Ashley Miller did a post on some background. She included a photoshop that I hadn’t seen before (although I have seen other versions of the same photo, the one we took in solidarity with atheist bloggers in Bangladesh – such a suitable subject for ridicule and mockery, don’t you think?). I was curious so I did a google image search – and found a whole page of images: three weeks’ worth at the slyme pit, 9/30-10/14 2014. They’re productive.
This is the slyme pit: Michael Nugent’s informants and allies, people Hemant Mehta thinks PZ is too hard on when he “deems” them “trolls.”
There are a lot of photoshops of PZ there, and some of Rebecca and Stephanie, a few of Greg Laden and Melody and maybe others, and there are a lot of me, probably because I’m so grotesquely ugly I make a good target for them.
Meet the slyme pit.
That’s the first installment. More in the next.
Your blog, Ophelia, but I wish you didn’t post these horrible images of yourself. A link would be enough. I don’t want to see the work of crude malevolence traducing you. As for your looks – you look like a dignified and serious-minded woman.
Rosie – well I normally don’t. I normally ignore the slimers, and I normally don’t post things like this. This is an exception.
Those are hilarious, thank you. I am so glad to learn you’ve kept your sense of humor in the middle of this senseless war.
For Christ’s sake, it’s not the SlymePit, it’s part of it, not all of which is supported by all there. Some of that is maybe “gratuitously nasty”, but you might consider that a lot more of it is little different from the satire that “graces” our newspapers.
I’m grateful that I know that Hemant Mehta endorses this shit. Put an end to the time that I wasted respecting the guy.
Mehta seems to have plenty of defenders wanting to die on the hill of ‘drowning in an ocean of whitewash isn’t explicitly endorsement!’
I’m glad I haven’t seen most of this stuff. (Enough examples in the past to thoroughly despise the SlymePit, though…and defenders like Steersman.)
That was informative. Now in addition to learning that the slymers are sleazy and dishonest, I see that they’re tasteless and humorless, too.
Let’s distort our enemies’ faces in photoshop and make ’em look really ugly! That’ll teach them!
Shorter Steersman@4: “#NotAllSlymers”
That second gif is a good “WTF” look — the type of look a person would give to a Pitter. So fail one on their part. And the buffoon that made the Indiegogo knock-off forgot to change the title tag from the page they ripped off: ONE CARD Thin On the Go Charger for iPhone Android (which seems to have been a real campaign). Fail two…out of an infinite number of fails that one couldn’t possibly begin to enumerate.
Wow O_O
The gifs look like a completely normal person – I don’t get the joke here O_O
…that’s the best they can do?
@Blanche Quizno #10: See, Ophelia is A WOMAN and she’s NOT 20 YEARS OLD, get it? Ha!
rosiebell @ 1,
Sometimes it is necessary – though it would always be Ophelia’s choice – to publish the evidence.
Why? Because those most keen to dismiss what is done are often incapable of doing their own research, taking anyone’s word for anything or even clicking on a link. Or unwilling to do any of those.
For instance, there’s someone called Hunt over at Ashley Miller’s blog trying to dismiss what James Randi said as the irrelevant opinion of a third party. Was Randi not the person at the head of the organisation running the conference at which Alison Smith encountered Michael Shermer. Was it not reported to him promptly and dismissed with the old “boys will be boys” line. Evidently Hunt and his ilk are not willing to learn anything which might challenge the slymepit party line.
I wish we had a passing psychologist with half an hour to explain the addictive nature of such behaviour. For it is clearly addictive, sometimes worryingly so.
In the very few cases of online harassment which have made it to court the accused’s first line of defence has always been, “I’m not guilty of doing this thing because other people are doing very similar things.” Which is pure 24 carat bollocks.
PZ Myers @7 wrote:
No, no, I have a much better idea, Mr. Myers. You should team up with Ophelia Benson, Stephanie Zvan, Ashley Miller, Rebecca Watson, and whomever else you can recruit to your side. Then, acting in a coordinated fashion and leveraging your considerable combined readership, you should all continually and publicly press the narrative that the Slymepit is a hate site filled with the following types of terrible people: rapists; rape apologists and supporters; harassers; abusers; obsessives and stalkers; trolls; misogynists; sexists; racists; ableists; MRAs; TERFs; and wankers.
That’ll teach them!
On second thought…
It is possible that some people might feel that being labeled as a rapist or rape apologist (to take the most egregious examples) is so nasty and despicable, so inaccurate, so unwarranted, such a gross mischaracterization of their actual position – that these kinds of photoshop caricatures are entirely justified as in-kind responses. It’s also possible that some people might feel they are “punching up” with such images, given your impressive individual and combined privilege and audience, especially as compared to their rather obscure forum and much smaller readership.
There you have it, folks. The slymepit retconning history message: we harass you because you deserve it.
Except these “entirely justified … in-kind responses” started long before the Shermer accusations were made public. As in years before, and really got going in earnest because a woman made a video and said “guys, don’t do that.”
Rather poor attempt to rewrite history.
I wish we had a passing psychologist with half an hour to explain the addictive nature of such behaviour. For it is clearly addictive, sometimes worryingly so.
Well, my degree is horribly out of date but back in 1985 “addiction” entailed a degree of physical dependency. That was the difference between an addiction and “habit” – something that’s purely behavioral. Perhaps the terminology has changed, but I’d say that the slyme pitters are engaged in a “self-reinforcing behavior.” The model there is heavily Skinnerian (Johns Hopkins’ psychology department when I was an undergrad was almost entirely Skinnerian) The idea is that an animal that associates a behavior with some kind of reward is going to engage in it more. Often, to the point where the animal can take the behavior to unhealthy extremes (i.e.: train a rat to push a lever to get a food pellet and it’ll become like a Tetris playing rodent- it will omit grooming or social activity and work the lever ’till it drops) Skinnerian models are at play in many self-reinforcing behaviors such as gambling, especially exacerbated in the case of one-armed bandits that play rewarding lights and sounds and make every attempt to encourage “just one more game…”
The slyme-pitters are reinforcing themselves. If one of them posts one of these photoshops, they get the reward of status and attention from the other slyme-pitters. It’s probably especially rewarding, in fact, since that kind of behavior is not rewarded much in the outside world. So the newly-minted ‘pitter is going to start immediately feeling like “one of the gang” and they egg eachother on. It’s a basic gang behavior, in fact: a close-knit community (because otherwise they are social outcasts nobody wants to talk to) that develops its own membership rituals (more reinforcement, as well as breaking down social barriers to bad behavior) that’s why some gangs require that the new member kill a person, or something, in order to join. That sort of transgressive ritual further binds the member to the gang. I believe that a psychologist who specialized in gang behaviors would be worried about the slyme-pitters. They’re not violent… but if they started doing anything more transgressive than stalking, it could spiral out of control really fast. (Part of why I think it was so important that Justin Vacula’s threatened attempts to show up at WiS turned out not to be rewarding for him; imagine if he’d had a great time and been wildly applauded by his “peer”s)
The Skinnerian model is that reward (food pellets or plaudits or whatever) gives a little kick to the pleasure centers of the brain. That is what some of the nastier addictive substances do. It also helps transfer short-term memories to long-term memories. So when the subject does something naughty and is very excited and gets a reward, they’re going to potentially bind an unforgettable life-experience. That’s part of the model Richard Rhodes outlines in “why they kill” (his study of violent criminals and the link between abuse and reinforcement in murderers) The process of violentization that Rhodes describes is remarkably similar to what military training does to break down our natural reluctance to do violence and replace it with esprit de corps (basic gang behavior) and group identity.
Anyhow – not “addiction” but self-reinforcing behavior that is very habit-forming. The warning message is that they are already willing to do violence – emotional violence of no benefit to the attacker. It’s part of the process of breaking down a natural reluctance to violence in general. That’s why stalkerish behaviors are bad bad news. The slymepitters’ parents didn’t do a good job raising them, and they’ve gravitated toward fellow abusers and formed a little circle-jerk(*) of mutually reinforcing abusers. They are already dangerous.
(* not the technical term. The technical term is “ingroup”)
Marcus @ 18,
My one year of psychology – Leeds 1960, under Patrick Meredith so heavily into perception – bows to your degree 25 years later, BUT ……
We now, even as lay people, know considerably more about the release of mood altering hormones in the brain and about how different parts of the brain light up under MRI technology in response to repetition of some act, especially an act someone is proud to have got away with – even before the social rewards kick in. So there’s your physical reward, just as real as anything Skinner or indeed Pavlov was able to describe.
We also know that unhappy or neglected children engage in repetitive behaviours, some of which are physically harmful. So, logic dictates that the physical reward must outweigh the pain, even if we’re not sure exactly how.
Given how inane and how repetitive some of the behaviour we’re discussing is and how irrelevant it is to the subject supposedly under discussion, there’s just got to be a reward. To go on doing it for several years and especially as most of the people doing it have little contact with each other in meatspace minimising the potential for social reward, suggests that the internal reward must be huge for some. There will, of course, be idiot hangers-on who have no idea what any of it is about.
For the regulars and the most persistent I still say addiction. Now we need some more research.