On Aug 2, 2007, at 10:15 AM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 8/2/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
...and this is talking about an email which directly compared my comments to being a wilful apologist for rape.
It is six o'clock in the morning. I first recieved a copy of that charming email at two. I have been unable to sleep because of it. It is monstrously insulting, it is at best tangential, and it is completely inappropriate.
Agreed. That message was completely out of line. Shockingly so.
No doubt there is a reason the users messages didn't make it through to the list, and Jay's forward did us no service.
This subject has been making enough noise without such disgraceful trolling.
Actually, the only reason it didn't make it through was that Armed Blowfish is subscribed under diodontida.armata@gmail.com, and his e- mails come through as @googlemail instead. (You should get that fixed, btw)
Speaking for myself, but as a mod, I thought the post was strongly worded, and perhaps disrupted the mailing list to illustrate a point, but mostly on target. I've twice been the victim of attempts at stalking that have moved between online and real life. It's terrifying.
A year ago, when I was the one on the receiving end of this treatment, I advocated the creation of a fund to help Wikipedians who find themselves under this kind of attack. Various practical problems were raised, and I accept that this is an implausible solution.
But the fact of the matter remains - SlimVirgin has been an extraordinarily valuable contributor to the project. She has been active in smacking down pernicious POV pushers, she has been an ardent defender of encyclopedic standards, she has been a productive writer of articles. I have butted heads with her as many times as I've agreed with her, but I have the utmost respect for her. She is one of the best we have. And she has been the victim of an ugly, insidious attack by somebody who has done this before and will do this again.
I am no proponent of BADSITES, and I know that, like our favorite hexidecimal string (09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0, for nostalgia's sake) this information cannot be shoved back into the bottle. On the other hand, I know (perhaps better than most of the people on this thread) what it's like to be attacked this way. The "second rape" comparison does not miss the mark. That is not to equate what happened to me, or to SlimVirgin with rape. It's just to note that both are traumatic events that involve one's privacy and life being violated. Theories that explain one have a place in explaining the other.
-Phil