Kathy and Chris sitting in a tree...
Posted by Mathew Abonyi Thu, 29 Mar 2007 02:13:06 GMT
Really hot stuff this Kathy Sierra nonsense. Oh wait, a tasteless pun. Is everyone going to hate me now? Grow up!
I usually don’t wade into political debate because it is full of morons, but it’s the middle of the night and I’m really bored. In fact, annoyed. Like I was with Rails 1.2 (how’s that for continuity!)
Who I Sympathise With and Who I Support
I’ll give, frankly, my sympathy to Kathy (who is manic, slightly weak-willed, has some good ideas, some other ideas a little dodgy, and has all the traits of a modern American woman, for good or ill) but I give my serious support to those calling for uncommon sense. This situation is so cliched and yet has slipped passed a few people I respect that I’m going to kill some time here and point out that Dave Winer, who I never heard of before, is right to be skeptical. He made just one mistake: he wasn’t confident enough to spell out why others should be. Please, please stop fuelling the media. It’s just evil.
So, without further ado, the train of thought:
The gist of my view:
- Threats and offensive comments on the internet are newsworthy, therefore not worth my time (unless I’m killing it).
- Being a high-profile speaker in the IT world will have its share of ‘acerbic’ commentary
- Being a blogger will get you the same
- Putting your details online is just dumb
- Men abuse each other using sexual language, but we’ve got used to it over the last five millenia and now think it’s kind of amusing
For example, the Bile Blog, which is an institution in slagging shit off. Thankfully it still exists. Poor Hani doesn’t get a BBC article because the Bile stays strictly asexual. But in a post-feminist, emasculated society, you can get really hated for saying anything remotely gender-specific. I’m sorry, but I don’t buy that. It’s proscriptive and - for the same reason I think I should be able to take a pie or bottle of water on a plane even at the risk of being blown up - molly-coddling. Anyone with some self-respect and decency should feel a little spineless and self-indulgent if they coddle Kathy. A mild dose of feminist support is fine, because I like women to be people rather than objects, but indulging in the mass opinion is, well, like getting a labotomy. Some of the points Kathy made were, of course, right: it’s pretty sick some of those things she cited. However, it’s not rocket science to see she is also over-reacting and taking the majestic ‘blogosphere’ with her. Her avid fans who want to hang her are most likely infantile, possibly autistic twits in the middle of nowhere, with the social graces of a louse.
What’s the truth?
The situation is as plain as a Bulgarian pin-up. Kathy takes the net seriously and flips out. Her readers, which are many, believe her. Others who see those believe her think the readers must be right because there are so many of them. A few people are skeptical and they are lampooned, making the case even stronger that Kathy is being persecuted. It goes to the media, which means it must be true!
Qualifications
Please realise that there are minorities of both idiots and intelligent people in the real world just as much as on the internet, with one slight difference: ‘law’ isn’t firmly established online. That’s quite literally fantastical, but true, and we should cherish that infinite freedom. I don’t want a jackboot in my face for telling someone online they can stick their ideas up their cuntflap or hang by their genitals, nor see a person cuffed and imprisoned for behaving as amorally as Sodom. Your morals and theirs may not mix, but that’s neither here nor there. Morality is for religion, not law and the internet is lawless.
All this lovely lawlessness is because of its anonymity. People use that anonymity out of cowardice (yes) but also safety. Uh huh, that’s right. The louse should be protected too, all the way up until he actually clubs Kathy over the head and brings her back to his cave. That’s real free speech. It’s not pleasant sometimes, but it’s very, very important to realise how extreme an idea it is (the original one, not the hashed up piece of shit served by ‘democracies’ around the world).
Summary
Kathy thinks threats are equal to actions, for which she loses my support, though I still hope she pulls out of her mire of self-doubt and back into posting for her readers. Maybe during that period she should read some comforting Spinozan ideas on epistemology and semantics.
Resorting to qualified (that is, reasoned) support and sympathy is quite different from just jumping on the wagon of lynchers, to use Chris Locke’s own words.
Just as a reminder, this is where enforcing morality leads. BBC are really getting lazy; they’ve got two articles on mass hysteria. But they are the news and cater to the lowest common denominator. It’s quite different when respected, intelligent individuals are the cause of the stir. I only hope some of you will give it a little more consideration next time and do the intelligent thing: be as long-winded as I am. Then no journalist could bear reading it.
see http://duckdown.blogspot.com/2007/03/kathy-sierra-and-ethics.html