When Lunatics Attack Your Family (Especially Women)
TODAY is Monday, so back we go to writing something short about the militants who spent years defaming me and harassing my family. These mobsters and monsters have mental issues, but that's hardly an excuse.
Don't worry, I won't keep it long, as the real goal is to stay on our main topics over 99% of the time (one article out of 100+ a week is less than 1%).
The harassment takes several forms, including doxing, harassment by proxy/process, and blackmail.
Just to be very clear, as we covered this topic last week, the campaign of hate stigmatises trans people. By breaking laws and misusing all sorts of things they contribute to this fashionable idea that they're too risky to hire or allow inside communities. It's potentially destructive.
Also, just to set the record straight, nothing we did was even remotely illegal. We banned people who had done many illegal things. We had no choice but to ban them. That had nothing to do with them being trans.
If some tribunal in Pakistan accuses a person of blasphemy in America or if some Russian authority issues a warrant on some Spaniard for "insulting" Putin, what does that even mean? It's like the Iranian regime issuing a fatwa or bounty on some author's head, sending him into hiding. Civil society views this unfavourably. It won't succumb to mob mentality like ISIS or Hamas. No sane person will subscribe to such ideology. When it comes to the legal process, no place is universal; a local court, for instance, has no jurisdiction or authority globally, nor does it cover every little facet of life or even the Internet.
A few months ago I became aware of a smear campaign that had spread to some other IRC networks, including SoylentNews (SN). It "seems the person who posts nazi stuff and attacks my wife is now trying to post submissions to SN," I informed them. "The person is a thug, but uses a female name to hide the past."
SN is run by people who are smart enough to see what's happening. They won't facilitate lunatics who keep intimidating and committing crimes against people who report on important world/tech issues and high-profile programmers. SN told me about this and we'll probably revisit this one day.
As one person put it: "The [redacted] isn't happy about SoylentNews. The harassment has been taken to Libera Chat, where he has been apparently banned from their room. He's busy screaming about Transphobia and cyberattacks on his latest blog. Maybe [redacted] will finally ban [redacted] if enough other people complain about him. Although I don't know how talking about a vaginaplasty every day in anime nonstop hasn't already done it. He did still only have the one, right? [redacted] v. SoylentNews?"
The harassment basically keeps extending to every person or site or group that supports us. Some receive menacing/threatening communications, as we showed here before.
Having contacted the local authorities for advice, they offered direct admission that I am permitted by the law to write about the crimes and abuses committed against me and my family. They won't stop any of that. Victims of crimes can talk about those crimes.
The attacks on my wife and my mom are rather revealing. These are acts of extreme misogyny. They will be treated appropriately and handled as such.
Next week we'll probably offer some more details, but until then we intend to publish about 20 stories per day rather than feed the trolls and criminals. While I am not a huge fan of American culture, I do value the US stance on free speech, which is codified in the First Amendment. Even though it can be misused by bigots it does safeguard society from all sorts of attacks, which ought not be unspeakable. █
