Very topical! This just happened:
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jan/07/jane-austen-banknote-abusive-tweets-criado-perez
John Nimmo, 25, from South Shields, and Isabella Sorley, 23, from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, pleaded guilty on Tuesday at Westminster magistrates court to abusing [Caroline] Criado-Perez online...The district judge Howard Riddle warned that [Sorley] would "almost inevitably" be sent to prison when he passed sentence on 24 January.
The backstory is that Criado-Perez had been successfully campaigning for Darwin to be taken off the £10, in favour of Jane Austen, because Elizabeth Fry was being taken off the £5 in favour of Churchill and this would leave the Bank of England notes devoid of even a Smurfette level of gender balance.
She would be if she'd been put on the £5 note. As it is she'll be sort of brownish.
Also on the Bank of England notes: Adam Smith on the £20 (not English), James Watt on the £50 (not English).
I've always found it odd that newspaper and magazine comment sections are the worst cesspits (misogynistic and otherwise) even though they're institutions where people are paid to deal with their online presence. Is it an "old media" thing where they don't really give a shit about online discussions? Or because it's higher visibility so either there's enough crap that it generally floats to the top and/or trolls are paid to fling poo there?
To make it relevant, in the OP example, did she attract a nutjob because she was a journalist in addition to being a woman on twitter?
Maybe journalists are just much more irritating than normal people.
I think it's the old media thing - the online arm of a newspaper is being run reluctantly, a blog is being run eagerly.
I always feel weird saying this, because it obviously says nothing at all about other people's experiences, but like heebie, I don't think I've ever gotten an abusive email.
Way way back in '03 or so, I used to hang around on an online forum also inhabited by Ace of Spades and some of his ilk, and drew a fair amount of profane abuse there, but nothing that felt scary at all.
I read Unfogged for a long time - possibly a couple of years - before I ever opened up a comment box. It had simply never occurred to me that Internet comments anywhere might be worth reading.
I wonder if it's because our photos are not up, and our pseuds are not obviously female to a cursory glance.
Anecdotally, there seems to be a sense in which people believe that journalists aren't real people, and feel they can get away with insulting them. Possibly because the old-media relationship was that you read the paper and then harrumphed about it to your spouse, friends, etc - "look what that idiot Monbiot has written today" - and that's being transferred over.
My bet is that pseuds not obviously female is a big part of it -- that most of the real abusive nutcases are driveby shooters, who don't engage with what they're reading long enough to learn anything about the writers. I thought my pseud was obviously gendered when I picked it, but have been repeatedly disabused of that notion.
But this is certainly a problem for women other than professional journalists. Bitch had a lot of trouble, escalating to a stalker calling her house at one point.
Journalists are communicating to the general public, the common clay. You know... morons.
7. Not sure about that. The Groan's comment threads, for example, are moderated quite enthusiastically and what I see there is the staggeringly high proportion of comments that get deleted. But I don't know how many of them are deleted for misogyny, because it never says why.
11- Heh, that's funny, I once got in an email argument with David Cay Johnston because he wrote an article about tax policy in the NYT that had something unclear about marginal vs. total rates and I thought he was making the ignorant error a lot of people make about "OMG I'm in a higher tax bracket, I shouldn't take that raise!" To his credit he responded and after a little back and forth he admitted it had been unclear but made it obvious that he knew the law. Then I looked him up and found that he is a professor of tax law and had won a Pulitzer writing about the tax code.
5: People are so dedicated to typing "I saw a cyclist who didn't stop at red lights" every time a car hits a bike, that I assume their being paid for it.
15, that newspaper is the exception to the "online arm is being run reluctantly" rule.
As a kid, I was interested in the weekly (Sunday? Saturday?) section of the paper where they published phone messages from readers. There was a lot of hateful idiocy in those as well, but it wast 100% hateful idiocy like it is with comment sections. I assume some judgment was being made on what to publish and what not to publish, but now they feel they can't "censor" "free speech"?
It not obviously gendered because you left the e off of Lizardbreathe.
Although I just went back and found my discussion with him (2007, thanks gmail) and actually he was kind of obnoxious in his admission: "Well perhaps I was in artful, but 35% of $3.6xxx billion is $1.3 billion,which is the VALUE of the tax deduction."
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The elderly cat has started to lose control of his bowels, over the past 24 hours. I think karma is truly biting me in the butt for making fun of my brother's bed-pooping dog. Heading back to the vet.
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Although he did spend the night in the bathroom, because I do not want poop in my bed.
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I think the directionality of misogynist abuse is essentially a branding issue. As heebie says, there are no pictures here, nor is there overt feminist labeling of any sort.
The crazy misogynist hate - and here I'm differentiating from ordinary misogynist hate - isn't a response to ideas or opinions, exactly, but a response to how people label themselves.
The reactionaries operate on a pretty primitive level. They aren't engaging arguments, they are lashing out against something that is simultaneously more superficial and more basic. Marrissa Mayer and Mary Barra, empowered women though they are, aren't going to draw the same type of abuse because they haven't branded themselves as women who support women, regardless of how they behave in their lives or the things they believe.
So commenters now need to link to a stored image ? I'll use this one.
Bank of England notes devoid of even a Smurfette level of gender balance
Is all British money not plastered with pictures of the Queen?
I had to Google Elizabeth Fry. Kind of sad that a Quaker would be replaced by Churchill. Not cool that Darwin ended up getting demoted for it.
I don't think abusive misogynists should be branded. Scourged, yes, but branding seems a little over the top.
Let's put Squeaky Fromme on the one-dollar bill!
re: 26
Queen on one side, and other notable person on the other side.
I'm all for replacing Andrew Jackson with Sojourner Truth.
I think Sojourner Truth was too much of a self-promoter. That stage name is a bit on the nose, isn't it?
Harrriet Tubman, maybe.
Not cool that Darwin ended up getting demoted for it.
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of an opportunity to establish his reproductive fitness."
Is all British money not plastered with pictures of the Queen?
According to the Guardian, the Queen is a man.
"Criado-Perez had begun her campaign after the bank announced in April that the social reformer Elizabeth Fry would be dropped from £5 notes in favour of Sir Winston Churchill, leaving no female figure on banknotes."
I'd prefer to have kept the science element by putting Rosalind Franklin or Dorothy Hodgkin or someone on there, but there you go.
Unfogged has been one of the least toxic online environments I've frequented (jinx). "Poly Shore" or whoever it was is the only standard brand mouthbreather troll I can recall seing here with any frequency. Of course I don't know how busy the main posters have been behind the scenes cleaning things up.
One of the weirder things I've noticed in the online era is a non-negligible number of people voicing the opinion that death threats are just "normal" and no big deal. When did that get started? Do people really believe it?
Dorothy Hodgkin
They went with a Non-Hodgkin persona.
Good God,man! You can't go around putting scientists on the money, unless they're self-financing gentlemen like Darwin. I mean, they're practically in trade!
"the only standard brand mouthbreather troll I can recall seeing here with any frequency"
36 is a testament to the diligent curation efforts. Or maybe you're not considering other disruptors to be "mouthbreathers."
They could put Turing but if they did people would be all, "So what, do you want a cookie?"
39: they put Faraday on there, and Newton. And Watt, who was worse than a scientist, he was an engineer. And (as noted above) not even an Englishman.
Ada Lovelace. We're ready to have tragic drug-taking gambling addicts on our currency.
(Ideally, as drawn by Sydney Padua in the very splendid but tragically aestivating 2dgoggles.com.)
40: by "mouthbreather", I mean the incoherent spewing obscenities type troll.
Unfogged, of course, gets its share of high quality artisanal trolling.
Unfogged has some of the best trolls on the internet.
Unfogged, of course, gets its share of high quality artisanal trolling.
Traditionally by the site owners.
Read it the other day (via LGM, which needs to be read to be believed) and thought it was a very good article. I don't really understand the extreme harassment or have a solution. Although I do have some thoughts. I am not trying to trivialize the horrific experiences, but understand them within a continuum of social interaction.
It took a whole lot less than physical threats or abusive language to get one kicked off I Blame the Patriarchy or old Pandagon. Not that I ever commented there. And I was asked to stay away from Making Light, without anything close to disemvowelment or objectionable enough to be moderated, for simply being less than wildly supportive.
I am not not blaming the victims. And the author herself deals with the contradictions of interacting on a globally inclusive social media while trying to limit participants to those with shared community standards. I certainly have seen Trotskyites and analytical Marxists kicked off Leninist discourses.
I ramble. And I am not so worried, simply interested.
Minimal standards of exclusion tend to escalate as communities become entrenched and traditional. As time goes on, they become somewhat paranoid and small groups start feeling threatened by even the moderately other.
Protection of the vulnerable while promoting an inclusionary atmosphere is not so simple or easy.
Our female FPPs should put bows in their hair so that we know they're girls.
Ada Lovelace. We're ready to have tragic drug-taking gambling addicts on our currency.
Unfortunately the Duke of Kent who died in WWII never got onto any banknotes.
46.3: Whaddya want, a Shachtmanite?
that death threats are just "normal" and no big deal. When did that get started? Do people really believe it?
Ohh, the cops written of in the article have a whole lot of experience in understanding the difference between bullshit and potential violence.
Instead of twitter, imagine a working-class bar on Friday night, and consider whether police should take every instance of insult and trash-talk as a potential criminal situation. Or a pick-up basketball game.
Most internet abuse is performative, because the mostly young abusers think they can, from the from of distance and anonymity, and want to prove they can, as in able to self-liberate from constraints of a particular local community discourse.
Trolling, I see it everywhere.
My dogs, who are on six-foot leashes, like to cut around behind me, making my arms cross behind my back and requiring contortions to keep from dropping a leash.
Breaking rules is fun!
Finally, before I walk 'em, everybody should study the 400 wasted comments in Holbo's latest anti-racism thread.
I am not so impressed with logic, elegance, and wit in attempting to destroy the soul of a supposedly civil racism apologist.
Fuck you clown works well enough for me.
"Well, one might be lead to wonder if my interlocutor has fully digested all the relevant material."
Fuck you clown.
Trolling, I see it everywhere.
Ok, this made me laugh. I've always imagined you, bob, as VP of Exploration and Extraction in South America for Exxon. Don't tell me I'm wrong.
On the original topic, if the NSA wanted to do some real public relations (but why would they?) they could provide us with awesome stats, like, 82.7% of rape threats online are made by young men of high school age. Then we could all be gobsmacked that 1.3% of those threats are made my girls, or whatever. We need a government that works for us.
Normally, I don't bother disagreeing with Bob, but in this specific context (a) Bob, asking you specifically to leave anyplace is not evidence of unusual or unjustified touchiness. We're very relaxed here, but you've been powerfully unpleasant to people and;
(b) Ohh, the cops written of in the article have a whole lot of experience in understanding the difference between bullshit and potential violence.
This is complete bullshit to the extent that it suggests that targets of online harassment should shrug it off as bullshit. I have no interest whatsoever in whether suggesting that to be the case was your intent or not.
55.3 Like it's a coincidence thta Listicles first started corroding public discourse after the NSA's budget grew.
Interesting Boulet comic partly on this.
Then we could all be gobsmacked that 1.3% of those threats are made by girls, or whatever.
Interestingly, one of the two offenders in the story I linked was female. There seem to be plenty of nasty behaviour online to go around, though I think girls are more keen on bullying their victims into committing suicide.
Finally, before I walk 'em,
OK, so we should only expect 9 more comments
59: Sort of like Gaudy Night, but without an aristocrat to come and find the person making threats.
I would like to leave some room for the specific, friendly type of trolling we do here.
Hey, if they're going to update Wimsey (as they did Holmes) that might not be a bad way to go.
("I'm afraid, Mr Pym, that it looks as though there is a secret advertising agency being run from inside your harmless cocaine smuggling operation."
"My God! This could ruin my reputation!")
62: Right -- 'trolling' generally is not equivalent to harassment or threats. There's lots of things that could reasonably fit under the heading of trolling that I enjoy a great deal having around here.
What a powerful article.
The uselessness of the cops in this story reminded me of something I read this week that the FBI has strongly cut back on law enforcement in favor of spying.
63: Bunter would have to be a hacker, not a photographer.
64: It's moments like these when a glimmer of hope surfaces that we'll work out our artistic differences.
As a committed philistine, probably not. But I am glad to see that you're finding readers who enjoy your writing.
This place seems quite different than others on the vast savannah of the internet for having what seems a fairly even gender balance. As I rather like hanging with both men and women in real life, not surprising I prefer it online as well. Although my other favorite online hangout is almost exclusively male and I do keep myself carefully gender neutral in presentation there and strongly suspect no one thinks I'm a chick.
crooked timber seems to have seriously deteriorated over the past few years or was that always as wretched? Commenters appear to be overwhelmingly 21 year old white boys with massive snotty egos and zero social intelligence.
68: Are you seeing that? Any chance you'll share the evidence with me?
I would like to leave some room for the specific, friendly type of trolling we do here.
Who is this "we"?
71: I was adopting a royal pronoun again. Nobody else's trolling is acceptable.
crooked timber seems to have seriously deteriorated over the past few years or was that always as wretched? Commenters appear to be overwhelmingly 21 year old white boys with massive snotty egos and zero social intelligence.
The posters at Crooked Timber seem determined to behave civilly toward libertrians, which encourages far too many of them to hang out there. I suppose the libertarians are flattered by the feeling that they're sitting at the grownups table and being taken seriously for a change.
"Never be nice to libertarians" is the lesson here.
I thought Crooked Timber was always wretched, but I don't read it very often. It could be worse.
This place seems quite different than others on the vast savannah of the internet for having what seems a fairly even gender balance.
DecaCon was a bit of a sausage fest.
69. I think CT has deteriorated significantly. It used to be a lot more fun and a lot less stupid and gotcha type language games in the comment threads. Lately I'm finding a number of the regulars are becoming really tedious to read which I find funny because I don't feel that way about any of the commenters here or at LGM where I comment frequently (I find this true even of the usual suspects although one or two are beginning to wear thin - maybe it's time to take those dogs for a walk!) The posts are still very good at CT and there is the occasional thread that turns into a very pleasant surprise.
70: I thought some people in your last thread liked your stuff? No?
76: Right -- people have been hating on the threads at CT forever, and I didn't use to mind them that much. Lots of idiots, but I don't mind arguments with idiots on principle. But the last year or two they've been really, really dull.
77: Oh maybe they did. But my strategy of buying lots of copies of my books may not work out in the long run.
What is "LGM"? I can never figure out what it is referring to.
80: Les Gendarmes de Mariachi. Who wants to write that out every time?
Rule of thumb: at CT, read the OP and ignore the comments; here, ignore the OP and read the comments.
The only other comment section I read regularly is on a baseball site, and there something kind of amazing happened. Once the comment section gelled into a community, a few women commenters managed to basically do feminism 101 for a group of 20s and 30s sports dudes in a way that left few hurt feelings, nobody defensive, and pretty much everyone friendly and happy. It turns out that hilarious Yasiel Puig animated .gifs can heal all or something and the guys were basically just like "oh huh never thought about it that way, guess I was being dumb, let's talk about who's pitching tonight" instead of "let me make rape jokes/expound my ponderous theory of why the feminazis are keeping me down."
Although Les Gendarmes de Mariachi would be a cool name for a band.
85 was me. I don't know why Firefox keeps losing my username here.
I think a lot of this is down to the imagined audience - the perpetrators don't seem to really believe the target can hear them and do it to count coup in front of their own following. I also think there's quite a bit of what I would call "camp sexism" about - nobody really imagines you can behave like this any more, but it might be fun to act it out. If you're an arsehole.
Also, back in the day I remember quite a lot more ambient viciousness floating around. High traffic blogs and forums used to be very spiteful in general and aren't any more - it's as if the phenomenon has moved on from teeing off on someone who disagrees with you on some website about Israel or digital cameras to picking a briefly famous @name.
84: Awesome. It's good to hear cheerful stories occasionally.
75: I thought Witt or someone did a count and it ended up being a quarter or a third women? Not parity, certainly, but not nothing. I'm curious how it felt to other women, because my own biases (and, actually, having been in the kitchen for a lot of the time) may have left me feeling less overwhelmed by the number of men than someone else might have been. Or maybe it was that you all had nametags and so I could tell you apart.
88. email and a bunch of interactions described in the OP link are private.
Seems like the cruddy public behavior really does encourage something worse in private.
90:But not too frequently; many of us have terminally-cynical worldviews to maintain.
here, ignore the OP and read the comments.
You know that I'm standing right here, right?
94: Someone had to demonstrate what the thread is supposed to be about, right?
My kid started a YouTube channel with bracelet making instructables and is very excited when he gets comments. I'm worried about how much he'll end up hating humanity.
It used to be a lot more fun and a lot less stupid and gotcha type language games in the comment threads. Lately I'm finding a number of the regulars are becoming really tedious to read
The commenters at CT now are 80% blowhards who either preface every comment with "Well, as I have always said, my philosophy is as follows", or you can tell they want to start it that way but they believe everyone is so familiar with their personal philosophy that they can babble on at length for the benefit of their legions of fans.
As for the posters, I'm kind of disappointed in Corey Robin. He has a strong tendency to the "gotcha" sort of argument.
i.e. three paragraphs that are interesting and useful summary of an issue, and then you see the post is actually eighteen paragraphs long, and you think "Where are you going with this". And it turns out that it's an argument along the lines of "You agree with this, right? And you agree with this, right? And you agree with this, right? Well, if you agree with those things and you don't agree with [something that you almost certainly don't agree with], you're a moral monster."
94, 95: SHOW US YR TITTEEZ, PEEP
You know that I'm standing right here, right?
Is it allowed to still be on topic after 94 comments?
I value your posts extremely, but you craft them with an eye to provoking a good thread, amirite? Whereas over there a couple of people I hadn't seen before are still pounding each other with all the grace and wit of King Kong vs Godzilla with New Year hangovers over some trivial difference of opinion after 430 screeds. I'm pretty sure that's not what Prof. Holbo was after when he posted.
I always found CT threads unreadable, but maybe that's just me.
LGM threads are mostly terrible and boring (piling on some right wing stupidity gets really old really fast unless you're very very funny which most people aren't) but are occasionally worth diving into for the epic annoyingess of Joe From Lowell and the epic weirdness (Ghana!) of J. Otto Pohl.
Crooked Timber should experiment with switching to an "all trolley car problems all the time" format.
102.last: That's enough for him to find this thread.
but you craft them with an eye to provoking a good thread, amirite?
Now this should go in the empty praise thread, right? I'm enjoying the word "craft" mightily, though. I craft threads with an eye to sheer dependable frequency.
99: Damn you, apo! I confide in you about my least favorite body part and that's what you do! I'm never commenting here again! : (
I changed my mind! I can't let the mean people win!
102 I hear if you say his name three times in a mirror you'll find yourself in Accra.
JfL is terribly annoying.
I find a number of the commenters there to be very funny.
Oh, well that's a relief. I thought I just didn't like CT because I wasn't smart enough, but either that's untrue, or a bunch of you are dumb, too. Dumbery loves company so I'm down with that.
I tried reading it a few years ago when I got here, because it was sometimes referenced. Everything seemed to be an argument about an argument about an argument and you had to turtle down through the arguments to the first one to know what the hell anyone was on about, only everyone was talking like "well of course all of this is well known to thinking people." I didn't last long.
108.1: I heard he once made a comment so passive-aggressive that a tenured professor at a Big 10 school resigned to take a job in Ghana.
Dumbery loves company
New and permanent mouseover text, please!
75: I thought Witt or someone did a count and it ended up being a quarter or a third women?
Here has a count of just over one third women, I don't know if this is the final count: "25:14, maybe. Who else?"
Regarding the linked article, I think they need to bring back the common law defense of "fighting words" to cases of assault and battery. A man who threatens to rape a woman in order to try and shut her up should be punched in the face. There's no other adequate response. It isn't "speech" in the sense of words which seek to express an idea. Generally there should be more fistfights.
In our house this place is known as "the dark side of crooked timber". In a good way!!!
If all two people can do is express mutual hatred, I don't think much is lost in letting them punch each-other for awhile. And if all one person can do is express unrequited hatred, really anyone should be allowed to punch him.
116: It's fairly common (at least in this town) for the police to tell people that getting punched in the face is a natural consequence of starting a fight and not arrest anyone.
PF gets it in 24. "Hate for women" is actually hate for feminists, and unfogged doesn't catch it because we're all so congenial.
120- I can't see why that might be a problem.
120: But next week when I have to be in court all day, I can't bring my knitting needles! I see how it is.
What if you mounted the needles on a gun and called them bayonets? Hello 2nd Amendment case.
My favorite part of 121:
Hauer suffered a stroke in recent years and can at times, be unsteady on his feet.Now I have the awesome mental image of him using pointing that gun around with his hand visibly shaking the entire time.
"Hate for women" is actually hate for feminists, and unfogged doesn't catch it because we're all so congenial.
I haven't been congenial since Nixon got elected.
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You know what's good?
Well, I was reading "Invented Traditions of Japan" which of course led me to Hobsbawn and Ranger's classic 80s Invented Traditions and the intro by H is great and the articles on kilts and Welsh are fun but the longest article on invented traditions in colonial sub-saharan Africa is simply wonderful.
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Back OT
Everybody here has been to college right? Since the 80s right? We all know this does not start and stop with death and rape threats, or egregiously obscene insults?
I could link, and will if requested as not remembered, to the discussion between the Narnia lady and Geo Sc, which went along the lines "What, are you implying that I have either not read Phillip Roth or that I have not understood him, or are you saying my tastes are somehow inferior to yours? Do you understand how sexist and misogynist that is?"
Foucault::Power is everywhere and always.
This is really about who gets the hegemony and power to exclude in a discourse community, not even about the rules, because the "rules" will deliberately be kept vague ambiguous and arbitrary. "Privilege" in part means not being insecure during processes of negotiation and interaction.
Now I'm back to the ways native Africans used Imperial symbolism to negotiate and enhance their positions under colonialism.
And using the extreme and radical instances to stifle competition in a discourse and establish hegemony is, to me, as recent as
"Uhh, do we really need to invade Iraq"
"9/11, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11"
CT has this one brilliant commenter named Bruce Wilder. No sense of humor but one of the best political commenters around. I almost read it for him at this point.
The main page posts vary a LOT in quality. Agreed with Ned re Corey Robin
It's a folk blog.
I will dependably laugh at this joke.
Since I mentioned this at LGM (and I'm huddled under a blanket trying to get warm after taking my daughter to her first skating class in about 15 degree weather, so I'm not going anywhere): I assume papers get lots of obscene letters to the editor, as well as hate mail addressed to journalists care of the paper--I'm sure I've read about this somewhere--and it tends not to get publicized, unless someone writes a memoir and mentions they got hate mail. I agree that it's odd that organizations that are very used to dealing with the entire public, and getting strange mail, are taking the attitude to comments on published articles (which why do we need, really, to comment on an article about street closings, and if we do, why shouldn't comments be limited to the topic) that the problem is with the fact that people feel free to say such things.
I've gotten peculiar mail, when I used my real name. Nothing entirely threatening. The huge troll guy put me on his involuntary mailing list of conspiracy theories--this was in the days of dial-up so it was pretty annoying--and sent things that could have been designed to be filtered into a surveillance list. A few people sent weird messages that didn't make sense but seemed vaguely insulting. A guy followed up on a Usenet post about something unrelated, with a personal-sounding discussion about whether I'd been to the movies lately. I was greeted, on starting to post to a Usenet group, by a few multi-page e-mails (like ten or more, I can't access that inbox now to check), the one screenful I read seemed to be telling me how to think about other members of the NG and how I was permitted to interact with them. Other vague conspiracy stuff, hard to gauge the intention of. Mail to my house related to stuff discussed online, with no explanation: things sent from commercial organizations very far from anything I'd ever requested myself.
127 Agreed about Bruce Wilder. That Duck Dynasty Holbo thread chris y alluded to above is fucking train wreck.
Help! I seem to be losing letters...
Back when this blog was (or seemed to be) more highly trafficked outside of the people who comment and lurk regularly, there were some people who showed up mostly just to attack feminism and feminist arguments and I think it really did have a negative effect on those threads. Also there have been some heated within-blog arguments, but that's obviously different than drive-by trolling.
Maybe this has been mentioned upthread, but I thought for a while there was a legal theory that if you don't moderate comments then you're not liable for what happens in comments. But if you do, then you take on a lot of responsibility for what people say. I don't know if this was ever true, but I remember reading it as a justification for either having shitty newspaper comments or turning off comments altogether, there being no middle option.
I prefer a drive-by troll to one who sticks around.
I had this weird dream last night where Apo had come over to drink some beers, and I was alternately chatting with him and hiding from some guy who was staking out my house, trying to sell me a used Prius for more money than it was actually worth. As long as this is kind of a metathread.
That's funny, I had a dream in which a homeless woman hid in my bathroom and then got upset when I asked her to move off the toilet.
Bruce Wilder is not the only good CT commenter. I think I have a more positive view of CT than others because I'm a hobbyist-type economics wonk, and some of the econ discussion on CT can be excellent. In particular, the econ posts by DD and Quiggin tend to be very good and attract very interesting comment sections. E.g. this recent post by DD was a good post with an epic discussion following. Josh Mason and John Halasz are some other good econ commenters, there are more.
The threads focused on culture and politics tend to be less interesting and more annoying. I don't like the main page posters in those areas so much either.
I will dependably laugh at this joke.
I take that as a challenge.
121 is insanely funny, but it must have been terrifying for the people in the audience. I presume the guy will suffer no adverse consequences at all.
