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sarracenia
2008-05-29 10:28 pm UTC (link)

You know, I think the fact that people possibly completely uninvolved with this are reporting her to her employers is horrible, awful, and full of fail, but frankly, I can't bring myself to give a damn about her pain. You stir up shit, harass people, hurt people, and, if the reports of the transpeople leaving their panel because they were afraid of being photographed and outed are accurate, endanger people and you face consequences. And you don't know what they are because not everyone reacts to being harassed the same way. Once she attended a real life con under her own name, at a convention that her employer has some kind of connections to, she was going to face some consequences for being a raging asshole. That it spilled over onto the internet is mostly because she brought it there to one of the least polite forums on the internet, and therefore involved a shitload of people who spend their time on the internet.

I think fandom standards, however the hell you define them, aren't relevant here. It was started in real life, involving people in real life, originally posted by her to a forum that prefers to mock fandom, and therefore beating your breast over the perfidy of fandom for using the same tactics they derided in jameth sounds frankly disingenuous.

If people are posting her real name and address while saying stuff like "Let's burn this bitches' house down", as you seem to be claiming, that is fucked up and wrong and all sorts of NO and I entirely agree with that. Unfortunately, you've excised all mentions of her name so strictly from your post that I can't know whether that's happened, now can I? And from what I've seen of the posts I've read, I'm firmly on the side of the outraged attendees.

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herongale
2008-05-29 11:57 pm UTC (link)

I agree with this. A good illustration of why this logic is necessary comes from day-to-day driving. Of the many, many reasons not to be an asshole while driving your car on the road, a very compelling one is that you open yourself up to retaliation. The retaliation may not be moral, or legal. Odds are low that severe retaliation will occur, but in those cases where it does, it is fucking scary.

An expectation that people are going to endure harassment like good citizens and do the right thing by letting the police handle things is a very unsafe expectation.

The people who are making actual death threats are various versions of crazy and/or evil. They are worse than the girl who posted the offensive BS in the first place. BUT. She was a serious idiot for not realizing that by doing something so cruel, she was doing something completely unnecessary that would have a higher-than-usual likelihood of attracting harassment and stalking.

There are many reasons not to be cruel to strangers online, but this practical reason should be one that even the most callous person should be able to appreciate.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

	beachlass 2008-05-30 01:04 am UTC (link)
	Yes. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	rosalita 2008-05-30 03:31 am UTC (link)
	Exactly. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	altera 2008-05-30 03:38 am UTC (link)
	IAWTC (Reply to this)(Parent)

squeakytoy
2008-05-29 11:43 pm UTC (link)

Having gone through almost all the threads after watching this unfold on my f-list...

I can see why passing hyperspaces' RL name around fandom might be considered necessary in order to prevent this happening again. Ban her from future conventions and the situation that hyperspaces precipitated (by going to a con for the exclusive and explicit purpose of mocking) won't happen again - at least, not with her.

The best way to ban her is via RL name to all fannish and semi-fannish convention organisers near and far.

If she's made the connection between her fannish life and her RL name, then 'outing' her RL name is not a problem - she's already made that connection.

My issue comes when:

a) she hasn't made the RL-fannish connection (not the situation here),
b) personal contact details are being put up on the intarwebs (the situation here).

From what I can tell - and, granted, I haven't been playing Nancy Drew on all this - the people at SA forums (and their off-shoots) put up her personal contact details, not the WisCon folks.

I believe that the whole fandom-side of this situation (from the passing around of her RL name, to the contacting of her employers/school, and including this UB post) could have been handled better.

But I understand why her name needed to be passed around - either privately among convention organisers (if she hadn't made the RL-fandom connection) or publically among fans (since she has made the connection). With her name known to have a stigma attached, con organisers could be wary if she registers at other conventions.

However, it's one thing to slag people over the intarwebs; it's another to take that harassment into real life.

Those that did take the harassment into RL - not only whatever folks were involved in digging out her personal contact details and whatever folks were involved in contacting her employer, but also hyperspaces herself - did wrong.

I agree that whoever posted her personal contact details on the web took it too far. I'm in agreement that contacting her employer is a no-no (although I understand why people did, I'm not convinced it was necessary). I disagree that naming her was unnecessary or out of place - not when she made the naming connection herself, or when she's planning to go back to WisCon next year to take more photos and perform more mockage. It would have been better, perhaps, if her name had been passed to major convention organisers in private rather than public, since there are always idjits who will turn "reasonable prevention" into "outright harassment". As we've seen.

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jupiterpluvius
2008-05-30 02:13 am UTC (link)

I agree that whoever posted her personal contact details on the web took it too far.

That was people from SASS, it appears.

And I do think that people who attend the same Local Institution of Higher Learning as she, and who are therefore her colleagues whom she has signed an agreement not to harass about age, race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or ability (along with other things) do have a right to bring this matter up with their mutual human resources folks.

The rest of us can just think she's a horrible, self-loathing asshole.