Talk:Kathy Sierra/Using term 'allegations' with harassment

Below is nonsense. She and her lawyers have what was written, and it is NO defense in law to say you are "just kidding" when you threaten a stranger. End of story. The harassment was a fact. Stop vandalizing the change.

NPOV is NOT whiteboy POV. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.82.33.202 (talk) 02:58, August 29, 2007 (UTC)


 * NPOV is NOT feminist POV either you know. --Zache 04:42, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

It isn't "feminist" to say that the harassment occured. The harassment occured as an NPOV fact. Indeed, had the harassment not occured, then the article wouldn't belong in wikipedia, since it would be strictly and logically equivalent to an article about a personal false delusion.

What's POV is the interpretation of the harassment and opinions as to whether death threats and sexual innuendo should be interpreted as harmless or beneficial "freedom of speech".

You want, obviously, to harass people but to have this behavior classed as protected speech. You are in fact allowed to do so with respect to public figures by virtue of Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 (1988), a famous case which narrowed the definition of harassment.

However, Kathy Sierra was less like Jerry Falwell and more like "Miss Wyoming" Kim Pring who was also harassed as "Miss Wyoming" in Hustler, because Sierra was "only" a tech blogger and far more a private and less political figure than Falwell.

Therefore she was harassed because the posts are not and cannot be in dispute.

NPOV is not WPOV (white boy point of view).

STOP VANDALIZING THE CHANGE.

202.82.33.202 07:41, 31 August 2007 (UTC)Edward G. Nilges (author, Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler, Apress 2004)
 * Edward Nilges! It's been a while since I've seen you on the net. Per WP:CIVIL, you're always an interesting read. Anyway, take a look at my article http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/apr/19/blogging.comment
 * for a response to the issues you raise in your comment -- Seth Finkelstein 14:23, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

The facts are not in dispute, Seth. And I detect in your article compassion for people who chose to post responses which upset Ms. Sierra, but none for Ms. Sierra, who's had her tech career ruined. When she made her feelings known, they probably treated that as a big fucking joke. This on a facility in which one would expect people to comport themselves with courtesy and with dignity.

The only question now is the law. Should people be permitted to "harass" in order to protect free speech? The harassment is a fact, it is not alleged.

I encountered this shit when I posted to comp.programming while writing "Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler" by people who could not grammatically construct a complex sentence (but found mine all too long) and who didn't understand OO programming: who thought their stylistic prejudices "good programming", but knew only C. They wrote to Apress about me when I responded, at first explaining why I wanted to relate programming to wider cultural concerns, and then (when the BS continued) inviting them to go fuck themselves.

Bloggers are mostly cowards who hide under anonymity because they're desparately afraid of having their little careers, usually messing up some data base so that patients and other consumers can't get redress because their company needs money, destroyed. They show absolutely no compassion for people like Kathy Sierra, who had her career destroyed by an harassment, the facts of which cannot be disputed because (d'oh) she and her attorney have the hard copy.

I'm now going to change the article to have the proper header. Again. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 218.102.35.229 (talk) 12:46, 1 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Edward, the facts are indeed in dispute. This should not be arguable. Please read my artice above for details -- Seth Finkelstein 15:20, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for leaving the title, because it's the right one. The harassment occured: the only question was whether a tort occured in law, whether or not the harassment ascended to that level under the US Constitution guarantee of free speech.

It's indeed my POV that the harassment was tortious, but even if you don't agree, to call them "allegations" means that the only facts were Kathy's claims that she'd received disturbing emails. But this would be to paint her as making an accusation and a claim that something, that did not occur, occured, which would be to make her a criminal or a crazy woman, and she's neither.

She received communications that disturbed her. A tort isn't in the mind of the beholder, but "harassment" is: in a normal public meat space, IF a person feels harassed, AND the ordinary man in the street, after witnessing the behavior, agrees that it is of the harassing type, such that he would feel harassed, then the facts, if not their legal status, are known and agreed upon.

Someone sits opposite Kathy Sierra on a Muni bus and silently gestures to his penis while goggling at her. She feels harassed, and the other patrons on the bus agree that this is ordinary garden variety harassment. Case closed: the cops take the guy down to Chinatown because IN ADDITION his conduct has no Constitutional protection and is illegal under municipal law.

However, there is a difference. To my knowledge, Kathy Sierra does NOT claim that the conduct was illegal. Instead she claims, she alleges, that it should not occur in the internet community as an ethical matter. Many people disagree, feeling that because the internet allows us to treat others as things and as crash test dummies, we should be allowed to do so.

That can be argued, separately, without changing the facts. Kathy felt harassed, and she was harassed under the ordinary meaning of the term.

Indeed, there are two ironies here.

One is that the conduct of poor and minority people has been absurdly overmonitored in American cities in "quality of [middle class white] life" programs, with "zero tolerance" for common-if-deplorable Seventies urban behavior such as leering at women on the bus, that for a black or poor white person to SAY or even IMPLY the sorts of things that were both SAID (in writing no less) and certainly IMPLIED to Kathy Sierra would be a short trip to jail if not prison. Whereas wealthy white males, while enthusiastically in most cases supporting "quality of life" culture wars, seem to in some cases want to engage in the same behavior all over the internet, in an arguably cowardly fashion.

The second irony is the disappearance of the Golden Rule and mere empathy on the Internet. Increasingly, "flame" wars (usually misnamed because there is usually a bully and a "mark" while "flaming" implies rough equality) show zero willingness to "do unto others as you would have done unto yourself", the game instead an almost absurd one-upmanship, a game of selves so apparently toxic that they have to win at all costs.

Your article in particular manifests a sort of inchoate empathy for the people Kathy named but none for her, whose livelihood and sense of personal safety was violated according to the facts of the case even though she had sought a mere livelihood as a technical spokesperson. You seem to want us to forget that "they started it". I understand that in one or two cases, "they" were the victim of identity theft but on the whole, your article commences a war that you can neither win nor settle.

This is the war of "I'm the victim, not her, ignore her, she doesn't count, I do". It puts a person under erasure, and denies their claims and existence in such a way that the person has to reply, and, an interminable war erupts.

Edward G. Nilges


 * Did you in fact read my article? Many things which you assert above are not correct -- Seth Finkelstein 18:44, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

And that would be? I did read the article. - Edward G. Nilges —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.82.33.202 (talk) 04:59, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
 * She made huge claims about the conduct being illegal, including a police investigation - which affected the ability of the accused to defend themselves. Your statement there is simply false. You're also begging the question above - if what she said was incorrect, it's irrelevant what an observer would think if the incorrect statements were true. The objective truth of the statements is the point of contention here, not her belief in the truth of her statements. Her account is also selective and leaves out crucial exculpatory evidence for the accused. -- Seth Finkelstein 14:43, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Edward G. Nilges replies: that's what a victim does: he or she makes "huge" claims of harm done. In a community such as the Web, these are informal claims of ethical harm, for which he or she is not responsible, performed by other agents. In law, he or she goes to law to claim a tort.

If the harassment was in Justice Holmes' terms "shouting fire in a crowded theater", or assault in that it is a credible threat-of-harm, then it doesn't enjoy Constitutional protection and may certainly warrant a warrant, that is, a police investigation. Now, such an investigation may offend people who neither shout "fire" in crowded theaters nor goggle at women on public transportation in that it seems to them an assault on good name: this is unfortunate, and poor and minority people who are subject to excess police investigation may extend their sympathies (but probably won't). However, one avoids this (except in the cases of identity theft) by restraint of tongue and pen.

Doesn't one.

Nobody has (yet) made the claim that Kathy was "incorrect". My understanding is that she received a lot of anonymous, non-anonymous, and pseudonomous hate mail based on the contradiction between her sex and what she professed as perceived by some males, therefore to claim or imply that Kathy was "incorrect" is to claim or imply that she's a psycho hosebag liar.

Unfortunately, this is the direction most responses to victim whistleblowing, in which a victim of abuse impugns the good name of a high-status person, take: they gradually, and in grave and serious tones, and in classy publications, push the perception of the case in the direction of Psycho Hosebag Off Her Meds.

This is what happened to the low-status, community college sex worker in last year's Duke rape case: an African American woman was unarguably abused by rich white boys at a party the theme of which was "American Psycho", from a novel and movie about a Yuppie who is a sex killer. Unfortunately for her, the rich white boys' fathers could afford not only first-class representation but were also able to plant articles in the press which gradually, as 2006 drew to a close, ever so seriously questioned the accuser's credibility, including a New Yorker article. Isn't that what is happening here? Or need people plant articles in the press when the whole direction of society is the protection of the rich, the well-connected, the male, and the blog with a lot of hits?

This is what happened to Anita Hill when she presented facts about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearings.

I suspect that your grave, serious, but inchoate Guardian article is less concerned about the facts than gradually painting a picture of Kathy Sierra as a psycho hosebag because only a PH would bring charges against men with broadband, careers and homes: these men in general need to be held harmless, it would seem, from the sort of wild accusations that low-status people (and not only women: also people perceived to be minority or poor) are subject to ALL THE TIME, ESPECIALLY on the Internet.

That is, it is in my direct experience (cf. usenet where I post as myself) that anyone in a usenet virtual community who is perceived as shall we say naive (he has for example traditionally "liberal" views), or low-status (he has for example and in my case taken the Greyhound Bus to get to the Microsoft Author's Conference) he becomes fair game for the most hyperbolic sorts of accusations, which can at any time be renarrated as just good clean fun, but which are, in a context of ongoing government surveillance, harm done, and, meant, in Kathy's case and others, to be so.

Kathy if anything is too narrow. She makes the absurd claim, or implication, that is women who are in some analytic way subject to abuse. While factually it is the case that to have a female name on the internet, or a female persona in meatspace, is asking for trouble in technology, Kathy has like so many American women refused to identify with The Wretched of the Earth: the people of the earth, that is, whose plight is defined by the word "victim", not a vagina.

Nobody wants to say "I am a victim and this is wrong" but in the final analysis this is what has to be said. And when on the face of it harm has been done, when bits are sent that say and mean "may you get raped or killed", the person receiving that transmission is a victim and harm has been done.

Plorans ploravit in nocte: she sits in front of her computer weeping because she's been abused, in writing, in the most foul and uncontrolled way. She is scared. And "she" might easily be a "he", like the man I saw in the public library of Durham NC arrested by the police for using the computer to complain about his property tax bill.

Of course, I don't hold the one or two people who were spoofed responsible. But I do hold anyone responsible that subjects a person on the Internet to hyperbolic sexual speech responsible for a tort in American law UNLESS the target is nationally known, and I'm afraid that they shall have to talk to the cops.

I have used hyperbolic and abusive words myself in the heat of debate and I was suspended from using the Google path to usenet in 2003 as a result of a complaint. I showed Google the context, in which I had already been subject to hyperbolic abuse and an attempt to start a letter writing campaign about me to my publisher. I'd elected to fight in usenet terms but had the initial posters of the abuse not "started it" I would not have had to do so. I agree with Kathy Sierra that this shit needs to END.

If the abusive bits sent to Kathy came from servers serving high-status males, then yes, the police should get involved. If in any individual case that high-status male was spoofed, the coppers can verify this. Professor Lawrence Lessig, in his book "Code and the Laws of Cyberspace", deconstructs the common notion that nothing can be forensically verified or controlled on the Web: yes we can get closure and know who dunnit, and if a person has received evil whisperings in the middle of the night on her machine, which show a disregard for his or her existence, and a zero empathy of the sort that keeps us all from a state of nature, then I say, let justice be done though the heavens fall. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.82.33.202 (talk) 11:46, 7 September 2007 (UTC)