A guest post by Athyco in a comment on A new way to stir up trouble.
It has been a knotted mass of stupid from the beginning, and each one contributes their little bit to the mess.
I looked over the comments to Karla’s It’s Personal blog post dismissing this WBC contact, then clicked on her banner to look at some other post titles. I wasn’t looking for anything that would relate to a tweet/con problem, but one surprised me.
Did you know that Karla, as one of four organizers, was not at all happy to have a tweet to #NEPABlogCon (single day September 2012 con for Northeast Pennsylvania bloggers) from someone who wasn’t interested in promoting/attending the con?
I used TweetChat to livestream hashtagged tweets on the screen behind a presenter who did not bring a visual presentation. As the presenter was half way through his excellent talk on how to monetize a blog, the audience was exposed to the following tweet on the screen behind him:
How many people were raped at #NEPABlogCon? Like, 50/60? I trust fake neck things were banned; they always lead to rape.
Do you know who this horrid FTB/Skepchick/A+/Social Justice Warrior was? (/sarcasm) It was ElevatorGATE. The very one who started the Brave Hero stuff that Justin Vacula and Karla Porter use as the title of their radio show. The one who has AmbrosiaX (declared “twitter sister” by Karla Porter) as his co-author on WP. Karla continued:
Can you imagine the confusion and even horror experienced by attendees of a blogger / social media conference seeing this on the screen behind an internationally respected presenter at the conference they were attending? The looks on their faces were quite telling. How would they know the tweet by @ElevatorGATE was a joke?
I knew what was going on, what the reference was to but no one else in the room did except Justin Vacula. I couldn’t allow attendees to feel uncomfortable and so I didn’t hesitate to reply:
Well, if you must know, 0. Model attendees without a con policy. RT @ElevatorGATE: How many people were raped at the #NEPABlogCon? Like 50/60?
As you can see Matt [Dillahunty], attendees did not understand the context of @ElevatorGATE’s remark – because they have no idea whatsoever about the drama of the paranoid, sick and dysfunctional element of the online atheist ‘community’. [Excuse me, but exactly which part of the online atheist ‘community’ sent this tweet to your con?]
But I did, and I felt rather fortunate that I was in the room at that moment to provide the response I did to calm rather than incite. It’s called damage mitigation. If it would have been one of the other organizers in the room instead of me, I can only imagine they would have felt the event was being hijacked and assaulted for no apparent reason. [But you can’t imagine the feelings of WiS2 conference organizers only a few months later. Huh.]
I’m not happy at all that any of the content filtered to this event, completely removed from the freakish sideshow that occurs on a daily basis on the Internet by people proselytising in ways harmful to one another about the viscosity of mud.
All typographical emphasis above is mine. The emphasis of “confusion and even horror,” “hijacked and assaulted,” “paranoid, sick and dysfunctional,” and “freakish sideshow” are all Karla’s.
She wrote this angry stuff to Matt Dillahunty because he commented on the situation, but I can’t find a word of reproach to ElevatorGATE for his hashtag “joke,” and I’m positive that she never reminded Justin Vacula of it when he later camped on a couple of con hashtags. I wonder if she ever explained to the other three women organizers of NEPABlogCon what it was all about.