Damn, I’m beating the dead horse of Elan to death here, but I got around to reading his triumphant post-flight post about what a great job he did of teaching people to be nice and I just couldn’t not say anything. So here’s Elan Gale on teaching everyone to be nice:
A lot of people have been really nice to me and called me a hero today. It’s really fun to hear but it’s not true.
Our troops are heroes. Fire fighters and policemen are heroes. Doctors and teachers are heroes. Flight attendants and pilots and waiters and baristas… These are the people that make things work in this crazy world.
What I did today was just point out something we all know: Be nice. It’s Thanksgiving. Be nice.
Wow. That is some classic cognitive dissonance there, describing his taunting and harrying of that woman as pointing out “be nice.” No. Bullying someone isn’t pointing out “be nice.” It’s actually pointing out the opposite. “Look at me, I’m being nasty, way nastier than you were. Now you know how to be nice, right?” No. Not right.
If he were really interested in teaching everyone to be nice, would he have sent all those boastful tweets about his oh-so-funny punishment of Diane? Hardly.
Be nice everyday, but if you see a man or a woman working on a holiday you better respect that they would like to be with their family too.
So have some compassion and have some appreciation.
Most people do. Most people are great. And then there are a bunch of Diane’s in the world.
And it’s OUR job to tell every Diane to shut up.
It’s OUR duty to put the Diane’s of the world in their place.
We need to REMIND them about the way of things.
We outnumber them.
So, I’m really glad we had fun today, but I really hope you guys join me, look a jerk in the eye, and tell them to eat a piece of your body, because really, that’s what the holidays are all about.
That’s disgusting. Really, really disgusting. The combination of delusional piety about having some compassion with the horrible boastful bullying – We need to REMIND them about the way of things – ugh, it makes my skin crawl.
I think that’s the last I’ll say about Mr Gale. I don’t like feeling disgust.
This guy reminds me a bit of Larry David’s character on Curb Your Enthusiasm, minus the humor: a miserable asshole who is obsessed with how everyone else is supposedly violating the rules of society.
NaleElan is reaching molecular shallowness.Bullying is being “nice.” Being an asshole is being “nice.” Telling a complete stranger to suck your dick is being ‘nice.”
Surely the cognitive dissonance created by that level of blatant hypocrisy is nearing a 5 on the Richter scale
And it’s OUR job to tell every Diane to shut up. It’s OUR duty to put the Diane’s of the world in their place.
God, self-righteous asshole, much? Have fun by being cruel to someone AND tell the world what a great person you are for doing it? You fucking moral imbecile.
Funny, the flood of supportive responses to his bullshit has helped convince me of the opposite.
Also, as Kerry brought up on the other thread, think of the implications putting people “in their place” has for targets with mental illness/disabilities.
NaleElan is reaching molecular shallowness.I see what you did there, fellow Order of the Stick fan!
Stephanie N. #7
We Are Not Alone.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2013/11/bullying-at-35-thousand-feet/#comment-1003024
it ought to be the Official Motto of the Internet:
may the most egregious narcissist win
Well, shoot. Every post I read is a more appropriate place to say what I just wrote on another post about four down the line. But this is the most recent post, and our host says she’s done talking about this topic (for now), so I’ll re-post it here, with slight modification.
In a world where women are regularly cajoled by male strangers to “Smile, sweetheart” — and scorned or bullied for not immediately complying — there is literally no level of talking-down-to, taking-ownership-of, behavior- and appearance-policing-of, and generally controlling behavior toward women and girls that I find even slightly surprising. Repellant? Absolutely. Surprising, shocking, unusual, or even notable? Not really.
But we must take notice of it. And we must oppose it. Or we will never change it.
The first step in any fight against any form of oppression is to pay attention to it, to discern it in spite of the many layers of “nature” and “culture” and “tradition” and “religion” and “just the way things are” that are imposed on it.
The second step is to de-normalize it — to explicitly and publicly point out that it IS oppressive, that it IS unjust, that there is NO possible justification for it. And to keep publicly pointing it out over and over and over and over and over… until we finally start making a dent in the assumption of normality.
There are people who recently have referred to this process as something they label with terms like “call-out culture” or “privilege-checking” and the like, and criticisms of it abound. Some of those criticisms may be legitimate, insofar as focusing too much effort on criticizing *individual people and their actions* without always at the same time calling attention to the broader context — that is, to the system of oppression and privilege concealed behind the veil of normality we ought to be fighting against — is probably not helpful, and is perhaps even vulnerable to becoming a tool for bullying people. In short, people can “call out” others in bullshit ways for bullshit reasons. I’ll grant that criticism some validity. But most uses, definitions, and discussions of terms like “call-out culture” I’ve seen are so hopelessly muddled that their usage doesn’t seem to consistently make such fine distinctions. I would think it’s obvious that something is wrong with the “call-out culture” critique if it is used in any way to imply that Ophelia (and others) are wrong to criticize Elan Gale’s outrageous sexist bullying. (And it has, as that Lousy Canuck Jason recently pointed out.) If they are serious about social justice issues and aren’t just trolls wearing a paper thin mask of concern for social justice, at least some of the people railing against “call-out culture” need to think again, with considerably more care: Because calling people out for their sexist, racist, heterosexist, classist, or otherwise oppressive behavior is not something we can ever stop doing if we actually want to change the culture for the better.
As Jason has held my last comment in moderation I’m unable to refute your claim I ‘lied’ when I said you welcomed back a harasser without a word to him about his harassment.
So I’ve storified the tweets you sent him once his account was restored.
Don’t call me a liar, please.
Sorry, should have given you a link to it.
https://storify.com/DarwinBlock/welcoming-back-harasssers
UPDATE: It was all just a funny hoax that Elan Gale made up and he totally fooled all of you!!!! #HERO
Yet for some reason his lesson was “I hope you all got some laughs on a slow Thanskgiving weekend”, not “Ha, I trolled you all just to show how terrible people are, and everyone who supported me in this is a horrible person and needs to rethink their life”.
If Elan is now a #bravehero for harassing an imaginary woman, can I please be a hero for rescuing an imaginary kitten and get a paycheck for some imaginary work?
This guy reminds me a bit of Larry David’s character on Curb Your Enthusiasm, minus the humor: a miserable asshole who is obsessed with how everyone else is supposedly violating the rules of society.
Humor? What humor? I seem to keep on missing the bits where Larry David’s character is funny. When you do comedy about an extremely annoying person, the result isn’t funny, its just extremely annoying. Do the geniuses in our TV industry really not get this simple and obvious truth?
It’s OUR duty to put the Diane’s of the world in their place.
Love the plural there — not just that one uppity woman, but EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE who expresses frustration, has to be smacked down and silenced immediately — it’s our DUTY, something ordinary people should be expected to do every day. People who express frustration are horribly annoying to the rest of us who are also frustrated, so it’s perfectly okay to express our frustration at such people.
I’m beginning to lose count of the levels of wrongness I see here. Beneath the childish hypocricy, it’s classic scapegoating: Elan was probably also frustrated at the flight delays, but he knew he couldn’t take it out on the crew, and the people who were actually responsible for the delay were WAAAY out of his reach…so he found another victim of the same problem to take it all out on instead. This guy would make a really good low-level Nazi functionary, if the Taliban don’t get him first.
And I can’t boycott any of the TV shows he’s worked on, because I never watch such crap in the first place.
And I can’t boycott any of the TV shows he’s worked on, because I never watch such crap in the first place.
But you can write to the TV channel that runs his shows and tell them that you won’t be viewing their programs until they fire him. If enough people do that, they’ll dump him. I think he deserves a chance to learn how to be “nice” while unemployed.
Giliell (#13)
Wouldn’t it make a better analogy to ask to be a hero for stomping an imaginary kitten and get a paycheck for pretending to call in sick to an imaginary job while you really go to the imaginary races for a day?
His apparent idea that it is okay to be an asshole when reminding others to “be nice” just makes me shake my head in disbelief.
David Jones @ 12 and 13 – good god, are you serious?
You asserted on Jason’s thread that I had “welcomed [unnamed person] back” and I said you were lying – so you show me a Storify of me exchanging some remarks with 3 friends, remarks that make NO MENTION of welcoming anyone back, by way of showing me wrong? ARE YOU SERIOUS?
I talk to 3 friends about magical experiences with animals in T H White’s Once and Future King, and that is me welcoming someone back?
Jeezis. Maybe you really think that. If you do, you need to work on the other minds problem. Here’s a hint: it’s a mistake to assume other people know what you know. Just because you know your friend Snuffles went to Palermo for the weekend, that doesn’t mean I know that too.
Don’t accuse people of things based on your stupid assumptions that they know everything you know.
Well, it’s nice to know that there is no RL Diane who is dying of cancer, and whose troubles were made worse by a self-appointed Guardian of Public Decency.
But my no means does that let Gale off the hook. Either:
– He wrote a Mary Sue which reflects and celebrates his real attitudes. Conclusion: he’s a a sociopath and a moral imbecile.
– He’s a chain-yanking troll, and there’s no way to discern when he really means it and when it’s just for lulz and followers. Conclusion: nothing he says is worth paying attention to; it should all be assumed to be a lie.
Of course, the second choice is pretty much a description of “reality” TV, isn’t it? A narrative alleged to be real, but actually carefully redacted to tell the story the producers think will get the most audience share.
David Jones, you are a liar. The Storify you cited does not support any claim about Ophelia welcoming anyone back from anything.
And quite frankly, I don’t remember hearing of that particular commenter being banned from any FtB in the first place.
Two things:
1) Anyone else find it much worse that the story was made up?
In the heat of the moment, folks can do silly things. What seems like a clever response or appropriate behavior turns out to be petty after consideration. I generally think a certain amount of latitude should be given, within reason.
The fact that the entire thing is fiction means that this Elan fellow was presenting his behavior in a fictionalized, heroic context. It wasn’t just his behavior, it was his ideal behavior. I find this to be much more disturbing from his perspective — obviously actually harassing a woman with sexualized bullshit would be significantly worse, if real. This was how he imagined himself rescuing the day?
We just saw a real world example of George Costanza’s “Jerk Store.”
2) In the first thread, it was jarring to read the comments from the wider web. Like the proverbial frog in the proverbial boiling proverbial water, I am accustomed to a certain class of comments around here. Watching the interlopers add that special brand of internet viciousness + jarring stupidity was a strange experience.
I’m reminded of a disturbing argument I saw once in a discussion of a kid being bullied for dressing oddly. It was wrong to condemn the bullies, someone argued, because by bullying the kid they were serving the valuable societal role of teaching him not to deviate from norms. It was THEIR duty.
@25: Oh hell, we just had almost that argument on Love Joy Feminism with some asshat who said it was Really Bad to allow to boys to dress at all “girly” because they’d get bullied for it. The idea that one might, you know, push back against the bullies was regarded as impossible (I think it was really driven by some serious sexism on his part).
@21 Ophelia, and David Jones. Funny he calls it abuse and harassment now, on latsots blog he said it was “a problem” to see his tweets in Tweetdeck. So the #bravehero reported him to Twitter for harassment, that of being annoyed and too lazy to mute him in Tweetdeck. Or more likely the slymepit fun game of false equivalence and “playing by FTBullies” rulez … Rather an own goal as he has succeeded in getting someone suspended from Twitter for “just disagreeing”, which they have never managed to prove a single “FTBully” or their bots of actually achieving. FREEZE PEACH, Dave!
Evidence for the “true skeptics” … Dave sez –
Uh oh, no harassment. Just a “problem” with seeing his tweets, and an apparent inability to use the easy to find “mute” function on Tweetdeck. Given Dave/@metaburbia commented on pretty much all latsots tweets I think he finds not perusing his TL the real issue, not Tweetdeck or latsot himself. Interesting he has such a lack of respect for censorship and freeze peach that he would use this as an excuse to silence someone who he disagrees with.
Haha, sorry for the derail… Realised this is DJones spreading his whine into more comment threads from here. http://freethoughtblogs.com/lousycanuck/2013/12/01/rage-blogging-and-drama-the-elan-gale-story/#comments
doubtthat@24:
I do think it’s interesting to note the characteristics Elan chose to give his invented nemesis.
He could have made himself seem “braver” by making Diane a large, physically imposing man, because then Elan is running a greater physical risk in standing up to this fictional bully. But he judged — correctly, I suspect — that the internet was much more eager to learn of a woman being put in her place. It seems to be a recurring theme with him, as his previous live-tweeting hoax involved two female adversaries (his blind date and the friend who arranged it). (I understand there’s also some note-passing saga involving a supposed neighbor couple, but I can’t be bothered to give him the web traffic of reading it to see if he focuses mostly on the female half of the couple.)
Diane has to be traveling alone, because if she’s with a boyfriend or husband, then he becomes the story: why isn’t he controlling “his” woman, why isn’t he standing up for “his” woman?
And of course, there’s the strange detail that Diane is wearing “mom jeans,” just to make sure we all know that she’s not hot.