Concerns online civility and comes from Sifu Tweety in response to another comment on his own post on lawyer Jil of Feministe’s law school and online harassment by rightwing fuckwits:
Sifu Tweety Says:
March 7th, 2007 at 10:58 pm[…]
What makes me nervous, and why I mentioned it, what makes me nervous anytime anybody of any gender implies it, is the theory that we should somehow “do something” that stops these people from being able to act like assholes in the first place. Because we cannot. There is no way. The internet completely breaks that (already broken) paradigm, and to forcefully reassert that kind of paradigm on the internet breaks the internet. Period.
And the more people don’t understand this, the more people think about the internet as the “real world,” the more likely it is that somebody will actually find a way to break the internet legislatively – again, this is not a partisan thing, although it should be, stupid dems – and then all of the world-changing things we love about this medium, the thing we have in common, will become more broken promises, just like TV, just like cable, just like movies, just like the fucking printing press as most of the world concieves it, as the traditional powers retake control, and all this citizen powered malarkey becomes a memory.
So, yeah, those guys are unbelievable shitheads, but all of us must fight for their ability to do at least some of the things they do. It’s to us that they’ve hitched their wagon, to our tools.
It’s unfortunate sometimes, but freedom means freedom for everyone, even the shitheads, and we just have to accept it. Damn you, personal liberty, why must you be so bloody double-edged all the time?
