Trolls call me things


Someone that calls itself @ikonographer and describes itself as

atheist. provacateur. all around asshole. (get it? ‘all a round’ asshole). Hey, fuck you, I’ve seen square ones. not pretty.

Someone I don’t know, by the way; someone I’m not aware of ever having had any interaction with, tweeted me

@opheliabenson i always figured you didn’t have scruples. hard to do if you’re not really human. don’t bother. blocked bitch.

People are strange. Strange strange strange strange.

(I know. This is “drama.” Yes, no doubt, but it’s also political. Because it’s political, we have to talk about it. Drama or no drama.)

Comments

  1. 'Tis Himself says

    I think a translation of the tweet would be: “Look at me. Look at me. Please look at ME!”

  2. says

    Mmmmno I don’t think so, I think it is what it looks like – just rabid hatred of women or feminists or people who resist open misogyny – some category like that.

    Hatred is just as real as longing for attention.

  3. Alukonis, metal ninja says

    Oh shit they figured out that you’re a fembot sent back in time from the future to kill John Connor and castrate all the menz! Your secret is out! How did they ever figure it out?!?!

    More seriously though, I note that you, Ophelia, are not the one sending unsolicited messages with dehumanizing language along with sexist slurs, so one wonders who exactly is the unscrupulous one.

  4. julian says

    Oh shit they figured out that you’re a fembot sent back in time from the future to kill John Connor

    After Terminator: Salvation I’m very cool with this.

  5. says

    Alukonis – Yeah no. I’m not. I don’t do shit like that. I’m supposed to be so evil, but I don’t do shit like that. Some people have bizarro priorities.

    The “scruples” was because I was joking with Paul Fidalgo who has scruples about blocking non-spambots even when they do trollish blowings up at him. I don’t have scruples about blocking people like that. Wooooooooooooooo am I immoral and unhuman or what.

  6. Fin says

    Well, at least he had the courtesy to save you the bother of blocking him for fuck-knucklery.

    I always imagine MRAs as kind of like male versions of Valerie Solanas. Their world view is so contorted and bizarre that you can’t even identify it as untrue, because there’s no ground on which it dwells, its just a seething mass of crazy.

  7. Stewart says

    “I always imagine MRAs as kind of like male versions of Valerie Solanas.”

    And they think almost all women are Solanas clones.

  8. Brian says

    I note that you, Ophelia, are not the one sending unsolicited messages with dehumanizing language along with sexist slurs
    I’ve not noted Ophelia doing that at all.

  9. Zed Zero says

    I have been reading this blog for about 5 or 6 years now and it has gotten just too petty.
    A lot of problems can be solved here and at FTB by not reading the comments, moderation or shutting them down.
    I am solving the problem by deleting this link and the rest of FTB too. Problem solved.

  10. says

    Indeed you can, and there’s even no need to report that you’re doing so, or to say what you dislike about the blog – and yet you did, and you did.

  11. says

    Sure thing Zed Zero, you go away and hang with the Cool Kids who enjoy shoving the geeks’ heads in the toilet. Be seeing you later at the Maccas counter. No, I won’t want fries with that.

    *sigh* If only they would grow out of it. But when you’re an adult bully there’s not much hope.

    BTW, Ophelia, do you have anything for sale? I bought some Surlyramics as a response to the bullying of Amy.

  12. chakolate says

    This cracked me up.

    Of *course* he had to send you that message – how else were you going to know you were blocked from a site you never had any intention of visiting?

    Reminds me of when my grandson, about 4 years old then, out of the blue got in my face and told me he was going to go poop in the toilet and he was locking the door so I couldn’t see.

    I kept a straight face then.

  13. Jakie_paper says

    @ Zed, Whaaaaat? FTBloggers are being petty because they acknowledge that aggressive, vitriolic bullshit and clueless criticism is being flung at them, like so much monkey poo? Not to mention kindly worded admonishments to be nicer to the pooflingers, lest they frighten the tender little darlings away from The Movement. What color is the sky on your planet? Exactly how much should Ophelia take silently before she can blog about it without being looked down on by the likes of you? Gah…..

  14. Alukonis, metal ninja says

    Brian I find your double negative confusing. Are you saying you *have* noted Ophelia doing this? I certainly haven’t and Ophelia says she hasn’t, so, yeah, what?

  15. Chakolate says

    Zed Zero announced it elsewhere (Friendly Atheist?) as well that he was done with FtB.

    Is it too much to hope that he meant it?

  16. Brian says

    Brian I find your double negative confusing
    Fair enough too. I misread the sentence to imply that Ophelia was sending messages. Reading fail on my part. Or comprehension fail. My bad.

  17. says

    I remember @ikonographer because they have a Twitter widget on @woolybumblebee’s blog page. WoolyBumblebee, you will recall, was the one who posted the long exhaustive list of all the different types of bullying. Their exhaustive knowledge of the many types of bullying was meant to convey that they have enough authority to be believed when they said that #FTBullies were guilty of being terrible bullies. When I mistakenly assumed that the Twitter widget on the blog page belonged to the owner/author of the blog post, @ikonographer got all pissy at me. I never got a clear answer as to whether the blog page belonged to @ikonographer or @woolybumblebee.

    If they are two different people, they are both assholes.

  18. Arty Morty says

    (I know. This is “drama.” Yes, no doubt, but it’s also political. Because it’s political, we have to talk about it. Drama or no drama.)

    I hope Jerry Coyne reads that. I’m getting tired of his not-so-subtle jabs at the “drama” here at FTB. He doesn’t seem to want to bother to look into why there’s drama, or what the drama is, you know, actually about. There is drama here, sure. But what you’re writing is justified and important. It’s not the fault of you or anyone else at FTB that shit like ikonographer’s tweet keeps getting hurled at you. It’s cowardly and lazy for Coyne and others to just dismiss the whole lot of you as drama queens for speaking up about it. They’re blaming the victims along with the aggressors.

  19. dirigible says

    Zed – I’m also a long-time reader and B&W has never been better in my opinion. Can you get something notarised to confirm that your flouncing off really is permanent? Thanks.

  20. says

    I can’t get inside the mind of someone who would say such things, any more than I can get inside the mind of someone who would microwave a cat.

    Are these “simply” nasty people who take advantage of anonymity to release them from the norms of enlightened society (as far as that exists)? Would they go away if forced to reveal their identity? (I suppose that is a bit different from being a troll, but surely related?)

    Or is there more “coherence” than this, and they have an ideology which is threatened by enlightenment? Would they continue because
    they are simply convinced they are right, according to their ideology? (I used to think that “enlightened” was a compliment, but realised that for some people it is an insult, and that the Age of Enlightenment was a terrible mistake).

  21. says

    Speaks volumes the @ikonographer account appears to be gone. Not even being willing to cultivate a pseudonymous identity seems a strong indicator of shame.

  22. says

    “I’m not reading FTB anymore” seems to be the atheoskeptic equivalent of “I don’t even own a television these days.” It’s a pretentious status symbol, achieved by doing absolutely nothing of substance.

    However, I wish more people would go for the achievement there, rather than obsessing over every little thing various FtBloggers say. There are some non-FTB blogs that I actually used to like reading, until they descended into these bizarre vendettas.

    It’s weird: when I stop reading a blog, I just don’t go there anymore, and I unsubscribe from their feed. I don’t go to the comments to announce my leaving as though it mattered, and I certainly don’t keep reading so I can work myself up into a blogposting froth every so often. I just don’t get some people.

  23. says

    Sally – ah well that helps to explain it, because it was Woolly Bumblebee who was ranting at Paul and thus prompted the scruples and thus my joking about scruples.

  24. says

    “Drama”…I know. Imagine if there were a bunch of atheist/skeptical/secularist people (otherwise allies, in short) setting up blogs and endlessly tweeting about “filthy kikes” and “ugly Yids” and “scheming Jews” and similar. Would it be “drama” to react to that? Imagine such a bunch setting up blogs and endlessly tweeting about “niggers” or “spics” or “faggots” or the like. Would it be “drama” to react to that? I wouldn’t consider it “drama.” I don’t want to be allied with people who act that way. I think it matters to get these things straight. I think it matters to make it clear that if some atheists or skeptics are going to make a big point of talking anti-Semitic or racist or homophobic shit, then they’re not our allies and the atheist or skeptical “movement” (if there is such a thing) is going to have to split. Oddly enough, the same applies when women are the reviled category.

  25. smhll says

    And they think almost all women are Solanas clones.

    I try to get anti-feminists who quote Andrea Dworkin as ‘evidence’ of utter feminist awfulness to read her Wikipedia entry. She experienced serious abuse in jail and her husband was so heinous that it doesn’t surprise me that her attitude towards all men was exaggeratedly negative. (A dude like that would warp a saint.) I seriously challenge any critic of feminism to read her life story at Wikipedia and be unmoved.

  26. callistacat says

    I really hate when people write off Dworkin as some extremist or even compare her to Solanas. (Solanas wasn’t even part of the feminist movement, she was a junkie who was part of the Andy Warhol Factory scene and starred in at least one of his movies. She got pissed off at Andy Warhol because he wouldn’t return a play she had written, which was her motive for shooting him. The Factory people even liked her “S.C.U.M Manifesto,” they thought it was “edgy.”)

    Whether you agree with Dworkin’s position on pornography or not, she was still an exceptionally talented writer and she tried in vain to dispel the false accusation that she believes “all sex is rape” or that she was pro-censorship. I admit some of her books pissed me off, they do seem almost hopelessly negative, but I can see where she’s coming from given her past as a battered woman and being sexually abused as a child and when she was a jailed Vietnam protester.

  27. says

    Proud of that, are you, “ikonografer”?

    Apparently your wife “wooly bumblebee” is; she was trolling me on Twitter earlier.

    You’re quite a pair.

  28. julian says

    “look at me!”

    sums up wooly bumblbee and her friends perfectly, I think.

    PPS: dear ophelia: yes, you are a less than fully human.

    *snort* Oh boy, they do make a wonderful pair.

  29. says

    as for hating women ophelia, please, tell my wife how much i hate her. tell my daughters. all four of them. tell them.

    Isn’t it adorable when people pretend that because there are women they know and care about, that makes it impossible for them to be sexist/misogynist? I mean, for the entire history of the human race, we have been reproducing sexually, i.e., there have been lots of men having sex with lots of women, and yet somehow misogyny persisted for eons. So mysterious, right, given that men who fuck women can’t possibly also hate most women at the same time.

    But yeah, so they’re husband and wife. How hard would it be to say, “That’s my wife’s blog post, it’s my web page,” rather than getting all snippy and haughty about my mistaking the authorship of that silly bullying piece? What a piece of work.

  30. says

    Besides, I didn’t even say mr ikon hates women, I said “I think it is what it looks like – just rabid hatred of women or feminists or people who resist open misogyny – some category like that.”

    At least I get the chain of “reasoning” behind mr ikon’s out of nowhere blat at me, now. (I haven’t read his post, merely skimmed it.) It was “wooly b.bee” who was ranting at Paul when I was joking at him about blocking trolls, so that will be why total stranger mr ikon felt justified in trolling me – I guess he expected me to know who the hell he is and that he’s married to “wooly”? But why the hell would I know that?

    But that’s nothing. One of their allies, Elevatorgate, said truly evil things to Rhys a couple of days ago. Rhys is 17.

    Ugh. It’s like swimming in a septic tank.

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