Markos Moulitsas Swings At Kathy Sierra, Misses Badly Click HERE to Bring Up Full Post

Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos, April 12, 2007:

Calls for a "blogger code of conduct" are stupid, as is one of the chief justifications of it:

The draft voluntary code follows incidents where a U.S. blogger and author received death threats by anonymous posters on her site.

I'm in and out of commission, so I hadn't heard of this so-called "death threat" thing. So I looked it up.

Prominent blogger Kathy Sierra has called on the blogosphere to combat the culture of abuse online.

It follows a series of death threats which have forced her to cancel a public appearance and suspend her blog.

Ms Sierra described on her blog how she had been subject to a campaign of threats, including a post that featured a picture of her next to a noose.

Look, if you blog, and blog about controversial [----], you'll get idiotic emails. Most of the time, said "death threats" don't even exist -- evidenced by the fact that the crying bloggers and journalists always fail to produce said "death threats". I suspect many are like this gem I recently received:

AIDS will be killing more amd more of you liberals every year. We conservatives have all the money, and you will be shining our shoes. You will stay in your minimum wage jobs. You are poor. We are rich. We get to travel. You don't. You have to scrape for tips. How about that 2000 election? Nigger Cochran couldn't save you. Is it true that "liberal" means "small penis" in Esperanto? Republicans will hold the Presidency until 2029 at least. You think you have power with Dago Pelosi, but you work for us. We let you "win" an election here and there just to fool you. Pretty cool how the Taliban would let stone walls fall on homosexuals. That is what will happen to liberals. God does not love liberals. That is why he gave you AIDS. Let's hope more gays and liberals get beaten up. From your genetic superior.

Dear, where to begin...

1. Kathy Sierra, whose stalking Crablaw covered some weeks ago, was not a "battle blogger." Crablaw Maryland Weekly is a battle blog. It declares itself to the an Enemy of the State. It takes on theocrats, homophobes, racists, sexists, appeasers of sexual violence, antisemites, bull[----]ers, weenies, hacks and general purpose busybodies. That's a LOT of people. I say plenty of controversial things on this blog, often aggressively, and I have never gotten a death threat.Kathy Sierra talked about technology, not gay marriage or separation of church and state.

2. The implication that women who face sexually predatory death threats - not just "all you will die of a disease" but particularized threats - from their critics should simply brush it off is asinine and comes from a standpoint of remarkably un-self-conscious male privilege from such predation. So even if Sierra had been talking about hardball politics, instead of about tech, her predator had no moral right and no legal right to send a sexually predatory death threat. When you tell an assault survivor that she had it coming and she should STFU if she finds such conduct unacceptable, what you are doing is silencing her. The bitch had it coming; how DARE she object! Kos was remarkably fact-free on this point.

3. To clarify, Kathy Sierra got this and a whole lot of other material from one of her critics, a mock noose made of women's underwear, with Sierra's own face portrayed bizarrely, almost corpse-like. For writing a non-controversial tech blog. The image was sickening, but has been taken off the web, mercifully. Law enforcement is apparently actively pursuing this matter. The text hate-spam Kos got is NOT comparable to this, not even close.

4. Zuzu of Feministe did a great, straight-forward job of taking Kos and his locker-room psychology to the tool shed for this. I punched out from my hourly job to post this, because I don't want any of my readers to think that Democratic operatives get some kind of pass from the rules here.

5. Some blogger code of conduct won't stop either predators like Ms. Sierra's stalker nor retrograde commentary from the likes of Moulitsas. What WILL stop what CAN be stopped is for civilized men and women, but especially men in light of men's frequent lag in "getting it", to step up, call the assailant a worthless predatory piece of garbage addicted to onanistic voyeurism from his mother's tool shed, and to stand up for victims who reasonably fear such predation, instead of using a national liberal and Democratic platform to tell such victims to STFU.

What Kos did was worse than calling a bunch of innocent basketball players "nappy-headed hos." Imus is a repeat offender on that sort of thing but what Kos did was terrible and premeditated - as a liberal, as a Democrat, as a leading voice in the progressive blogosphere and as a man. He should apologize to Ms. Sierra by personal letter, at least.

There is NO free pass for liberals and Democrats. NONE.

UPDATE: What Jessica Valenti of Feministing said over at TPM Cafe.

I think it will be interesting to see who among the liberal blogosphere is willing to challenge Kos on this, given that he has a certain amount of influence (I won't say power) by means of his blog advertising network which supplies ads and cash to many liberal blogs. Crab Media is not affiliated with Moulitsas' ad network. The feminist blogosphere has been on the case promptly as noted above as well as at Lindsay Beyerstein, Amanda Marcotte, Echidne and undoubtedly others.

UPDATE: Out of sheer disgust at Moulitsas' arrogant refusal to honor justice and crime victims more than his own ego in his "clarification" that ends appropriately with "that's all," I have written the dreaded GBCW diary over at Big Orange and will no longer be providing content to Kos Media, LLC in any formal or informal setting.