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Jun. 21st, 2006 05:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
doctoraichaSo you would've believed inconclusive IP evidence over a friend who you had no reason to believe was dishonest? That's your call; it wasn't, at the time, mine. And I was completely hoodwinked. I was completely wrong to believe her.
Yes, you were wrong. You chose to believe her over the evidence that was provided to you – in no way was it inconclusive except that you chose to believe the nanny did it. You had two paths; you chose loyalty over suspicion. That is exactly what the GT admins did that you and your friends publicly and privately vilified them for doing. When they chose to believe Jeff over IP evidence, you attacked them as if the Entire GT Site was personally responsible for sending those wanky, freakish emails to Arabella, Cassie et al.
So, here is the problem: you wanted them to be sorry for their culpability in allowing this to continue when they had the evidence right in front of them. This PuppeteerGate is precisely the same situation. You (and your friend Cassie, and a few others) have personal responsibility for letting MsScribe continue to send vicious, wanky, freaky things out into cyberspace. Either you do, or Anne and Paula and some of the other GTers that you blamed for StalkerGate have no responsibility for that. Evidence in both cases was provided by various SQers. I believe they were partly responsible, just as I believe you (and others, but we are talking about you, here) are partly responsible.
I wouldn’t have believed IP evidence whole heartedly over a friend. But I would have checked. Considered the evidence. Investigated more than just asking around and in one place. You asked SQ for evidence in StalkerGate. Why not ask portkey or the Quill or any of the other sites – I’d have done more checking than you admit you did, if only to PROVE she was right. To exonerate her of all charges. For one, I’d have asked to meet the nanny/babysitter/friend she was claiming was the Root of All Evil.
No, I did not. snacky posted on my LJ about the posts on Sapphsmum's LJ just before March 14th began, and when I was next online …
Ok, I was wrong in thinking it was three days. I’m sorry.
I did get in touch with D and ask her to keep to her pledge, though. I didn't know she was going to post there before she posted there... Please remember that I was four weeks away from delivering at that point. I think it's awful that Christina and family had to read anything that was deliberately cruel, but you're suggesting that I should have been able to stop someone who had lied to me, and who had done things to hurt me? How do you think I could have accomplished that? Even threatening to defriend her if she posted there again would've been utterly useless because she just would've used a journal not associated with her name, and I never would've known.
As for being four weeks away from delivering- that is pretty much beside the point. You were online and posting to LJ repeatedly that week. However, there is a wider problem with your argument.
You contacted Dionne and asked her to stop posting at F_W, but you didn’t appear to make any real effort to make her take back the horrible things she said. You didn’t say “Hey, this is my friend but she is not speaking for me right now, and I do not condone it” – and this means you were culpable: you knew what she was doing, you told her to stop, but you didn’t make her stop or apologize. That is the same as approving what she had done. If you make your kids stop hitting other kids, you still need to make them apologize to those they hurt for already hitting them.
Yes, I am suggesting that you should have been able to make her MsScribe identity stop posting terrible things, and retract what she said, and apologize. If you could not, you should have apologized for that. Why? Well, she claims to have been doing the wanking in defense of you. You are responsible for the entire wank in the first place, because you acted callously. You were posting to your LJ, but you couldn’t take 3 minutes to post a shout-out – which everyone our age knows is a “hey, you guys, if you have a sec take a look at this. She might really need some help.” CharityGate was disgusting, and you were at the heart of it. The first step in a long line of reprehensible wankage.
The other problem is that you are saying that it was no use to make her stop by defriending Dionne-as-MsScribe because she’d just have turned to another sock, because she is lying and hurtful. But you have said you didn’t know she had other socks, and you didn’t know she was a hurtful liar, so there is no way you knew at that time she would use other socks. So you could not have known that defriending would not work. Your argument is circular. Why did you not threaten to defriend, when you didn’t know that it wouldn’t work on this sociopath MsScribe? Did you know MsScribe had the socks and figure it wasn’t worth your time to try to make her stop because she would use the socks? If not, and you didn’t know, and importantly, if you didn’t condone her behavior, why not threaten to defriend? Or, for that matter, why was the only action you took to ‘ask’ her not to post further?
Look, I have a bit of a hot temper, and I can be a Big Ol Bitch, so sometimes I say stuff I shouldn’t say. Zsenya will tell me – HAS told me – to cut it the heck out. Either because she’s right, because I am not making it better – or because it’s her site and therefore her place to make the defenses – or because I am her friend and she asked me to – I STOP.
You ought to ask Arabella and Zsenya, …[re Cassie].
I did as you suggested. A couple of emails and IP matches makes Jeff a real freaker, in my opinion, and probably dangerously weird. What he did was make terroristic threats. This does not make him a stalker, any more than MsScribe is a stalker (the only person she seems to have really stalked, IMHO, and STRANGELY ENOUGH, is Cassie, in a kind of Single White Female way). Chryslin and Jeff acted very badly. GT admins closed ranks around their friends – we have since made them apologize for protecting a criminal. Jeff admitted he did it, and Sue left the site over the actions of her husband. When will FA apologize for harboring MsScribe and protecting her in the face of the evidence? OK, she was not a mod the whole time, but Jeff was NEVER a mod. Again, GT acted badly and stupidly. So have FA, the so called inner circle, and your friends. So what we (royal we, me and a lot of people on the bad_penny board, for what it’s worth) really want to see is an unequivocal “I am sorry for my part in this harboring this person. I should have looked closer at the evidence.” Period.
Believe me, I am plenty angry at D right now - it's a metaphorical "want to hit her with a 2x4" sort of thing.
Good, you ought to be. Me, too. She is pretty sick. If I saw her in person I’d probably backhand her and take the consequences. I am fairly certain that the fandom would pay my legal fees.
I don't know what our friendship meant to her
I think I can answer that. Not very damned much, and you can take that to the bank. She treated you and the rest of your friends pretty badly.
Look, you had information that you chose not to believe. You preferred to believe racist, homophobic, prejudiced, and classist vitriol was coming from GT (despite the fact that there was no evidence of this at all) and that GT and Angua forged evidence that suggested MsScribe was stalking herself. Angua deserves a real apology. GT admins – not just users – deserve an apology (although methinks they were no saints during the Cassie Incident, and they acted pretty damned badly toward both FA and SQ when GT imploded). Nevertheless… Don’t say you’re sorry for what Dionne did, and don’t cast yourself only the role of victim.
Most importantly, you owe Christina and her mother apologies for your inaction. As Moeyknight puts it, you set yourself up as “Top BNF” of the fandom. You want everything to come through you for approval (we saw the post). You have to expect that people are going to ask for help. It’s pretty appalling that you didn’t do it immediately, and the fact that you were publicly shamed into doing it doesn’t really fix the fact that you were willing to ignore it at first. http://moeyknight.livejournal.com/111120.html .
Christina, her mother, GT admins, Arabella (since the sociopath attacked Arabella, too, when we were all at B’s dad’s funeral), and the fandom deserve Official Apologies from you, Heidi, for your part in this mess. And you had a part that was not simple victim, make no mistake. I know it’s hard to admit mistakes, and harder to stand up to your friends than your enemies. JKR has that exactly right. You probably really are hurting right now, and I don’t doubt that Dionne used you. That’s hard as hell, and I know it is. You’ve made a step in the right direction in the last couple of days – but take Neil Armstrong’s giant leap and the fandom will respect you in the morning. I know I will.
Yes, you were wrong. You chose to believe her over the evidence that was provided to you – in no way was it inconclusive except that you chose to believe the nanny did it. You had two paths; you chose loyalty over suspicion. That is exactly what the GT admins did that you and your friends publicly and privately vilified them for doing. When they chose to believe Jeff over IP evidence, you attacked them as if the Entire GT Site was personally responsible for sending those wanky, freakish emails to Arabella, Cassie et al.
So, here is the problem: you wanted them to be sorry for their culpability in allowing this to continue when they had the evidence right in front of them. This PuppeteerGate is precisely the same situation. You (and your friend Cassie, and a few others) have personal responsibility for letting MsScribe continue to send vicious, wanky, freaky things out into cyberspace. Either you do, or Anne and Paula and some of the other GTers that you blamed for StalkerGate have no responsibility for that. Evidence in both cases was provided by various SQers. I believe they were partly responsible, just as I believe you (and others, but we are talking about you, here) are partly responsible.
I wouldn’t have believed IP evidence whole heartedly over a friend. But I would have checked. Considered the evidence. Investigated more than just asking around and in one place. You asked SQ for evidence in StalkerGate. Why not ask portkey or the Quill or any of the other sites – I’d have done more checking than you admit you did, if only to PROVE she was right. To exonerate her of all charges. For one, I’d have asked to meet the nanny/babysitter/friend she was claiming was the Root of All Evil.
No, I did not. snacky posted on my LJ about the posts on Sapphsmum's LJ just before March 14th began, and when I was next online …
Ok, I was wrong in thinking it was three days. I’m sorry.
I did get in touch with D and ask her to keep to her pledge, though. I didn't know she was going to post there before she posted there... Please remember that I was four weeks away from delivering at that point. I think it's awful that Christina and family had to read anything that was deliberately cruel, but you're suggesting that I should have been able to stop someone who had lied to me, and who had done things to hurt me? How do you think I could have accomplished that? Even threatening to defriend her if she posted there again would've been utterly useless because she just would've used a journal not associated with her name, and I never would've known.
As for being four weeks away from delivering- that is pretty much beside the point. You were online and posting to LJ repeatedly that week. However, there is a wider problem with your argument.
You contacted Dionne and asked her to stop posting at F_W, but you didn’t appear to make any real effort to make her take back the horrible things she said. You didn’t say “Hey, this is my friend but she is not speaking for me right now, and I do not condone it” – and this means you were culpable: you knew what she was doing, you told her to stop, but you didn’t make her stop or apologize. That is the same as approving what she had done. If you make your kids stop hitting other kids, you still need to make them apologize to those they hurt for already hitting them.
Yes, I am suggesting that you should have been able to make her MsScribe identity stop posting terrible things, and retract what she said, and apologize. If you could not, you should have apologized for that. Why? Well, she claims to have been doing the wanking in defense of you. You are responsible for the entire wank in the first place, because you acted callously. You were posting to your LJ, but you couldn’t take 3 minutes to post a shout-out – which everyone our age knows is a “hey, you guys, if you have a sec take a look at this. She might really need some help.” CharityGate was disgusting, and you were at the heart of it. The first step in a long line of reprehensible wankage.
The other problem is that you are saying that it was no use to make her stop by defriending Dionne-as-MsScribe because she’d just have turned to another sock, because she is lying and hurtful. But you have said you didn’t know she had other socks, and you didn’t know she was a hurtful liar, so there is no way you knew at that time she would use other socks. So you could not have known that defriending would not work. Your argument is circular. Why did you not threaten to defriend, when you didn’t know that it wouldn’t work on this sociopath MsScribe? Did you know MsScribe had the socks and figure it wasn’t worth your time to try to make her stop because she would use the socks? If not, and you didn’t know, and importantly, if you didn’t condone her behavior, why not threaten to defriend? Or, for that matter, why was the only action you took to ‘ask’ her not to post further?
Look, I have a bit of a hot temper, and I can be a Big Ol Bitch, so sometimes I say stuff I shouldn’t say. Zsenya will tell me – HAS told me – to cut it the heck out. Either because she’s right, because I am not making it better – or because it’s her site and therefore her place to make the defenses – or because I am her friend and she asked me to – I STOP.
You ought to ask Arabella and Zsenya, …[re Cassie].
I did as you suggested. A couple of emails and IP matches makes Jeff a real freaker, in my opinion, and probably dangerously weird. What he did was make terroristic threats. This does not make him a stalker, any more than MsScribe is a stalker (the only person she seems to have really stalked, IMHO, and STRANGELY ENOUGH, is Cassie, in a kind of Single White Female way). Chryslin and Jeff acted very badly. GT admins closed ranks around their friends – we have since made them apologize for protecting a criminal. Jeff admitted he did it, and Sue left the site over the actions of her husband. When will FA apologize for harboring MsScribe and protecting her in the face of the evidence? OK, she was not a mod the whole time, but Jeff was NEVER a mod. Again, GT acted badly and stupidly. So have FA, the so called inner circle, and your friends. So what we (royal we, me and a lot of people on the bad_penny board, for what it’s worth) really want to see is an unequivocal “I am sorry for my part in this harboring this person. I should have looked closer at the evidence.” Period.
Believe me, I am plenty angry at D right now - it's a metaphorical "want to hit her with a 2x4" sort of thing.
Good, you ought to be. Me, too. She is pretty sick. If I saw her in person I’d probably backhand her and take the consequences. I am fairly certain that the fandom would pay my legal fees.
I don't know what our friendship meant to her
I think I can answer that. Not very damned much, and you can take that to the bank. She treated you and the rest of your friends pretty badly.
Look, you had information that you chose not to believe. You preferred to believe racist, homophobic, prejudiced, and classist vitriol was coming from GT (despite the fact that there was no evidence of this at all) and that GT and Angua forged evidence that suggested MsScribe was stalking herself. Angua deserves a real apology. GT admins – not just users – deserve an apology (although methinks they were no saints during the Cassie Incident, and they acted pretty damned badly toward both FA and SQ when GT imploded). Nevertheless… Don’t say you’re sorry for what Dionne did, and don’t cast yourself only the role of victim.
Most importantly, you owe Christina and her mother apologies for your inaction. As Moeyknight puts it, you set yourself up as “Top BNF” of the fandom. You want everything to come through you for approval (we saw the post). You have to expect that people are going to ask for help. It’s pretty appalling that you didn’t do it immediately, and the fact that you were publicly shamed into doing it doesn’t really fix the fact that you were willing to ignore it at first. http://moeyknight.livejournal.com/111120.html .
Christina, her mother, GT admins, Arabella (since the sociopath attacked Arabella, too, when we were all at B’s dad’s funeral), and the fandom deserve Official Apologies from you, Heidi, for your part in this mess. And you had a part that was not simple victim, make no mistake. I know it’s hard to admit mistakes, and harder to stand up to your friends than your enemies. JKR has that exactly right. You probably really are hurting right now, and I don’t doubt that Dionne used you. That’s hard as hell, and I know it is. You’ve made a step in the right direction in the last couple of days – but take Neil Armstrong’s giant leap and the fandom will respect you in the morning. I know I will.
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no subject
Date: 2006-06-22 04:33 am (UTC)There's two sides to any story. I can't comment on the GT/FA war because I wasn't there, but I really can't believe that Heidi doesn't want to take ownership for the CharityWank nonsense.
Simple decency tells us that if a friend goes too far in our defense, we tell them to stop. If we find what our friend did to be morally suspect, we say so. Silence does equal consent as far as a lot of people are concerned. I asked Heidi to give a yes or no answer on whether she approved of her friend's comments in Charitywank and she nicely avoided giving an answer at all.
I am so not impressed. I really doubt you'll get better answers than I did, but good posts just the same.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-22 04:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-22 11:59 am (UTC)I just don't think she gets my point - and the point of a lot of the non HP involved people. I don't care what went down with GT and Jeff. Hell, I am willing to assume that the FA side is all totally true. Jeff's an ass. I don't really give two shits about the Fermatojam/Pottersginny nonsense. It's all stupid immature fan crap and sockpuppeting sucks but I see how some people got caught up. I even don't care about the details of Charitywankl. To be honest? Heidi has every right to refuse to post a link. Heidi also has every right to take up collections for pals who get stuff stolen and I can even admit that heaven forbid I ever get robbed, I would love it if my friends took up a collection.
What *bugs* is that Heidi still won't apologize for how her friends (because there was more than just Msscribe involved although that bitch was certainly the prime offender) behaved towards Christina. If someone decides to defend me in such a fashion, it's my job to pull them back. If they aren't willing to make amends, it's my job to do so. Heidi doesn't seem to get that this does not relate back to the GT/FA crap.
You did good, and I think you're right, you're not going to get an answer.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-22 12:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-22 01:17 pm (UTC)A crappy situation for all :(
no subject
Date: 2006-06-22 01:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-22 01:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-22 01:45 pm (UTC)That's all I've got.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-22 01:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-22 03:02 pm (UTC)My take on this? If you say you were betrayed, it implies that something was done to *you*. It takes away culpability. It's also an invitation for people to offer their sympathy and *hugs*. But to admit that you were mistaken or fooled? well, that's different. It means that you were active in listening, believing, and making a decision. And it's a lot harder for people to offer up those *hugs* if they think you could have avoided the drama-trauma in the first place.
To add to her comment:
In Heidi's case, I suspect that it's because a lot of her self image, beyond being The BFF, is her underlying suspicion that she is smarter than and more clever than pretty much everyone (I am basing this on a lot of things, in part, her strong identification with Hermione). For her, she not only looses the ability to get the *hugs*, as divinemum so aptly pointed out but also, she forfeits part of her identity as the most clever girl who can do it all and, not only that, but, she's lost it over the vanity of those very same traits.
Edited to clarify what divinemum said and what I said.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-22 06:23 pm (UTC)But I'm also still exasperated by it. Because you know, you can't be that clever or that intelligent if you're so blind to yourself. Self awareness is key, not only to being a Hermione like sort of person, but to being a normal, responsible adult!
no subject
Date: 2006-06-22 06:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-22 03:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-23 11:44 am (UTC)Word. And it's funny how people seem to think that friendship = turning a blind eye when your friend is in the wrong or worse, batshit insane.
If that happened to me in RL, I would probably would find it hard to accept that my friend was a wacko, but with such evidence against her... as a REAL friend, I would also call her out on her behavior and ask her to seek professional help. Whether she was a true friend of mine during this time is also questionable.
(Some of them seem to think that acting like nothing happened or standing by this sockpuppet master is a good thing. But that's exactly why she was able to do those awful things- she fed on everyones sympathies and continued with whatever she was doing because she had an army of supporters around her!)
no subject
Date: 2006-06-23 12:47 pm (UTC)And THANK YOU for your support.