Markos Moulitsas Zuniga once again finds himself in hot water. Aside from its questionable policy of making a sizeable income from writers who receive no pay for their work, his blog DKos has always had about it the creepiness of Shirley Jackson�s famous 1948 story “The Lottery,” in which a seemingly benign community periodically gathers to stone someone to death. The story begins:
The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green.
The Kos community also lives on public stonings. Like some NASCAR fans who flock to the races hoping for a crash, one of the perverse attractions of the Kos site has always been to see who will next face a public stoning. Some diarists almost seem to relish throwing that first stone. These “stonings” have periodically caused troubles for DKos, but only within the very narrow blog community.
However, as everyone in blogdom knows, not long ago Kos went another step beyond symbolic stonings–he conducted a purge. In essence it became a mass stoning, but not of his own people but those who were listed on his blogroll. It is instructive that after this stoning, the blogosphere largely behaved like Jackson’s community.
A few mavericks led by one Bush Kangaroo expressed some indignation and protest at this, but most blogs–even some of the protestors–still cross-posted items from Dkos, continued posting on his site and/or listed the site on their blogrolls. As Kos hoped, the affair largely blew over with little impact on his site, but unfortunately had an impact on those he purged.
It did not take long for Kos to again find himself in trouble over his bullying and his somewhat skewed perception he IS blogdom. Once again the story spread all over the net. A tech blogger named Kathy Sierra received hate mail, some of it with explicit death threats that scared her enough she felt a need to call the police and cancel public speaking arrangements. Currently she posts the following at her site:
As for the future of this blog, I know I cannot just return to business as usual — whatever absurd reasons have led to this much hatred for me (and for what I write here) will continue, so there is no reason to think the same things wouldn’t happen again . . . and probably soon. That includes anything that raises (or maintains) my visibility, so I will not be doing speaking engagements–especially at public events.
The incident ignited bloggers like gasoline on a dry prairie. Suddenly all the purges and troll ratings and nastiness became very scary. People all over the blogosphere rushed to defend Ms Sierra. The incident may have cost Ms. Sierra dearly, but it finally moved bloggers to do something I have been calling for since the beginnings of this blog: a code of conduct for bloggers.
It is the most important and positive development on the web in quite awhile. Blogger Tim O’Reilly wrote the first draft so I will let him explain:
I was quoted in a BBC article a few days ago and a San Francisco Chronicle article on Thursday calling for a “Blogger’s Code of Conduct” in response to the firestorm that has arisen as a result of Kathy Sierra’s revelation that she’s been targeted by a series of increasingly violent and disturbing anonymous comments on her blog and on a series of weblogs that appeared to have been created for the purpose of celebrating cyber-bullying.
O�Reilly’s code begins:
Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog.
This was enough to send Kos over the edge. He began his post by ridiculing the code, calling it “stupid.” But what else could someone who lives by NOT following the code say? Then he went after Sierra, impugning her honesty and throwing in a few choice epithets such as �crying.�
The “crying” crack in particular lit a fuse under feminist bloggers and should, like Don Imus’ remarks light a fuse under all of us. Many bloggers have gone on to open a door not unlike C. Vivian Stringer opened when Don Imus insulted her and the Rutgers women’s basketball team. They detailed the ugly realities faced by women writing on the Net. Melissa McEwan did her usual through job of uncovering these facts. No stranger to attacks on female bloggers (McEwan endured a right wing hate campaign after it was announced she would work with the Edwards campaign), she wrote:
When it comes to harassers targeting people online, there�s no equality of the sexes: Simply having a recognizably female user name makes one far more likely to receive malicious messages online. So common are online threats made against women that cyberstalking has been incorporated into Violence Against Women legislation, and a 2001 Department of Justice report to Congress on Stalking and Domestic Violence made clear the issue must be taken seriously, even when it does not meet the criminal standard for stalking.
What people forget is that this is not the first time Kos has blown off women. By now Kos hopes you have forgotten the 2005 mess he got himself with the “Gilligan�s Island” parody ad he ran for TBS in 2005. That prompted a storm of protest not unlike the current one.
Kos answered his critics with his usual arrogance:
Apparently, having two women throw pies at each other, wrestle each other in a sexy, lesbianic manner, then having water splashed on their ample, fake bosoms is degrading to women. Or something like that.
Whatever. Feel free to be offended. I find such humorless, knee-jerk reactions, to be tedious at best, sanctimonious and arrogant at worst. I don’t care for such sanctimony from Joe Lieberman, I don’t care for it from anyone else. Some people find such content offensive. Some people find it arousing. Some people find it funny. To each his or her own.
Melissa McEwan didn’t like that answer either:
Asking why the most influential liberal blogger is running an ad promoting something that is generally anathema to liberal women is not the same as being a culture-vulture like Joe Lieberman. There�s a big difference between seeking to ban content, and questioning whether that content is in alignment with the objectives of those who profit from it. This distinction seems patently clear to me, but apparently it was easier for Kos to assume to sanctimonious and arrogant tone of which he was accusing women of having in order to scold them for gettin� uppity, rather than address the actual issue�whether he had chosen to either overtly or covertly condone the exploitation of women.
The outrage over Kos’ remarks resulted in the founding of the blog Women Kossaks, which is still hanging in there two years after the protest. But DKos weathered the storm and many who had blasted him were sucking up to him after memories faded.
As for Kos himself, he learned the wrong lesson from that one and he may learn the wrong one from this one. The controversy over the ad INCREASED traffic to his blog. My guess is that this latest one has done the same. Could there be method to this madness? To spell it out: does Kos like to use sexism and misogyny to stir up controversy and increase traffic to his blog?
I don’t normally publish words from Kos, but the language of the 1995 post troubles me. Notice the phrase “ample, fake bosoms.” It could come from a porn site. Or the even more bizarre “sexy, lesbianic manner.” What is one to make of that? I find this extremely discomforting, especially in a blog that is supposed to be about political ideas. What goes on in the back regions of his strange mind?
Despite this, Kos continues to prosper. The undercurrent of many comments on the remarks by Kos is that a lot of bloggers are afraid of him and his Kossaks because they wield power and can threaten you with the blog equivalent of a pogrom. Lord Acton had it right when he said:
Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.
As I have said many times, “It�s about values.” Those bloggers who continue to support DKos explicitly support those values. As long as you list, crosspost or otherwise support his site you are part of the problem, not the solution. Will the same media sources who give Kos excessive coverage see fit to treat him like Imus the next time he derides women? Will his advertisers turn off the spigots that feed him? Kos lives off his ads. Perhaps bloggers, especially female bloggers, ought to direct their outrage at those sponsors just as they did with Imus.
In Shirley Jackson’s story when someone announces a nearby village is thinking of ending the lottery, an old man says:
Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live hat way for a while. Used to be a saying about ‘Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.’ First thing you know, we’d all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There’s always been a lottery.
Maybe one reason Jackson’s story is considered one a classic is that she captured a side of human nature that lies just below the surface, waiting for the right demons to summon it. Curiously, Kathy Sierra wrote about this in a post on her site before the controversy began:
Can any of us honestly say we haven’t experienced emotional contagion? Even if we ourselves haven’t felt our energy drain from being around a perpetually negative person, we’ve watched it happen to someone we care about. We’ve noticed a change in ourselves or our loved ones based on who we/they spend time with. We’ve all known at least one person who really did seem able to “light up the room with their smile,” or another who could “kill the mood” without saying a word. We’ve all found ourselves drawn to some people and not others, based on how we felt around them, in ways we weren’t able to articulate.
It is both an eerie and instructive post. Neither she nor Shirley Jackson would not have written of the demon Sierra calls “emotional contagion” had they not sought to warn us of it. We ought to listen.
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