This here is Alex Dunn, a PhD student in the Philosophy department at UCSB and someone who started a blog about Harry Potter. (“A blog for people who take silly things way too seriously.” What a novel idea on the internet!) Last night, Alex told some lies about me on Twitter.
“his finest moment was explicitly suggesting SK lied about threats then immediately denying it http://fredrikdeboer.com/2014/06/10/what-amber-alee-frost-actually-wrote/#comment-21781 …”
No. No, I didn’t. Let’s follow the link and see what I actually had to say, shall we?
As a result, that person and her family received even more rape threats.
Source?
At the moment, Anon — who is almost certainly Mr. Alex Dunn here, although the internet is full of people who are too cowardly to sign their names to stuff — started using that as a bludgeon with which to suggest that I was some rape denier. Asking for a source to a claim is now apparently enough to conjure the shadow of skepticism which is supposedly proof positive of being a full-throated rape denier. Well, in fact, it was this “and her family” that caused me to ask for a link. That was literally the first time I had seen any reference to these threats reaching her family, so I wanted a link. I never said that Kendzior was lying about rape threats, not once, not ever, not even a little bit. I am not shy, I was already up to my elbows in that fight, and if I thought she was lying, I would have said so. But I didn’t think she was lying, so I didn’t say so. Ever. To say that I was “explicitly suggesting” that is just a pathetic, cowardly lie, told by Alex Dunn of UCSB’s Philosophy department, who apparently finds it cool to slander people on Twitter when he thinks nobody is watching.
Now, I repeatedly did call Kendzior a liar during Jacobinghazi, for the sensible reason that she kept lying. That’s what the linked post was all about. She lied about what Amber Frost’s point was. She lied about what Elizabeth Stoker said. She lied about what Elizabeth Nolan Brown said. Again and again, she blatantly misrepresented what people had said to advance her little crusade. And she has recently been involved in another embarrassing round of writing deceptively about others, causing two women — it’s almost always women who Kendzior lies about, and isn’t that funny — to attempt to clear their names, and to point out that she had badly misrepresented them in a piece for hack website Politico. (The words “journalism 101” were used by Melissa Golden to refer to Kendzior’s failings.) So, yeah: I’ve called her a liar about some things. But I never said she lied about her threats.
You might ask yourself why Mr. Dunn here would be obsessing about that one accusation that he’s inventing when I’ve been straightforward with so many other accusations of dishonesty. Well, first, as when this all went down, even Kendzior’s most rabid defenders seemed to be too shamed to flat out say that she wasn’t lying. I mean, the Elizabeth Stoker thing was such an absurd, direct act of dishonesty that even people in full-throated “I am being an online social justice warrior!” mode seemed too ashamed to defend it. But more to the point, claiming that I denied that she had received threats (which I absolutely did not do) ticks the Bingo card. It’s one of those things which the Twitter left has decided equals immediate denunciation. So he’s trying to squeeze me into that space, rather than to actually engage me on what I actually believe, which would require him to, you know, marshal evidence and argue.
Just as with Karl Steel, some will say “why get into this stuff, why call attention to it, it just looks petty.” But they were wrong with Steel and they’d be wrong now. A lot of people seem to think that they can lie about others, on the internet, when nobody is looking. And in particular, people seem to think that if they wrap themselves in the flag of progressive politics, they receive carte blanche to be serially dishonest. Well I think that attitude is a disaster for actual, effective left-wing politics, and I think that people who skulk around telling lies need to be called out, both for basic honesty’s sake and for the health of social justice. If you tell lies about me online I’m going to find out about it and respond. So Alex Dunn of UCSB’s Philosophy department: stop telling lies.
I think 80% of your problems in life would be solved if you didn’t compulsively search for your own name on Twitter
I believe in honesty and accountability, in an age in which these are disappearing virtues.
If you’re going to write these kinds of posts, force yourself to edit them down to a single understated paragraph. You’ll come off as witty rather than unhinged.
Your opinion of how I appear is irrelevant to me. I’m not in this to impress you, to make friends, or to burnish my reputation. I am here to tell the truth. If it’s more important to you that I fulfill the Cool Kid stereotype of what it means to make it as a blogging insider, then please, utilize your privilege and don’t read my blog. I could not care less.
I like your blog and your writing. These posts just make me uncomfortable.
And that’s the problem: the enculturated attitude that it’s okay to rip somebody unfairly on Twitter but not to call them out for it.
I dunno, I think some of these posts would be more effective if you succinctly said: ,
Alex Dunn, you’re too stupid to bother with. Which he is.
Maybe so.
Arrgh, my post was eaten.
Maybe you could just have a formula:
WHat I wrote.
What Dunn claims I wrote.
Alex Dunn, you’re too stupid to bother with. Which he is. There’s a danger with your current path that you’re just becoming troll-bait.
That’s kind of too bad…I think the nature of reading a blog is that you feel a fair amount of camaraderie with the blogger, especially if he or she has real talent. So I think
Oh please. FdB is fully hinged. Every word he writes is correct and necessary.
I completely agree with you on the merits of your argument. I guess I just don’t see the point of the war you are waging. Doesn’t this campaign fail some rudimentary cost-benefit analysis? It clearly seems costly to you emotionally. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld: Are you destroying or dissuading more trolls than you are creating? I don’t see how you could be. It is simply not possible to shame the entire world into thoughtful decency.
I’ve no special insight into Freddie’s logic here, but I think there’s a fairly straightforward cost-benefit analysis.
Namely, his larger complaint about the culture of social media isn’t that he gets ripped on it sometimes, but that it’s destructive to the larger discourse and effective political organizing.
If this works, he’s established a mechanism by which to push back against social media shaming that would be available to others and reduce the appeal of such slamming on Twitter and the like.
I have no idea whether it will work, as I’ve got limited understanding of those networks and even less presence there. But I do know that the the potential for shaming is something that can have ramifications beyond the individual case in question. He wins if people shift their calculus towards, “y’know, I’ve a critique to make, but maybe I should either caveat it more carefully or use a medium that lets me express nuance or just switch to a genuinely private medium.”
Seems like each of you has an awfully expansive and uncharitable concept of lying.
Dunn reads your question as an accusation that Kendzior is lying, when it could just as easily have been a suggestion that someone honestly (but incorrectly) summarized what she said.
You call Dunn’s accusation a lie, when the plain of it meaning to me, let alone the charitable interpretation, is that he honestly (but incorrectly) believed that that’s what you were suggesting. I mean, he linked to your exact words. Would he have done that if he’d known that his description of them was false?
So your defense of Dunn is that he’s an idiot who can’t read?
Stupid, or a liar. Tough choices.
No, I think he misunderstood a truly misleading question by FdB and then uncharitably interpreted FdB’s clarifications (such as they were). Consider this Twitterspiel in one act.
Alex: Sarah L. Kendzior received rape threats.
Freddie: Source? [Meaning, what’s your source that her middle initial is “L”?]
Alex: You’re saying that she’s lying about receiving rape threats?
Freddie: I didn’t say that. You’re lying. That has nothing to do with what I said.
Alex: [To the whole world:] Freddie accuses Sarah Kendzior of lying and then denies it.
If I thought she was lying about that, I would say so. Do you think I’m scared of controversy? Scared to attract negative attention? Hmm? No. I didn’t say that because I didn’t believe it. You know that because I’m here telling you about it, and I am the only arbiter of what I believe.
And let me say, this thing people do where they constantly try to insist that they can define for others what their beliefs are -it’s absolutely ruinous for meaningful political interaction. It has no chance of leading to any progress.
Hey, I believe you! (Though I’m tempted to say otherwise just to get my picture on your blog.) But I still think your “Source?” was misleading – unintentionally misleading, I’m unfortunately compelled to stress here – and that Dunn’s initial misunderstanding was reasonable.
Aaron Gross: Given the history of the various petit storms around these issues, why are you even asking your final question? The answer is pretty obvious, if sad.
Ok, revise and resubmit. 😉 You seem awfully obsessed with SK.
This is something like the third time I’ve ever mentioned her, and it’s in response to someone explicitly bringing her up. Troll harder.
Let’s not forget your “close friend” over at noted progressive publication Reason. Though maybe you had nothing to do with that? Stranger things have happened.
I had nothing to do with that, at all, and the suggestion that a female journalist and blogger would only comment on something at the behest of a man is sexist and offensive.
Jesus, the article quotes you heavily enough that the author feels compelled to disclose her friendship with you as a footnote to the text. But your zeal to see sexism in the actions of those with whom you disagree is telling.
Troll tactic: say shitty thing. Call reaction to shitty thing an overreaction. Say overreaction is “telling.” Rinse and repeat.
If you think that someone quoting someone else is evidence that the original person compelled the other to write something, you’re an idiot. And now you’re banned!
Classic thin-skinned blogger tactic: calling critics trolls and banning them. Just sayin.
“Explicitly suggesting” is pretty horrible.
OK so you’re saying that you didn’t suggest she lied about threats, you were just completely ignorant of the fact that she had received those threats, is that right?
I didn’t think that was the case, for the following reason: the normal response to being informed that her family was being threatened would have been “I had no idea, did she say that on twitter”, or “I missed that, when did she mention it”, or “oh my god”.
Not, “source?”
I expected you, as a student of rhetoric, to be aware of the implications of your language. But you’re also engaging in Harry Potter-based ad hominems and SEO attacks, so I guess my expectations were off.
1. OK so you’re saying that you didn’t suggest she lied about threats, you were just completely ignorant of the fact that she had received those threats, is that right?
I’m saying that I wanted a link to be able to read about these threats myself. Which is what I said at that exact time when you first started up with this bullshit charade.
2. the normal response to being informed that her family was being threatened would have been “I had no idea, did she say that on twitter”, or “I missed that, when did she mention it”, or “oh my god”.
Actually, I think the normal response is to say “can you give me a link so I can read about this?”
3. Saying I “explicitly suggested” that is bullshit, and you know it’s bullshit.
4. I see you have nothing to say about her lies about Elizabeth Stoker and others.
5. I’m not a student of rhetoric.
Ad hominem? He’s just making fun of your shitty blog.
The funny thing is, I don’t think you actually think that I “explicitly suggested” anything at all. But you’re hanging on like death.
(For the record: I think “explicitly suggests” is a contradiction in terms, but what do I know.)
Lol. Wow, this guy is almost comically stupid. He’s pretty much admitting that he made up everything he charged FD with because one word, “Source?,” automatically led to his over-the-top conclusions. I knew he was irresponsible, but I didn’t know he was this dumb.
He’s lying again:
Nowhere here do you say that you wouldn’t have accepted a link from Kendzior herself. In fact, that’s pretty clearly what you were asking for. A fair request, by the way, considering I followed the scandal and never saw anything about her family members being threatened except in the comments here.
He doesn’t actually think that’s what I was saying, of course.
Freddie, back in June, the Jacobin crowd did do something a bit worse than you ever let on in your defenses of them. I think maybe you eventually realized this, though if you did, I don’t think you ever said so.
I’m thinking this might be why some people (not myself) are being totally uncharitable in how they remember your involvement in the spat.
What, exactly? Amber Frost linked to a tweet in which Sarah Kendzior referred to someone who threatened to rape her as a “bro.” Her point was that “bro” is insufficiently serious to refer to rape threats. Is that a fair point? I don’t know. Was it a mistake to link to the tweet? I guess so. What I know is that Kendzior reacted negatively, and Jacobin immediately — immediately — removed the link. To the degree that it was on the piece for less than a half hour. After that Kendzior began to consistently and intentionally misrepresent what Frost did, saying that Frost was mocking her rape threats. That is entirely untrue. It is not at all a fair or accurate representation of what Amber Frost was saying. So Megan Kilpatrick, herself a rape survivor, called Kendzior out for it. What followed was a torrent of lies, including the lie that some of Jacobin’s own writers were sending rape threats to Kendzior. It took two full days for that particular lie to be retracted. In that time, Kendzior did nothing to correct the record. Meanwhile, she slandered Elizabeth Stoker by out-and-out lying about something she had written, and did the same to Elizabeth Nolan Brown. Others began to attack Kilpatrick, and mocked her husband when he registered unhappiness that her actual rape had been reported by a sleazebag from Newsweek. That’s what happened.
I agree with everything you’ve written here. But it is a notch different than what you were saying in June. Re-reading your “Not What Amber Lee Frost Say” post (which I liked a lot, btw), I’m not seeing any concession that, yeah, the Jacobin editors probably made a mistake (or were inconsiderate) — and that, yeah, it would probably suck to be Sarah Kendzior and wake that morning to discover that your tweet about being sent rape threats was being read not by sympathetic friends, but by thousands of people who got to the tweet through the Frost piece, which was using the tweet as an object of cult-criticism.
I’m just saying, this is why some people see you as wearing the black hat, here. Me, I think you did a good job picking apart SK’s bizarre torrent of slanders and misrepresentations, most of which occurred after Jacobin scrambled to fix the article, and calling her out on that crap.
“I’m not seeing any concession that, yeah, the Jacobin editors probably made a mistake (or were inconsiderate)”
This is incorrect. The link to SK’s tweet was only live for a couple hours (during which time it’s possible but extremely unlikely that “thousands” of people saw/followed that link). Within 30 minutes of her initial complaint about it, the editor of the piece unequivocally apologized and removed the link, and then the top editor/publisher apologized.
What’s incorrect? I don’t follow.
Moreover, this text has been present at the top of the article since shortly after they removed the link: “Out of concern that linking to a conversation about personal threats might only encourage more, we removed the link shortly after publication and offer our apologies to the journalist.”
Oh, I’m sorry, I misunderstood. I realize now you meant that Freddie — rather than Jacobin — hasn’t said as much. I apologize.
Let’s see, Scott, are you leaving anything out? Oh, when the other editor, your freaking SISTER IN LAW, undid the apology, called sk a dishonest child and turned a nothingburger into leftist ww3. Yeah, there was that. But honesty, right?
That is not what happened. Megan reacted negatively to the portrayal of Frost as mocking take threats, which is sensible, given that the claim was a ludicrous misrepresentation of what Frost wrote.
What was the German original for eternal recurrence?
When I was in my teens, my dad was in the military, and I kindasorta inherited his conservative views until high school, when I decided that Reagan not giving a shit about the unemployed was pretty lame. But when I was a conservative, what struck me even then was that many of them weren’t into it so much because of a program they wanted to promote. It was because they got off almost orgasmically (and still do) on whatever outrage the left (or the left of their minds) had committed. Some of this stuff strikes me the same way. In lieu of actually doing something or trying to accomplish something, we just go around looking for the next outrage hit or outrage fix, whether it comes from the other side or within, and whether what we’re saying is true or not. When I was 16, I thought this kinda pathetic and unworthy of anyone’s respect, and I haven’t changed my mind about it since. Inventing shit and getting angry about it is infantile.
If there was one thing I thought Anglo-American philosophers were good at after the analytical turn (there aren’t many), I thought it was the careful parsing of language used in ordinary settings. Based on what I’m seeing, I’m starting to have grave doubts.
It is ironic that you call out someone’s “troll tactics” here when, as Alex noted on Twitter, you’re guilty of using a classic troll tactic yourself. Your repetition of “Alex Dunn of UCSB’s Philosophy department” in this post title, the body of the post, in your other post about this today, etc. is designed for search engine optimization. In other words, you’re trying to get this up in his Google ranking. You share this technique with some very ugly people indeed.
Everything I say, I am accountable for. If what he says is correct and fair, then why would he need to hide from it? I am asking him for no more accountability than I hold myself to every day. That’s how it works, when you’re a grown up.
Spot on! Catherine Fitzpatrick couldn’t have said it better.
I feel compelled to post because the view that Freddie’s overreacting is so heavily represented. Freddie, I don’t think you’re overreacting. Your reaction is reasonable and justified. Dunn is, to some degree, poisoning your name on the internet with accusations that are pretty damning. No one should sit there & take shit like that.