Generals Gone Rethuglican; or, Shattered Faith & Pressing Deadlines

UPDATE #4

The General has requested that I not contact him through email again.  You read the email I sent him below, so it must be obvious to you why he reported my address to abuse@gmail.com.  Clearly, he is the one being abused.  He is the one whose career is being threatened by the actions of one of his commenters ... wait, that's me. I will honor his request—and would have, even if I had not independently discovered the IP address of the man stalking me—and would inform him of such, but doing so would constitute harassment. 

The strange thing is, by virtue of being harassed by one of his commenters, I have been summarily banned from commenting on Jesus' General.  I think this speaks volumes about the General's priorities, but I don't want to speculate.  Maybe he is not trying to defend the person whose identity he conspired to hide from me.  Two days ago, I would have given him the benefit of the doubt.  Today?  Not so much. 

My fear is that they will begin slandering me over there again, and I will have no recourse to respond.  (I will not stoop to using proxies.  What I write online I write under my own name.  This is a matter of principle.)  If my fellow liberals should choose to slander me again, I would not be upset if one of you voiced your dissent. 

On another note, in the comments I see two trends emerging.  The first is that I'm experiencing my first taste of how liberals behave. I don't buy it.  Many of the General's commenters have expressed their outrage both in the comments and via email.  I do not believe the actions of "John Casper" or the General reflect upon liberals at large.  A certain type of liberal whose life plays out online, maybe, but these clowns do not represent the left.

The second trend is that I should remove the gloves, pick up a roll of quarters and give as good as I'm getting.  I can't stomach that. I'm not some common internet thug.  I know who "John Casper" is.  I know where he works.  I even know his home phone number.  I may be a brawler, but I am no tattler.  I will not tell his employers what he does on company time.  I will not stoop to his level.  I believe in the medium, no matter how much "John Casper" and the General shake my faith.

The irony in all this is that I need to put the finishing touches on an article espousing the virtues of blogging sometime tomorrow.  You may be surprised to learn that I'm not as sanguine on the idea of online communication as I once was.  I hope that this all passes over, and that my optimism returns shortly, so that my praise for the possibility of online criticism might not ring hollow ... but who knows.  Maybe tomorrow I'll toss my hands in the air and declare that I'm done with all this.

After all, if the anonymous can effectively calumniate this easily, there may be no place for the likes of those who would own up to their words.

Comments

[Steven Bobker]

No one can slander you at JG now that commenting has been disabled. The only comments left enabled are the rarely used Report to the General commenting system and they apparently are currently only being used by some hit-and-run posters who it is claimed will be banned (of course only to appear under another name).

This is all so sad. I know you need to defend yourself, but you also have to be careful not to go appear as crazed as your attacker clearly is. So far you seem to be doing fine, but no one can win a full war. Doesn't ever happen. Trust that the recipients will see the craziness too. Let them react before you do. I would hope none would have the power to summarily harm you with allowing you to mount a credible defense.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Most certainly continue to be the better person -- but don't close off avenues due to a perception of a dilemma that may be false. You may have to use that information at some point. If so, it's slightly less annoying not to have to go back on saying that you wouldn't do it.

As for being slandered on blogs that you've been banned from, I have considerable personal expertise. I'd say that if it's actual slander, like saying that you're a racist, it's worth responding to. If it's the usual kind of "Joe X is a fool and now we can say so since he can't say anything", it's annoying, but best ignored. I don't think it's likely to happen on JG, because the public stance is that the whole subject is over, period.

I'm still hoping that after a couple of days go by, everyone will look back at the more heated aspects of this exchange and wonder what they were thinking. (Of course, you won't get to do that and then forget about it -- the official gears will have been put in motion, paperwork generated, etc.) One comparison to past blog scandals that I haven't yet seen in the Kos saying didn't care about the contractor deaths in Iraq one. Having an online flamewar with someone's death in it somewhere makes it far worse than normal.

[Anthony Paul Smith]

You're kind of like the Job of blogs. I'll be one of your three friends - why won't you just curse blogger and erase your blog?

It was funnier in my head. Good luck with the clusterfuck of idiocy.

[Adam Roberts]

Casper the unfriendly ghost.

Pphhh.

I'm with you, Scott, for what that's worth. It'll be clear to anybody stumbling in on this that you're on the side of the angels here.

[Adam Roberts]

I see now that Rich has already made the 'Casper the unfriendly ghost' joke over at CT.

Soooo ... I trust it doesn't too severely devalue my statement of soldarity that it came pinned to a stale old gag ...

[Adam Kotsko]

So did you ever finish editing that chapter into an article, or have you spent all your time on this stuff?

[Number9]

Now Jesus General is contacting ISP's and lodging harassment charges with people who post anything about Scott or Brittney.

Of course one of the Borg elite from Jesus General's army comes here and lays the blame at Scott's feet. A little clarity Steve, it was Jesus General and his Borg that blew up the PatriotBoy blog.

Steve Bobker, what is your Borg designation? 2 of 3? Do you have any idea how people see you when you "Report to the General"?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Actually, I'm half-finished with that, and nearly completed something I'd promised to write a long, long time ago. (Mentioned above.) As much as this upsets me, I'm still able to work.

Speaking of which, that's what I'll be doing for the next couple of hours.

[Steven Bobker]

Scott, compliments on your commentators and their reading of context. God grief.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Steven, Number9 is not one of "Scott's commenters" in the habitual sense, if that's who you're referring to. If anyone does want a fairly authoritative, recent list of who Scott's habitual commenters are, I suggest that they carefully read through the thread here. By the time you're done with that, perhaps tempers will have cooled. For that matter, anyone who wants to speak on blogfight pro or con matters that don't involve Scott should probably read through that thread in any case, if only so that they'll have something else to think about.

[Tammy]

Hi. I'm coming your way by a link from somewhere else and I've caught up on your current situation and I just want to say that as a person who has been stalked and harassed online myself, I think the people who are encouraging you not to respond to these people anymore are correct. It took me a very long time to come to that place of understanding when others advised me to ignore them myself, however, what I learned was that people who do this sort of thing CANNOT be reasoned with. So you sit on your end and you think to yourself---well, if I just present a rational telling of everything that went down, he/she will see that he/she is being unreasonable/wrong/stalkerish/whatever, but that NEVER happens because the person doing the harassing will never look at the situation from your point of view and will never admit to being wrong. NEVER.

It took me almost a year of wasting my life trying to fight my stalkers to realize how futile my efforts were. The lengths they were willing to go to harm me were insane (hunting down my children from information I had given out in my own blog--posting my home address and phone number to name a few). They did not consider going after my CHILDREN as wrong. They told me it was my fault that I had ever mentioned my children. This is the mentality of the mentally unstable stalker/harasser. They have nothing to lose and they go where they know you will be harmed the most and they simply DO NOT CARE.

I decided to NEVER again refer to them or respond to them in my blog. Since that point, they've pretty much left me alone although once in a while one of them will post something to try to get under my skin and I pretend I haven't seen it. I have everything copied that they have done and keep it in a file, but I refuse to give them anymore attention. They love the attention and feel like they hold some sort of power over you when you respond--and they do what this JG person is doing by trying to make it appear as though YOU are the one initiating things when you are a VICTIM.

So I would suggest keeping all evidence and refusing to give them more airtime because believe you me, they are loving this.

[belle waring]

d00d, why does everybody have to be hating? also, you are one unlucky fellow, scott. maybe I should fix you up with ny sister and you can have the anti-kwisatz haderach, the supremely unlucky being.

[Sheelzebub]

SEK, you've handled this very well. This idiot should keep in mind that this can come back to bite him--if say, you were fired or disciplined, and took it to legal, he could very well be subpoenaed. (Hell, with the level of harassment he's subjecting you to, he should really hope and pray you don't take it to the law.) And how would he explain this activity to his boss? How would he explain this activity to his friends?

As for JG, well--it seems the greatest offenses committed have been some of us bitches calling his actions sexist (apologize! NOW! damn you, harpies!), and letting him know that one of his commenters is a stalker freak. JG's enabling of this is disgusting, but not surprising. It would be one thing if you were trolling his blog--I could understand his reluctance then--but you aren't.

[Adam Kotsko]

Scott, Don't listen to Tammy. I think that you should completely devote yourself to proving your innocence definitively, in the course of several more blog posts. You could even bring back the fine art of "fisking." You're in the right here, and you should push it for all it's worth.

[nm]

#9 is a right-wing Nashville troll. I'm so sorry that he's migrated over to your place. Once again, I think the proper response is none at all.

[Clayton]

I never thought I'd find myself saying this, but you should sue. Given the nature of the academic job market, you're leaving yourself in peril if you don't get JG to retract and apologize and there's no way you'll get him to do that without getting the lawyers involved.

[Tim Lacy]

SEK: I'm with Tammy. I just happened on to your situation after a weekend away from the blogworld, and Acephalous appears to have been taken over by someone else. That's not you, and it means that the stalker has won. Everytime you acknowledge this attention-seeking bastard, you're conceding another victory.

We who pay attention to your posts know you're not some kind of insane racist nutjob. Let the stalker's energy run its course. I guarantee you he/she won't be watching your blog in two weeks. - TL

[Steven Bobker]

NM & Rich, thanks for clearing that up for me. Scott, I didn't realize you and #9 (who seems scary based on his web home) didn't know each other. When I first saw many of your messages, #9 was also a frequent poster in the same area of the same thread and seemed to be a defender of you. My bad and my apology. Steve

[Number9]

Once again, I think the proper response is none at all.

How does that work? Ignoring is enabling. If you don't find the whole "Sir, Reporting to the General Sir" meme disturbing then you need some help.

Ignoring Jesus General is a mistake. I hope Wired Magazine writes up this issue. Not even the Daily KOS goes as far as the General and his "troops". I find bigotry, misogyny, blackmail, and coercion offensive no matter who does it.

Jesus General is a cancer, ignore it and it will grow.

[R.L.Page]

Sweetjesus, I hate the word "enable" in all its forms and uses.