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pecuniumAmanda 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2007-02-16 12:29 pm (UTC)(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.)