It Must Be Nice

It Must Be Nice

To have a job where your fannish/SF/online life is not a detriment, but an enhancement of your professional standing. Or, it must be nice not to have a damn job at all, and thus say whatever crazy shit comes to mind whenever one wants.

It’s always great to hear from people who have nothing to lose chide people who have to walk a fine line every day of their lives about how they should be and do.

I’m so disgusted right now that I can’t even form a properly snarky post. You people ought to be ashamed of yourselves.

ETA: the first link used to go to a blog post by Kathryn Cramer, but she redirected the URL.  Classy!  Now it just links to her About page.  To understand why I linked to her with those words, I offer an excerpt from the post titled “I Am Appalled”:

“Kathryn Cramer has been linking my LJ to my full name on wikis and in other people’s blog comments ”

[coffeeandink’s full name] owes me an apology. Anyone interested in what I might have actually done to give such overblown offense should look HERE and HERE. […]

(I’ve seen strange tactics for protecting one’s Internet handle before, but I’m quite nonplussed at the tactic of flaming people who have actually acquiesced to requests for concealment of identity. What was she thinking?!?)

[…]

Can I just say, for the record, that I think it is wildly unethical to flame, under a fake name that you refuse to associate with your real name and history, your former boss and people you formerly worked with at a company, especially like claiming to take the moral high ground on an issue like, say, race. I am appalled, just really appalled, & even more appalled by people who think this is a legitimate use of an alias. It is not.

Google cache here, for now.

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26 thoughts on “It Must Be Nice

  1. Someone clearly needs to redesign computers to that they have an additional check before one posts:

    Are you Will Shetterly? Y/N

    and not post anything if he clicks yes. Weirdly, I think this would work for him as it doesn’t for most trolls because he stands by his words.

    But yes, shame on them. Posting someone’s real name without their permission is NEVER right (My real name isn’t remotely hidden, but I’d still take it as an affront if anyone did try and post my personal information for no good reason.)

    1. “Someone clearly needs to redesign computers to that they have an additional check before one posts:

      Are you Will Shetterly? Y/N”

      Oh, dude, YES. Like the breathalyzers on drunk drivers’ cars.

  2. I was going to yell at you for engaging. But… as a person who has to hide the fact that I _have_ hobbies and opinions from my employers, let alone that I’ve aired my opinions about my hobbies on the internet from time to time… well, seeing Micole’s name hanging out there in the open is deeply troubling. Not as horrifying as someone posting a picture of their ex-wife naked, perhaps… but it leaves Micole vulnerable just the same, and quite possibly has more practical impact.

    This is not integrity. This is not a demand for accountability–as a public blogger and a regular SF con-goer, Micole has been plenty open and accessible, and has remained completely accountable for her actions.

    No, this is a petty way of taking advantage of someone who has a weakness you don’t have, in order to try and bully them into silence–just because that someone disagrees with and/or doesn’t like you and/or your friends.

    And even if Ms. Cramer thinks Micole lacks common manners for complaining about her after she acquiesced… how does posting her last name again show better integrity? It’s petty, it’s vengeful, and it’s low.

  3. I wanted to call Will S out for being out of order, but at coffeeandinks request I am not commenting at his blog about it. After the crap the troll and her crew through at my family since last year, I found myself regreting being as open about my identity as I am. I got so used to being open in my activism and opinions, that now that I have kids I worry about how what I say will affect them, not from the people I am talking to, but from the trolls lurking. It must be nice to be like these people and be above such bothersome things as caring about someone else.

  4. I’m livid, seriously. Kathryn Cramer has been online long enough to know the kind of harrassment that female and PoC bloggers have to put up with–and more to the point, that there are perfectly valid reasons not to use your real name online. Her arrogance is truly breathtaking.

  5. Yes. I have the easy comfort of having a job that wouldn’t care about my blog unless I were leaking spoilers, and a lifestyle that wouldn’t raise many hackles with conservative America. I try hard to be aware of what my friends do and don’t want revealed about them — when I should use a name instead of a handle, when it’s acceptable to mention events that happened in real life, and so on.

    To see someone take that trust, that responsibility, and use it as a blunt instrument to silence someone who disagrees with his or her viewpoint, is disgusting. As I said on another blog, I have no hope of Shetterly becoming a better person, so I’m left with the hope that he will continue to slide into obscurity at his present brisk rate, soon relegated to an embarrassed footnote in a chapter of the pre-maturity history of the science fiction community.

  6. The crazypants, they wear themselves!

    You know, I come from the Olympics of stupid internet behavior, and I’m still puzzled that this sounded like a good idea to anybody over the age of nine. I mean, what next, perhaps some nice, steaming Hitler who was mean to you in highschool?

    Oh wait, Shetterly’s already invoked the Klan. Never mind.

  7. Um, what the hell is the big deal? It’s not like he did any major research to discover her name. It was already out there – she was blogging under part of it, fer crissakes.

    1. OK, but actually, choosing to use your first name is different than having your full name linked to your LJ via Yahoo/Google.

      One of the points here is that one can choose, first of all, the name one decides to use.

      /Part of that/ may or may not involve not wanting one’s offline life to know about one’s online activities. Which is a valid choice.

      1. “One of the points here is that one can choose, first of all, the name one decides to use.”

        Sure.

        “/Part of that/ may or may not involve not wanting one’s offline life to know about one’s online activities. Which is a valid choice.”

        Well, if that is part of it, then choosing a name that /doesn’t/ return your full name via a simple Google search on “FirstName, LiteraryGenre” is a very basic step to take. Not taking it doesn’t make your choice invalid, per se, it just makes it very, very stupid. At the least, disinegenuous.

        Honestly – if you’re worried about your name getting out to different places? Um, don’t use it. Use a pseudonym, free e-mail, whatever.

        1. A google search of her full name didn’t turn up her blog until Will Shetterly and Kathryn Cramer outed her.

          1. Her LJ turned up her first name, and her first name and LiteraryGenre turned up her full name. A->B, B->C, A->C. Simple.

    2. I post under 2/3 of my real name. I’ve mentioned my surnames (Past and present) where they could theoretically be found by anyone who cared. I’m sure anyone who read my blog for a year or two could put together a pretty accurate picture of exactly where I live. And my job hardly would care about anything I’ve posted.

      And I still think it would be deeply offensive (and worrisome) for someone to put the whole Name out there for strangers to find and see, then demand an apology from *me*.

      1. I prefer to stay anonymous online – or, at least, pseudonymous – so I (*gasp*) don’t make it trivial to find out my real name. The issue isn’t whether or not she wanted to establish a pseudonymous identity online, it’s that she went about doing it so badly she has no right to complain when it failed.

        1. Are you SERIOUS? It’s *her* fault when a malicious asshole outs her because she should have tried harder to hide? Did you really just say that?

          1. Did I say it was her *fault*? No. I said that she had no right to complain. If you post online under a complete pseudonym and someone only tracks you down by, say, faking a subpoena to someone’s ISP and then cross-referencing court records, for instance, then yeah – you can complain, and rightfully so. But using your first name, a distinctive first name, and then allowing your real name and your blogging identity to overlap online? Sure the postal employees shouldn’t read your postcards, and it would certainly be wrong of them to copy your CC number off the back of one of them, but you’d be an idiot to put it there to begin with, knamean?

          2. First of all, it’s not that easy to keep your online and offline lives separate, especially if you move in some of the same circles in both places (as is true of many people whose RL friends and blog friends overlap). What are you supposed to do, give a pseudonym to everyone you meet IRL? You sit on a panel at a con using your real name, or someone puts up a picture that they took of you at last night’s con dinner with your real name, or people address you by your real first name when they comment in your blog, and the line gets eroded.

            The idea that we have to be constantly vigilant and massively restrict our activities or else we “can’t complain” when malicious people use our information against us is ridiculous.

            But on top of that — this not a case of someone reposting information that they turned up in a cursory googling. My understanding (and admittedly, this is an outsider’s understanding) is that all of the people involved knew each other offline, at least passingly. It is a case of someone taking personal information about another person that they *already had* and posting it, information which the person did not want public. That is a huge, blatant violation of Internet etiquette and basic human decency. Damn straight I think she has a right to complain.

  8. Well, I engaged with him because he was disingenously misquoting and misrepresenting my argument–I come from a background that’s similar to his, though with even less money (I didn’t have a trust fund for college, for instance, like Shetterly did; I got a need-based scholarship and worked 30+ hours a week to get through).

    And I would never have been delusional enough to confuse my experience as a broke-ass upper-middle-class white person with the experience of actual working-class white people (let alone with the experience of working-class people of color).

    If I had ever done so, I would hope that my much-missed heroine Patricia Silver (a coal miner’s daughter who was part of this group and wrote beautifully about how she experienced academia as someone from a white, poor, working-class background) would have read me the Riot Act.

    1. Cramer appears to have changed the URL of the blog post that everyone is linking to, so that they are redirected to that site. (God. How petty.) The outing post is still located here on her blog, however.

      1. She made the post password-only – you can’t access it either individually or by looking at the entire month.

  9. Sigh. Shameful behaviour, that. The only time I find that behaviour less than rude or reprehensible is when the other party has actively engaged in criminal conduct.

    I don’t understand this weird backlash against pseudonymity. I’ve been semi-pseudonymous for ages, and while my website is under my real name (because I’m an art monkey and graphic designer) and my LJ is linked to my real name as well, I can see why people would want to preserve their identity from public consumption. (In the cases I’m most familiar with, on the ex-Mormon boards, it’s because folks aren’t ready to have their crisis of faith outed, or because their beliefs will affect their standing in the community or stuff like that. It’s so easy to think of perfectly valid reasons why people don’t want their online lives linked to their offline ones.)

    As a minor note, I’m irritated with the redirect to the MLM site or whatever that is. I freaked out and thought I had a virus. Meh.

Comments are closed.
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