Rebecca Watson is going off to China, and she’s already getting veiled threats from some guy called ShenzhenTony. Who? Rebecca did some sleuthing, found out his real name is Tony Ryan, and further, discovered that he’d been formerly known around the web as Coffee Loving Skeptic…and I remember that ass! He was at the center of one of the more surreal bits of psycho MRA drama back in 2012. Coffee Loving Skeptic was one of many skeptics who totally lost their mind over ElevatorGate, who raged at Rebecca Watson, and flung bits of spittle my way on Twitter.
So I blocked him. Everyone proceeded to further lose their poop. HOW DARE I BLOCK SOMEONE. Then a bunch of people jumped on a very strange bandwagon: that I’d blocked him when he used the word “cunt”, when he didn’t — I’d blocked him for flinging around the slur “feminazi”, unironically — and they then insisted that I owed Tony Ryan an apology and an unblocking, which I don’t get; he’s an obnoxious twit, as further demonstrated by his recent behavior, he’s a slymer, his style of argument is to post photoshops like this, and I had no interest at all in ever conversing with him.
It was truly weird. It was an early instance of entitled doofuses raging against someone who dared to use the block function on Twitter, as if I were required to heed every word, no matter how scurrilous or petty, that they might direct at me. We saw the same odd phenomenon when people started using the Block Bot, a voluntary service that would block a whole raft of characters for you at once. They’re pretty incoherent about explaining why that is offensive, too.
And now Ryan’s reduced to making vaguely threatening noises at Rebecca Watson. Yeah, that’s a sign I should have apologized and forgiven him several years ago.
Uh. right. sounds like someone I would have consigned to the outer darkness ages ago. Life is too short to put up with jerks like that.
Reminds me of when my kids were teens and they would have angsty meltdowns that involved yelling “You’re not listening to me!” when told they would not be allowed to do X. No child, I heard you, I’m just not agreeing with you.
Well, of course.
If only you’d been nice and listened to him, he wouldn’t have had to escalate like this, would he now?
Perhaps you even called him a fuckbrained idiot under your breath. You really should apologise to Tony Ryan and to Michael Nugent, I’m sure, now that I’ve demonstrated how dangerous your *impolite* approach is.
/snark, in case that isn’t clear.
Yes, because men who don’t make threats to women totally owe apologies to those who do.
Wait, wut?
One other detail from Rebecca’s blog: “Ryan was, at the time, a police officer in England, but was eventually disciplined by his superiors for his relentless online harassment of women and rape victims. This led to him blogging about plans to commit “suicide by cop.” ”
I don’t know what more needs to be said about this piece of slime.
Oh, c’mon PZ, you’re a bright guy, you surely know how freeze peach works by now. The freeze means literally anything is cool, and the peach is a guaranteed audience, as in, “Be a peach and listen to me.” :-P
I am in Shenzhen right now, until the 21st, then traveling down to Hong Kong. (If only Rebecca could swap the dates around!) I have tried getting hold of her via Skepchick, but am having trouble with the login. It appears social media is on the blink again.
It sounds like there is a case for harassment, and she should notify her contacts in Hong Kong to pass on this information to the police. This type of thing is certainly beyond the pale.
With regard to Donguan, I would do the same, by getting her contacts there to inform the Public Security Bureau of the threatening language. They take a particularly tough line on such threats. He would be lucky to merely get deported if he tries anything there.
If Rebecca would like my contact details, perhaps PZ or someone can forward them to her.
U.K. citizen living in China making threats? Yawn. Must be another of your parochial American disputes.
/Nugent
Reminds of the Terrible Sea Lion. Some people insist on, and feel entitled to, pushing their opinion upon specific others for no rational reason. And then they call the people they’re harassing rude and irrational for not being interested in engaging them.
These people have serious issues…
weatherwax
See, feminists ruin poor innocent men’s lives by making them write shit on Twitter first and then complaining about it!
weatherwax #5:
Odd, that. “Suicide by cop” is quite difficult to achieve in England. Not impossible, but… difficult.
Sounds like someone with a lot more ego than is good for him.
And of course, he chooses the most vile way to discuss suicide. I’ve got no love lost for the police profession given how they act towards anyone not exactly like them, but you do NOT force someone to murder you. You don’t do that to people. I lack the words to express how despicable that is.
pensnest #11:
Perhaps he considered himself still a cop, so killing himself would have been a suicide by a cop?
Some people seem to take being ignored as the most grievous insult possible. Though, if you’re even calling them a fuckbrained idiot, you’re acknowledging their existence.
It seems it’s always the same assholes making life difficult for everyone, isn’t it? A case example would be GamerGate – their frothing hate towards Gawker indicates they’re the same pieces of shit who are still angry that Violentacrez got outed, and probably are the same ones responsible for a number of 4chan harassment raids in the past. Aren’t some of the trolls from the BBS and Usenet days still around?
:-o
O hai! I maded you this internetz out of lavender cookies. And I did not eated it.
I really, really, really don’t get the MRAs (I should end this sentence here) who get in an uproar over people blocking them on Twitter. It’s just so completely absurd and the absolute extreme of Freeze Peach. Dude, you have the right to speak, you even have the right to tweet so long as Twitter doesn’t find you in violation of its terms, but you don’t have the right to clog my Twitter feed with whatever bile you choose. The block function is there because the service Twitter provides its users includes choosing who you want to communicate with via the service. This is like saying, I have the right to free speech, so I also have the right to follow an individual around all day, on the bus, into their place of work and home while shouting insults at them. Completely bonkers.
I sent a mild, supportive tweet to Rebecca back at that time and instantly started getting hate tweets. So I blocked people. Hell, I’d go right out right now and block people all over the place just to demonstrate I could if I hadn’t deleted my Twitter account to increase my productivity (which is why I’m now commenting more here!)
Anyone can block me anytime and I really won’t care. Heck, I can imagine some tweet I sent intending to be supportive being misconstrued because 140 characters and someone who’s been getting a lot of harassment blocking me. Oh well. I would feel bad about it, but whatever, they’ve got to take care of themselves, they don’t know me, what right would I have to complain?
I did get blocked on Facebook by a high school friend for having the audacity to mildly question something she posted, I think about gay marriage. I was amused. That’s all. I’ve unfriended anyone on Facebook who posts anything that espouses LGBTQ discrimination. Maybe they’re mad, but that was a real life unfriend too, so who cares?
Tony Ryan sounds like a total charmer. By which I mean complete asshole.
I expect the pit is going to lose its shit over you and Watson “doxxing” Tony Ryan.
To which I say — tough. Threats of violence = absolute elimination of any expectation that you can keep your anonymity.
Especially someone like Tony Ryan, with a history of demented fuckwittery. And apparently a proclivity of creating multiple online IDs…how many socks does one need these days anyway, Tony Ryan?
This is why I miss Usenet, where you could kill-file anyone and anything without the target knowing. (Specifically: trn, which had surgically precise filtering ability, though you had to have at least a moderate level of regexp-fu to get the full benefits of it. By the time I chucked Usenet for the blogosphere my talk.origins kill-file was a thing of beauty ;-) ).
There were plenty of entitled asshats around in those days, but I don’t recall anyone decrying the horrible repressiveness of the kill-file.
@ gussnarp
I have a couple of related ways of looking at this. I can’t say precisely how they are justifying it to themselves as I still need to look at what they say about it, but the nice thing about social behaviors is that they tend to have a social use no matter what they think they are doing.
Their arguments are entirely emotional and they treat social struggles over rights, privilege, and preventing problems specific to groups as zero-sum games. This is a war and not social persuasion you see, so any gains that “they” make necessarily come at the expense of “us”. So in anything on the internet mentioning feminism in a positive light they must decrease the positive. In anything talking about how women are treated and trying to reduce suffering for women they must fill the comments with the problems of men. That they do not actually try to improve things for men and in fact hate women more than they want to help men is a common pattern.
Additionally they are trying to maintain a system of dominance that they are used to. Part of any system of dominance is a micro-aggression system that maintains dominance by reminding you who is in charge. Thus the raging at demands that they stop using racial and gendered slurs, the need to make people objects (sexual or otherwise) of use, the need to change minds and behavior by swarming highly visible targets like Sarkeesian as a warning, and a need to make sure that you can be a potential target of swarming.
These folks depend on pack behavior. So they want to be free to swarm you and force you to listen.
@Eamon Knight:
You obviously never hung out in news.groups, people freaking out about being ignored was a common thing.
So, Oolon should not have called it the Blockbot but the USENet KillFile and the ‘freeze peach’ advocates would have been a-okay with it, right?
@Brony — I could not agree more, about the micro-aggression being critical to the system of dominance. How many times do you hear British or Aussie assholes chime in about c**t meaning something different there? Or claiming that f****t is a bunch of sticks or f*g is a cigarette butt? Or virulently defending that D.C. administrator who was reprimanded for using the word niggardly — when he actually did it as part of a long-running pattern of taunting and dog-whistling, it was not simply an “old-fashioned” choice of words, the guy was a well-known putz. So even down to the level of word-choice, it’s micro-aggression, in support of preserving the dominance. I used to walk my dogs in an urban park that had a lot of swaggering MBA dicks around, and it was the same thing, just their little comments when a pretty woman walked by — where a normal het man might cock his eyebrow to his normal het friend, who would nod back at him, and that would be the extent of the two dog-walking men acknowledging it, the MRA/Iron John/High Finance dude-bros would either steamroll up to her to try to chat her up, even if she had earphones on and eyes straightforward, or they would make really UGLY comments (which always seemed to revolve around anal sex). And if you objected, they would accuse you of pretending to be a decent guy, just in order to “get liberal pussy”. They have to turn the micro-aggression toward other males, if it threatens to undermine the dominance pattern.
And that’s the funniest of all, the “White Knight” and “mangina” accusations, as examples of micro-aggression in flailing support of eroding dominance — they believe that your being decent toward women might lead to a greater chance of the women sleeping with you. And the wackiest thing is, they’re dead right! Yet the logical truism escapes theses Evo-Psych geniuses! It’s more important to maintain the conditioned fratboy groupthink of dominance over the vagina-things than it is to actually succeed in their conditioned fratboy groupthink that life is all about getting pussy. It must be a tough life, stuck inside those little cross-purposed psychological prison cells in their heads.
I got the unreasonable indignation at being blocked thing just yesterday from Derek Walsh of Atheist Ireland, a friend and supporter and fan of Michael Nugent. I tweeted that repeatedly @ing people who have blocked you is one of Twitter’s criteria for banning, and he instantly replied to tell me I was wrong. That was a surprise because I hadn’t realized I hadn’t already blocked him. I fixed the error of omission, so then he did a flurry of tweets about my daring to block him, my stupid reason for blocking him, yadda. Then he went out of his way to tag me in conversations with other people, just to underline his claim that doing that isn’t at all like harassment. I gather this is all part of a campaign to convince us that we Freethought bloggers need to be more civil.
@pensnest #11:
I dunno. Carrying a table leg or selling some newspapers can sometimes be sufficient.
@ anbheal
As a white male with more innate aggressive tendencies this stuff seems to jump out at me more when looking at these social bias issues. I guess I’m just becoming aware of how the programming is shaped and would love to find effective counters for it.
One of the harder things for a privileged person to see, and deal with at a group level is the power structure set up by individuals that are used to acting dominant in their group. It’s an integrated system and needs an integrated response that while different in some respects depending on the issue (race, gender…), also has similarities that can be discussed as bits of aggressive social psychology. Those are the most important target because those are their most important social tools.
The won’t give up their tools without a fight. This is how they control things. This is how they understand and manipulate social interactions so they will yell and squeal as much as they can when they can’t actually do anything like harassment (see Dawkins). They will help each other even when they don’t know each other because they use the same tools and sense a threat (might be involved in police/authority investigation difficulty), or they are social allies in other ways (see Nugent).
Not only will they do what they can get away with socially to preserve their ability to engage in micro-aggressions. They will use similar behavior against people in their group who threaten their tools with a ton of pre-packaged behaviors, because being in their group is a psychological advantage. Projection (the one you mentioned about “get liberal pussy”), twisting the good into bad (“white knight” and SJW as slurs), outright trying to dominate you, collecting into bands to deal with higher ranking in-group threats, emotional characterizations of people/situations/ that don’t match the reality (and that they refuse to objectively describe or even link to), victim blaming (they started it, they shouldn’t wear clothes like that…
It’s all a primate chess match to keep the attention off of their behavior. This stuff is so stereotyped that we really need to itemize the behaviors as simply as possible and give them good names. Preferably names that highlight the cruel or dishonest nature of the behavior. Or some kind of a social combat playbook that covers everything bullies and abusers do between and within groups.
I was just looking for Lewis’s Law and found a couple of examples of what I mean and including “Anita’s Irony”.
These could be standardized for intersectional purposes as “Threatening or criticizing a dominance behavior or micro-aggression increases the probability of it’s appearance.” I’m not trying to take away anything from feminism, but these are much more broadly applicable. I’m wondering just how many patterns could be identified and named to make some new social tools.
Or you could just be Brazilian.
That’s the first I hear of that. Thanks. Though a source would be nice.
Kevin Kehres, 18,
While it may be true of Ryan, and don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with having multiple identities anymore than having a slew of emails. I certainly don’t want my work identity mixed up with my Pharyngula or porn activities.
That was great at 26, Brony.
A cop picking on rape victims?? George Will wonders why the crime goes unreported.
This creep is beyond being an asshole. He needs to be confined.
#11 pensnest: “Odd, that. “Suicide by cop” is quite difficult to achieve in England. Not impossible, but… difficult.”
One of my old college professors had a great story from when he had lived in England years before. While he was waiting for a train, a young man snatched a woman’s purse and ran off with a bobbie chasing him. Well, bobbies don’t carry firearms, but they do carry a blackjack* in a hidden pocket. This bobbie yelled “Halt, or I shall deliver injury!”, and nailed the dude in the back of the head from over 40 ft.
*A long, thin leather bag full of lead balls.
weatherwax #33
The periodic qualify at the blackjack range must have been a sight.