This article incorporates adult themes and language.
This is a flat-out attack on the hypocrisy and thin-skinned holiness of a major blog that purports to stand for freedom of expression and open ideas. The blog is BoingBoing.net. I’ve had my problems with the site before, having made comments that their moderators found to be excessive or too foul-mouthed for their rather puritanical tastes. I say puritanical and I mean exactly that.
Boing Boing has a problem with genitalia. You’ll see why in a few moments.
My first experience with Boing Boing was back in 2006 after I had in fact found several interesting posts there about science fiction, civil rights and the art of machinima filmmaking. I had just finished my own machinima film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s short story, ‘Dracula’s Guest,’ and submitted a link for the film to Boing Boing. Admittedly, I had also said to several of my friends that I would bet them that if I mentioned ‘Bram Stoker,’ ‘Dracula,’ and ‘Machinima’ in a submission to Boing Boing, I would be instantly posted on the blog. Sure enough, within several hours I heard back from someone named Cory Doctorow. But his reply email put me off immediately because of its rather righteous and bitchy tone. He wrote that he had enjoyed the film but that he refused to post anything involving a video encoded with Microsoft’s Windows Media format. He advised me to re-encode the video in a more open format like mpeg.
I thought about this for a few moments and then began to formulate a reply to Mr. Doctorow. It went something very close to this: ‘Hey, dipshit. I’m a filmmaker, not an anti-corporate activist. I make what I make the way I want to make it and if you can’t stand the kind of canvas I use, go put your head up your ass.’
I saved a draft of that message and came very close to sending it. But I figured a little publicity might actually be interesting. So I sat down and reformatted the film to suit the petulant Mr. Doctorow’s idea of a proper video format. Frankly, if he sent me such a response to a piece of work today, I’d tell him to fit one of his sleeping-pill novels up his ass. Ultimately, the film got posted on Boing Boing.
My next encounter with the blog was as a commenter. I composed a very rough and nasty poem in response to some article about police abuse of a child protester in England that appalled me. The poem was actually a very serious piece of work that took quite a lot of time to finish. The moderators used their favorite censorship technique on it which involves removing all the vowels from the text, leaving only the gibberish of consonants behind. That led to a running argument with them about how adults should be free to communicate with each other using language that suits them. I felt that they used foul language when it fit their own purposes but forbid its use when it didn’t. I also felt that the people behind Boing Boing were somewhat fusty and schoolmarmish underneath all their dress up as liberal freedom fighters. They didn’t like that one bit and continued to censor various remarks that I made criticizing them without any rough language at all. This was clear and simple censorship of criticism. It really angered me. I had called them hypocrites and they didn’t like that one little bit. But if you are against censorship and stand for freedom of expression and turn around and censor comments you don’t agree with, you are a complete and total hypocrite and you invalidate every single element of your false stand against censorship. There’s no wiggle room here. Boing Boing is a house full of shrill hypocrites. When you run a blog, what your moderators do and enforce is exactly what we can all logically assume you would do and enforce. If Cory Doctorow wants to come around my neighborhood and make a speech about freedom of expression and anti-censorship, I am the first guy that’s going to stand up and yell ‘Bullshit!’
So yesterday I found a short post about a cartoonist who got mad about all the threats against people for drawing Mohammed. She apparently tried or did in fact start a group she called ‘International Everbody Draw Mohammed Day.’ Now she is supposedly being threatened by some Muslim extremist somewhere. The FBI has asked her to go into hiding. So Xeni Jardin posts this and pretty soon all the comments start rolling in.
Early on I see a comment actually posted by Xeni Jardin and the first part of it goes like this:
You gotta put this in context. There’s also this little thing called a war going on. Iraq. Afghanistan. Koran burning or Mohammed-mocking are seen by some as a symbol for the occupation and military offense taking place within their countries’ boundaries, against their will. In context, while no one among us condones this sort of thing, or wishes to excuse it away — one can begin to understand why the fringe reactions are so extreme.
I’m of the opinion that pissing on a symbol for what someone else holds as sacred generally proves you to be a douche, or a provocateur who’s in it for attention.
Should it be legal, as free speech? Hell yes.
Does free speech mean you won’t encounter some potentially violent consequences, from some wacked-out fringe members of the community you mock?
Sorry. It doesn’t. Your relative privilege as a white American doesn’t make you immune to that.
I pretty much almost spit my coffee across my desk. What? Is she kidding? So she’s basically calling this cartoonist woman a douche and a provocateur and she’s also linking opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with a death threat for drawing pictures. And then she’s bringing up ‘white American’ privilege. This is pretty stupid writing from where I’m sitting. So she supports the freedom to piss on a symbol that someone holds sacred but considers you a douche if you do? It would also seem to me that Xeni herself is something of a provocateur who is seeking attention. I am in fact one myself. Anyone who writes a blog has probably tried to provoke someone in order to get a little attention. So calling a woman who’s life has been threatened a ‘douche’ and a ‘provocateur’ who should have known she was bringing violence upon herself is, quite honestly, totally asinine, unintelligent and hypocritical. Maybe Xeni can’t draw and she dislikes people who can. Who knows?
If artists didn’t piss on sacred symbols there would be no art. It would all be pretty pictures of flowers that you could hang over your mother’s kitchen table. Xeni’s world of art would not include any offense, would it? It would be a neutered and sterile art like most of what’s posted on Boing Boing. Art is dirty and sloppy and nasty and it offends and it provokes.
So, after a series of comments and arguments with commenters who seemed to somehow equate drawing a prophet with Islamophobia or bigotry against Islam, I wrote this:
What I see in the western world and its anxiety about artists and what they might or might not draw is creeping fear that begins to operate as censorship. Major press institutions are getting nervous about being shut down or having people killed if some individual or small group of extremists is offended.
This kind of thinking begins to have a dangerous effect on journalism, art, literature, music, film, drama, poetry, science and the act of thinking itself.
I’m seeing some of this waffling behavior right here on Boing Boing with the effort to report the threat to a cartoonist accompanied by the rather bullshitty and carefully worded jabs at the cartoonist for being a ‘douche’ or somehow wrongheaded in her assumption that she would not encounter difficulties.
This is rubbish thinking and it weakens everything the writers at Boing Boing pretend to stand for.
I’m frankly rather pissed off about the week-kneed approach to a gang of jackasses in some country thumping on a religious text and demanding that heads be cut off.
Up their asses. The cartoonists are right. They should carry guns to back up their drawings. And Boing Boing’s Xeni should grow some damn balls.
The next time some nitwit threatens a cartoonist, Obama should Predator drone his ass right off the planet.
It’s as good a use for a missile as I could possibly imagine. That is apparently what we do to terrorists, isn’t it? So go for it for bloody damn real.
You can draw whatever you damn well like any way that you like with any expectation or lack thereof that you like.
To threaten people for their drawings is actually to threaten them for even imagining the image in the first place. It appalls me to see a stance against these violent pricks softened with schoolmarmish scolding of a cartoonist who is simply trying to say to her peers: Don’t operate out of fear!
The Boing Boing moderator wrote me a response that said I should ‘grow some manners.’ The moderator apparently didn’t like me telling Xeni Jardin to ‘grow some balls.’ Boing Boing doesn’t like genitalia. Perhaps theirs are hard to find. I don’t know. But I like genitalia and I like referring to them in conversation. When I tell someone to grow some balls it means I think they are a little pussy without any firepower behind their remarks. The Boing Boing writers apparently feel free to call people douches but they don’t want to talk about those metaphorical private parts that they may or may not possess.
Boing Boing then turned the above quoted comment into this:
Wht s n th wstrn wrld nd ts nxty bt rtsts nd wht thy mght r mght nt drw s crpng fr tht bgns t prt s cnsrshp. Mjr prss nstttns r gttng nrvs bt bng sht dwn r hvng ppl klld f sm ndvdl r smll grp f xtrmsts s ffndd.
Ths knd f thnkng bgns t hv dngrs ffct n jrnlsm, rt, ltrtr, msc, flm, drm, ptry, scnc nd th ct f thnkng tslf.
‘m sng sm f ths wfflng bhvr rght hr n BngBng wth th ffrt t rprt th thrt t crtnst ccmpnd by th rthr bllshtty nd crflly wrdd jbs t th crtnst fr bng ‘dch’ r smhw wrnghdd n hr ssmptn tht sh wld nt ncntr dffclts.
Ths s rbbsh thnkng nd t wkns vrythng th wrtrs t BngBng prtnd t stnd fr.
‘m frnkly rthr pssd ff bt th wk-knd pprch t gng f jcksss n sm cntry thmpng n rlgs txt nd dmndng tht hds b ct ff.
p thr sss. Th crtnsts r rght. Thy shld crry gns t bck p thr drwngs. nd BngBng’s Xn shld grw sm dmn blls.
Th nxt tm sm ntwt thrtns crtns, bm shld Prdtr drn hs ss rght ff th plnt.
t’s s gd s fr mssl s cld pssbly mgn. Tht s pprntly wht w d t trrrsts, sn’t t? S g fr t fr bldy dmn rl.Y cn drw whtvr y dmn wll lk ny wy tht y lk wth ny xpcttn r lck thrf tht y lk.
T thrtn ppl fr thr drwngs s ctlly t thrtn thm fr vn mgnng th mg n th frst plc. t pplls m t s stnc gnst ths vlnt prcks sftnd wth schlmrmsh scldng f crtnst wh s smply tryng t sy t hr prs: D nt prt t f fr!
Yup. That is my own little example of censorship, courtesy of Boing Boing. When I wrote a final comment pointing out their thin-skinned hypocrisy, they simply deleted it entirely.
Boing Boing is something of a cultural icon in the blogosphere today – for better or worse. They attract a lot of eyeballs and appeal to a wide range of people, including some famous and very accomplished ones. They are a sort of grab bag of stuff and opinions. They are openly political and rail against DRM, state surveillance, militarism, and, strangely… censorship.
Time Magazine has been a cultural icon for a long time. Back in the 1960s Bob Dylan had a famous encounter with a Time reporter who was filmed asking the musician some questions. Mr. Dylan suddenly turned on the reporter and began to systematically tear him down and berate him for the uselessness of his entire existence and everything the poor reporter stood for. It’s uncomfortable to watch. It kind of makes you hate Dylan for a while. But you know what’s most interesting about the entire episode? It’s not what Bob Dylan says to the guy. It’s the fact that the reporter kept his tape recorder running.
He kept recording what Dylan said to him. He listened. He did his job as a reporter and was actually superior to Dylan in that moment.
Boing Boing could learn a great deal from that footage of Dylan and the reporter.
But they won’t. They are too righteous. They speak in short bursts of watered-down text that seems on its surface to be angry but is really only irritable and constantly gauging whether search results will find it or not. It’s modern geek-speak that likes to dress up in rebellion but doesn’t like real tough language. It likes a measure of cleverness. Short and pithy insults that are only there really to convince you that the speaker knows a lot of things. Semi-technical talk about open source and iPads, even though these people have never been able to write a program that opens a text file in Notepad.
You want to know how to get yourself on Boing Boing? Follow these instructions: Build a coffee table made entirely out of old clothespins. Or, if you live in Great Britain, print one hundred images of a naked rear end and clip them in front of closed circuit surveillance cameras all around an urban area.
Clever bullshitty ideas that are right up the alley of Boing Boing because they represent a foolish, poorly conceived environmentalism and an ineffective though eye-catching form of social rebellion.
But if you really rebel against Boing Boing itself, you will get immediately censored for your trouble. If you are an artist you should not want to please Boing Boing. You should want to kick the snot back up their noses. If you are a living artist who has been posted about several times on Boing Boing, change your identity and learn how to do something else.
I miss the days when we had writers like Norman Mailer who would have actually scheduled an appointment to kick the snot back up the Boing Boing noses. I’m quite certain that the Boing Boing writers would admire William S. Burroughs. But I am also sure that the old man would have pulled a gun on them. Why are people such pussies today? Why is everyone out there trying to please some silly bunch of trendy, geek hipsters who are just as super-white as anything I’ve ever seen and talk like they haven’t had a date in ten years. The reason we have neutered idiots like Lady Gaga running around mocking sex and turning it into an absolute joke is people like Boing Boing. Lady Gaga was invented to get on Boing Boing. Sex in the hip geek Boing Boing world becomes a brightly colored toy maneuvered close to a camera lens in a plastic swimming pool with no water. A TV show about dildos hosted by obese people wearing Speedos.
I put my foot through the Boing Boing aesthetic. It’s brittle and goes to bits easily. If Boing Boing walks into my art show, I’ll send them out via the back door.
I want a tougher Web. I don’t want pussies blogging about art and politics anymore. I want real, hard-talking sons and daughters of bitches who can take an insult and send it back at me with some extra horseradish on it.
Boing Boing ain’t it. Boing Boing is a douche.
Yep – they don’t like the political right either – post anything conservative and you are toast lol
biobob: They leave right-wing comments posted by people who have a poor grasp of English, or are simply ridiculous.
They only delete the comments that don’t gel with their liberal agenda if they are well-spoken and nobody is able to contest them with their own arguments. I’m a liberal, and I’ve seen many of my boingboing comments “disappeared” for criticizing the gay agenda in the media.
You’d really think boingboing would be above that, especially with all their anti-censorship articles & posturing.
I’ve started taking screencaps of my comment posts before & after deletion for proof. I’m thinking about sending them to rachel@msnbc… I wonder if she would sell short freedom of speech in order to muzzle legitimate critiques of sexualization and homosexualization of mainstream media? Considering her lifestyle, she probably would disagree – but that’s honorable. Silencing critics is not, and would probably be beneath her.
The only political blog I read that never censors opinions is reason.tv, though I haven’t read this one much yet; I found this blog from a google search of “boingboing” and “censorship”
In the past few days I’ve had several posts in a row deleted by BoingBoing and my account deleted. This after two years commenting there, well over a hundred posts with no more than a handful of words “disemvoweled”.
Xeni did a post making fun of a neuroscience researcher for having plucked eyebrows – this guy just had HIV-infected razor blades sent to him by the Animal Liberation Front, the same group that torched his car a while back. I noted that Xeni’s eyebrows looked a lot like his, in fact aside from the bleached-blonde hair and incarnadine lipstick they could almost be twins. Post disappeared.
An ex-television ad copywriter, Andrea James, did a post “TSA outrage critical mass: Angry White Guy Syndrome” claiming that no one paid any attention to objections to the TSA’s invasive procedures until privileged white men started complaining. “Now that white guys are being objectified, scrutinized, touched, and considered guilty until proven innocent, they are finally getting a taste of what an encounter with authority can be like for other groups on a daily basis, and not just when traveling.”
Commenters objected to the tone, language and thinking. One noted that the objections might be easier for some people to understand by mentally replacing “white men” with “uppity bitches”. Antinous (whoever that really is) replied: “If we lived in a society where white men were being beaten, raped and murdered by ‘uppity bitches’, your statement would have some validity. In the real world, not so much. When you’re privileged, you DO live in Pleasantville. Not everybody does.”
I gave a link to a bibliography of abstracts of hundreds of papers showing that women commit about as much violence of all levels of severity against men as the reverse. I also noted some other terribly harmful things that women are privileged to do to men, hardly ever with any legal consequences. Post disappeared.
I restated the point in the most abbreviated and neutral language. Post disappeared.
Andrea James did another post, this time of a sequence of film-student type surrealist shorts packaged with faux-50s beach-girl intro and end bits (not wearing a swimsuit, though – fully clothed, with Cory-Doctrow style rape-prevention-glasses and a super-robotic affect). I wanted to see if James’ professional work was as corny and stilted, so I went to her site and watched her ad reel – one Verizon and several Budweiser commercials. They were indeed a bit corny, though actually rather funny. But there was a huge amount of anti-male programming in all of them, ranging from overt (man imprisoned in a copier and electrocuted, played for laughs) to more covert (woman X-ing out men’s personal ads, hen as pro pitcher doing better by shooting eggs out her cloaca than the best pro ballplayers.) I wrote an analysis and tried to post it and found my account was deleted. I posted it anonymously using a different email address and it never appeared.
It’s been three days since I emailed David Pescovitz with a very moderate, factual letter and I haven’t yet had a reply. Perhaps it’s just the holiday weekend, but I suspect not.
After the Xeni’s deletion of all old posts about Violet Blue, and last year’s mysterious disappearance of Takuan (after saying something Xeni objected to for no reason I could discern) and your article above, it seems there is something rotten behind the scenes at BoingBoing. All the incidents I know about so far seem to involve Xeni, but the others there seem to have a big douchey streak, too. It’s time to drop these shallow, manipulative hypocrites. There are better things on the web.
Though I admire, on the surface, the political and social stances of Boing Boing, I have repeatedly found that they tend to employ desperately brittle people who affect a certain aura of free-thinking but are actually more rigid and deeply conservative than Fox News. You know, you can be a flamboyant cross-dressing moderator and still be unable to withstand an opposing view. No blog that resists foul language or opposing views can possibly represent free expression. Not on any planet where logic is operative.
yeah
boingboing still has some good articles, some of which are even original
but xeni killed the commenter community when she killed takuan
Boing Boing, what a joke. I really enjoyed some of the articles but I have been banned from commenting because I disagreed with their positions. I did my best to give informed opinions and was respectful of others. Never once did I use fowl language or attack anyone. Simply disagreeing is enough to get you booted. What a bunch of sensitive self righteous jerks.
Yep. I just told them yesterday that I essentially felt the same way as the comments above. I mentioned that I expected that sort of bowdlerizing from a “group think” site of Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck supporters, not them, and that “disemvowelling” was smarmy and childish and served no one.
For the record, I was NOT talking about them deleting or disemvowelling anything of mine (which I don’t believe they ever did) or even people I agreed with. That’s not the point, of course.
The REALLY annoying thing was they didn’t even delete things sensibly so a reply would remain but make no sense after the comment it was replying to had vanished! Just ridiculous behaviour.
Anyhow, strangely enough, my comment about this has since disappeared from their site! ;)
Sad, really.
the ‘disemvoweling’ (hilarious term) is just about the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen. That’s aggressive in a really bizarre, disturbing way. The deletion of comments they disagree with is, frankly, fascist. I don’t agree with the views of some people posting on this article, BUT not being allowed to say them stifles discourse and that’s completely stupid. Why have a blog if you’re going to go on a power trip and kill conversations? Don’t they know how to let other commenters carry on the conversation and rebut if needed? Actually my search brought me here bc I heard XJ on a popular public radio station. When I hear her, I have to turn it off. I do remember her ridiculing the science that shows radiofrequency radiation DOES have health effects. It’s like the smoking–the studies that say it’s not harmful are bought and paid for. Established scientists are finally beginning to question those studies and push back. It’s a topic I’ve followed for many, many years; the coverups have been appalling. And yet this woman who clearly hasn’t followed the issue closely, is on the radio in the middle of the day sneering and ridiculing that science. It was so superior, and you couldn’t criticize the obnoxiousness, because they were actually talking about breast cancer. Well—–dumbass, cancers of all kinds happen because of exposure to environmental toxins. God forbid your communications toys might cause it! Got to smear those scientists! They offended!!! There is a certain brand of hipster that touts the liberal point of view while acting like total fascists. If there’s anything more fucking mental up taking vowels out of comments, I don’t know what it is. Did they not get beyond third grade? There, I feel better. It felt like I was personally taking abuse at the hands of this person who has exposure and is heard, but does not have the facts. Thanks for writing this.
I absolutely agree. I have long enjoyed Boing Boing, but their hypocrisy is absolutely sickening. Like Ultan I commented on their double standard when it comes to gender politics, and was immediately suspended from commenting. I believe it is the moderator Antonius who is particularly thin-skinned. Encyclopaedia Dramatica has a slightly amusing entry on Boing Boing and its moderators.
I posted two fairly innocuous comments to a couple of Occupy Wall Street related stories. The first was about some ex-judge who got arrested. The second about UC Davis students being pepper sprayed. In both cases I had taken a neutral or pro-cop stance suggesting that perhaps the person(s) got themselves to blame through their actions. Neither comment was strongly worded, just my opinion. In both cases my comment was removed within 24 hours. And the second comment caused me to be banned from posting there at all. So my high crime was to post an opinion contrary to the group think and for that my words were erased.
This kind of censorship disgusts me. What kind of site censors people while screeching about Occupy Wall Street protests? BoingBoing you are the worst kind of coward – a hypocrite with obvious double standards. I find it hilarious BoingBoing are even protesting SOPA. They have no qualms about censoring people on their own site and so they have no moral highground to protest what SOPA may or may not do.
That one’s actually because victim-blaming (what you did) is against the commenting policy. So slightly different.
Have to agree with the comments above.Boing Boing is unbelievably heavy-handed in its censorship, and pretty much anything that disagrees with their agenda or the opinions of the authors gets deleted. As noted Antinous is one of their moderators and a particularly despicable coward who attacks people in the forums and then abuses his privileges as moderator to delete comments where the responder hands him his ass in the debate. For all their grandstanding on censorship issues they are Stalinesque in their zeal to purge any comment they don’t like. Just a bunch of thin-skinned, narcissistic poseurs on an anal-retentive, nerd-rage power trip. They should be ostracized by the online community.
Although even carefully worded comments from a conservative viewpoint tend to get censored, any criticism of their agenda from a leftist viewpoint is almost guaranteed to be censored, as such criticisms tend to have more weight among the liberal crowd than do those made by conservatives.
Just found this post after having my entirely reasonable comment on the causes of Chinese execution policy deleted, along with the account, within minutes. A follow-up comment pointing out that I had been deleted was also deleted. And yes, this was on a Xeni Jardin item.
Fuck boingboing.
Boing-Boing is a friggin joke. Oh sure, they’ll go on and on about censorship and open/free discourse but if you post anything they don’t like they will delete the post and ban you. And I’m not talking about anything vulgar or nasty – just something that they don’t agree with.
They are hypocritical and lame.
Fig
Oh, I’m glad (but also sad) it’s not just me! I’m a nice person, and I try to be moderate, never heckle or bully anyone. In one thread I commented that I’d had an experience different than the one mentioned in the article posted. This comment, and several other moderate comments, were deleted. When I questioned this, the moderator (Antinous) said the comments lacked any substance that would make them a valid part of the thread. Actually, he/she (?) said that “preconceived notions” (that not all cops are evil?) meant that our comments would go straight in the bin, next to comments that mentioned “first world problems”.
The thread I was responding to was about a police officer, and every other comment on the thread was about what bullies they were/ they are *all* monsters, etc, I found this heavy-handed censorship of a very moderate, unaggressive comment both painfully ironic and frustrating.
So the lesson learned is: agree with BoingBoing. Always agree. Even if it’s talking about brutalizing another living person.
Chaz,
I almost feel ridiculous maintaining animosity toward boing boing after all these years, but I really just can’t get past the fact that they are insipid, falsely liberal, eyeglass-obsessed, fat-butted, thin-skinned, dipshitish, uptight, schoolmarmish, prickish little white bread assholes who don’t want any kind of argument whatsoever. But these people have lots of friends… so fuck them too.
it’s the false-liberal business that really, really gets me.
Xeni did the same to me. I have a strong feeling that ‘Antinous’ is in fact Xeni, passing judgment down on her readers. I was first blocked from commenting, then my comments were removed.
pity.
I just got banned for presenting the outline of an economic argument, ON REQUEST (!), against same-sex marriage (which I am actually not against, but being able to present an argument you might not agree with is an art to be admired) for which the other commenters actually thanked me (and expressed appreciation all round for the civilised discourse).
I can only assume that someone in power saw people examining arguments presenting other viewpoints and realised how dangerous this was :)
Boing Boing really isn’t interesting enough to worry about. They are the sugary breakfast cereal of liberal web sites. They want to be an edgy Time Magazine. In fact they are not liberals. They are closer to fascism than anything else. Young adult novels, thick dark eyeglasses, hip tech, a little David Byrne on his dumbass bicycle, whiteness, and some cheap lawyers. That’s it.
It saddens me to see Doctorow so associated with them. I like to think that he does what he can to explain that censorship is still censorship when it’s not being done by the China/DPRK/boogey-man-du-jour. But I doubt it :(
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This:
“It doesn’t matter whether rich or poor, male or female, black or white; a person who is comfortable in the position they’re in is a privileged person.”
Got me banned for racism.