Mobbing Rachel Moss, a WisconFail

When Rachel Moss mocked WisCon on the internet and was outed by badgerbag, she became Internet famous, real-world notorious:

…a few persons upset with Moss and her trolling started posting her personal contact and medical information that they had found online, spreading these details through blogs and forum posts. Others called for supporters to Google bomb her name, and she began to receive threats through email and at her office, with unidentified individuals threatening to render her unemployable. Moss filed a pair of police reports, one with the MPD after receiving what she describes as “vague physical threats” and another with the UWPD after somebody entered her campus office and left behind “a negatively-themed note scribbled on the back of a page ripped from the WisCon programming booklet.”

unfunnybusiness fills in details:

Attendees on Wiscon discover the post, and all hell breaks loose. Massive amounts of rage, including posts (locked and the source for this didn't get caps) of several people threateninghypersurfaces about how they would hurt/STAB her if they saw her on the street.hypersurfaces is forever and ever banned from WisCon. But not content with that, people -- including badgerbag -- find her real name, her school, and write to her dean saying she was violating the schools sexual harrassment policy. I'm not posting the link because it has her real name in it, and I like my permanent account here too much to risk the ToS.

hypersurfaces real name and real info are posted all over by fen who have previously rallied against that sort of thing - because in this case, she clearly deserves it. The casual threats of violence are astounding, and now apparently people are writing her and saying they're going to hurt/kill her - using the real name/addresses so thoughtfully provided by the angry wisconners. Kudos to the mod there for at least stepping up and telling people to knock the shit out.

But nada about this behavior from fen normally so worried about community standards, like coffeeandink. 

So it's okay now to post people's real names and similar information, as long as they do something that really, really pisses you off. Because they deserve it.

In the comments, oulangi says,

I did see some fucked up threats when this first appeared on my flist - people saying they were glad they knew her name/appearance (from google/myspace, joy) because if they saw her in the street they would slap/punch/stab her. Which, YIKES. Those threads seemed to have disappeared/been edited away, one can only hope that the people behind them decided that issuing death threats over internet drama was perhaps a BIT over the top.

Moss asked Something Awful to take down her post, and the sysops did. Then a few readers of SA began mocking Moss, but only online, which suggests SA readers understand a principle that should not be broken lightly: What happens on the internet, stays on the internet.

When Wiscon members talk about what Rachel Moss did, few of them mention what was done to her in return. When they do, the attitude tends to be "she had it coming." The Angry Black Woman's response is typical: "if Rachel Moss feels scared, hurt, embattled, and like she can’t walk down the street without someone having something nasty to say about her, all I can say is: good. She deserves it."

When online mocking is answered with anonymous threats in person's office and attempts to get her fired, when childish deeds are answered with illegal actions, proportionality has been lost.

But to cults, there is no proportionality. There's only what serves the cult.

P.S. Possibly the best response by one of the people Rachel Moss mocked: A Response to Hate.

cults and mobbing

When I wrote the cult of RaceFail ‘09, I left out one trait of cult belief systems from The Culture of Cults:

Psychologically damaging - when established members leave or are expelled, they may develop a particular kind of cult-induced mental disorder, marked by anxiety and difficulty in making decisions. The disorder exhibits similarities to (but is not identical to) post-traumatic stress disorder, and certain types of adjustment disorders. [ICD 10, F60.6, F66.1, etc.]

It didn't seem relevant, but since then, I've been reading the journals of several writers on the RaceFailers' "shit lists" and thinking about my own depression, and I thought there was something there, not in degree, but in kind. Reading about cults and cliques led me to Mobbing. From IN THEIR OWN WORDS: Academic Mobbing: Is Gender a Factor? - Women in Higher Education:

What exactly is mobbing? According to authors Noa Davenport, Ruth Schwartz and Gail Elliott in Mobbing: Emotional Abuse in the American Workplace (Civil Society Publishing, 2004):

...Through innuendo, rumors, and public discrediting, a hostile environment is created in which one individual gathers others to willingly, or unwillingly, participate in continuous malevolent actions to force a person out of the workplace.

These actions escalate into abusive and terrorizing behavior. The victim feels increasingly helpless when the organization does not put a stop to the behavior or may even plan or condone it.

As a result, the individual experiences increasing distress, illness, and social misery…Resignation, termination, or early retirement—the negotiated voluntary or involuntary expulsion from the workplace—follows. For the victim, death—through illness or suicide—may be the final chapter in the mobbing story.

from Warning: Mobbing is Legal, Work with Caution:

...At times mobbing is done as a bully revels in animosity, gaining pleasure from the excitement that it creates, giving the bully what Westhues (2002) calls “the euphoria of collective attack”.

...the target may find that he/she is less productive, creative, and self questioning. Mobbing can leave the target’s life in turmoil (Glass, 1999), feeling embarrassed, frustrated and untrusting. Symptoms may include crying, sleep difficulties, lack of concentration, high blood pressure, gastrointestinal problems, excessive weight loss or gain, depression, alcohol or drug abuse, avoidance of the workplace, and/or uncharacteristic fearfulness (Namie & Namie, 2000; Davenport, Schwartz and Elliot, 1999). For some the degree of symptoms may become severe and include severe depression, panic attacks, heart attack, other severe illnesses, accidents, suicide attempts, violence directed at third parties and symptoms of PTSD (Namie & Namie, 2000; Davenport, Schwartz and Elliot, 1999). These symptoms may lead the target to feel who they are as a person is being stripped away.

...According to Leymann (n.d.) roughly ten to twenty percent of those mobbed in his study seemed to contract a serious illnesses or committed suicide.

Changes take place in relationships inside and outside of work. When the target fails to “bounce back” from the impact of being mobbed, family and friends may begin to abandon the target (Namie & Namie, 2000). According to Westhues (2002) “Not infrequently, mobbing spelled the end of the target’s career, marriage, health, and livelihood.”

ETA (July 2011):

When I think about the logic of anti-racists, I remember this (bold by Julia sparkymonster , yellow highlight by me):

Julia takes a typical Anti-racism Theorist position when she says criticizing AW equals criticizing all POC: if you disagree with a black person who believes in Anti-racism Theory, you're a racist

. Given her difficulty with conventional reasoning, it's entirely understandable why her "academic phallus" is ignored "a bunch".

Her logic made me worry about the provider of her academic phallus. I don't know if sparkymonster  considers herself "out", but it's easy to find her with a quick google. If she's not "out", at the very least, she should tell the folks at the feministsf wiki to do something about this page. Julia, it turns out, is a testament to the ruling class education provided by Harvard University.

The Anti-racist belief that a criticism of an individual equals criticism of a race was shown throughout Racefail 09. Patrick Nielsen Hayden was called a racist for noting that "Some people are smarter than others," even though his "some people" included "white allies" like coffeeandink.

Julia's sarcastic claim that "critical race theory doesn't exist" is a fine example of cult logic: she can afford to be sarcastic because she's speaking of an article of faith; she knows true believers know that critical race theory exists.

But there's a problem with that claim. Black folks on the right and left criticize Critical Race Theory. For example, from the right:

The Lightness of Critical Race Theory by Winkfield F. Twyman, Jr.

From the left:

The limits of anti-racism by Adolph Reed Jr.

Why Anti-Racism Will Fail, by the Rev. Thandeka

How Anti-racists deal with this inconvenient fact, I don't know. Are black folks who reject identitarianism considered race traitors, or allies of the wrong whites?

The answer seems to be that Anti-racism Theorists simply ignore criticism. That's what cults do.

Perhaps the greatest card they palm: They pretend they speak for all people of color while they ignore nearly half of the US's black population. Anti-racism Theory is beloved by middle-class activists, but "African Americans see a widening gulf between the values of middle class and poor blacks, and nearly four-in-ten say that because of the diversity within their community, blacks can no longer be thought of as a single race". So, when an Anti-racist claims to know what black folks want, remember that what they mean is they know what liberal bougie black folks want.

Anti-racists are very comfortable with a theory that has no evidence to support it. They prefer rules to reason, which is why they'll tell you not to say "niggardly" and to ban Huckleberry Finn and that no one should adopt anything from another culture. Rules make life comfortingly simple. You can ignore context.

Which is why I was wrong to get upset at coffeeandink and sparkymonster  and marydell  for taking what I've said out of context. They do not seem to grasp that meaning changes in context.

Possibly of interest:

Testing for racism

The unbearable whiteness and upper class privilege of anti-racism

The comments on the original post are here.

mobbing

Once, when I was discussing equality, someone asked me, "Why do you feel so guilty?" Her assumption appalled me. I don't remember what I said—I probably asked if she really believed the desire to do good comes from guilt.

But now I know more of the answer. When I was young, my brother and sister and I were bullied at school because my father was the only liberal in Levy County. I remember my mother in tears from anonymous death threats from racists. We couldn't get fire insurance because the word was out that the Ku Klux Klan would burn us down—one of my earliest memories is learning how to carry the shotgun to my father in case they came. We kids were sent north for our safety to live with relatives, and for months I wondered if my parents would be killed.

That was my first experience with mobbing. Its consequences can be extreme. From Warning: Mobbing is Legal, Work with Caution:

...the target may find that he/she is less productive, creative, and self questioning. Mobbing can leave the target’s life in turmoil (Glass, 1999), feeling embarrassed, frustrated and untrusting. Symptoms may include crying, sleep difficulties, lack of concentration, high blood pressure, gastrointestinal problems, excessive weight loss or gain, depression, alcohol or drug abuse, avoidance of the workplace, and/or uncharacteristic fearfulness (Namie & Namie, 2000; Davenport, Schwartz and Elliot, 1999). For some the degree of symptoms may become severe and include severe depression, panic attacks, heart attack, other severe illnesses, accidents, suicide attempts, violence directed at third parties and symptoms of PTSD (Namie & Namie, 2000; Davenport, Schwartz and Elliot, 1999). These symptoms may lead the target to feel who they are as a person is being stripped away.

As emotional and psychological changes take place often physical difficulties follow. Those mobbed have been found to experience reduced immunity to infection, heart attacks as well as numerous other health problems (Davenport, Schwartz and Elliot, 1999). According to Leymann (n.d.) roughly ten to twenty percent of those mobbed in his study seemed to contract a serious illnesses or committed suicide.

Changes take place in relationships inside and outside of work. When the target fails to “bounce back” from the impact of being mobbed, family and friends may begin to abandon the target (Namie & Namie, 2000). According to Westhues (2002) “Not infrequently, mobbing spelled the end of the target’s career, marriage, health, and livelihood.”

All of the psychological, physical and relationships changes will likely lead to financial difficulties. Paid time off from work, doctor appointments, therapy, as well as medications may be required.

Even the fear of mobbing can be devastating. Megan Meier killed herself after getting a message saying, "Everybody in O'Fallon knows how you are. You are a bad person and everybody hates you. Have a shitty rest of your life."

Mobbing damages the mobbers as well as the mobbed. Five years after the Salem witch hunts, jurors signed an apology saying, "And we also pray that we may be considered candidly and aright by the living sufferers as being then under the power of a strong and general delusion, utterly unacquainted with and not experienced in matters of that nature."

I've been noticing the posts of people who have been mobbed, and I think I've learned something about myself. From here:

Heinz Leymann ... analyzed the impact of mobbing on the target's psychological well-being and found severe anxiety reactions of either obsession or depression. Leymann defines obsession as the"opposite of depression" where instead of"pathological inactivity" the individual experiences"over-activity and dependency" as a consequence mobbing (Leymann 1992). Just like depressive symptoms, obsessive symptoms can become chronic after a prolonged period of abuse. Permanent personality changes that Leymann noted includes the following:"a hostile suspicious attitude toward the surroundings, a chronic feeling of nervousness that one is in constant danger, compulsory fixation on one's own fate to a degree that exceeds the limit of tolerance of people in one's surroundings (leading to isolation and loneliness), and hypersensitivity with respect to injustices and a constant identification with the suffering of others in an almost compulsory manner" (Leymann 1992).

That "constant identification with the suffering of others in an almost compulsory manner" rings frighteningly true. I'd always thought the problem with the world was that rich people care too little about the rest of us. But maybe being comfortable with comfort is what's normal for humans, and it takes being broken a little to want to heal the world.

understanding cults: Gresham's Law meets the Law of Group Polarization

discussing Freepers at Language Log in "Gresham's Law meets the Law of Group Polarization::

...in some contexts, it seems that an intellectual analog of Gresham's Law applies... It's not only that bad ideas drive good ideas out of circulation, but also that certain kinds of bad ideas reinforce themselves, becoming stronger in the people who believe them to start with, and taking root in the people who don't. 

This is a particularly noxious form of the Law of Group Polarization, which says that "members of a deliberating group predictably move towards a more extreme point in the direction indicated by the members' predeliberation tendencies" (Cass R. Sunstein, "The Law of Group Polarization", Journal of Political Philosophy 10(2), 175-195, 2002; working papers version here). 

As Sunstein explains, "[G]roups consisting of individuals with extremist tendencies are more likely to shift, and likely to shift more (a point that bears on the wellsprings of violence and terrorism; the same is true for groups with some kind of salient shared identity (like Republicans, Democrats, and lawyers, but unlike jurors and experimental subjects).When like-minded people are participating in 'iterated polarization games' -- when they meet regularly, without sustained exposure to competing views -- extreme movements are all the more likely." 

In cases like the Freeper thread that I cited, there seems to me to be an additional factor. In addition to the basic group-polarization dynamic, there's a sort of Gresham's Law effect, whereby people with a taste for the rational evaluation of evidence are likely to withdraw from a forum whose participants are so obviously uninterested in the facts of the matter. As a result, as the group opinion becomes more extreme, the standards of evidence get worse and worse, until we get to the point illustrated in that Freeper thread: a freely-available web link is cited to "prove" the opposite of what it plainly says, and 30-odd participants chime in enthusiastically, over a period of several hours, without even noticing.