Fake Syrian lesbian turned out to be a real American douche

geekdom, Numpties
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So there was this Syrian blogger, supposedly a gay girl living in Damascus, who got a lot of attention recently, as her blog was one of the few direct eyewitness accounts of the Syrian revolution and subsequent government crackdown. This attention reached a fever pitch when it looked like she had been abducted, perhaps by government agents. But several bloggers smelled a rat however; she sounded slightly too good to be true, certain details didn’t add up and people started digging in “Amina”‘s background. Surprise surprise, it was all a hoax and “Amina” wasn’t a Syrian lesbian living in Damascus, but a straight American douche called Tom MacMaster.

Yesterday the shit hit the fan as various people closed in on his story, so he dropped the mask and posted a non-apology:

I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground. I do not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.

I only hope that people pay as much attention to the people of the Middle East and their struggles in thıs year of revolutions. The events there are beıng shaped by the people living them on a daily basis. I have only tried to illuminate them for a western audience.

This experience has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism.

However, I have been deeply touched by the reactions of readers.

Which was followed by a longer explenation today which I won’t bother with. Even in his apology it’s all about him and his feelings, with no thoughts spared to the people he decieved or the damage he has done. There’s no awareness whatsoever that his actions might have consequences beyond the internet. As Daniel Nassar put it, an actually existing Syrian LGBT activist puts it:

Because of you, Mr. MacMaster, a lot of the real activists in the LGBT community became under the spotlight of the authorities in Syria. These activists, among them myself, had to change so much in their attitude and their lives to protect themselves from the positional harm your little stunt created. You have, sir, put a lot of lives, mine and some friends included, in harm’s way so you can play your little game of fictional writing.

This attention you brought forced me back to the closet on all the social media websites I use; cause my family to go into a frenzy trying to force me back into the closet and my friends to ask me for phone numbers of loved ones and family members so they can call them in case I disappeared myself. Many people who are connected to me spent nights worrying about me and many fights I had with my family were because you wanted to play your silly game of the media.

You feed the foreign media an undeniable dish of sex, religion and politics and you are now leaving us with this holier-than-thou semi-apologize with lame and shallow excuses of how you wanted to bring attention to the right people on the ground. I’m sorry, you’re not on the ground, you don’t know the ground and you don’t even belong to the culture of the people on the group.

You took away my voice, Mr. MacMaster, and the voices of many people who I know. To bring attention to yourself and blog; you managed to bring the LGBT movement in the Middle East years back. You single-handedly managed to bring unwanted attention from authorities to our cause and you will be responsible for any LGBT activist who might be yet another fallen angel during these critical time.

I’m outraged, and if I lived in a country where I can sue you, I would.

MacMaster’s little stunt is born out of an attitude that denies the reality of the people on the other side of his computer screen, an attitude you see a lot on the internet. It’s clear he never thought about the impact his lies might have had on the lives of real Syrians, gay or otherwise, because he’s clearly never really believed that what he did on the internet might matter “in real life”. It’s also clear that despite his protestations, MacMaster never saw the Syrian and other Middle Eastern activists and bloggers who fell for his story and became concerned about “Amina” as real people, or he could not have done this. These were the actions of a psychopath, but it’s the sort of psychopathy that all of us are vulnerable to on the internet, as it is so easy to stop believing in the humanity of people who aren’t part of your own social circle. Proof for this can be found in every collision between two separate net cultures, going back to e.g. the invasion of rec.pets.cats by alt.tasteless in the prehistory of the internet, 1993. Internet as a game, rather than as a way to communicate, where because you’re manipulating symbols on a screen it’s easy to forget you’re dealing with people.

As seen in Amsterdam

Amsterdam
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A statue that looks a lot like a Crumb woman

For some reason this strange little statue has been up at a water treatment plant near the hospital where S. is staying and coming past it by train it always reminds me of Robert Crumb’s women. Must be the arse.

Not helping

Feminism, science fiction
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If you know anything about feminism, you probably know about how feminist history can be roughly divided into three different waves of activity. In that scheme the first wave of feminism took place in the late 19th and early 20th century and focused on winning women equality before the law (right to vote, stand for election, get an education and so on), the second wave of feminism hit in the sixties and seventies, focusing on winning economical and societal equality (equal work for equal pay, getting out of restrictive gender roles, women winning control over their own reproductive systems and all that jazz) and the third wave started sometime in the nineties or perhaps earlier, focusing more on cultural issues and the interaction between sexism and racism, gender and sexuality and so on. Each wave built on the accomplishments of the preceding ones, while carrying the struggle into areas left untouched by them. It’s a massively simplified view of feminist history of course, based mainly on American experiences not always applicable to other countries and it leaves out everything that happened before the first wave or inbetween waves, but that’s only the start of the problem.

The real problem is that much of the difference between the various waves is political. Now nobody but historians really cares about first wave feminism anymore and all the people involved with it are long dead, but things are different for second and third wave feminists, both generations still very much alive and not always understanding each other. As with most movements, the differences between the two can often be decidedly minor to outsides, more a question of difference in degree rather than kind, but for those in the middle of the struggle they can look enormous. Especially on the internet, where everybody has a voice and is an expert — second versus third wave feminism leads to almost as many flamewars as gun control does. These sort of debates can be hugely counterproductive, especially when taking place in the context of bigger battles.

Case in point, when Cheryl Morgan gives the following definition of second wave feminism in an otherwise sensible post teasing out the impact of different notions of feminism on modern UK science fiction and why it’s so seemingly unfriendly to women, it doesn’t help:

Second wave feminism was the movement that started in the 60s and 70s. In theory it was about equal rights for women in all areas of life. In practice it was sometimes more about equal rights for middle class white women, and occasionally about the rights of middle class white lesbian separatists.

That’s cherrypicking and caricaturing the very worst aspects of second wave feminism, as seen through the lens of several decades worth of backlash. If your view of a second wave feminist is a bra-burning lesbian until graduation willing to pull the ladder up behind her as soon as she and her friends have broken the glass ceiling, that’s the backlash talking. Yes, there have been class and race issues with classical feminism that modern feminism is attempting to avoid and correct, but we should not forget that much of what third wave feminism concerns itself about was an issue for second wave feminists as well. That it sometimes degenerated into “equal rights for middle class white women” is not a feature of second wave feminism as such, but more of its defeat; the co-opting of parts of it by the patriarchy or the capitalist system or whatever you want to call it.

In the context of what so far has been a relatively fruitful debate about how to fix science fiction, especially British science fiction to make it less excluding towards women, such a sneer is unnecessary and unhelpful.

The Netherlands embraces net neutrality

geekdom, IT is not magic pixiedust
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Imagine a world without net neutrality

Dutch politicians as a class are not know for their internet nous, but they exceeded expectations in a big way this week. Lately several big mobile phone companies (ex government monopoly KPN and of course Vodafone) have been whinging about their consumers not texting and phoning enough. Instead people have increasingly turned to things like WhatsApp or Skype to do it for free, over mobile internet. And sure, KPN and Vodafone earn money selling mobile internet subscriptions, but not enough. Which is why KPN announced a few weeks ago it would start to charge extra for access to certain kinds of internet services.

Which pissed people off big time, of which politicians took notice and last week the opposition parties drafted a proposal to introduce net neutrality, which would prohibit providers from filtering or charging for access to internet services the way Vodafone and KPN wanted to. If this proposal makes it into law, the Netherlands would be one of the first countries in the world to regulate internet access this way. Which is important, because it means your provider will no longer be able to decide what you can and cannot see on the internet.

Without net neutrality, we’d see mobile internet evolve cable access subscription schemes: you’d just get a small part of the internet with your standard subscription and would have to pay extra to see the more interesting stuff, without ever having the opportunity to see everything, a bit like on the illustration above. Kudos for our politicians for preventing this from happening.

DC reboots celebrates diversity by uncrippling Oracle

Comix
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Batgirl

So one of the main selling points of the upcoming DC reboot was going to be an increase in diversity, making the DC universe look less like an Aryan Nations wet dream. DC never had much luck with heroes of colour, for the most part unable to sell anything but the usual suspects, with most attempts to replace white Silver Age or Golden Age heroes with more ethnically diverse succesors, especially in the last decade, being reversed quickly. Having diversity as one of the key elements of the reboot is therefore a good thing, if DC manages to pull it off.

But uncrippling Barbara “Oracle” Gordon and turning her back into Batgirl is a bad start. Here you have one of the few high profile heroes with a disability, who unlike e.g. a Daredevil actually doesn’t have magic powers or technology to compensate for her disability, but has to deal with its consequences while still being a hero and you turn her into just another superheroine?

And I like the Barbara Gordon Batgirl; she was a fun character and I hated what Alan Moore did to her in The Killing Joke. Having Barbara crippled, helpless and having the Joker strip her naked than take pictures, with rape implied was a cheap trick, something any hack can think up to show how naughty the villain is this time. That it was done in service of a story showing how much alike Batman and the Joker “really” are was just adding insult to injury.

But in the more then twenty years since, people like John Ostrander in Suicide Squad and Gail Simone in Birds of Prey made Barbara Gordon/Oracle into one of the more original heroes in the DC universe. Oracle was somebody who, unlike any other hero, couldn’t solve problems by hitting them simply because she was physically incapable of doing so and therefore had to use her brain. If she’s now back to being Batgirl, she’ll just be another non-powered superheroine in a tight costume and cape, not even the only redhaired Batman-related superheroine as we’ll finally get to see Batwoman too…

No doubt the Gail Simone written Batgirl series will be quite good, but if it was worth sacrifising Oracle for?