"Who today remembers Harriet Miers, never mind her hair-do?"
April 27, 2018 12:03 PM Subscribe
The Very Specific 2006-ishness of Those Alleged Joy Reid Posts [Richard Kim, The Nation]
"I don’t know if Reid did or did not write these posts, and I do not have the technical expertise to comment on the central question about hacking around which this controversy now revolves. But I was a gay blogger and a prolific reader of blogs, gay and political and otherwise, during the period in question. And when I forced myself to review the posts, many of them were instantly recognizable to me as something a liberal blogger in those years could have written. In fact, the more I put on my 2006-ish hat, the more unexceptional they seemed to me." [Context: Joy Reid Doubles Down: Homophobic Posts ‘Hacked,’ ‘Fraudulent’]
"I don’t know if Reid did or did not write these posts, and I do not have the technical expertise to comment on the central question about hacking around which this controversy now revolves. But I was a gay blogger and a prolific reader of blogs, gay and political and otherwise, during the period in question. And when I forced myself to review the posts, many of them were instantly recognizable to me as something a liberal blogger in those years could have written. In fact, the more I put on my 2006-ish hat, the more unexceptional they seemed to me." [Context: Joy Reid Doubles Down: Homophobic Posts ‘Hacked,’ ‘Fraudulent’]
Also, has anyone in the public space who got called out for stupid shit and then claimed to be hacked ever actually been hacked? Like ever?
posted by leotrotsky at 12:13 PM on April 27, 2018 [41 favorites]
posted by leotrotsky at 12:13 PM on April 27, 2018 [41 favorites]
It's weird that Wikileaks has been pushing this, it's weird how Reid is handling this, and it's weird that we're even discussing this.
Also, has anyone in the public space who got called out for stupid shit and then claimed to be hacked ever actually been hacked? Like ever?
I think Reid most likely wrote the excerpts in question but the fact that Wikileaks is involved makes me think she might have been hacked. So... weird.
posted by asteria at 12:14 PM on April 27, 2018 [10 favorites]
Also, has anyone in the public space who got called out for stupid shit and then claimed to be hacked ever actually been hacked? Like ever?
I think Reid most likely wrote the excerpts in question but the fact that Wikileaks is involved makes me think she might have been hacked. So... weird.
posted by asteria at 12:14 PM on April 27, 2018 [10 favorites]
Why does it seem that everyone who rises a level of media visibility seems to have egos the size of Zeppelins and is unable to admit they're wrong?
I suspect it's something similar to what I associate with getting married and "wife jokes." In order to reach that level of media visibility, you are subject to the inherent (or evolved) biases of others in that position, which perhaps has created a kind of paranoia in the profession that their positions are precarious and must be defended. So, you start singing the song.
posted by rhizome at 12:16 PM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
I suspect it's something similar to what I associate with getting married and "wife jokes." In order to reach that level of media visibility, you are subject to the inherent (or evolved) biases of others in that position, which perhaps has created a kind of paranoia in the profession that their positions are precarious and must be defended. So, you start singing the song.
posted by rhizome at 12:16 PM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
Also, has anyone in the public space who got called out for stupid shit and then claimed to be hacked ever actually been hacked?
It's short for “hacked off at getting caught.”
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:17 PM on April 27, 2018 [5 favorites]
It's short for “hacked off at getting caught.”
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:17 PM on April 27, 2018 [5 favorites]
Yeah, I mean, I vividly remember, in 2004, hearing a story on NPR about the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling for same-sex marriage and crying as I drove down the road.
I guess it's a sign of progress that people are denying they said homophobic shit when they have their pretty bog-standard-for-the-time homophobia thrown back in their faces.
posted by Automocar at 12:18 PM on April 27, 2018 [11 favorites]
I guess it's a sign of progress that people are denying they said homophobic shit when they have their pretty bog-standard-for-the-time homophobia thrown back in their faces.
posted by Automocar at 12:18 PM on April 27, 2018 [11 favorites]
PLUS straight people are still making BOTTOM JOKES in fucking 20gayteen and it's like... are you seriously going to sit there and act all shocked that random pundit was socially acceptably homophobic like 10 years ago
posted by Automocar at 12:20 PM on April 27, 2018 [19 favorites]
posted by Automocar at 12:20 PM on April 27, 2018 [19 favorites]
I thought the careful argument based around the actual blog-culture context of the period was really good, and I feel like this is an important type of history to write. Very often I see internet essays about things I lived through which misread the actual events because they do not situate things.
posted by Frowner at 12:22 PM on April 27, 2018 [33 favorites]
posted by Frowner at 12:22 PM on April 27, 2018 [33 favorites]
There really seems to be an assumption that Our Side (tm) can't do anything wrong, that it's always some ratfuck job. No Democrat (or liberal or progressive) could possibly have done something wrong. It's always Someone Else's Fault, and tribalism being a helluva drug, people eat it up.
But flash back to the Bush era - remember God, Guns and Gays handing the 2004 election to Bush? Remember Proposition 8 in oh-so-blue California? I distinctly remember commenters on liberal blogs muttering about how those pushy same-gender marriage advocates helped Bush to win because the idea of gays marrying *gasp* scared all the nice heartland people.
Remember that Obama changed his mind on same-gender marriage - from opposing it to endorsing it? That was in 2012!
I hate this "OMG I was hacked I was ratfucked I didn't say that I pinkie swear!" It makes us look like a bunch of paranoid conspiracy theorists who can't admit that we've said and done some wrong things and apologize.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 12:26 PM on April 27, 2018 [62 favorites]
But flash back to the Bush era - remember God, Guns and Gays handing the 2004 election to Bush? Remember Proposition 8 in oh-so-blue California? I distinctly remember commenters on liberal blogs muttering about how those pushy same-gender marriage advocates helped Bush to win because the idea of gays marrying *gasp* scared all the nice heartland people.
Remember that Obama changed his mind on same-gender marriage - from opposing it to endorsing it? That was in 2012!
I hate this "OMG I was hacked I was ratfucked I didn't say that I pinkie swear!" It makes us look like a bunch of paranoid conspiracy theorists who can't admit that we've said and done some wrong things and apologize.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 12:26 PM on April 27, 2018 [62 favorites]
It seems the question that Kim doesn't come right out and ask is, "That was then, this is now. Does Joy Reid get a pass?"
I'd say sure, provided that she earns it. I don't think she has, yet, because instead of owning up to writing those things and then appending "but I've evolved," she's absolutely denying that she wrote them (despite pretty good evidence to the contrary) and blaming a bogeyman hacker.
Kim is right that 2006 was a lot more homophobic than 2018. That's a good thing. I personally am willing to drop the charges against people who admit that they were wrong then, and even hurtful, but whose thinkings have changed, and whose hearts have changed. I mean, that right there just described a bunch of my family. I appreciate them for being okay with me now, even if they weren't then, and I'm willing to just move forward. (But if any of them ever tried to pull the "Hey, I've never felt that way, I was never homophobic" trick, it would be another issue.)
posted by mudpuppie at 12:27 PM on April 27, 2018 [16 favorites]
I'd say sure, provided that she earns it. I don't think she has, yet, because instead of owning up to writing those things and then appending "but I've evolved," she's absolutely denying that she wrote them (despite pretty good evidence to the contrary) and blaming a bogeyman hacker.
Kim is right that 2006 was a lot more homophobic than 2018. That's a good thing. I personally am willing to drop the charges against people who admit that they were wrong then, and even hurtful, but whose thinkings have changed, and whose hearts have changed. I mean, that right there just described a bunch of my family. I appreciate them for being okay with me now, even if they weren't then, and I'm willing to just move forward. (But if any of them ever tried to pull the "Hey, I've never felt that way, I was never homophobic" trick, it would be another issue.)
posted by mudpuppie at 12:27 PM on April 27, 2018 [16 favorites]
I mean I've seen plenty of people say "oh sorry that was 2006 I've grown" and not had much made of it. Maybe that wouldn't have flown with everyone but surely it would with anyone loyal enough to believe this hacking story.
posted by atoxyl at 12:33 PM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by atoxyl at 12:33 PM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
BTW, it's not just Democrats and liberals who are doubling down on the "it's a conspiraceeeeee!" stuff - the Republicans and right-wing are experts at that. But I wish Democrats/liberals didn't start doing it so much because, well, I thought we were better than that.
As I see it, the social justice needle has moved and what would go unchallenged in 2006 does not in 2018.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 12:33 PM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
As I see it, the social justice needle has moved and what would go unchallenged in 2006 does not in 2018.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 12:33 PM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
Well now I'm just going to write a variation of the comment I made in the reading list conversation; I don't understand the way people view history these days. If we are getting better doesn't that inherently mean we were worse in the past? How can we judge everything by today's standards? If everyone is supposed to be at today's standards back then doesn't that mean we're not moving forward?
posted by bongo_x at 12:36 PM on April 27, 2018 [8 favorites]
posted by bongo_x at 12:36 PM on April 27, 2018 [8 favorites]
She'd pretty much be fine if she just owned up to it. People can change, people DO change, and admitting you've grown and addressing it head on is the way to do it.
Trying to disown it and claim to have been "hacked" is a sure path to making it into a disaster.
Also, if we're wondering if she would write things like this, I present you this 2010 transphobic tweet of hers. Unless she's going to claim that someone hacked her 8 years ago for the long game.
https://twitter.com/JoyAnnReid/status/13821396677
"@JoyAnnReid: RT @Mediaite Elena Kagan and Ann Coulter Attacked For Physical Appearance http://www.mediaite.com/jabvs FM [k but really, Coulter is a dude]"
posted by evilangela at 12:41 PM on April 27, 2018 [17 favorites]
Trying to disown it and claim to have been "hacked" is a sure path to making it into a disaster.
Also, if we're wondering if she would write things like this, I present you this 2010 transphobic tweet of hers. Unless she's going to claim that someone hacked her 8 years ago for the long game.
https://twitter.com/JoyAnnReid/status/13821396677
"@JoyAnnReid: RT @Mediaite Elena Kagan and Ann Coulter Attacked For Physical Appearance http://www.mediaite.com/jabvs FM [k but really, Coulter is a dude]"
posted by evilangela at 12:41 PM on April 27, 2018 [17 favorites]
1) Those old posts were obviously genuine, and it's really fucked up that Reid isn't willing to take responsibility for having written them.
2) The only reason we're talking about those old posts, however, is because a certain portion of the Brogressive Internet has a political vendetta against Reid.
In conclusion, fuck everybody involved.
posted by tobascodagama at 12:45 PM on April 27, 2018 [61 favorites]
2) The only reason we're talking about those old posts, however, is because a certain portion of the Brogressive Internet has a political vendetta against Reid.
In conclusion, fuck everybody involved.
posted by tobascodagama at 12:45 PM on April 27, 2018 [61 favorites]
Sorry, but if she didn't claim she was hacked back when it originally happened, she doesn't get to claim it now.
FWIW, I like Reid, but as I've mentioned here before, those statements in the past did make it uncomfortable to watch her subsequently.
posted by darkstar at 12:45 PM on April 27, 2018 [5 favorites]
FWIW, I like Reid, but as I've mentioned here before, those statements in the past did make it uncomfortable to watch her subsequently.
posted by darkstar at 12:45 PM on April 27, 2018 [5 favorites]
this...does not look like a hacking. but it has been damn weird to me the way Joy Reid (and other women who write/comment about politics) have been laser-focused on as #1 Enemies of the People in certain circles of the Greenwaldian left.
posted by prize bull octorok at 12:46 PM on April 27, 2018 [37 favorites]
posted by prize bull octorok at 12:46 PM on April 27, 2018 [37 favorites]
I think Reid most likely wrote the excerpts in question but the fact that Wikileaks is involved makes me think she might have been hacked. So... weird.
There are two different "hacks" being alleged here. One is that someone got access to the blog back in 2006 (or whenever) and posted homophobic content under Reid's byline (possible) yet no one noticed from then all way up to the current moment (not impossible, but extremely hard to believe).
The other "hack" is that someone injected false archived data into The Internet Archive. This is incredibly unlikely and unless The Internet Achieve came to the conclusion themselves everyone can just ignore it as being made up.
Both explanations seem like something non-experts would make up that sound good to them, but are complete horseshit to anyone who actually knows anything about the subject. Similar to Paul Ryan just casually lying how he once ran a sub 3 hour marathon.
posted by sideshow at 12:50 PM on April 27, 2018 [13 favorites]
There are two different "hacks" being alleged here. One is that someone got access to the blog back in 2006 (or whenever) and posted homophobic content under Reid's byline (possible) yet no one noticed from then all way up to the current moment (not impossible, but extremely hard to believe).
The other "hack" is that someone injected false archived data into The Internet Archive. This is incredibly unlikely and unless The Internet Achieve came to the conclusion themselves everyone can just ignore it as being made up.
Both explanations seem like something non-experts would make up that sound good to them, but are complete horseshit to anyone who actually knows anything about the subject. Similar to Paul Ryan just casually lying how he once ran a sub 3 hour marathon.
posted by sideshow at 12:50 PM on April 27, 2018 [13 favorites]
Also, I have a question: Since a bunch of these posts came out months ago and Reid apologized for them, what's to stop her from saying: I have already apologized for my previous, terrible views? Is this new stuff a worst tier of homophobia? Or is more a case of not coming clean for all the posts last time around?
posted by sideshow at 12:53 PM on April 27, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by sideshow at 12:53 PM on April 27, 2018 [3 favorites]
Or is more a case of not coming clean for all the posts last time around?
Option 3: A virulent case of dig-your-heels-in-ism.
posted by mudpuppie at 12:58 PM on April 27, 2018 [5 favorites]
Option 3: A virulent case of dig-your-heels-in-ism.
posted by mudpuppie at 12:58 PM on April 27, 2018 [5 favorites]
Nobody hacked the Wayback Machine, Joy, you are just a horrible person. You had/have odious views, you got called out on it, now learn from it.
posted by Kitteh at 12:59 PM on April 27, 2018 [15 favorites]
posted by Kitteh at 12:59 PM on April 27, 2018 [15 favorites]
"But I wish Democrats/liberals didn't start doing it so much because, well, I thought we were better than that. "
This is why so many people believe both parties are the same.
Disclaimer: I guess I should note that most of the people who say this, including myself, are saying it from a relatively privileged position.
posted by kevinbelt at 1:16 PM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
This is why so many people believe both parties are the same.
Disclaimer: I guess I should note that most of the people who say this, including myself, are saying it from a relatively privileged position.
posted by kevinbelt at 1:16 PM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
I don't know if it's really a useful move to jump from "held homophobic views common at the time" to "horrible person." That is not to excuse the statements, or the frankly weird sidestepping of what could be a fairly straightforward apology. It's just that I think "bad/horrible person" should be used somewhat sparingly in general, and these days there are enough folks rushing forward to let us know they're actually Nazis and such that probably Reid doesn't definitively rank in that league.
posted by praemunire at 1:18 PM on April 27, 2018 [23 favorites]
posted by praemunire at 1:18 PM on April 27, 2018 [23 favorites]
Is it possible that Joy Reid isn't particularly tech-savvy, and is using "hacked" to mean "accessed old posts that I set to private"?
With the on-going meme of Trump vs Trump (setting Trump's old anti-Obama tweets against his own actions), I could see media figures with even half a brain telling their assistants to hide/delete/set to private anything older than a year or so. If this were the case, I could see...ah, fuck it, that's giving waaaay too much credit.
People need to learn to just apologize and mean it. The world is so forgiving if you just actually apologize and don't double down.
posted by explosion at 1:22 PM on April 27, 2018
With the on-going meme of Trump vs Trump (setting Trump's old anti-Obama tweets against his own actions), I could see media figures with even half a brain telling their assistants to hide/delete/set to private anything older than a year or so. If this were the case, I could see...ah, fuck it, that's giving waaaay too much credit.
People need to learn to just apologize and mean it. The world is so forgiving if you just actually apologize and don't double down.
posted by explosion at 1:22 PM on April 27, 2018
I find it pretty believable that it was ghostwritten, and that's why she's digging her heels in. She doesn't feel she should apologize for something she didn't write, but she also doesn't want to acknowledge that she put her name on someone else's work.
/pure speculation
posted by politikitty at 1:22 PM on April 27, 2018 [9 favorites]
/pure speculation
posted by politikitty at 1:22 PM on April 27, 2018 [9 favorites]
Agreed, praemunire, and I'd also add that calling anyone who said or wrote something homophobic 10-15 years ago a "horrible person" just means that the common homophobia of 10-15 years ago is meaningless because of course only horrible people were homophobic! Which, just... no.
It was everywhere, and as all queers are really used to doing, we just had to roll our eyes back then and think to ourselves "well, they're liberal, at least they don't want to ship us all to a camp to be forcibly converted" because that's where we were 10-15 years ago, and to pretend otherwise is dangerous.
posted by Automocar at 1:26 PM on April 27, 2018 [38 favorites]
It was everywhere, and as all queers are really used to doing, we just had to roll our eyes back then and think to ourselves "well, they're liberal, at least they don't want to ship us all to a camp to be forcibly converted" because that's where we were 10-15 years ago, and to pretend otherwise is dangerous.
posted by Automocar at 1:26 PM on April 27, 2018 [38 favorites]
OTOH, it isn't hard to believe that a liberal-ish person might've had retrograde opinions on gay people in 2006. Bush won the previous election by running against gay people explicitly and more than a few liberals thought the gays should shut up and take a back seat.
OTOH, this, very much ...
It's weird that Wikileaks has been pushing this, it's weird how Reid is handling this, and it's weird that we're even discussing this.
I think it's quite possible that Reid did have those opinions, has changed her mind, has demonstrated not the soundest judgement in all this, and is under attack. That's pretty much how culture wars work these days.
But mostly I really agree with Jenny Boylan's take on this:
OTOH, this, very much ...
It's weird that Wikileaks has been pushing this, it's weird how Reid is handling this, and it's weird that we're even discussing this.
I think it's quite possible that Reid did have those opinions, has changed her mind, has demonstrated not the soundest judgement in all this, and is under attack. That's pretty much how culture wars work these days.
But mostly I really agree with Jenny Boylan's take on this:
I have been trying not to follow all this Joy stuff because I keep trying to keep my brain from rotting. In general I am less concerned with people's former beliefs and more concerned with the bullshit they are perpetrating right now.posted by octobersurprise at 1:31 PM on April 27, 2018 [20 favorites]
It's a good thing to have prominent, visible people who used to be shitty about this stuff own up to it and show others that they too can change, and I wish people in the public eye would think about that before making thin excuses for past behavior. Or hey, maybe even get ahead of it and proactively call out your own shitty past work before others remember it and drag it back into the light, and make it into an example of how people can evolve and reconcile their past behavior with their evolved thinking? That would be nice, a lot of people have trouble navigating that.
posted by jason_steakums at 1:32 PM on April 27, 2018 [5 favorites]
posted by jason_steakums at 1:32 PM on April 27, 2018 [5 favorites]
Wait. She admitted to the first round of homophobic posts, and apologized, and everything was fine. Then a second round of homophobic posts surfaced, hardly different than the first round, and now she’s claiming she was hacked? And this has all been pursued and ferreted out by the misogynist left?
I mean. I’m not going to trust her on queer issues without a convincing piece about how she’s changed — the sort of piece she’s definitely capable of writing — but it’s ludicrous to pretend that wasn’t absolutely mainstream 10 years ago. $100 says most of the people attacking her said similar or worse in the same time frame.
I don’t understand why she would disavow one set of posts and not the other without...something.
I do understand why the misogynist left wants to take her down.
posted by schadenfrau at 1:34 PM on April 27, 2018 [19 favorites]
I mean. I’m not going to trust her on queer issues without a convincing piece about how she’s changed — the sort of piece she’s definitely capable of writing — but it’s ludicrous to pretend that wasn’t absolutely mainstream 10 years ago. $100 says most of the people attacking her said similar or worse in the same time frame.
I don’t understand why she would disavow one set of posts and not the other without...something.
I do understand why the misogynist left wants to take her down.
posted by schadenfrau at 1:34 PM on April 27, 2018 [19 favorites]
Not posting this to defend Joy or claim she did or did not write them – her story seems... unusual – just providing information.
@joanwalsh (The Nation, CNN)
1) So: Many people know I am close friends with @JoyAnnReid. Few of you know I was the first person to publish her, roughly 18 years ago. We didn't meet for at least a dozen years.
2) At Salon, I kept track of her work and read her blog, "The Reid Report," after that. In 2008, when we started our blogging platform "Open Salon," we asked our favorite contributors who had blogs to cross post with us. Joy did so and was immediately a huge hit.
3) Our editors monitored "The Reid Report" to see if she posted anything we wanted; sometimes we'd nudge her to cross-post, and she did.
4) Obviously, none of us ever saw the kinds of homophobic posts she's now accused of. If we had, we'd have stopped publishing her.
5) Interestingly, no one has come forward and said that they read any of this garbage in real time: "Oh hey, that Joy Reid was a real nightmare, can't believe she got published."
6) Also, to my knowledge, the offensive posts had no comments on them, while the posts she acknowledges had some lively comments debates.
7) Now, can I claim I read every word she posted? Of course not. But I did read it enough to know that she did not regularly reflect the attitudes she's accused of here.
8) Maybe most important, I write this to say: I've followed Joy's writing for @17 years. She did not appear out of nowhere, to me, and wind up with a television show. Some of her critics imply that. Which only shows their own isolation
9) Because let's be honest, too often a great black writer seems to appear out of nowhere. Sometimes that makes them vulnerable to criticism; sometimes it makes them just magical. Those of us who followed the politics of race, class and gender more than a decade ago know Joy Reid
10) Again, I cannot say with certainty none of these posts she's disavowed appeared on her blog way back when. I can just say: I've been reading her for 17 years. And I don't believe they did. Thanks for reading.
posted by chris24 at 1:36 PM on April 27, 2018 [21 favorites]
@joanwalsh (The Nation, CNN)
1) So: Many people know I am close friends with @JoyAnnReid. Few of you know I was the first person to publish her, roughly 18 years ago. We didn't meet for at least a dozen years.
2) At Salon, I kept track of her work and read her blog, "The Reid Report," after that. In 2008, when we started our blogging platform "Open Salon," we asked our favorite contributors who had blogs to cross post with us. Joy did so and was immediately a huge hit.
3) Our editors monitored "The Reid Report" to see if she posted anything we wanted; sometimes we'd nudge her to cross-post, and she did.
4) Obviously, none of us ever saw the kinds of homophobic posts she's now accused of. If we had, we'd have stopped publishing her.
5) Interestingly, no one has come forward and said that they read any of this garbage in real time: "Oh hey, that Joy Reid was a real nightmare, can't believe she got published."
6) Also, to my knowledge, the offensive posts had no comments on them, while the posts she acknowledges had some lively comments debates.
7) Now, can I claim I read every word she posted? Of course not. But I did read it enough to know that she did not regularly reflect the attitudes she's accused of here.
8) Maybe most important, I write this to say: I've followed Joy's writing for @17 years. She did not appear out of nowhere, to me, and wind up with a television show. Some of her critics imply that. Which only shows their own isolation
9) Because let's be honest, too often a great black writer seems to appear out of nowhere. Sometimes that makes them vulnerable to criticism; sometimes it makes them just magical. Those of us who followed the politics of race, class and gender more than a decade ago know Joy Reid
10) Again, I cannot say with certainty none of these posts she's disavowed appeared on her blog way back when. I can just say: I've been reading her for 17 years. And I don't believe they did. Thanks for reading.
posted by chris24 at 1:36 PM on April 27, 2018 [21 favorites]
Blaming what's soon to be time-travelling russian hackers isn't helping anyone. It undermines the idea that yes, there are foreign (mostly Russian) psyops operations in the country to disrupt elections and influence policy.
because a certain portion of the Brogressive Internet has a political vendetta against Reid.
Reid was often a favourite of the left-punchers I used to see on Twitter. I'm shocked they are punching back. Shocked, I tell you.
posted by lmfsilva at 1:36 PM on April 27, 2018 [10 favorites]
because a certain portion of the Brogressive Internet has a political vendetta against Reid.
Reid was often a favourite of the left-punchers I used to see on Twitter. I'm shocked they are punching back. Shocked, I tell you.
posted by lmfsilva at 1:36 PM on April 27, 2018 [10 favorites]
Is it possible that Joy Reid isn't particularly tech-savvy, and is using "hacked" to mean "accessed old posts that I set to private"?
"hacked" is the right word for that, though.
posted by Going To Maine at 1:38 PM on April 27, 2018 [6 favorites]
"hacked" is the right word for that, though.
posted by Going To Maine at 1:38 PM on April 27, 2018 [6 favorites]
Also, FUCK anyone who compares her to Al Franken. It was 10 years ago, her abhorrent beliefs were unfortunately mainstream at the time, and she didn’t fucking assault anyone. She hasn’t committed any ongoing violations of other people’s bodies.
Seriously, anyone who makes that comparison is a terrible person.
posted by schadenfrau at 1:38 PM on April 27, 2018 [19 favorites]
Seriously, anyone who makes that comparison is a terrible person.
posted by schadenfrau at 1:38 PM on April 27, 2018 [19 favorites]
That Joan Walsh tweetstorm is a pile of bullshit in which she pretends that the way she would react to Reid's homophobic blog posts in 2018 is how she would have reacted in 2007.
posted by Automocar at 1:39 PM on April 27, 2018 [15 favorites]
posted by Automocar at 1:39 PM on April 27, 2018 [15 favorites]
Wait. She admitted to the first round of homophobic posts, and apologized, and everything was fine. Then a second round of homophobic posts surfaced, hardly different than the first round, and now she’s claiming she was hacked?
The first round and much of the second round was mostly attacking republican hypocrites on gay rights, which as the OP states was an unfortunately common past-time in the left-wing blogosphere, and like, let they who are without sin cast the first stones.
The argument that is being made by Jonathan Nichols, whoever he is, is that this second round contains some legitimate posts, some posts that were injected by someone who gained access to Reid's blogger account, and some posts that are manipulated screenshots.
posted by muddgirl at 1:40 PM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
The first round and much of the second round was mostly attacking republican hypocrites on gay rights, which as the OP states was an unfortunately common past-time in the left-wing blogosphere, and like, let they who are without sin cast the first stones.
The argument that is being made by Jonathan Nichols, whoever he is, is that this second round contains some legitimate posts, some posts that were injected by someone who gained access to Reid's blogger account, and some posts that are manipulated screenshots.
posted by muddgirl at 1:40 PM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
this...does not look like a hacking. but it has been damn weird to me the way Joy Reid (and other women who write/comment about politics) have been laser-focused on as #1 Enemies of the People in certain circles of the Greenwaldian left.
she punches left pretty routinely - I don't think it's unfair that people punch back, necessarily
I do find the "digging up something bad they said in the 00s" approach to this tiresome, though. It's easy to take these shots back and forth (Greenwald has some dirt from when he used to be more of a right-wing libertarian) without really going anywhere or saying anything relevant to the state of things now. Apologizing doesn't make the history un-happen but in most cases if someone apologizes and makes it clear that they are now working to rectify the harm that they might have done it doesn't seem useful or fair to harp on it forever. But Reid made a really weird decision here, to turn something she'd previously apologized for into a conspiracy. And unless somehow that turns out to be legit - which I have to say I really do not believe - that's a pretty shitty move for a journalist to make.
posted by atoxyl at 1:43 PM on April 27, 2018 [8 favorites]
she punches left pretty routinely - I don't think it's unfair that people punch back, necessarily
I do find the "digging up something bad they said in the 00s" approach to this tiresome, though. It's easy to take these shots back and forth (Greenwald has some dirt from when he used to be more of a right-wing libertarian) without really going anywhere or saying anything relevant to the state of things now. Apologizing doesn't make the history un-happen but in most cases if someone apologizes and makes it clear that they are now working to rectify the harm that they might have done it doesn't seem useful or fair to harp on it forever. But Reid made a really weird decision here, to turn something she'd previously apologized for into a conspiracy. And unless somehow that turns out to be legit - which I have to say I really do not believe - that's a pretty shitty move for a journalist to make.
posted by atoxyl at 1:43 PM on April 27, 2018 [8 favorites]
(I should say that I don't agree with Nichols - although her blog has been made private on the internet archive, cursory googling turns up other archive webhosts with contemporaneous scrapes.)
posted by muddgirl at 1:44 PM on April 27, 2018
posted by muddgirl at 1:44 PM on April 27, 2018
The argument that is being made by Jonathan Nichols, whoever he is, is that this second round contains some legitimate posts, some posts that were injected by someone who gained access to Reid's blogger account, and some posts that are manipulated screenshots.
For what it's worth, The Daily Beast found that a lot of Nichols' specific claims fall apart under close examination.
posted by teraflop at 1:48 PM on April 27, 2018 [7 favorites]
For what it's worth, The Daily Beast found that a lot of Nichols' specific claims fall apart under close examination.
posted by teraflop at 1:48 PM on April 27, 2018 [7 favorites]
Why is it that no one famous seems to comprehend the concept of not making things worse?
Assume, for the moment, that Reid is 100% correct and that time traveling Russian hackers (or whatever) inserted some added extra homophobic and transphobic comments in along with the genuinely from her homophobic and transphobic comments.
Even if that is entirely truthful and honest it sounds like total bullshit and, most important, there's no gain for Reid in making that claim even if it were true.
Which will make the story go away faster and not make it worse? Blaming it (honestly even) on time traveling Russian hackers, or saying "yup, this is more of the old homophobic Joy Reid and I apologize again for making those types of comments, I have grown since then and I stand now against the sort of bigotry I held in my heart then" ?
From a PR and spin standpoint it really doesn't matter if her (bizarre, insultingly false) claim that some of the newly found posts were fake. Claiming they were fake makes her look awful and extends the story.
Even if they were fake she'd have been so much better off just apologizing and trying to move on.
Also, this is why we must never have heroes. They'll always disappoint us. If we'd said "yup, Joy Reid is a damn fine journalist and I like her work" rather than "I love Joy Reid with a passion she's super amazing" it'd be easier for us to accept her flaws.
posted by sotonohito at 1:48 PM on April 27, 2018 [10 favorites]
Assume, for the moment, that Reid is 100% correct and that time traveling Russian hackers (or whatever) inserted some added extra homophobic and transphobic comments in along with the genuinely from her homophobic and transphobic comments.
Even if that is entirely truthful and honest it sounds like total bullshit and, most important, there's no gain for Reid in making that claim even if it were true.
Which will make the story go away faster and not make it worse? Blaming it (honestly even) on time traveling Russian hackers, or saying "yup, this is more of the old homophobic Joy Reid and I apologize again for making those types of comments, I have grown since then and I stand now against the sort of bigotry I held in my heart then" ?
From a PR and spin standpoint it really doesn't matter if her (bizarre, insultingly false) claim that some of the newly found posts were fake. Claiming they were fake makes her look awful and extends the story.
Even if they were fake she'd have been so much better off just apologizing and trying to move on.
Also, this is why we must never have heroes. They'll always disappoint us. If we'd said "yup, Joy Reid is a damn fine journalist and I like her work" rather than "I love Joy Reid with a passion she's super amazing" it'd be easier for us to accept her flaws.
posted by sotonohito at 1:48 PM on April 27, 2018 [10 favorites]
For what it's worth, The Daily Beast found that a lot of Nichols' specific claims fall apart under close examination.
He seems like a little bit of a crank to me. The part cited in other articles about his association with weev is maybe taken a little bit out of context, because as I've said before a lot of people made the mistake of sticking up for him when he was going to prison, before it was clear that he was not at all kidding about being a Nazi
though on the other hand he says he was at weev's getting-out-of-prison party, and um at that point I'm pretty sure he'd announced publicly that he was a Nazi?
posted by atoxyl at 1:53 PM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
He seems like a little bit of a crank to me. The part cited in other articles about his association with weev is maybe taken a little bit out of context, because as I've said before a lot of people made the mistake of sticking up for him when he was going to prison, before it was clear that he was not at all kidding about being a Nazi
though on the other hand he says he was at weev's getting-out-of-prison party, and um at that point I'm pretty sure he'd announced publicly that he was a Nazi?
posted by atoxyl at 1:53 PM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
Also, this is why we must never have heroes. They'll always disappoint us. If we'd said "yup, Joy Reid is a damn fine journalist and I like her work" rather than "I love Joy Reid with a passion she's super amazing" it'd be easier for us to accept her flaws.
A huge part of why we are where we are in my opinion.
"A God!"
Oh wait there's a flaw.
"A Devil!"
It's weird toxic fan culture applied to everything.
posted by bongo_x at 1:56 PM on April 27, 2018 [23 favorites]
A huge part of why we are where we are in my opinion.
"A God!"
Oh wait there's a flaw.
"A Devil!"
It's weird toxic fan culture applied to everything.
posted by bongo_x at 1:56 PM on April 27, 2018 [23 favorites]
this...does not look like a hacking. but it has been damn weird to me the way Joy Reid (and other women who write/comment about politics) have been laser-focused on as #1 Enemies of the People in certain circles of the Greenwaldian left.
she punches left pretty routinely - I don't think it's unfair that people punch back, necessarily
it seems like she's got a lot of people on the Right going after her, at this point - but unfortunately that doesn't get her off the hook if the story doesn't pan out
posted by atoxyl at 1:57 PM on April 27, 2018
she punches left pretty routinely - I don't think it's unfair that people punch back, necessarily
it seems like she's got a lot of people on the Right going after her, at this point - but unfortunately that doesn't get her off the hook if the story doesn't pan out
posted by atoxyl at 1:57 PM on April 27, 2018
But Reid made a really weird decision here, to turn something she'd previously apologized for into a conspiracy.
I can't help but wonder just a smidge about this cybersecurity guy and like--if you were someone who liked to think of yourself as better than that, and maybe you didn't actually remember writing these things, and then someone else was like "ah yes this doesn't even look like your writing!" then... would you seize on that? I'd hope not, but I suspect a lot of people would.
posted by Sequence at 1:59 PM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
I can't help but wonder just a smidge about this cybersecurity guy and like--if you were someone who liked to think of yourself as better than that, and maybe you didn't actually remember writing these things, and then someone else was like "ah yes this doesn't even look like your writing!" then... would you seize on that? I'd hope not, but I suspect a lot of people would.
posted by Sequence at 1:59 PM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
Very interesting to see the shift from "She was hacked" to "Ok, she wasn't hacked but that stuff was normal back then" to "Ok, the stuff she said is horrible but she's being unfairly targeted by Bernie Bros." Isn't the partisan flexible morality supposed to be the kind of thing Liberals accuse Republicans of? Just like Evangelicals hand-waving away Trump's sins, we've got Liberals trying to wave awayconsistent homophobia and transphobia. Some of y'all are suddenly really quick to forgive someone of something they won't even admit to or apologize for. Perhaps the reason the "Misogynist Left"(TM) is focusing on this is because the defense of Reid is some naked Liberal hypocrisy. It must be hard to see when you're invested in someone and don't want the truth to be true.
If some hacker didn't expend a lot of effort to undetectably alter the blog and Archive.org and Library of Congress in order to smear a relatively no-name blogger a decade ago...if that's all bullshit...then she's a LIAR. CURRENTLY. So it's not just about her perhaps forgivable past bigotry. It's about her current willingness to double down and lie about a conspiracy. Why would you defend that? Why wouldn't people Left, Right, and Center criticize a fairly major media figure lying in such a way? I understand the impulse to defend someone you like, and apply more skepticism to critical claims about them, but once those claims are shown to be accurate, it's a really bad look to go "ok, it's all true, but LOOK at the people pursuing it! This is persecution!"
Oh, and a quick edit to note: I'm not necessarily talking just about people here on the Blue, but the general narrative happening out there on the great wide Internet in general.
posted by abrightersummerday at 2:04 PM on April 27, 2018 [29 favorites]
If some hacker didn't expend a lot of effort to undetectably alter the blog and Archive.org and Library of Congress in order to smear a relatively no-name blogger a decade ago...if that's all bullshit...then she's a LIAR. CURRENTLY. So it's not just about her perhaps forgivable past bigotry. It's about her current willingness to double down and lie about a conspiracy. Why would you defend that? Why wouldn't people Left, Right, and Center criticize a fairly major media figure lying in such a way? I understand the impulse to defend someone you like, and apply more skepticism to critical claims about them, but once those claims are shown to be accurate, it's a really bad look to go "ok, it's all true, but LOOK at the people pursuing it! This is persecution!"
Oh, and a quick edit to note: I'm not necessarily talking just about people here on the Blue, but the general narrative happening out there on the great wide Internet in general.
posted by abrightersummerday at 2:04 PM on April 27, 2018 [29 favorites]
I can't help but wonder just a smidge about this cybersecurity guy and like--if you were someone who liked to think of yourself as better than that, and maybe you didn't actually remember writing these things, and then someone else was like "ah yes this doesn't even look like your writing!" then... would you seize on that? I'd hope not, but I suspect a lot of people would.
yeah I wouldn't be entirely surprised - could be a sinister thing but could also just be a minor folie à deux
(if I were in her position at this point I would probably try to take this exit)
posted by atoxyl at 2:04 PM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
yeah I wouldn't be entirely surprised - could be a sinister thing but could also just be a minor folie à deux
(if I were in her position at this point I would probably try to take this exit)
posted by atoxyl at 2:04 PM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
I have no use for "punching" as a term for online interactions; my punch is your legitimate harsh criticism, your punch is my misogynistic dogpile, etc
posted by prize bull octorok at 2:05 PM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by prize bull octorok at 2:05 PM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
A whole lot of the posts seem par-for-the-course for 2006 (lukewarm opposition to gay marriage, speculatively outing purportedly closeted celebrities, particularly Republican politicians). The one where she says that "adult gay men tend to be attracted to very young, post-pubescent types, bringing them 'into the lifestyle' in a way that many people consider to be immoral" and a couple of the others seem surprisingly bad to me, even for ten years ago, and surprising in a way where it seems weird to me that that contemporaneous readers aren't coming forward to say that they remember them.
On the other hand, the hacking story seems implausibly convoluted and unlikely (I'm no technical judge, but it just sounds unworkable). At which point it almost certainly happened, but I'm surprised the worst ones of these didn't attract some negative attention at the time that people would remember.
posted by LizardBreath at 2:05 PM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
On the other hand, the hacking story seems implausibly convoluted and unlikely (I'm no technical judge, but it just sounds unworkable). At which point it almost certainly happened, but I'm surprised the worst ones of these didn't attract some negative attention at the time that people would remember.
posted by LizardBreath at 2:05 PM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
I am never entirely sure why we feel compelled to carry water for really terrible liberals, but I suspect the answer has to do with really making sure we define ourselves differently from Republicans. A lot of liberals have really awful awful views. A lot of them are not as progressive as we want. And they should be called out for that. Maybe Joy Reid no longer believes the things she has said on her blog, or maybe she just learned not to say them anywhere but in private.
posted by Kitteh at 2:08 PM on April 27, 2018 [12 favorites]
posted by Kitteh at 2:08 PM on April 27, 2018 [12 favorites]
People need to learn to just apologize and mean it.
I agree!
The world is so forgiving if you just actually apologize and don't double down.
The world may be, but the internet?
posted by Barack Spinoza at 2:10 PM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
I agree!
The world is so forgiving if you just actually apologize and don't double down.
The world may be, but the internet?
posted by Barack Spinoza at 2:10 PM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
Where my last was intended to come out, which I didn't really make clear, was that I think 19 out of 20, all the posts are hers, she's lying, and even if they're not so bad that they couldn't have been apologized for, making up a story about hacking is both stupid and dishonest, so she's a complete mess.
But I've got a tiny amount of residual doubt about how maybe the hacking story might possibly be true (don't know technically how, not my area), because the worst of the posts seem as if they should have been notable at the time, and contemporaneous readers don't seem to be showing up as remembering them. But not much doubt, just more than none.
posted by LizardBreath at 2:14 PM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
But I've got a tiny amount of residual doubt about how maybe the hacking story might possibly be true (don't know technically how, not my area), because the worst of the posts seem as if they should have been notable at the time, and contemporaneous readers don't seem to be showing up as remembering them. But not much doubt, just more than none.
posted by LizardBreath at 2:14 PM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
Isn't the partisan flexible morality supposed to be the kind of thing Liberals accuse Republicans of? Just like Evangelicals hand-waving away Trump's sins, we've got Liberals trying to wave awayconsistent homophobia and transphobia
Do not fucking compare blog posts from 2006 to serial sexual assault
That you would even think to make this comparison is why nobody trusts the misogynist left
posted by schadenfrau at 2:19 PM on April 27, 2018 [25 favorites]
Do not fucking compare blog posts from 2006 to serial sexual assault
That you would even think to make this comparison is why nobody trusts the misogynist left
posted by schadenfrau at 2:19 PM on April 27, 2018 [25 favorites]
Also, this is why we must never have heroes. They'll always disappoint us. If we'd said "yup, Joy Reid is a damn fine journalist and I like her work" rather than "I love Joy Reid with a passion she's super amazing" it'd be easier for us to accept her flaws.
I think we on the left have a huge pedestal problem with politicians. Someone can't just be a good leader, they have to be The Most Amazeballs National Treasure. St. Bernie Would Have Won! Al Franken was an irreplaceable asset brought down by a scheming harridan and a couple of lying harpies! And I don't have to tell you how that worked with Barack Obama - he was a great president and leader, but jeez, many of us saw the Obama we wanted to see (a progressive hero who would save us!) rather than the Obama who really was. Obama himself said that we, not he, were the real instruments for change, and he was right.
When the National Treasure Of The Month disappoints, then either they're victims of a conspiracy or they really weren't progressive in the first place and therefore don't count, so we need to go find our new shining liberal light. Rinse and repeat. I think it's toxic and destructive to real progress.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 2:20 PM on April 27, 2018 [28 favorites]
I think we on the left have a huge pedestal problem with politicians. Someone can't just be a good leader, they have to be The Most Amazeballs National Treasure. St. Bernie Would Have Won! Al Franken was an irreplaceable asset brought down by a scheming harridan and a couple of lying harpies! And I don't have to tell you how that worked with Barack Obama - he was a great president and leader, but jeez, many of us saw the Obama we wanted to see (a progressive hero who would save us!) rather than the Obama who really was. Obama himself said that we, not he, were the real instruments for change, and he was right.
When the National Treasure Of The Month disappoints, then either they're victims of a conspiracy or they really weren't progressive in the first place and therefore don't count, so we need to go find our new shining liberal light. Rinse and repeat. I think it's toxic and destructive to real progress.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 2:20 PM on April 27, 2018 [28 favorites]
I mean, I honestly cannot think of a better way to illustrate that to these Brogressives, or whatever you want to call them, including the ones showing up in this thread, this is all just a game. It’s an abstraction where you score points and take down enemies and then You Win. How else could you think it remotely appropriate to compare homophobic blog posts to serial sexual assault, unless they are all just abstractions for you, little marks in the moral superiority ledger and not actual things in the world that happen to actual people
Jesus fucking Christ
posted by schadenfrau at 2:22 PM on April 27, 2018 [30 favorites]
Jesus fucking Christ
posted by schadenfrau at 2:22 PM on April 27, 2018 [30 favorites]
I don't think Richard Kim is carrying water for Reid. The point of his post is that it's pretty much impossible that any modern troll could write those blog posts. They are so time-specific that they have references that even I forgot about, and I was there, in the democratic blogosphere, in 2006-2009. He says that it's unforgivable for her to claim that she was hacked when that's clearly not true.
Looking back and saying "gosh we were toxic by today's standards" isn't an excuse, it's a reckoning. And yes, there absolutely were people at the time calling out this kind of shit.
posted by muddgirl at 2:27 PM on April 27, 2018 [8 favorites]
Looking back and saying "gosh we were toxic by today's standards" isn't an excuse, it's a reckoning. And yes, there absolutely were people at the time calling out this kind of shit.
posted by muddgirl at 2:27 PM on April 27, 2018 [8 favorites]
And now that I think about it, this is why this whole thing makes me skeptical. Because the howling from the people who want to, what? Punish Joy Reid? Cost her her job? Diminish her influence? All of the above? Is completely out of proportion to the offense. It’s opportunistic. They just don’t like Joy Reid for Reasons we all know are mostly terrible, and they see this opening and jump on it like it’s the last Twinkie in a post apocalyptic landscape. It’s fundamentally dishonest, and it leads to truly reprehensible things like comparing, again, fucking blog posts to sexual assault.
I mean...I’m a lesbian who remembers the political environment of 2006 really ducking well, considering how traumatizing it was, and uh...honestly, so what? Everyone was homophobic back then, it was just something we had to deal with. I’ve made allowances for literally every one else in my life and in the public sphere who has since evolved, which is literally 90% of the left, and so has everyone else. Except, apparently, for Joy Reid, the black woman who calls bullshit on Greenwald/Bernie/misogynists. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
posted by schadenfrau at 2:29 PM on April 27, 2018 [42 favorites]
I mean...I’m a lesbian who remembers the political environment of 2006 really ducking well, considering how traumatizing it was, and uh...honestly, so what? Everyone was homophobic back then, it was just something we had to deal with. I’ve made allowances for literally every one else in my life and in the public sphere who has since evolved, which is literally 90% of the left, and so has everyone else. Except, apparently, for Joy Reid, the black woman who calls bullshit on Greenwald/Bernie/misogynists. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
posted by schadenfrau at 2:29 PM on April 27, 2018 [42 favorites]
The one where she says that "adult gay men tend to be attracted to very young, post-pubescent types, bringing them 'into the lifestyle' in a way that many people consider to be immoral" and a couple of the others seem surprisingly bad to me, even for ten years ago, and surprising in a way where it seems weird to me that that contemporaneous readers aren't coming forward to say that they remember them.
That's just basic "there's a gay agenda" plus "everyone knows gays are pedophiles." It doesn't stand out to me as outlandish at all in the time period we're talking about. (And by "outlandish," I mean it seems similar enough to the prevailing contemporaneous popular narrative about gay people that it doesn't particularly stand out. And by that I mean it's something I guess I got used to hearing.)
posted by mudpuppie at 2:32 PM on April 27, 2018
That's just basic "there's a gay agenda" plus "everyone knows gays are pedophiles." It doesn't stand out to me as outlandish at all in the time period we're talking about. (And by "outlandish," I mean it seems similar enough to the prevailing contemporaneous popular narrative about gay people that it doesn't particularly stand out. And by that I mean it's something I guess I got used to hearing.)
posted by mudpuppie at 2:32 PM on April 27, 2018
anybody trying to torpedo a black woman with a following out of politics/the media ought to have their motives scrutinized at least as heavily the subject herself, IMO
posted by prize bull octorok at 2:33 PM on April 27, 2018 [14 favorites]
posted by prize bull octorok at 2:33 PM on April 27, 2018 [14 favorites]
I agree with much of what you’re saying, schadenfrau, but not all of it. But I’m not sure I could convey my concerns without it further inflaming matters, so I’ll just leave it at that.
posted by darkstar at 2:43 PM on April 27, 2018
posted by darkstar at 2:43 PM on April 27, 2018
Man, this Left/Liberal discourse is fucked. I can't believe I'm finding out right now for the first time on Metafilter that I hate women.
I'm sorry about the inadvisable analogy. The comparison you're drawing isn't the one I intended. I was thinking on the basis of evangelicals' moral fixations, i.e. his naughty language, his association with porn stars. If you recall, the discourse on the Right had already reduced Trump's comments to "locker room talk"... specifically the language. Not about actual sexual assault, as it was (rightly) on the Left. I should have put "sins" in quotes. The point was about people dismissing behavior against their own values by people they support. I should have used a different example, or been more specific about the parts of Trump's behavior I figured that Evangelicals found objectionable but reached to excuse.
But yeah, if you want to think I'm gleefully trying to take down a woman out of unbridled misogyny (in a post on a small forum, focusing on the response to this story, and not really on Joy Reid at all) then go right ahead. I don't have a lot of strong feelings about her either way, and I don't have the political allegiances you think I do. I just think the specific path this story has taken is pretty illustrative of the contortions people make on partisan grounds. That's literally it.
posted by abrightersummerday at 2:46 PM on April 27, 2018 [23 favorites]
I'm sorry about the inadvisable analogy. The comparison you're drawing isn't the one I intended. I was thinking on the basis of evangelicals' moral fixations, i.e. his naughty language, his association with porn stars. If you recall, the discourse on the Right had already reduced Trump's comments to "locker room talk"... specifically the language. Not about actual sexual assault, as it was (rightly) on the Left. I should have put "sins" in quotes. The point was about people dismissing behavior against their own values by people they support. I should have used a different example, or been more specific about the parts of Trump's behavior I figured that Evangelicals found objectionable but reached to excuse.
But yeah, if you want to think I'm gleefully trying to take down a woman out of unbridled misogyny (in a post on a small forum, focusing on the response to this story, and not really on Joy Reid at all) then go right ahead. I don't have a lot of strong feelings about her either way, and I don't have the political allegiances you think I do. I just think the specific path this story has taken is pretty illustrative of the contortions people make on partisan grounds. That's literally it.
posted by abrightersummerday at 2:46 PM on April 27, 2018 [23 favorites]
Mod note: A couple comments deleted. Let's not drive off into denouncing or exculpating all Bernie supporters etc; that's shifting the focus to a fight we've had many times and don't need to leap right into today, in this thread, which is on a specific topic.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 2:52 PM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 2:52 PM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
I think "bad/horrible person" should be used somewhat sparingly in general
Ah then you would not like the Internet very much I suspect.
Man, this Left/Liberal discourse is fucked.
may all your firing squads be circular!
We should be united against our common enemy
posted by eustacescrubb at 2:58 PM on April 27, 2018
Ah then you would not like the Internet very much I suspect.
Man, this Left/Liberal discourse is fucked.
may all your firing squads be circular!
We should be united against our common enemy
posted by eustacescrubb at 2:58 PM on April 27, 2018
As someone who works in web archiving and thinks about archive security -- I'm glad people are looking critically at web archives, neither blindly accepting nor rejecting them.
There are theoretically ways we could make web archives very hard to fake after the fact (like recording SSL details and publishing hash trees), but the tech isn't built yet. In the meantime it's hard to say how hard it would be to fake archives without getting caught, but the Internet Archive is a huge, complicated project and it's definitely not impossible. I expect to see someone screwed by a convincingly faked archive eventually.
But that just makes web archives like every other kind of fakable evidence, where you have to look for corroboration and consider what's most plausible. Here folks I trust like Michael Nelson are using multi-archive searches and saying it doesn't look like IA's copies were changed any time recently. That goes a long way for me. But I hope "the archive was faked" doesn't get rejected out of hand if and when it happens.
posted by john hadron collider at 3:04 PM on April 27, 2018 [16 favorites]
There are theoretically ways we could make web archives very hard to fake after the fact (like recording SSL details and publishing hash trees), but the tech isn't built yet. In the meantime it's hard to say how hard it would be to fake archives without getting caught, but the Internet Archive is a huge, complicated project and it's definitely not impossible. I expect to see someone screwed by a convincingly faked archive eventually.
But that just makes web archives like every other kind of fakable evidence, where you have to look for corroboration and consider what's most plausible. Here folks I trust like Michael Nelson are using multi-archive searches and saying it doesn't look like IA's copies were changed any time recently. That goes a long way for me. But I hope "the archive was faked" doesn't get rejected out of hand if and when it happens.
posted by john hadron collider at 3:04 PM on April 27, 2018 [16 favorites]
But I hope "the archive was faked" doesn't get rejected out of hand if and when it happens.
Well, if Reid's claim turns out to be bullshit, that is almost certainly what the response will be in the event of an actual archive-faking incident in the future. (Which is what makes the lie—if indeed it is a lie—so much worse than the original trespass.)
posted by Atom Eyes at 3:21 PM on April 27, 2018 [6 favorites]
Well, if Reid's claim turns out to be bullshit, that is almost certainly what the response will be in the event of an actual archive-faking incident in the future. (Which is what makes the lie—if indeed it is a lie—so much worse than the original trespass.)
posted by Atom Eyes at 3:21 PM on April 27, 2018 [6 favorites]
Ah then you would not like the Internet very much I suspect.
Don't get me wrong, I am a judgmental blankety-blank. I just find the construct of "bad person" or even "good person" far more likely to mislead and misdirect than to be useful in analysis. If Joy Reid is truly a horrible person, then she's probably unsalvageable. I mean, what's the point even of rebuking her? (And, NGL, I have reached that point with more people in the public eye right now than I ever thought I would. I didn't say I'd sworn the concepts off completely!) But if she's a great person, then clearly she could never have done such things, etc. Or they must not have been wrong! You see how neither helps. I just think it's more helpful to focus on behavior and beliefs when possible. I think Reid probably did say these homophobic things, or things like them; I think saying them at the time was a reflection of less awful attitudes than they would be if said today; and I think ten-plus years is long enough that an apology and a changed course of conduct should be sufficient not to exclude her from the public sphere (though of course no one injured by those remarks/attitudes ever has to forgive her, or trust her, if they don't wish to). There are relatively few people who need to be cast into the outer darkness forever, on either side.
I just find her conduct here so puzzling. I can't make it out. Maybe she's seizing on what she would like to believe, given that her memory of what she wrote ten years ago on a blog can't be very precise. There are some things I'm pretty confident I would never have said, but if you confronted me with a text from 2000 on some issue on which I know now I had blind spots back then, I would probably be at a loss to say with certainty that I'd never said that thing.
posted by praemunire at 3:35 PM on April 27, 2018 [6 favorites]
Don't get me wrong, I am a judgmental blankety-blank. I just find the construct of "bad person" or even "good person" far more likely to mislead and misdirect than to be useful in analysis. If Joy Reid is truly a horrible person, then she's probably unsalvageable. I mean, what's the point even of rebuking her? (And, NGL, I have reached that point with more people in the public eye right now than I ever thought I would. I didn't say I'd sworn the concepts off completely!) But if she's a great person, then clearly she could never have done such things, etc. Or they must not have been wrong! You see how neither helps. I just think it's more helpful to focus on behavior and beliefs when possible. I think Reid probably did say these homophobic things, or things like them; I think saying them at the time was a reflection of less awful attitudes than they would be if said today; and I think ten-plus years is long enough that an apology and a changed course of conduct should be sufficient not to exclude her from the public sphere (though of course no one injured by those remarks/attitudes ever has to forgive her, or trust her, if they don't wish to). There are relatively few people who need to be cast into the outer darkness forever, on either side.
I just find her conduct here so puzzling. I can't make it out. Maybe she's seizing on what she would like to believe, given that her memory of what she wrote ten years ago on a blog can't be very precise. There are some things I'm pretty confident I would never have said, but if you confronted me with a text from 2000 on some issue on which I know now I had blind spots back then, I would probably be at a loss to say with certainty that I'd never said that thing.
posted by praemunire at 3:35 PM on April 27, 2018 [6 favorites]
I don’t buy the “people would have remembered reading this when it occurred if it really happened” argument. Memory is extremely fallible, so I don’t find it persuasive at all.
While I think the focus on Reid’s past opinions is being driven by some dubious parties, based on the evidence currently available it appears she did make the posts. Claiming she was “hacked” comes off as disingenuous and is not good for discourse, especially considering the post-truth world in which we’re currently living.
If the posts are real, I wish she would own up to it and apologize, the way she did back in December. Given the views expressed, it’s an entirely different story whether or not it would be enough for people to forgive her. I fear that at this point there is no turning back on claiming “hacked”, though.
posted by defenestration at 3:37 PM on April 27, 2018
While I think the focus on Reid’s past opinions is being driven by some dubious parties, based on the evidence currently available it appears she did make the posts. Claiming she was “hacked” comes off as disingenuous and is not good for discourse, especially considering the post-truth world in which we’re currently living.
If the posts are real, I wish she would own up to it and apologize, the way she did back in December. Given the views expressed, it’s an entirely different story whether or not it would be enough for people to forgive her. I fear that at this point there is no turning back on claiming “hacked”, though.
posted by defenestration at 3:37 PM on April 27, 2018
As an aside, holy moly I had forgotten all about Harriet Meiers, but man was she emblematic if so many things that infuriated me about Bush ‘43 back in 2006-2007. I mean it’s all preferable to what’s going on now but the fact I’m saying that sentence is so flipping depressing.
posted by midmarch snowman at 4:31 PM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by midmarch snowman at 4:31 PM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
I don't think we need to rank Bush and Trump. One bad president doesn't improve the other.
posted by muddgirl at 4:43 PM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by muddgirl at 4:43 PM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
Also, if we're wondering if she would write things like this, I present you this 2010 transphobic tweet of hers. Unless she's going to claim that someone hacked her 8 years ago for the long game.
https://twitter.com/JoyAnnReid/status/13821396677
"@JoyAnnReid: RT @Mediaite Elena Kagan and Ann Coulter Attacked For Physical Appearance http://www.mediaite.com/jabvs FM [k but really, Coulter is a dude]"
Hardly her only such tweet, too.
"A Muslim Miss USA? Rush Limbaugh and that Coulter dude's heads to explode in three... two..." (2010)
""@ricksanchezcnn: i'm going to interview ann coulter tonite , what do u want me to ask her?" /don't you mean "shim?"" (2010)
"I'm sooooo tempted to crack on that Coulter dude right now... @lawrence #strainingforcivility" (2011)
"Sorry @Lawrence. I'm not gonna watch Ann Coulter. I like my drag queens fierce. Not a way to build ratings, my man." (2011)
Transphobia is a lot more acceptable than homophobia among centrists, so these tweets haven't been purged yet. In a few more years, yeah, maybe she'll start ranting about her twitter being hacked too.
posted by kafziel at 5:37 PM on April 27, 2018 [22 favorites]
https://twitter.com/JoyAnnReid/status/13821396677
"@JoyAnnReid: RT @Mediaite Elena Kagan and Ann Coulter Attacked For Physical Appearance http://www.mediaite.com/jabvs FM [k but really, Coulter is a dude]"
Hardly her only such tweet, too.
"A Muslim Miss USA? Rush Limbaugh and that Coulter dude's heads to explode in three... two..." (2010)
""@ricksanchezcnn: i'm going to interview ann coulter tonite , what do u want me to ask her?" /don't you mean "shim?"" (2010)
"I'm sooooo tempted to crack on that Coulter dude right now... @lawrence #strainingforcivility" (2011)
"Sorry @Lawrence. I'm not gonna watch Ann Coulter. I like my drag queens fierce. Not a way to build ratings, my man." (2011)
Transphobia is a lot more acceptable than homophobia among centrists, so these tweets haven't been purged yet. In a few more years, yeah, maybe she'll start ranting about her twitter being hacked too.
posted by kafziel at 5:37 PM on April 27, 2018 [22 favorites]
Some folks on Twitter think that the screenshots of Reid's blog were altered.
posted by asteria at 5:40 PM on April 27, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by asteria at 5:40 PM on April 27, 2018 [3 favorites]
It will be cool in like 2028 when a bunch of people defending homophobia and transphobia from their neoliberal hero this week will be claiming their Twitter was hacked.
posted by Jimbob at 6:22 PM on April 27, 2018 [10 favorites]
posted by Jimbob at 6:22 PM on April 27, 2018 [10 favorites]
And now that I think about it, this is why this whole thing makes me skeptical. Because the howling from the people who want to, what? Punish Joy Reid? Cost her her job? Diminish her influence? All of the above?
Yes, please. She has a long history of being casually homophobic and transphobic, and when called out on some of it now her response is to claim "I was hacked"! when the things she says she didn't write bear a strong resemblance to things she admits to writing. All the available evidence from the Internet Archive says those posts have been there since their original posting dates. Whatever her views on LGBT people, and whether she's "evolved" or learned not to say some things in polite company, the frankly bizarre and elaborate lie she's come up with to excuse herself should destroy her credibility.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 6:23 PM on April 27, 2018 [8 favorites]
Yes, please. She has a long history of being casually homophobic and transphobic, and when called out on some of it now her response is to claim "I was hacked"! when the things she says she didn't write bear a strong resemblance to things she admits to writing. All the available evidence from the Internet Archive says those posts have been there since their original posting dates. Whatever her views on LGBT people, and whether she's "evolved" or learned not to say some things in polite company, the frankly bizarre and elaborate lie she's come up with to excuse herself should destroy her credibility.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 6:23 PM on April 27, 2018 [8 favorites]
5) Interestingly, no one has come forward and said that they read any of this garbage in real time: "Oh hey, that Joy Reid was a real nightmare, can't believe she got published."
And yet someone was able to find a contemporaneous post from Democratic Underground calling Reid out for her homophobia.
In Walsh's position there's a sense of "I certainly would have objected if Reid said these terrible things back then." The point of Kim's piece--one I think he makes pretty successfully--is that on the liberal left in the years that these things were originally posted, most liberals certainly would not have objected.
The thing I remembered when reading Kim was my sense about the jokes that were everywhere in the wake of Larry Craig's arrest. Plenty of liberal comics and pundits seemed absolutely giddy that events had given them license to make fag jokes again, so long as they pretended what the jokes were about was the hypocrisy of Republicans. I have a visceral recollection of Bill Maher smirking gleefully..
posted by layceepee at 7:13 PM on April 27, 2018 [20 favorites]
And yet someone was able to find a contemporaneous post from Democratic Underground calling Reid out for her homophobia.
In Walsh's position there's a sense of "I certainly would have objected if Reid said these terrible things back then." The point of Kim's piece--one I think he makes pretty successfully--is that on the liberal left in the years that these things were originally posted, most liberals certainly would not have objected.
The thing I remembered when reading Kim was my sense about the jokes that were everywhere in the wake of Larry Craig's arrest. Plenty of liberal comics and pundits seemed absolutely giddy that events had given them license to make fag jokes again, so long as they pretended what the jokes were about was the hypocrisy of Republicans. I have a visceral recollection of Bill Maher smirking gleefully..
posted by layceepee at 7:13 PM on April 27, 2018 [20 favorites]
I have a visceral recollection of Bill Maher smirking gleefully
Speaking of people who're casually homophobic and transphobic (and inexplicably beloved of some liberals)...
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 7:26 PM on April 27, 2018 [19 favorites]
Speaking of people who're casually homophobic and transphobic (and inexplicably beloved of some liberals)...
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 7:26 PM on April 27, 2018 [19 favorites]
I mean just so we’re clear on the level of paranoia on display by Reid’s boosters - apparently the fact the Internet Archive once hosted a call in with Snowden is proof they’re complicit (presumably along with some “Russians”) in hacking Reid’s blog or something. Totally normal.
posted by Jimbob at 8:29 PM on April 27, 2018 [7 favorites]
posted by Jimbob at 8:29 PM on April 27, 2018 [7 favorites]
It's kind of sad that Jason Scott posted this right after the election and now the Internet Archive is under attack but not from Trump fans.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:41 PM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:41 PM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
Since 2016 I've been ignoring anything that uses the word "neoliberal" incorrectly and it's really worked out for me.
posted by asteria at 3:09 AM on April 28, 2018 [6 favorites]
posted by asteria at 3:09 AM on April 28, 2018 [6 favorites]
One of Reid's MSNBC colleagues comes to her 'defense': "What do @tombrokaw and @JoyAnnReid have in common? They are both excellent journalists who are greatly respected by their NBC News colleagues. Note the widespread support for them by those of us who know them best. This contrasts with others under fire."
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 5:18 AM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 5:18 AM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]
And Ben Carson is an excellent surgeon. Doesn't mean anything about whether they have faults in other areas. And based on Brokaw's nasty unhinged rant yesterday "defending" himself, not sure I'd be name-checking him if I was Alter.
posted by chris24 at 5:26 AM on April 28, 2018 [5 favorites]
posted by chris24 at 5:26 AM on April 28, 2018 [5 favorites]
Daily Kos is all a-flutter with Joy Ann Reid, the wronged and perfect cinnamon roll being railroaded by the Alt-right/the Russians/Wikileaks/"cyber" warfare. This is why I'm on MeFi and not DK.
I believe that Reid said some homophobic and transphobic things in the mid-2000s that were pretty much mainstream liberal thought at the time, which would now call for an apology because, as I said, the social justice needle has moved. "I said X in 2005, my views have changed, I was wrong and I apologize."
I can also believe that there are those who want to scapegoat Reid in particular because of her race and/or gender, rather than white men who have said similar things in the past but are not having their blog archives picked over.
But hacking? Shadowy conspiracy ratfuck job? Aimed at someone who really isn't that powerful or famous compared to other journalists, pundits, and politicians out there? No, and please don't be the conspiracy theorist who cried wolf. I feel like parts of the left have become paranoid speedfreaks en masse.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 6:26 AM on April 28, 2018 [14 favorites]
I believe that Reid said some homophobic and transphobic things in the mid-2000s that were pretty much mainstream liberal thought at the time, which would now call for an apology because, as I said, the social justice needle has moved. "I said X in 2005, my views have changed, I was wrong and I apologize."
I can also believe that there are those who want to scapegoat Reid in particular because of her race and/or gender, rather than white men who have said similar things in the past but are not having their blog archives picked over.
But hacking? Shadowy conspiracy ratfuck job? Aimed at someone who really isn't that powerful or famous compared to other journalists, pundits, and politicians out there? No, and please don't be the conspiracy theorist who cried wolf. I feel like parts of the left have become paranoid speedfreaks en masse.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 6:26 AM on April 28, 2018 [14 favorites]
So apparently Reid looks like she's staying with her "hacking" story, according to those watching her show this morning: "I genuinely believe I did not write those hateful things," she says
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 7:43 AM on April 28, 2018
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 7:43 AM on April 28, 2018
cinnamon roll
What does this mean?
posted by eustacescrubb at 8:39 AM on April 28, 2018 [5 favorites]
What does this mean?
posted by eustacescrubb at 8:39 AM on April 28, 2018 [5 favorites]
"I genuinely believe I did not write those hateful things," she says
She's also not claiming the Internet Archive was hacked. So those things were on her blog in, what, 2005? 2006? 2007? and she, who was blogging at the time, never noticed these posts she didn't write? Uh huh. So was she on a lot of prescription medication at the time, or drunk? (Those are always popular excuses for people who say horrible things, after all.) Was it a mysterious one-armed man?
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 8:49 AM on April 28, 2018 [3 favorites]
She's also not claiming the Internet Archive was hacked. So those things were on her blog in, what, 2005? 2006? 2007? and she, who was blogging at the time, never noticed these posts she didn't write? Uh huh. So was she on a lot of prescription medication at the time, or drunk? (Those are always popular excuses for people who say horrible things, after all.) Was it a mysterious one-armed man?
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 8:49 AM on April 28, 2018 [3 favorites]
This is from earlier this morning.
Yashar Ali (New York mag)
Just now, Joy Reid apologized, on her show, to the transgender community (and Ann Coulter) for her transphobic tweets.
posted by chris24 at 9:31 AM on April 28, 2018 [4 favorites]
Yashar Ali (New York mag)
Just now, Joy Reid apologized, on her show, to the transgender community (and Ann Coulter) for her transphobic tweets.
posted by chris24 at 9:31 AM on April 28, 2018 [4 favorites]
Democrats can too be heel-digging dipshits. Pobody's nerfect, and I just can't get excited about how this particular dipshit is handling things.
It's easier (and just as consequential) just to flag her as unreliable and move on.
posted by rhizome at 9:31 AM on April 28, 2018 [2 favorites]
It's easier (and just as consequential) just to flag her as unreliable and move on.
posted by rhizome at 9:31 AM on April 28, 2018 [2 favorites]
Video (3:41) of Joy's apology on her show this morning.
posted by chris24 at 10:01 AM on April 28, 2018
posted by chris24 at 10:01 AM on April 28, 2018
Parker Molloy
I’d been really critical of Joy’s posts (especially the ones related to trans issues or Ann Coulter). I believe her statement today is genuine, and I appreciate her addressing this head-on during her show (probably better there than in a social media post, tbh). When she says she doesn’t recognize the posts as her own, you know what, I also believe that. It’s entirely possible that she *did* write them, but as she said in her statement, she didn’t recognize the voice as her own.
In any case, I don’t believe that the Joy Reid of 10 years past is the Joy Reid of today — and that’s a good thing. Learning and growing is always a positive thing. I appreciate her commitment on LGBT issues moving forward. Again, I say all of that as someone who spent the past week being extremely skeptical about all of this. I think she means well, and I’m very glad that she didn’t lose her job over this.
Final comment on this: I’m not taking a position on whether I think she wrote those posts or not (an Occam's Razor approach would suggest the answer is likely yes). What I’m saying is that I believe that she believed that she didn’t write them. Have a nice Saturday, all.
posted by chris24 at 10:08 AM on April 28, 2018 [9 favorites]
I’d been really critical of Joy’s posts (especially the ones related to trans issues or Ann Coulter). I believe her statement today is genuine, and I appreciate her addressing this head-on during her show (probably better there than in a social media post, tbh). When she says she doesn’t recognize the posts as her own, you know what, I also believe that. It’s entirely possible that she *did* write them, but as she said in her statement, she didn’t recognize the voice as her own.
In any case, I don’t believe that the Joy Reid of 10 years past is the Joy Reid of today — and that’s a good thing. Learning and growing is always a positive thing. I appreciate her commitment on LGBT issues moving forward. Again, I say all of that as someone who spent the past week being extremely skeptical about all of this. I think she means well, and I’m very glad that she didn’t lose her job over this.
Final comment on this: I’m not taking a position on whether I think she wrote those posts or not (an Occam's Razor approach would suggest the answer is likely yes). What I’m saying is that I believe that she believed that she didn’t write them. Have a nice Saturday, all.
posted by chris24 at 10:08 AM on April 28, 2018 [9 favorites]
Reid was right to apologize. She had said those things and sweeping them under the rug never works.
I still think that the possibility of screenshots being edited, the participation of Wikileaks, and the decision of Greenwald to amplify this should all be questioned. But as some people have decided this will be their 2016 primary proxy du jour I know they won't be.
Guess we better hope the 2020 candidate is flawless.
posted by asteria at 10:27 AM on April 28, 2018 [3 favorites]
I still think that the possibility of screenshots being edited, the participation of Wikileaks, and the decision of Greenwald to amplify this should all be questioned. But as some people have decided this will be their 2016 primary proxy du jour I know they won't be.
Guess we better hope the 2020 candidate is flawless.
posted by asteria at 10:27 AM on April 28, 2018 [3 favorites]
Completely agree with that, chris24. I’m disappointed that it took a career-threatening uproar for her to finally do the right thing, but that’s humans for you.
posted by darkstar at 10:29 AM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by darkstar at 10:29 AM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]
Completely agree with that, chris24.
Sorry for any confusion. That post is 100% a tweetstorm by writer and transgender activist Parker Malloy. I just reformatted it to make it more readable.
posted by chris24 at 10:31 AM on April 28, 2018 [5 favorites]
Sorry for any confusion. That post is 100% a tweetstorm by writer and transgender activist Parker Malloy. I just reformatted it to make it more readable.
posted by chris24 at 10:31 AM on April 28, 2018 [5 favorites]
Thank you for sharing, chris24.
I appreciate those who are discussing this in good faith, here. More of that please.
posted by Barack Spinoza at 10:44 AM on April 28, 2018 [3 favorites]
I appreciate those who are discussing this in good faith, here. More of that please.
posted by Barack Spinoza at 10:44 AM on April 28, 2018 [3 favorites]
Guess we better hope the 2020 candidate is flawless.
I don't ask for flawless, just "not a complete moron"; if whoever gets the Democratic nomination in 2020 has a previous history of casual public homophobia and transphobia, I would hope they sincerely apologise for expressing those views rather than claiming to've been hacked and never really walking that back. Reid's "apology" is bullshit.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 11:24 AM on April 28, 2018 [7 favorites]
I don't ask for flawless, just "not a complete moron"; if whoever gets the Democratic nomination in 2020 has a previous history of casual public homophobia and transphobia, I would hope they sincerely apologise for expressing those views rather than claiming to've been hacked and never really walking that back. Reid's "apology" is bullshit.
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 11:24 AM on April 28, 2018 [7 favorites]
As another data point: I grabbed the image from this tweet (linked to in the OP HuffPo piece), cropped it down to the image of Charlie Crist holding an umbrella, and plugged the result into the https://tineye.com/ reverse image search.
One of the hits was:
posted by XMLicious at 11:41 AM on April 28, 2018 [4 favorites]
One of the hits was:
blog.reidreport.comSo, this would appear to be a non-IA corroboration of the Internet Archive crawl of that one specific page.
Filename: http://blog.reidreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/charlie-leaping1.jpg
Found on: http://blog.reidreport.com/2009/11/wouldnt-it-have-been-easier-to-just-leave-town/
Page crawled on Jul 06, 2012
posted by XMLicious at 11:41 AM on April 28, 2018 [4 favorites]
A mix of Twitter reactions to Joy and the apology.
Louis Peitzman (Buzzfeed)
Have whatever opinion you want about Joy Reid, but it's disingenuous to suggest people are criticizing her for something she wrote 10 years ago when the more pressing issue is that she appears to have lied about it and doubled down on that in increasingly bizarre ways.
Charlotte Clymer (HRC Comms)
I speak just for me, and this is what I know without a doubt: when I came out as trans, my own aunt, with whom I've barely spoke over the past decade, reached out and reiterated her support of Trump. @JoyAnnReid responded with kindness, affirmation, and love.
Eric Holder (Obama AG)
Joy Ann Reid apology. Appropriate. Heartfelt. This unique and compelling voice for tolerance and equality should not be silenced. We learn - and change - from our mistakes. She has.
David Sirota (TYT)
Left unsaid in the Joy Reid crap: when high-profile media folk appear to blatantly lie & then their media buddies publicly defend them, it fuels overall distrust of media, which makes it harder for honest workaday journalists to be viewed as credible, do their jobs & have impact.
Andy Lassner (Ellen)
I don’t know if Joy Reid is telling the truth or not. Here’s my truth. I grew up being taught in school that being gay was wrong. I was told people chose to be gay. I used gay slurs with my friends. And then I learned the truth. I evolved. I changed. Now I produce Ellen.
Dan Savage
I don’t like people who are currently homophobic. If I was gonna be mad at people who used to be homophobic, I’d have to be mad at my mom.
George M Johnson
Being a black queer writer is hard when one of the black “faves” is questioned on homophobia. There is an expectation to protect blackness while dispelling homophobia that leave many of us at a crossroads with how we as queer folk can express our hurt knowing we aren’t supported. I’m not gonna lie. Watching so many jump to the defense of Joy without question hurt. Black queer writers didn’t even have a chance to say how we felt before the world was standing with her. So even if we did address it, we would be fighting homophobia and a lot of our own.
I guess what I’m saying is the next time a black fav is called out on homophobia, can we give some time for the community affected to feel? Parse out the impact and intent. Let the queer writers do the work of nuance and complexity. We sometimes feel unsupported and it hurts. I’m glad Joy addressed it. I’m glad some folk got closure. I just want us to remember that when you stand up so quickly for someone, that you may also be standing against an LGBT community that rarely gets the benefit of the doubt. That’s all I got. Be easy.
posted by chris24 at 12:45 PM on April 28, 2018 [16 favorites]
Louis Peitzman (Buzzfeed)
Have whatever opinion you want about Joy Reid, but it's disingenuous to suggest people are criticizing her for something she wrote 10 years ago when the more pressing issue is that she appears to have lied about it and doubled down on that in increasingly bizarre ways.
Charlotte Clymer (HRC Comms)
I speak just for me, and this is what I know without a doubt: when I came out as trans, my own aunt, with whom I've barely spoke over the past decade, reached out and reiterated her support of Trump. @JoyAnnReid responded with kindness, affirmation, and love.
Eric Holder (Obama AG)
Joy Ann Reid apology. Appropriate. Heartfelt. This unique and compelling voice for tolerance and equality should not be silenced. We learn - and change - from our mistakes. She has.
David Sirota (TYT)
Left unsaid in the Joy Reid crap: when high-profile media folk appear to blatantly lie & then their media buddies publicly defend them, it fuels overall distrust of media, which makes it harder for honest workaday journalists to be viewed as credible, do their jobs & have impact.
Andy Lassner (Ellen)
I don’t know if Joy Reid is telling the truth or not. Here’s my truth. I grew up being taught in school that being gay was wrong. I was told people chose to be gay. I used gay slurs with my friends. And then I learned the truth. I evolved. I changed. Now I produce Ellen.
Dan Savage
I don’t like people who are currently homophobic. If I was gonna be mad at people who used to be homophobic, I’d have to be mad at my mom.
George M Johnson
Being a black queer writer is hard when one of the black “faves” is questioned on homophobia. There is an expectation to protect blackness while dispelling homophobia that leave many of us at a crossroads with how we as queer folk can express our hurt knowing we aren’t supported. I’m not gonna lie. Watching so many jump to the defense of Joy without question hurt. Black queer writers didn’t even have a chance to say how we felt before the world was standing with her. So even if we did address it, we would be fighting homophobia and a lot of our own.
I guess what I’m saying is the next time a black fav is called out on homophobia, can we give some time for the community affected to feel? Parse out the impact and intent. Let the queer writers do the work of nuance and complexity. We sometimes feel unsupported and it hurts. I’m glad Joy addressed it. I’m glad some folk got closure. I just want us to remember that when you stand up so quickly for someone, that you may also be standing against an LGBT community that rarely gets the benefit of the doubt. That’s all I got. Be easy.
posted by chris24 at 12:45 PM on April 28, 2018 [16 favorites]
That last point, by George M Johnson quoted by Chris24, is really important:
posted by Joe in Australia at 1:44 PM on April 28, 2018 [10 favorites]
Watching so many jump to the defense of Joy without question hurt. Black queer writers didn’t even have a chance to say how we felt before the world was standing with her.When things like this come up there's a lot of cheap and easy grace being offered before the dust has even settled. It's absolutely true that the zeitgeist was much more homophobic back then, and that from what I've seen and recollect Joy Reid's comments were unexceptionable. When we say that, though, it's not so much a defense of her as an indictment of us: we tolerated, accepted and expected casual cruelty under the guise of witticisms for all sorts of mostly-bad reasons (excepting gays and allies who were simply resigned to it). We need to do a lot more soul-searching on our selves and make our own apologies, because "she's OK because everybody was doing it" is basically saying that prejudice and hatred are OK when everybody is doing it, which is, emphatically, not OK.
posted by Joe in Australia at 1:44 PM on April 28, 2018 [10 favorites]
Personally I'm not particularly impressed by the haste with which people forgive and absolve decade-old (and more recent!) homophobia and transphobia in a way they wouldn't if the comments in question were racist, or anti-Semitic. I'm also not impressed by the number of people who act like that's just normal; I keep seeing "I bet you wouldn't want people digging through things *you* wrote over a decade ago either" like that sort of casual bigotry just isn't a thing at all (I mean, yeah, okay, I'm sorry you were a shitty person a decade ago, but not everyone was?). And the comparisons to Obama and Clinton are also kind of gross (yeah, neither of them supported same-sex marriage in the '00s, but I'm pretty sure neither of them has a documented history of cheap and lazy homophobic and transphobic "jokes", either; these things aren't really comparable).
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 2:13 PM on April 28, 2018 [12 favorites]
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 2:13 PM on April 28, 2018 [12 favorites]
Mod note: One comment deleted; if you want to speak from your own experiences/reactions go right ahead, but it creates a weird situation to demand other people's personal details and insist they must have had the same experiences/reactions or else they're less queer or something.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 2:52 PM on April 28, 2018
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 2:52 PM on April 28, 2018
As queer Florida dweller who works in politics, I've been annoyed by Crist jokes forever. I don't watch Joy Reid, but I believe her when she says she doesn't remember making some of those jokes. People say that kind of shit all the time. It's hard to keep track of all the LOL He's Gay jokes straight people make. hashtagnotallstraightpeople.
I'm glad she at least apologized for the ones she could remember. Now I can go about my life without hearing about Joy Reid anymore, probably. I'm ok with that.
posted by Cookiebastard at 4:54 PM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]
I'm glad she at least apologized for the ones she could remember. Now I can go about my life without hearing about Joy Reid anymore, probably. I'm ok with that.
posted by Cookiebastard at 4:54 PM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]
"I genuinely believe I did not write those hateful things,"
It's entirely likely that this is a 100% true statement.
Memory is notoriously plastic, and science shows that when we change our minds we usually don't remember doing so. We adjust our memories so they reflect our current positions, beliefs, and decisions. We always tend to remember our past selves as simply younger versions of our current selves rather than the different people they often were.
Where Reid has failed is in failing to realize the fallibility of her own memory. The Joy Reid of today would not make casually transphobic remarks, therefore when confronted with evidence that the Joy Reid of yesterday did, today's Reid is unable to believe that she wrote what she did.
We see a similar, if somewhat wackier, thing in the people who misremember various geographic or historic facts and have convinced themselves that their memory is right but they have changed timelines or universes.
Reid's disconnect with reality is more personal, and if she weren't a famous journalist she would have been able to remember her past self incorrectly without any real pushback.
Where it gets problematic is that rather than acknowledging her past transphobia and moving on, she's still stuck trying to reinforce her own (false) memory of not being so casually transphobic. Which makes her look foolish to say the least.
posted by sotonohito at 5:59 PM on April 28, 2018 [13 favorites]
It's entirely likely that this is a 100% true statement.
Memory is notoriously plastic, and science shows that when we change our minds we usually don't remember doing so. We adjust our memories so they reflect our current positions, beliefs, and decisions. We always tend to remember our past selves as simply younger versions of our current selves rather than the different people they often were.
Where Reid has failed is in failing to realize the fallibility of her own memory. The Joy Reid of today would not make casually transphobic remarks, therefore when confronted with evidence that the Joy Reid of yesterday did, today's Reid is unable to believe that she wrote what she did.
We see a similar, if somewhat wackier, thing in the people who misremember various geographic or historic facts and have convinced themselves that their memory is right but they have changed timelines or universes.
Reid's disconnect with reality is more personal, and if she weren't a famous journalist she would have been able to remember her past self incorrectly without any real pushback.
Where it gets problematic is that rather than acknowledging her past transphobia and moving on, she's still stuck trying to reinforce her own (false) memory of not being so casually transphobic. Which makes her look foolish to say the least.
posted by sotonohito at 5:59 PM on April 28, 2018 [13 favorites]
Personally I'm not particularly impressed by the haste with which people forgive and absolve decade-old (and more recent!) homophobia and transphobia in a way they wouldn't if the comments in question were racist, or anti-Semitic.
No, people are eager to forgive and forget those things, too, and public figures that are called to account for those prejudices make very similar excuses. You would be amazed at how frequently their accounts have allegedly been hacked, someone should really look into it.
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:53 PM on April 28, 2018 [4 favorites]
No, people are eager to forgive and forget those things, too, and public figures that are called to account for those prejudices make very similar excuses. You would be amazed at how frequently their accounts have allegedly been hacked, someone should really look into it.
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:53 PM on April 28, 2018 [4 favorites]
Oh, and "it must have been a staffer what posted those comments I never saw" is popular, so is "I was added to the Facebook group/Twitter followers/petition/committee without my knowledge". And maybe those excuses are true! It's certainly not easy to refute them, and by that time the caravan has moved on.
posted by Joe in Australia at 8:02 PM on April 28, 2018
posted by Joe in Australia at 8:02 PM on April 28, 2018
I'm trying to search for what's known about Wikileaks in relation to this (are they just tweeting shit around, or did they have some other involvement), and I literally cannot. Anything is buried under people yelling. This information environment is getting tougher and tougher to deal with.
On the tangent of hackability of web archives, I hope they have something like yearly snapshots that are hard to modify. A write-once medium would be nice, but the protection is more in the provenance systems built around, like "the only tape drive in this vault has no record head." After all, write-once won't save you if I'm able to swap in my own CD-R for the original one.
posted by away for regrooving at 12:32 AM on April 29, 2018
On the tangent of hackability of web archives, I hope they have something like yearly snapshots that are hard to modify. A write-once medium would be nice, but the protection is more in the provenance systems built around, like "the only tape drive in this vault has no record head." After all, write-once won't save you if I'm able to swap in my own CD-R for the original one.
posted by away for regrooving at 12:32 AM on April 29, 2018
Unless I'm completely misunderstanding something fundamental about cryptography, even more verifiable than checksums or signatures on large yearly archives are the concepts described in the Wikipedia articles trusted timestamping and transient-key cryptography... they should be able to create a new public-private key pair every day or every hour, create a digital signature of every single page at the time they download it, and then destroy the private key immediately after they stop using it. (At the end of the day or the hour.)
So, you'd be able to find the public key whose corresponding private key was only used to sign pages grabbed between 2012-06-12T04:00:00Z and 2012-06-12T05:00:00Z and verify that the archived page you're looking at, which was purportedly saved by the archive during that period, was signed with that key.
It's hardly infallible—the private key could be stolen before it's destroyed, or the store of public keys could be hacked†—but it seems like a relatively easy way‡ to increase the trustworthiness of archives. Perhaps john hadron collider or someone else who works in web archiving can comment on whether this sort of capability is in the works, or already exists in some projects.
† But they could distribute the public keys via blockchain, and raise a billion dollars in donations just because they used the word "blockchain"
‡ I realize that a "relatively easy" effort relative to an endeavor the size and complexity of the Internet Archive is still an enormous project
posted by XMLicious at 4:43 AM on April 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
So, you'd be able to find the public key whose corresponding private key was only used to sign pages grabbed between 2012-06-12T04:00:00Z and 2012-06-12T05:00:00Z and verify that the archived page you're looking at, which was purportedly saved by the archive during that period, was signed with that key.
It's hardly infallible—the private key could be stolen before it's destroyed, or the store of public keys could be hacked†—but it seems like a relatively easy way‡ to increase the trustworthiness of archives. Perhaps john hadron collider or someone else who works in web archiving can comment on whether this sort of capability is in the works, or already exists in some projects.
† But they could distribute the public keys via blockchain, and raise a billion dollars in donations just because they used the word "blockchain"
‡ I realize that a "relatively easy" effort relative to an endeavor the size and complexity of the Internet Archive is still an enormous project
posted by XMLicious at 4:43 AM on April 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
"Being a Pundit Like Joy-Ann Reid Means Never Saying Sorry"
posted by kafziel at 11:55 AM on April 29, 2018
posted by kafziel at 11:55 AM on April 29, 2018
One concept I feel like I've never heard any famous person express, as part of an apology: "I am not always the best authority on myself. I don't remember doing X, but if evidence outside my memories suggests I did, then I did. Self-serving memory is one of the ways I'm fallible, and I sincerely apologize for having done the thing I don't remember doing."
The culture's conceptual holes are such that "I don't remember but I do apologize" would be seen in some corners as a non-apology — because "I don't remember it" is so broadly understood to mean "It didn't happen." Admitting to that kind of forgetfulness is seen as admitting so some kind of extreme delusion, like schizophrenia, even though study after study shows that human memory is generally malleable. "I trust you and not my lying brain" should become a new rallying cry for honesty.
posted by InTheYear2017 at 1:00 PM on April 29, 2018 [6 favorites]
The culture's conceptual holes are such that "I don't remember but I do apologize" would be seen in some corners as a non-apology — because "I don't remember it" is so broadly understood to mean "It didn't happen." Admitting to that kind of forgetfulness is seen as admitting so some kind of extreme delusion, like schizophrenia, even though study after study shows that human memory is generally malleable. "I trust you and not my lying brain" should become a new rallying cry for honesty.
posted by InTheYear2017 at 1:00 PM on April 29, 2018 [6 favorites]
I forgot that I took a shower this morning. I definitely don't remember what dumb shit I wrote on a blog in 2000-whatever.
posted by runcibleshaw at 2:17 PM on April 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by runcibleshaw at 2:17 PM on April 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
Now that the bulk of the serious discussion has been had, can I say that I have totally forgotten why Harriet Miers was important but I have a pretty good memory of what she looks like? I do, in fact, remember her hair-do.
posted by Frowner at 2:32 PM on April 29, 2018
posted by Frowner at 2:32 PM on April 29, 2018
I forgot that I took a shower this morning. I definitely don't remember what dumb shit I wrote on a blog in 2000-whatever.
If somebody showed you a picture of yourself stepping into the shower, would you be inclined to suggest it was probably Photoshopped?
posted by layceepee at 2:32 PM on April 29, 2018
If somebody showed you a picture of yourself stepping into the shower, would you be inclined to suggest it was probably Photoshopped?
posted by layceepee at 2:32 PM on April 29, 2018
I forgot that I took a shower this morning. I definitely don't remember what dumb shit I wrote on a blog in 2000-whatever.
If somebody showed you a picture of yourself stepping into the shower, would you be inclined to suggest it was probably Photoshopped?
This is an odd comparison: If someone showed me a picture of me stepping into the shower, I’d be inclined to accuse them of variously photoshopping me into a picture or spying on me in my home, because how the hell would they get a photograph of that?
If you showed me some dumb comment of mine on MetaFilter I’d be inclined to disbelieve it, but at the same time I know I’ve forgotten like 90% of what I’ve produced and no one cares about me that much around here to mess with my account.
posted by Going To Maine at 2:40 PM on April 29, 2018
If somebody showed you a picture of yourself stepping into the shower, would you be inclined to suggest it was probably Photoshopped?
This is an odd comparison: If someone showed me a picture of me stepping into the shower, I’d be inclined to accuse them of variously photoshopping me into a picture or spying on me in my home, because how the hell would they get a photograph of that?
If you showed me some dumb comment of mine on MetaFilter I’d be inclined to disbelieve it, but at the same time I know I’ve forgotten like 90% of what I’ve produced and no one cares about me that much around here to mess with my account.
posted by Going To Maine at 2:40 PM on April 29, 2018
Pollsters should start asking people who support LGBT issues if they always have. It'd be interesting to see the numbers compared to what they actually were.
posted by bookman117 at 2:57 PM on April 29, 2018
posted by bookman117 at 2:57 PM on April 29, 2018
Pollsters should start asking people who support LGBT issues if they always have. It'd be interesting to see the numbers compared to what they actually were.
We're all born stupid and we can only hope we get smarter. I've heard my kids repeating jokes they clearly did not understand. They weren't racist jokes, but my kids wouldn't have known if they were. I know that I repeated racist jokes at the same age without understanding them, let alone having any idea that they could be hurtful. I was repeating things I had heard from other kids (and maybe adults?) because that's what was going around. So basically, pretty much anyone of my generation who didn't grow up isolated from other kids is going to have been racist and/or sexist and/or homophobic. And the goalposts keep moving: support for gay marriage was once seen as quixotic, but it's now accepted that opposing gay marriage is homophobic.
So keeping this in mind, it would be more interesting to ask people when and why they stopped doing particular things - telling racist or sexist jokes, or nodding along when people expressed revulsion at the idea of same-sex intimacy, or whatever. Because almost all of us did this stuff, at some point, even if we didn't understand it.
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:20 PM on April 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
We're all born stupid and we can only hope we get smarter. I've heard my kids repeating jokes they clearly did not understand. They weren't racist jokes, but my kids wouldn't have known if they were. I know that I repeated racist jokes at the same age without understanding them, let alone having any idea that they could be hurtful. I was repeating things I had heard from other kids (and maybe adults?) because that's what was going around. So basically, pretty much anyone of my generation who didn't grow up isolated from other kids is going to have been racist and/or sexist and/or homophobic. And the goalposts keep moving: support for gay marriage was once seen as quixotic, but it's now accepted that opposing gay marriage is homophobic.
So keeping this in mind, it would be more interesting to ask people when and why they stopped doing particular things - telling racist or sexist jokes, or nodding along when people expressed revulsion at the idea of same-sex intimacy, or whatever. Because almost all of us did this stuff, at some point, even if we didn't understand it.
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:20 PM on April 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
Pollsters should start asking people who support LGBT issues if they always have. It'd be interesting to see the numbers compared to what they actually were.
So keeping this in mind, it would be more interesting to ask people when and why they stopped doing particular things
This has actually been done a number of times, usually about gay marriage, although as this thread proves, the recollection of, and willingness to recall, unfortunate prior views isn't 100%.
One finding from a few years ago:
"Thirty percent of Americans who now think same-sex couples should be allowed to legally marry say they once held the opposite view. When asked why they changed their minds, one in five volunteered that they are more educated about the topic now (21 percent). Other reasons included knowing someone who is gay or lesbian (12 percent), that it's none of their business (9 percent), that it's the modern way of thinking (6 percent), that same-sex couples should have equal rights (5 percent), and that it's already legal in some states (5 percent)."
posted by eponym at 7:56 PM on April 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
So keeping this in mind, it would be more interesting to ask people when and why they stopped doing particular things
This has actually been done a number of times, usually about gay marriage, although as this thread proves, the recollection of, and willingness to recall, unfortunate prior views isn't 100%.
One finding from a few years ago:
"Thirty percent of Americans who now think same-sex couples should be allowed to legally marry say they once held the opposite view. When asked why they changed their minds, one in five volunteered that they are more educated about the topic now (21 percent). Other reasons included knowing someone who is gay or lesbian (12 percent), that it's none of their business (9 percent), that it's the modern way of thinking (6 percent), that same-sex couples should have equal rights (5 percent), and that it's already legal in some states (5 percent)."
posted by eponym at 7:56 PM on April 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
Wait, so some MSNBC pundit says that "most straight people cringe at the sight of two men kissing" and I'm supposed to just swallow that bullshit and move on because it was 2006, when it was okay for liberals to be openly homophobic because, I guess, I'm gross? And because of "brogressives?" What? I'm sorry, but fuck that. I had never heard of this person before this story broke and I'm frankly shocked to see so many people here defending this horseshit. I'm pretty disappointed and angry right now.
posted by zeusianfog at 4:48 PM on April 30, 2018 [12 favorites]
posted by zeusianfog at 4:48 PM on April 30, 2018 [12 favorites]
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This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
Why does it seem that everyone who rises a level of media visibility seems to have egos the size of Zeppelins and is unable to admit they're wrong? The selection pressures in media have got to be selecting for it. Disappointing.
Is it so hard to admit that, even in the past 10 years, the window of what is considered acceptable has shifted, and so the comments, though not uncommon at the time, are regrettable and that you've grown as a person to recognize the error of your ways?
Apparently it is.
posted by leotrotsky at 12:11 PM on April 27, 2018 [22 favorites]