Maybe Days

HOLY SHIT. A direct response. I guess there’s always a first time. :) More evidence being forceful with these people, and not ignoring them or being civil in response at first, is worth it. Usually, when I respond to this sort of thing, I just get bitten. But, perhaps against my better judgement, here we go! Advance apologies for length.

pervocracy:

Hoo boy did MayMay have a response to this.  Skim down to the bottom after the cute guinea pig if you don’t want to read a whole lot of “kill yourself” or if you’re just sick of this whole thing by now.

I want to preface this by pointing out that I’m an abuse survivor, and have never committed or been accused of any kind of abuse.  So right off the bat, this sort of puts the whole “I’m doing this because fighting abuse is more important than your little feelings” motivation into question.

Well that’s certainly a remarkable way to start this conversation.

Here’s why: in a conversation about creating or improving tools to resist rape culture, your perspective is important regardless of whether you’re an abuse survivor or not, so it doesn’t really matter whether you are or aren’t. By the same token, it doesn’t matter if I’m an abuse survivor or not. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been accused of abuse or not. It doesn’t matter if I’ve been accused of abuse or not.

I think we both agree that rape culture is A Thing, and we live in it. That means we are both complicit with systems of coercion, and when those systems touch sexuality, with rape culture. I don’t know if we both agree that we need to face our own abusiveness, because I don’t think you actually admit to the complicity you have in this system, or your role in its perpetuation despite your best efforts (which I do genuinely believe are your best efforts—I think you care about the things you say you care about, I just think you’re terrible at actually being effective in that work). The reason I think you don’t really admit to your complicity is because you point-blank just said you “have never committed…any kind of abuse.”

WOW. I mean, WOW. Talk about an extreme form of denial and hero-complex! But, wait a second, isn’t a hero (or “martyr”) complex exactly what you and your popular kids clique constantly accuse me of having? Hmm….

So, Cliff, I think right off the bat we’re working from two very fundamentally different positions, and perhaps that’s why it’s no surprise that the words we use don’t align with our respective meanings of them. I submit that the words you use are stretched to the point of meaninglessness, that your blunt, categorical, and unabashed denial of any possible abusive behavior on your part—ever!—is a symptom of at least an unwillingness to do more work than you have already done.

And, look, I’ve always been very clear about this: I’m not asking you to prove that you’ve done any work. I’m just asking you to do it, and constantly pushing you (the general you, not you in particular, Cliff, although certainly you as well) to do it more, and better. And when you make clear that you’d really rather not do that work, or claim to not need to do any more of it because you’ve already figured it all out, when you’re that stalwart, that self-assured, that confident you’ve “never committed…any kind of abuse”?

Well, let’s just say I’m justifiably skeptical.

What, exactly, are you trying to signal with that preface? And to whom? Would you change your tune if you were accused of abuse? If so, why? If not, why? Would the accusation’s “falseness” or “truthness” change how you responded to it, or not?

These are questions I’ve been grappling with concretely for a long time, in part because the mountain of accusations against me grows and grows the more people like you chime in with your opinions and judgements about how I should live my life, how I should behave, what language I should use, and how abusive I am or am not. The Internet is a telephone on steroids and so when you chime in about me like that you’re playing a massive game of telephone, deliberately at my expense. But that’s actually okay. I’m a public figure. I know that. You’re certainly within your rights to say whatever you like about me. Also, when you do say stuff about me, sometimes it makes me think. Occasionally (rarely, but it has happened) you challenge me to be better. Sometimes you really hurt me, very deeply, very personally, and sometimes being that hurt is downright useful to me.

But here’s the thing, Cliff. I don’t trust that you’ve actually considered those questions about yourself. I don’t think you think you need to. I think you think you’re above that. And I don’t actually think you are above that. So I get really angry at you when you use your relative popularity in the narrow subsection of the Internet social justice community (a subsection I’m a part of but reach far beyond as well) to do the cyberbullying equivalent of sending the dogs on me. It’s, well, it’s kind of abusive, Cliff. Moreover, I think my increasingly hostile responses to this treatment by you and your friends over the course of years is very understandable for most people who actually take a close look at it.

I think your behavior over time has clearly shown your primary concern is with effectively marking yourself as a “safe” and “good” person, someone who’s “never committed…any kind of abuse,” and therefore your efforts inevitably focus on only doing work necessary to prevent yourself from being labelled “an abuser,” which of course you aren’t because, after all, you’re not “that kind of person”, right? You are above reproach. And it’s important that everyone knows that about you, Cliff.

Cliff, this is a dangerous way to behave. It makes you, personally, very dangerous to a lot of people. That behavior is what a fellow blogger termed “personality manicuring.” Check it out. Coupled with a lack of awareness or admission of one’s own power (and privilege is a form of power), that dangerousness is easily misdirected, or exploited by the very systems one claims to be resisting.

But y’know what? Not even that changes how logic works, so none of this is directly relevant to large parts of the conversation about Predator Alert Tool’s efficacy anyway. All this conversation about my abusiveness or your abusiveness are ad-hominem derails you’ve been magnifying, intentionally, for a long time. And while your “little feelings” are one thing, your actual behavior magnifying ad-hominem derails, however, absolutely throws a lot of your motivations for engaging this conversation into question.

But, hey, you’ve actually engaged me more-or-less as a decent human being for once, instead of starting out as part of the dogpile like so many times before, so I’m going to do the same and assume good faith. For now.

maymay:

pervocracy:

[snip]

It’s unfortunate you’re still alive, Cliff,

Why? I mean, shit, say I did die.  What would that change?  Would that somehow reduce the amount of abuse in the BDSM scene?

Given that you believe yourself to have “never committed…any kind of abuse,” and that I judge your behavior towards me to be kind of abusive, then yes. If you killed yourself, there are definitely some people who involve themselves in the BDSM Scene, such as myself, who would be subjected to less abuse.

It wouldn’t even make your life easier, because if you think people are hard on you now, imagine how people (and law enforcement) would react if you succeeded in hounding someone to death.

That sounds like a threat, but I’m going to reply as if it’s a concern for my well-being.

Think for a moment, in ernest, and realistically, about what would happen if someone whose first and ongoing interactions with me consisted of telling me things like I’m “garbage” committed suicide after I tweeted the two words “kill yourself” back at them. Is it possible that the force of the State would come down on me? I guess it’s possible. Is it likely? I don’t think so.

Also, how likely do you really think it is that a tweet in such a situation could be reasonably determined to be the cause of suicide? People don’t just go around killing themselves because someone they’ve engaged first replies that way to the insult they’ve hurled across the Internet. People kill themselves because the totality of the pain they’re experiencing in their lives dramatically outpaces their ability to process and cope with it.

When you try to shame me for saying “kill yourself” in these contexts, one thing you’re doing is imparting unrealistic power to the words of strangers to affect your own life, which is a fundamentally disempowering thing to model for people. You’re also seriously trivializing all the other influences in the circumstances in which real people actually commit suicide.

That’s why it’s a tone argument, Cliff. You should know this. I think you do know this. I just think you’re not really willing to consider the hard radical conclusions that are staring you in the face. And, like, I get that. I mean, those conclusions are scary.

But they’re also really empowering, and really worth considering. If you’re willing to do a bit of reading to keep exploring them, I suggest starting at this Facebook thread, which began when I wrote:

When you wonder why I’m an ass to strangers & if I’m even meaner to people I love, it tells me being mean to people you love & nice to strangers is normalized for you, instead of visa versa.

That thread also discusses the important distinction between speaking to “strangers” versus talking to “the public.”

I’ve actually spent time thinking this through, and sometimes I still do because it’s really interesting to me and helpful in keeping me alive, too. I genuinely believe that telling people I don’t know well to go kill themselves is not actually as terrible a thing as other people think it is. I’m happy to come to different conclusions than you about this, but you can’t ethically categorically eschew tone arguments and then concoct circumstances, especially circumstances like the ones borne from lots of bullying and silencing like we’re having now, in which you get convenient loopholes to avoid the hard work of creating an integrious ethical system for yourself to live by.

That’s just lazy. And I’ll call you the fuck out on it.

[snipped for length/ranting, go to the link if you care]

But since you’ve shown time and again that you care way more about your own social standing, I really do hope you kill yourself

Once again, it’s really fucking creepy that you think the only reason to be upset by “kill yourself” is a cynical popularity ploy.

I’m not sure where you got the impression that I “think the only reason to be upset by ‘kill yourself’ is a cynical popularity ploy.” That’s not what I think, nor have I ever said that’s what I think. What I said was I think you care more about being popular than doing the hard work of understanding why I’m using that phrase, and even more than doing the very easy work of looking at the context in which that phrase is getting used. What I think is a cynical popularity ploy on your part is trying to reframe this issue as “maymay thinks the only reason to be upset by ‘kill yourself’ is a popularity ploy.” THAT is a popularity ploy, and while I once thought that was beneath you, you proved me wrong.

For the record, as someone who’s been suicidal in the past and occasionally still ruminates on my own death with uncomfortable frequency, I do understand the power of the words “kill yourself.” I understand how that can be and is triggering for a lot of people. But perhaps unlike you, I don’t believe human beings have the right to be free from triggers. I also and especially don’t believe humans whose first interaction with other humans is to tell them that they’re “garbage” have the right to be free from triggering responses to that action.

I do understand where you’re coming from when you say things like, “[It’s not ethical to tell anyone, even maymay, to kill themselves] because it would be more likely to trigger bystanders than to have any [other] impact.” I think that’s a really disgusting way to behave, and I respect that you disagree. I just think you’re tragically wrong.

I’m not sure how to make this more clear than I already have, so I’ll just repeat myself:

I’m not here to make you believe in safety or reassurance or comfort. I’m not here to be your friend, or hold your hand, or tell you things are going to be okay. I’m not here to tell you you’re a good person, to tell you to keep your chin up, or to be strong on your journey.

I’m here to make a difference. […] People like you think that there’s a sacredness to “caring about the individual” that goes hand-in-hand with “caring about The Cause.” You’re wrong. Sacrosanctity is a form of insidious corruption.

We’ll all be dead soon; you’ll be dead soon, and so will I. And if we prioritize our utterly insignificant lives above anything our lives stand for, then we don’t truly respect the lives of the people who will inhabit the reality we’ve failed to make better.

In other words, Cliff, I’m not willing to prioritize the potential of other people’s discomfort over the actuality of making an impact. Triggers are hard things to deal with, but they’re also things that we have to learn to deal with. Other people’s triggers are ultimately their own shit; they need to own that. This isn’t to say I won’t help them when I can, but it is to say that I won’t do other people’s work mitigating their triggers for them.

If you are willing to mitigate other people’s triggers for them, if you think that makes you a better person, you’re obviously within your rights to keep doing that. I’m not here to tell you how to feel about your own ethics. But I find that way of behaving patronizing, and insulting, and ultimately disempowering. So, I don’t behave in that way, your vilification of me for it notwithstanding.

But you know what, popularity actually does matter if you’re trying to accomplish a change in the culture.  I’ve sought an audience for my writing not because I’m looking to be an Internet Celebrity, but because I think I have some good messages so I want them to get out there. I don’t think it’s immoral to act in that interest.

Agreed. What’s immoral is becoming so invested in your own popularity that you are unwilling to stake your reputation on something that’s unpopular, or unwilling to critically examine how that popularity inevitably affects your complicity with systems of power. Popularity and power are related. Fucking question that shit.

I think it’s pretty obvious to everyone that I’m willing to destroy reputations, including my own, in the pursuit of something I consider more important. Are you? If not, you show yourself to be eminently exploitable, because it keeps you behaving as the person you think other people think you are. And that person is never going to be as powerful as whoever you want to be, at any given moment, in any given situation, or as ethical in any given future situation without an ability to reconsider what responsibilities they have in new and changing contexts.

On that note, I’m particularly fond of this quote by the poet Rumi: “Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious.”

What Rumi doesn’t mention is that when someone does this, other people (like you, Cliff) will attack that someone because they’ve broken expectations. (This is evidenced in the case of you and I by your earlier post in which you express “disappointment” in me; disappointment belies expectation.) Rumi also doesn’t mention that destroying your reputation can be a helluva lot of fun. ;)

[snip]

First, (obviously?) none of the Predator Alert Tools can tell you who is or is not a predator—that’s not a computer’s job, it’s a specific human’s job. More specifically, it’s everyone’s job to do for themselves. […] there is no ethical alternative to using your own judgement.

Wait, WHAT???  I thought your whole crusade was because of these magical tools that are more important than human lives, and now you’re saying you don’t really care if they work because people should just take personal responsibility for not getting abused???

No, see, you’re still operating under the assumption that for the Predator Alert Tool to “work,” it has to determine which people are “predators” and which people are not in a binary fashion. This also betrays your deeply flawed thought processes in which you maintain a binary distinction between “abusers” and “not-abusers,” as I mentioned to you in the prior post, and unpacked from your preface to this post.

You seem to believe that getting rid of “rapists” is the same as ending “rape culture.” That is incorrect. Further, you seem to think that I’ve been writing code with the presumption that “abuse” can be distilled to a universal characteristic applicable to every person who uses Predator Alert Tool, in every situation. Worst of all for me personally, you’ve only now shown even a hint of beginning to question that assumption about me and my work. Well, that explains a lot.

What I am telling you, Cliff, is that your premise is wrong. Your model of reality is flawed. You have a glaring error in your discourse. And because of this, you are making critical mistakes in your approach to what you call “social justice” that gives oppression—the DNA of evil—a certain power over you. I am telling you, in no uncertain terms, that you are corrupt.

I understand that this hurts to hear. I understand that it can be hard to explore how you’ve given something you care deeply about more power over you than you have over it. I understand that it’s terribly painful to examine the ways in which your behavior doesn’t align with your ideals. That doesn’t mean what I’m saying is wrong.

Cliff, I very rarely patiently explain first principles, because I believe my time is better spent applying said principles. I’m a terrible educator because I’m typically very impatient. But you are important to me precisely because you have spent so much energy trying to hurt me, trying to discredit me, trying to dissuade people from understanding how the Predator Alert Tools are designed, and you’re important because you have the ability to reach an audience I cannot. So I genuinely want you to understand the mistake you’re making.

I’ve written at length about all of these principles, and I’ll encourage you to re-read my posts about them. But if you’re to really understand them, you have to be willing to question your premises. Rape is not rape culture; as a piece of public domain code, Predator Alert Tool only has the power to resist the latter, not the former.

Limited to writing, I don’t know how to explain myself better than the many times I’ve already articulated these ideas. So consider this an invitation to discuss the Predator Alert Tool face-to-face, as peers, where we can be more patient with one another. My only condition is that you respect my humanity, my intelligence, and my intentions.

Meanwhile, please read or re-read the following in-depth explanations of the Predator Alert Tool’s purpose and functioning, listed in no particular order, with an open mind. These were written by an array of people, including but not limited to me:

• Rape Culture, meet Internet Culture: PAT-OKC and other online anti-rape initiatives
• Predator Alert Tool comes to Facebook
• Why We Need a Predator Alert Tool for Facebook
• Monogamous Cultural Norms Contribute to Protecting Abusers
• You Can Take It Back: Consent as a Felt Sense

There’s a lot more useful exposition in the links embedded in those posts, too. And yes, I know that’s a lot of content. But when so many influential people, such as yourself, have such flawed ideas about the very basics, it takes a lot of words to get ideas across and through all that resistance.

[snip]

 It is certainly fitting with your modus operandi of being popular and hating on convenient enemies (of which I am all too pleased to embody) to have people avoid critical thinking on their own, and encouraging them instead to take whatever information they receive from you as gospel, oh great answerer of Tumblr asks. That kind of paternalistic approach you’re taking is the same way oppressors work, even if the words they use vary. So, of the two of us, Cliff, it’s not me whose behavior in this interaction functionally results in people being less empowered.

Again.. what?  I’m trying to parse this, and the best I’ve got is “saying you have an opinion different from somebody else’s opinion, and worse yet telling people about it, is oppression.”

I’ll try to break this down for you:

1. “It is certainly fitting with your modus operandi of being popular,” means: “I am not surprised that you take actions to make sure that you remain popular, given how you say this is important to you,"…
2. "…and hating on convenient enemies (of which I am all too pleased to embody)”, means: “one way to make sure you stay popular is to find other people who a lot of people you care about influencing think isn’t as good as you, and then compare yourself against them to show how much better you are, and I’m in some ways pleased that I’ve been able to be a foil for you to do that, as it’s been useful to us both…”
3. “…to have people avoid critical thinking on their own, and encouraging them instead to take whatever information they receive from you as gospel,” means: “crafting presentations of yourself and your enemies in such a way as to make your readers more heavily rely on your assessment of yourself and the other person is useful for maintaining the kind of public image that feels good, but this is actually an unethical way to behave…”
4. “…oh great answerer of Tumblr asks,” means, well, that’s just me being snarky. ;)
5. “That kind of paternalistic approach you’re taking is the way oppressors work, even if the words they use vary.” This means: Doing the kind of image-crafting through selective omission, decontextualization, etc. that I’ve observed you doing is also how I’ve observed people who you describe as oppressive behaving, both towards you and towards me. I see very little difference in the tactics someone like you and someone like, say, Donna Hughes uses, and I think that speaks volumes about you.
6. “So, of the two of us, Cliff, it’s not me whose behavior in this interaction functionally results in people being less empowered.” This means, of the two us, the tactics I use makes more information more accessible to more people in more contexts with more primary sources, which gives them more of an opportunity to think for themselves rather than take what I say on faith or trust. I do this in order to model what ethical behavior looks like, which is all about prioritizing people’s ability to control their lives, and their thoughts, on their own. I do this better than you, Cliff, because I care more about that outcome than about staying popular.

I hope that explanation clarifies this part. :)

Of course, this isn’t the first time I’ve made these points, but you don’t see Cliff linking to any of those posts. Consider reading a post on my blog making that point in a different way. And keep reading Pervocracy’s blog for more posts that selectively ignore mine, of course.

Yes, there are posts on my blog that aren’t about you. Quite a few of them. Horrors.  (If I had better willpower and self-preservation instincts 100% of my posts wouldn’t be about you, but alas.)

This is the kind of remark I expect you not to make should you accept my invitation to discuss the Predator Alert Tool in person.

With regard to the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife, you apparently think that the “jokes and grudges” are a problem and lead to the tool being less useful, when in fact the opposite has proven to be true. [snip] In fact, even one of your buddy-buddy activist blogger fellow petty cowards, Thomas Millar cogently addressed this very derail you’re making:

You might expect that people would spam the database to make it useless.  There are many obvious griefing entries, just junk filled in with silly descriptions.  But so what? In fact, sometimes, the patterns of those entries tell a story themselves.  Someone named a British kinkster, and the response over the next two days was a flood of obvious griefer traffic, many of the reports made by people who identified themselves and were in fact friends of the guy identified as having violated consent.  This is the community response to survivors’ stories, captured in real time, the support for the accused and pressure to shut down disclosure.  That swarm had one other nugget in it, though: another report that the accused had violated someone’s consent. 

Okay, point taken, although this is expecting people to dig pretty deep in the database.  But fair enough; the general idea of an off-site place to discuss predatory behavior on FetLife is actually a good idea.  Someone who’s trustworthy, open to criticism, and makes survivors feel safe should start one.

YES PLEASE OH MY GOD YES SOMEONE ELSE SHOULD START ONE! I have been all but begging someone else to do something like this from the very beginning. It’s more than a year later! To date, I’m still the only one maintaining these databases, the only person writing new tools, the only person who’s contributed code, and as far as I know all the other people who would have the technical means and personal motivation to actually do this won’t touch the idea, much less the code, with a ten foot pole because (according to them!) of the sorts of things you’ve been saying about me and this project.

For fuck’s sake, Cliff, how much clearer can it be that you’ve done a great deal of harm to this process, and how much clearer than this do I have be that I’d like to please have these ideas out there being worked on by all sorts of people who aren’t me? I’ve been saying exactly that, in so many ways, ever since this began, and I’ve had to work against the tide of people like you who have been trying to force the conversation to be about me instead of about making sure other people have access to these tools and more.

And THEN you exclaim horror and confusion at why I’m so goddamned exasperated? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? AUGH.

That said, no, it’s not expecting people to dig pretty deep in the database. While you may be overwhelmed with the view of the entire database all on one page, that’s not how the Predator Alert Tool for FetLife’s interface works. When you’re using the tool in your browser and browsing FetLife, you only see the reports for the profile you’re currently viewing. If you’re not viewing a profile page, you never see the full reports, just a yellow box that outlines the profile pic that’s been flagged. That’s a much more manageable chunk of data to sift through. Plus, it’s contextually restricted to the people you interact with on FetLife.

So, again, if you can’t understand why I’m utterly fed up with your spreading of completely ignorant misinformation, then I don’t think we have anything more to discuss, ever.

Also, it’s kinda funny how your rebuttal had to be couched in “by the way, this quote is from another evil monster.”

I don’t understand the joke you think I made. I find nothing funny about, nor intended anything funny about, my statement about Thomas Millar.

[snip]

So, there’s that. If you’re still alive tomorrow, Cliff, try coming up with a critique that we haven’t already addressed. I’d genuinely be interested in your constructive feedback about the tools, but I’m not going to be nice to you when you purposefully make ad-hominem attacks, encourage logical fallacies, decontextualize my words, actions, and intents on your platform to hoard your own social capital, selectively ignore my posts, and generally try shaming me into behaving the way you’d like to see me behave with tone arguments. That’s just cyberbullying, and I’m going to keep telling anyone who does that to me to kill themselves, because doing so is actually appropriate and helpful in defeating the social censorship and misinformation you’re evidently hell-bent on reinforcing.

No, it’s not helpful. It just makes people respond to your tools with “oh, the ‘kill yourself’ guy?” instead of even considering their usefulness.  And like I said, God forbid someone actually did die; even if you don’t have any moral qualms about that, your whole mission would be completely tanked.

I understand saying “fuck off” to critics; you’re certainly not obligated to give every criticism a polite response, or any response.  But responding with pages-long screeds about people’s deaths is… that kinda goes beyond “tone” and into verbal abuse. (It’s also sort of appropriative to bring up the “tone argument,” which was meant to explain why oppressed people aren’t always polite about their oppression, when the “oppression” you’re suffering is people calling you a jerk on the Internet.) I mean, if the whole point here is that you’re willing to do anything to fight abuse, shouldn’t you be willing to not abuse people?  Change starts at home.

And of fucking course I “selectively ignore” you, how egotistical do you have to be to think it’s malicious for people to talk to you without reading every word you ever wrote?

…Egotistical enough to think that people should die if they say anything bad about some marginally-useful browser extensions you wrote.

Okay, I’ve just, as in literally yesterday, addressed this, but you apparently selectively ignored that, too, so I’m just going to quote myself:

Yesterday, the various Predator Alert Tool posts on my blog had one of their biggest single days ever: over 1,050 hits.

After weeks of trying to share the idea with anyone who’d listen, and weeks of seeing people literally refuse to share the link, mention the idea, or even just remark on its existence publicly, despite their self-professed “little” knowledge about it and me, I called those people out for being supportive of rape culture because they made clear that they cared more about their personal distaste for me than they cared about spreading ideas and sharing empowering tools with rape survivors.

Then, when someone on Twitter took a jab at me for saying that, I told him to kill himself. This, in turn, lead to even more people trying to shame me for using such language, so I told those people to kill themselves, too.

Lo and behold, it worked.

[…]

Over the course of the day, traffic to Predator Alert Tool posts spiked, over 90% of which was “new” traffic (people who’d never seen my blog before), and some landing pages, such as the “No good excuse for not building sexual assault prevention tools into every social network on the Internet” post saw some of the lowest bounce rates I’ve ever gotten: 35%.

In other words, if you think shaming me out of telling people who’s first ever interaction with me is telling me that I’m “garbage” and who admit to having no un-addressed critique of the anti-rape culture work itself to go kill themselves is an unacceptable tactic, then it’s just not going to work.

For one thing, it’s not going to work because it’s a tone argument and people who make those arguments are the worst kind of person, so I hope they go kill themselves.

For another, it’s not going to work because the analytics show that when everyone in your immediate sphere of influence is hell-bent on socially censoring your ideas, telling those people to kill themselves loudly enough and unashamedly enough that they freak out about it sends new eyes to your own work, helping you pop that particular social censorship filter bubble.

Cliff, the thing I quoted above was directly linked in the post you’re responding to. Do you, just, like, not click links? Like, ever? Do you just reblag and respond? Do you just, like, never see if what you’re talking about has been addressed and continue to spout your mouth off as if you have all the information you need to have an informed opinion about something you’ve been so adamant about having big, strong, IMPORTANT feelings and opinion about? Do you do this because, as we discussed earlier, you are obviously above reproach?

The whole point of links is so that we don’t have to repeat ourselves. That’s what a link is, a reference to some other relevant bit of information. I’m having trouble accepting that this basic concept of the Internet is foreign to a prolific blogger such as yourself. But then again, judging by how deeply flawed so much of your understanding of other fundamentals are, I wouldn’t be shocked if you just, I dunno, don’t follow links or think to find relevant data before you talk about a topic, I guess.

Cliff, by doing that you paint yourself with a red mark that clearly says you are not mature enough to have these conversations. You do not get to rewrite history to start at the first thing you took offense for and then discount the years of historical context built up around that issue. When I remark about your selectively ignoring my posts, I’m not saying you have to read every word I’ve ever written (that’s a strawperson and you know it), I’m saying you expressly omit the relevant piece of information, and you do it to such a consistent degree my only conclusions are you are dreadfully incompetent and stupid or intentionally malicious and cynical. Part of me can’t even believe it’s gotten to this, it feels like fucking grade school the number of times we’ve had to go around in circles in this one thread for fuck’s sake.

(Hey, speaking of selectively ignoring!  The one thing MayMay didn’t address in this incredibly long rebuttal was how their ex talked about feeling abused and threatened by them and afraid to speak out!  Funny how that one bit slipped their mind!)

*headdesk*

First of all, I did directly address this. Let me quote myself, because apparently you don’t understand how links work?

I’ve answered every accusation that I know exists, at length, in detail, and yet somehow my responses are never even acknowledged by the people making the increasingly ridiculous (to the point of literal, blatant contradiction—”maymay deletes entries about himself in the Predator Alert Tool databases”, followed by, “Hahaha! Maymay is IN the Predator Alert Tool databases, he’s such an abuser!”) accusations about me. Claims of my being a “stalker” and “abusive” literally stem from my not attending a party where I was not welcome, and blogging about being unwelcome, as well as linking to the work of Lisa Millbank when she asked me not to, respectively. You can read more than you ever wanted to know about those things by starting at my posts, “Here’s where ‘maymay is a stalker’ probably comes from,” and “Follow up to ‘When Lisa Millbank writes words, better make sure you understand the context she’s using them in,” respectively and following the links. (And DO FOLLOW THE FUCKING LINKS.) For FetLife-specific accusations, see “FetLife Lies; like, a lot. Reversing the spin.”

If you had cared to follow the fucking links (I’ll just put them here AGAIN so there’s more for you to click on), you would have seen this post, which directly addresses a slew of accusations including that one, and if you really wanted to get in-depth, you’d have seen and followed this other link in that post to every single email between myself and this supposed “ex” (for the record, Maggie is not my ex) during the relevant period of time.

How many times, Cliff? How many times do you expect me to copy-and-paste the same thing over and over again before you acknowledge its existence?

Please, please, please stop ignoring information just because it doesn’t fit your worldview. If you can’t do that, Cliff, we’re done.