As you know, Oedepus Maximus, with the help of a handful of diligent women and men put all into one place the data needed to prove that the now infamous You’re Not Helping blog was not in fact written by a woman and three men of possible ethnic diversity working out of the Midwestern US. Instead, it was written by one twenty something year old grad student named William working in Alabama. Supposedly. Anyway, what you may not know is that the YNH web site was taken down last night but still exists in various easily accessible fragments here. (Poke around in the updates and comments for the links.)
But I also wanted to point out to you a few other blog posts that you should visit that relate either directly to the YNH meltdown or to the fallout.
The Problem with Sock Puppets
Fraud And Schadenfreude: The You’re Not Helping Archives And Post-Mortems
And, of course, somebody had to write a poem about it: The Saga of the You’re Not Helping Blog
Oh, and is anyone with ovaries (so that it counts) going to go and tell Zuska that she is full of shit? A 20-something year old guy pretends to be a woman to get she-creds, horribly attacks a female blogger, a half dozen people about half female and half male do a little digging, put some facts together and contribute significantly to putting a stop to it, and somehow this is male privilege attacking a few innocent sock puppets? Zuska, I am deeply embarrassed for you. You should have been on top of this. And, I think now you owe a number of people apologies.
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It is amusing to see the obsession a number of people have with dissecting every word that YNH produced.
It should be laughed off or angrily recalled, but people should just move on.
i was baffled by Zuska’s response, too.
You’re Not Helping is now not only blocked but deleted, meaning he has made his decision apparently about whether to return or not.
I like Glendon’s theory as to his actual identity: http://xrl.in/5qo6
I posted something on Zuska’s blog. If one doesn’t read deeply into this it reads like we are ganging up on YNH, especially if you read his final post literally and not enough of the context. I’m sure there is no ill intent here at all.
His final post does claim that folks basically persecuted him and tried to shut him up. If that was true, it’d indeed be bullying by people trying to shut him up. Reality is reverse, but it needs more context to understand this.
I thought Zuska’s comments that more popular bloggers ganged up on YNH were unfair – I may have been around longer, but YNH got way more hits than I do in a week.
And if defending yourself and others in the comments section of a blog where everything you say is taken out of context constitutes bullying, then the meaning of the word has changed.
Do you really think it would help?
YNH has issued another apology,
http://thebuddhaisnotserious.wordpress.com/2010/06/19/the-curious-case-of-the-youre-not-helping-blog/#comment-374
It comes from a Comcast IP address from Tuscaloosa AL, so it appears to be legit.
Dude, you need Communication Is My Field to explain the rhetorical device of reductio ad absurdum to you.
Comrade Physioprof, you need to kiss my ass.
You’re the fucking best, holmes!
That’s better.
Dude, you still need CIMF to splain this shit to you, cause you and your sidekicks are totally not fucking getting it.
Chirag is my friend?
But seriously, before someone gets to “explain” shit, there are two things that can’t be broken: One needs to be taken seriously, and one needs to be credible.
Dude, wouldn’t you consider CIMF as a credible source of serious explanation of reductio ad absurdum?
Chronic Idiopathic Myelofibrosis?
1) Comrade Physioprof may want to find a new saw. Repeating ad nauseam the same things about the same people is the mark of a hack.
2) If you need to explain that your rant was parodic, then you did it wrong.
Like I’m supposed to give a flying fuck what some dumbass Austrobelgian blogger says?
male privilege hur hur hur
Oh well, I told Zuska she’s full of shit, days late, and before seeing this. I probably would have done a better job if I had the faintest idea who she is and what her problem is and what it’s all about – or then again, maybe not. Anyway I told her.
She is, too. That was some heavy-duty sexist bullying that William was doing. Even he gets that now, so if Zuska doesn’t…she’s full of shit.
I think the comment section says it all about Zuska and a few fans (Hi Comrade PhysioProf!). It’s a small subculture who think that a specific set of word play counts for satire. But really it’s lots of stereotypes (mostly anti-male). Yet they themselves have no self-refection and show no sign of humor (outside the humor that they cultivate in their subculture). The tiniest request for correction is inconceivable. They like this slogan: Communication Is Not Your Field. I’m loving it, the ultimate irony. They have no clue how to communicate, because they lack the basic capacity to even listen. It’s all about projecting their sense of “irony” (aka oversimplified anti-male stereotypes) which could be awesome if they had some self-reflection in the mix.
And if you have a point, you don’t understand their satire. You don’t get it, not them.
It’s basically failing satire, or rather idle banter, that they believe to be deep satire, and sold to others as satire.
Well it could be if only they had their facts right. But they are incapable of even taking in a criticism without being both defensive and offensive in response.
Hidden under all this trans-literation are incredibly literal people. They couldn’t even get the joke when I employed their own satirical devices. I would have been up for a multi-layered riff, but not possible. The minds are too rigid, and too out there to be right and find a new target to stereotype.
Like this being on there is like Terry Gross speaking to Gene Simmons, revealing on a broader level, but futile in the specific exercise. For those who haven’t heard the interview, Gene Simmons revealed a complete lack of self-reflection and irony in how he viewed himself. He employed this combined defensive/offensive rhetoric that talks beside the questions Gross had. The interview basically ended with both Gross and Simmons giving specific descriptions how they wished the other person was under the facade. Quite weird.
Anyway, I’m done. If she wants to do the angry angel thing but lack irony, sure she can do it. I’m no more likely going to hang out there than buy a Kiss album though. There is too much good, deep really ironic zany blogs out there to bother.
A little background on “Communication Is Not Your Field” …
Frequent GLB Commenter, any my co-blogger at Quichemoraine.com and the writer of Almost Diamonds blog (at blogspot) Stephanie Zvan made a remark about communication during one of these endless backs and forth with CPP/Isis/Whomever (collectively dubbed The Kliqueons because they form a Clique). Just about that time in that conversation CPP had run out of things to say, so like most seven year olds, he chose to say “Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah” and his form of that was to refer to Stephanie as “Communication is your field” or some variant of that since.
Yes, folks, Comrade Physioprof is willing to tell YOU how to not be a sexist bastard, while at the same time taking away a woman’s name while telling her how to act and what to say and not say.
The persistent mocking is the main thing for me over there. Mocking is fine if it is mutually understood as a joke. If it’s just a way to be right and denigrate, it is indeed a type of bullying.
Sadly in our society very few people can give clear definitions where the boundary is between a joke (yes it can be depricating and worse even, if understood in the right context by all parties) and bullying (here the goal is to use the joke to actually demean the other side).
Mockery in Zuska’s blog is used to demean. I thought they had a real honest joking culture, so I tried to approach it with humor. But no. Under a very shallow surface, they are dead serious. Laughing at the other to defend oneself.
Exactly like the nastier cliques we may have seen in school. Lots of in-group reinforcement and out-group derision. And when people have any criticism, they are very quick to be offended and exhibit reactive aggressive behavior, assuming the worst possible intentions in the other.
Dude, I turned EIGHT this year, and you missed my fucking birthday party and didn’t give me a present! {pout}
Here, I graph for you: http://cheezburger.com/View/3709374464
Can I get the quote were anybody has called someone a bully because they said that calling a person stinky has political implications? Or is this just demagoguery where people make loose and improper connections again?
Hitch- have you been reading GeekMommyProf’s blog, Isis, Zuska, and Jason over at The Thoughtful Animal for the past month or two? If so, and you don’t understand my graph, I’ll be happy to discuss things. If not, then maybe you should be open to the idea that what appear to be ‘loose and improper connections’ are simply *highly context dependent* in a setting where you, personally, are unfamiliar with the context?
I’m all for sub-context. I’m weary of loose connections, because sometime no connection can be constructed to look like a loose connection.
That’s why I am post-structural not structural. Sometimes we impose the structures we want to see. I’m not saying this is the case here, I don’t have any way to know. But I think you get the sense of what I mean.
I indeed to not understand the graph. But if I have to study 2 months worth of comments, that may be too much on my time availability just now.
I suspect that Comrade Physioprof fancies himself a Loki.
My bad if the graph is too esoteric to be funny. The relevant issue is that in this admittedly simplified model, is that the relevant independent variable is “who you are” not “how you behave” (of course, in complicated reality *both* “who” and “how” go into our calculations when we think about who is being a bully; but there are different ways of considering ‘who’- ideally, the fact we are familiar with someone, and trust them, should not weigh overmuch into determining whether they have power that can be abused)
Hitch– Hidden under all this trans-literation are incredibly literal people. They couldn’t even get the joke when I employed their own satirical devices. I would have been up for a multi-layered riff, but not possible. The minds are too rigid, and too out there to be right and find a new target to stereotype.
The descriptor you are looking for is stupid.
Which is why ‘SciBlogs short-bus’, despite its controversy, is an infinitely more appropriate and descriptive label than the awkward, nerdy, niche-joke, ‘Kliqueons’.
*crosses arms in the you-know-Im-right pose*