not what it's all about. It's about fear, and stress. It's about not wanting to get more threats, not wanting to have more worry. It's about silencing those who disagree, and so shaping the discourse.

There are more insidious ways to do it. Wearing the opposition down my mis-representing what they say, or refusing to accept the evidence presented; moving the goalposts, and claiming victory whenever one's specious claims are ignored.

The Lurkers support you in e-mail, you have a list of communists working in the State Department, those are also tools of the "shut up or be blasted" school of supression.

It works. There are people I hate to see in a discussion, because they have stooped to various of these tactics to savage me. So far it's only caused me to retreat from one venue (and that only some time after I got my Lj, and a wider audience), but I think about them; every time I start to write something, wondering what bit of bile and foulness they will choose to send me.

Part of what makes it so insidious is that those who've never wondered if there would be thugs waiting to beat, or kill, them, discount it. Those people ask about the "credibility" of the threat.

So fucking what? If someone sent me a letter, they know someplace I spend time. That's pretty damned credible. E-mail... not as distant a remove as all that. I (as Amanda, and Melissa) publish under my own name. My IP can be logged. It happens there are photos of me (and not all linked to this blog, so I could delete them all, and my face would still be indentifiable).

Writing this has been hard. It calls up fears, and terrors, which are (in an almost Lovecraftian sense) indescribable. Tonight is going to be shitty sleeping, whisky (neat) and the warmth of my lover's body are all that stand between dreamless sleep and the night terrors of sticky dreams.

I've got more baggage than I did 20 years ago, and that makes some of it worse, but I feel for Juan Cole, and Amanda, and Glen Greenwald, and all those who get that sort of shit in the ir inboxes, on a more regular basis than I.

Because there's nothing one can do about it, save to bear up under the load, and keep on keeping on. If "they" want to kill me, then can, but I refuse to let them win.

As has been said, you can kill a free man, but you can't enslave him. He has to acede to that himself.

Comments

[lalouve.livejournal.com]

How I recognise this. I managed to disregard many of the death threats I got when workign security, because any such threat would have had to be carried out at work - they didn't know my name or where I lived. And at work I felt reasonably safe. The death threats I got from a certifiably insane acquaintance were a different matter, though - I still keep a weapon right inside my door. All threats might not be 'credible,' but I'd rather be a little bit paranoid than a little bit dead.
I read some of the mail excerpts that Amanda published, and they were scary. Even when they didn't include open threats, it's frightening that someone would choose to generate and spew such hatred, and it must be even more frightening to be the target. The amount of anger expressed is not quite sane, and that would scare me.
I hope whatever you use to get you through the night works for you. I wish there was something I could do or say that would help, but I've been there, too. And it sucks.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Face to face threats aren't quite the same. At the very least, I know who they are (yeah, they could ge a friend to do it, or hire someone, but the odds?).

It's a lot easier to estimate the risks, and deal with them (the guy who said he was going to shoot me if I kept telling women he was starting to see about the women he'd beaten in the past... while I as at conventions he was also at, I never went anywhere alone).

The dread of the faceless, that's the edge that hate mail has, and why it's so insidious.

TK

[lalouve.livejournal.com]

Yes, I can see the facelessness makes it worse. I rarely had threats with no faces attached to them, although it did happen (I was the only redheaded security guard so it was easy to see when a passed-along threat was for me).

[saoba.livejournal.com]

The threats I saw were quite vivid and detailed. That suggests some level of thought and planning went into making the threats. I don't blame either blogger for being disturbed. The threats and insults were meant to be disturbing.

Given the unfortunate ease with which bloggers personal information has been tracked down and published in the past, if I were Amanda or Melissa I would have been worried for my safety.

I swear, the first right winger who tries to give me the 'the left is full of meanies who use bad words' speech just might get dragged to the nearest computer to read the vile things Amanda and Melissa received in email.

Who Would Jesus Threaten?

[neadods.livejournal.com]

Don'tcha know? It's always fair and reasonable if it's outgoing, but the slightest negativity incoming is oppression and abusive. At least those are the rules that Rush and Malkin et al live by.

(There is an "Oh, poor pitiful Malkin" article in the Washington Post today, which has her saying without irony that "her detractors don't play fair." And even when the Post chronicles other conservatives who think she goes too far, they always have a follow-up quote about how you'd expect that sort of thing as a release after the horrible attacks she has experienced.)

[desert-vixen.livejournal.com]

What really bothers me about the hate mail that Amanda got - I haven't seen any of Melissa's, but I haven't been over that way yet this week - is the focus on violating her. Not, "We're going to kill you" or "We're going to kill your cats" or "You should have the sh*t beaten out of you", but threats like "you need some sense fucked into you", "you should be beaten and raped daily", and my personal fave on the irony scale, "i wish you'd been aborted" - because it usually comes from a member of the "pro-life" crew.

Like the hate mail Biting Beaver got over her problem.

The people who think punishment of women should be linked to sex, whether through violence or through taking away options to end a pregnancy because "sex is a consequence", scare me, as well as the fact that it's apparently all right for those things to be said.

I still just wonder if anyone at the campaign actually read any of their work, and maybe thought about what the possible worst-case scenarios would be - because it sure doesn't look like it.

DV

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

That is truly disgusting. I guess we now have to start asking the question "Who would Jesus rape?" as well.

My fantasy of how to deal with these folks involves tracking them down, finding out where they work, and then sending copies of their letters to their employers and local police departments.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

It's not just women... there's the entire trope that criminals ought to be raped in prison.

It's a subjecgation issue. It's sick, but it's all too human.

As I said when this started, the lack of apparent preparation for what happened is the greatest indictment of the Edwards campaign.

TK

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

Better mail than actual attacks -- I had CPS called on me for something I didn't even write, but was associated with my paper, and Dan FINALLY finished his community service for something similar, but we just couldn't fight any more.

People tried to destroy our lives because of the VERY local politics (think community board, neighborhood, hardly even borough or city) printed in a teeny tiny paper. And in one way they did.

I really feel bad for people who have to put up with that -- people do still die for their ideas and there are a lot of really crazy people out there. I think that's one of the reasons that now that I am returning to school, I haven't even remotely thought of journalism. Let someone else put up with it, I'll make a difference a different way.

They hurt my kids. That's worse than hurting me. MUCH worse.

[cluefairy-j.livejournal.com]

Weird. I clicked over to Making Light and didn't expect to see Dafydd's name (didn't we call him Scouter and he didn't like it?) in the subject line and the content of the post. Weird to see someone we knew as teens in such sterling (sarcasm) company like Michelle Malkin. Huh. Well, from what I remember of him, this definitely fits in the whole birds of a feather flock together thing.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Scouter (which was his name, so far as it mattered, until he decided he'd get better published by changing his name to Dafydd ab Hugh, before that, to annoy him one called him Scooter).

I saw his name about three months ago, praises the mewlings of Jonah, "Juan Cole didn't take my bet, so I don't have to confess I was completely wrong in both my analysis and predictions," Goldberg column.

It was stunning. But then again, the media are all liberal, so it's understandable that, of our friends, Scouter, and Eugene, get paid to ponitificate, and we don't.

TK

[cluefairy-j.livejournal.com]

>>>the media are all liberal, so it's understandable that...>>

*snort*

Yeah, Eugene was a surprise for me a few years ago. I was like, "Whaaa?" and then I went over to check it out...and didn't really go back after reading the stuff there.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

What's funny is how I came to know his brother. Sasha started going out with my, recently, ex-girlfriend.

We were having coffee while she was getting a haircut and he was explaining that he was the idiot-child of the family, despite his graduating, at 19, from UCLA with a double-major in Mathematics and Middle English.

So he's telling me about his non-idiot brother, and I realise it has to be Eugene... So I say, "Wait, is your last name Volokh?" and he says yes.

Small world.

Hard to think I've known Eugene since he was 16.

Harder still to know he now thinks torture is acceptable, even desireable; just not legal. He also seems to be sorry that making it, explicitly legal, isn't likely to be acceptable to the body politic.

Sigh.

TK

[martyn44.livejournal.com]

What's the difference between the anonymous threateners and their Janjaweed buddies raping and slaughtering their way out of Darfur and into a new country?

Well, not a lot, actually, although nobody accuses the Janjaweed of being civilised.

I wish there was something constructive I could say, but the idea of thinking you have the right to threaten someone's life because they dare to disagree with you... What the hell, these people would have got on really well with Adolf and Heinrich and the rest.