No precedent

There’s a lot to be disgusted at in Richard Carrier’s inaccurate, patronizing, mental-illness-attributing post about me, but I’ll spare us all and just address one ridiculous assertion.

No one here called for her to depart. She chose to on her own. We all maintain many disagreements with each other at FreethoughBlogs, and criticize each other often, without this result. It appears Benson didn’t think colleagues should publicly criticize each other, particularly in ways she saw as paranoid for some reason. I hope at least she enjoys less stress in her new home.

That’s grotesque. This was not just “disagreement” and it was not just “criticism” – it was vehement moral condemnation and shunning, aided by much misrepresentation.

That is not something that routinely happened on the network. As far as I know it never happened on the network before it happened to me. I’ve been trying to remember, I’ve done some searching – I can neither recall nor find anything like it in the network’s history.

The closest comparison would be to Phil Mason aka Thunderf00t. (Yes, that’s right, they treated me as if I were another Thunderf00t.) But that didn’t happen on the blogs – he was expelled before it could happen on the blogs. There were other behind the scenes tensions at various times, but they didn’t make it onto the blogs…presumably because of that unconscious assumption I’ve mentioned, that we didn’t do that on the blogs. That’s the assumption I didn’t realize I had until people started doing it to me on the blogs, and I was surprised, because I had always assumed we didn’t do that, for obvious reasons.

So, no – Carrier is full of shit about that. (He’s also full of shit about almost everything else in that post.) He’s completely full of shit to imply that the shunning of me was just another disagreement, totally normal, entirely routine. It wasn’t. I can’t think of a single precedent for it.

But hey, if you can, by all means point it out in comments. I’d be interested to know about it.

(There was one incident that, if other bloggers had participated, could have developed into the same kind of thing, but we didn’t. Greta Christina disagreed with Taslima on sex trafficking in what I thought was an excessively heated way. But it ended there, as far as I remember. That’s the difference.)

You might think this was just my personal reaction which is naturally biased in my favor…but I’ve heard privately from a lot of respected people who are horrified by what happened, so no, it’s not just my reaction.

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