Trouble at the Koolaid Point

There's been a general push, among communities suffering harassment, against the notion that vocally calling out malicious actors is 'feeding the trolls' in the traditional exacerbating sense. i.e. standing aside allows further victimization.

Years ago, I found Kathy's posts both very informative and entertaining. She seemed to be very generous with her time and writing. She even took the time to respond to me, personally, once on some question or other.

Something I read at the time about the Weev "data breach" circumstance, that I did not see widely reported. I'm sorry I don't have a reference at hand, so take this as unsupported and from memory: Weev did not immediately reveal the problem. He first took some time (in relative terms; I don't know or recall an absolute quantity) to decide what he was going to do about it and with the data. The reporting implied that perhaps he chose disclosure after realizing there was no other avenue that was personally more advantageous; or perhaps he came to the decision to "do the right thing".

I do NOT support the prosecution of Weev especially under the twisted rationale proffered. The Internet is a public space, and if you are stupid enough, lazy enough, and/or especially simply uncaring and arrogant enough to expose your (and perhaps worse, your customers'/clients') private data there on an unsecured URI/URL, then that is YOUR problem and you DESERVE to be called on it -- all the more so when you do it deliberately as a part of your design.

Nonetheless, I was left with the impression that Weev is not Mr. Goodie-Two-Shoes. (And this was before I knew he was the one who apparently led the bandwagon against Kathy.)

The prosecution shifted attention from the fuck up that is AT&T, onto Weev. Another stupid and probably self-serving prosecution...

And that's the last time I want to use his name. Because, as has become apparent, the loss we are focusing on now has been contributions like those Kathy made to our online world.

So, my two cents. The post implied it is up to us; therefore...

Some of those self promotional brands are multinational megacorps and when you divide the internet hate machine between prez, CEO as you list, plus board members, major shareholder investors, 10 thousand dealership owners, 10 thousand service dept managers, probably 100 thousand salespeople, the average "GM dude" gets a middle finger from the internet hate machine about once every decade and just kinda brushes it off. When the self promotional brand is one woman as the face of social justice warriors (generally speaking, not the specific lady from the article, although we know who I'm talking about), she's going to take the full impact square on full force no protection. Its going to hurt. GM can take a GM sized punch and laugh it off. One nice normal lady cannot take a GM sized punch. She, as a basically nice person, doesn't deserve it at all, but brands will be brands and culturally we think its OK to hit a brand that hard. And she wants to be a brand, so the painful result is not exactly surprising when it happens...

You wanna be as big as GM you better be able to take a GM sized punch. Nobody in the general public understands the difference between her financial statements and GMs statements, they just know her and GM are both on twitter, and we all know what twitter is for, so the guy who was screaming at GM for taking .gov bailout tax money last night is going to be on her case tonight, with 10 million of his "friends" and she's not going to like it.

"I don't consider ... bashing ... a net good"

Any mistake in my summarization of your position is my own. Given that disclaimer, the sound you just heard was every clickbait journalist and sports writer and PR dude in the world just disagreeing with you.

Members of the general public making an emotional connection with a brand is idealized because optimistic people assume it'll be like a laughter filled life long infatuation of a love affair right out of a sappy hollywood romantic comedy movie, forgetting that too many intense human emotional relationships end in hatred, murder, insanity, beatings. Not that many, thankfully, but enough to be a problem when you scale it to a 7 billion person marriage. If you use techniques that give people an emotional response to a brand, you might not like that response... And if you're GM sized you don't care, but if you're one human female sized that punch is going to sting a bit.

(Edited to add, think of social media as a multiplier. You can have the force of a billion dollar brand, if you're lucky and play it well. The bad news is if you don't play it well, you WILL have to be able to take a punch like a billion dollar brand. And that'll hurt if it all lands on just you. And the Billion Dollar Brands like it that way, who needs competition from the little people?)

If there's any reasonable amount of support for your ideas, any at all, you really should have no problem finding work, friends, and wealth. We're not exactly at a point where LGBT rights, feminism, and similar subjects have anywhere close to unanimous support. You only have to look across this discussion board and in most newspapers to see that.

> They were calling for him to be fired for participating in a political campaign they disagreed with.

Yes, that's part of a decent protest - telling the company what they can do to get you back as a customer - and Mozilla could've chosen to ignore them and potentially lose them as customers and community members. That's fine. That would be their choice. Many companies have done so and succeeded - Chick-fil-a, as one example.

You really think that when it comes back round again, if we're nice and don't try to cause any real societal change, the (little-c) conservatives won't try to cause any real change in the opposite direction? That the Government and the media are never going to pick another scapegoat minority for society to go after when the majority is fed up again? That they'll always tell both sides of the story from a fair and neutral perspective? That's never been my experience, and history tells us the complete opposite.

The majority is always going to have immense amounts of power, and they're always going to wield it. We might as well try and push in our direction while we have any power at all (and seriously, we have far less than you think).

Here's a question: We have the right to freedom of association. Is that somehow a lesser right than freedom of speech? Or must we be forced to associate with those whose speech we find bigoted and harmful?

No, I'm pretty sure that free speech is an end in itself. It's how we as humans maintain our integrity in a social context. That's why it's seen as a basic right.

In any case, I have no problem with the fact that you disagree with me on that and I have enough basic respect for you as a human (and even for racists) to be willing to let everyone talk have it all sort out (or not). Marginalizing people only makes them more bitter. It doesn't solve problems.