Man up and defend your right to blog

April 2, 2007
By Billy Dennis

Vaspers the Grate, bloggers who quit when the mean kids start picking on them:

Most of the time, you can win by ignoring, or making fun of, the attacks.

But the worst thing you can do is relent, throw in the towel, and then claim, “I just got tired of hearing them go on and on about it.” I actually knew a pretty woman who gave into a man who wanted to have sex with her. He kept badgering and pleading and coaxing.

She told me, “I figured if I gave him what he wanted, he’d leave me alone.”

But for bullies, terrorists, and pushy people, if you give them an inch, they’ll return to demand a mile.

If we stop blogging, just because we’re being harshed, trolled, flamed, or spammed, what good are we? What are we saying to our enemies? What kind of a legacy and role model are we providing for the next generation of online communicators?

I’ve been pretty lucky here, in that my trolls are relatively mind and are easily chased away (no doubt I’ve jinxed myself). It helps that I know how to ban IP addresses and notify ISPs and the admins of the sites from which trolling originates. In some local cases, I know the admins by name.

Vaspers is ticked at Robert Scoble. I wrote about the Kathy Sierra matter here. I hate have to resort to gender stereotypes here, but Sierra handed the matter like a scared little girl, not a confident, self-assured professional. A man who acted that way would be laughed at, not defended.

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One Response to “ Man up and defend your right to blog ”

  1. vaspersthegrate on April 3, 2007 at 8:33 am

    I’m not angry or annoyed by Scoble’s taking a week off in protest to hateful, racist, and vulgar comments against his wife Maryam and against Kathy Sierra.

    I’m just disappointed.

    When good people collapse from exhaustion, fear, or frustration, it makes the bad people happy. They count on their ability to intimidate or wear you down. Wars of attrition, etc.

    Kathy Sierra seems like a neurotic attention seeker who panics at a scowl. She unfairly caused great damage to some seemingly innocent people, like my buddy Chris Locke.

    The controversy began with Tara Hunt of Cow Horse Pig blog saying we should all have a Higher Purpose, like Henry Ford. Locke reacted against that statement, saying that Ford was a rabid anti-semite schmuck, which is true.

    Chris and Vaspers the Grate and others posted comments on Tara’s weirdly named blog, bashing and harshing the Higher Purpose that, in New Age realms, is usually linked, ultimately, to hatred and genocide of the Jews, as Chris Locke’s Mystic Bourgeoisie blog documents.

    Tara started whining about “mean kids” coming to her blog to antagonize the innocent dear fluffy bunny rabbit that she thinks she is.

    So that’s how the Mean Kids blog got started. It was supposed to be satire and parody, like Saturday Night Live. But I guess it degenerated into a Howard Stern type circus of vulgarity and spite.

    CNN’s coverage of the Kathy Sierra vs. Chris Locke controversy was, as is typical of many MSM venues, very chaotic and unclear.

    All you hear Locke say is “We can’t have police checking out every troll and flamer” or words to that effect. That’s all. That’s not good journalism. That’s utter crap, as is to be expected from CNN.