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Authors Behaving Like A**holes


Myshkin

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3 hours ago, Raja said:

Iand I'm glad to see her acknowledge that she was out of line, but I don't think you can equate the two things *at all*  - the grad student has subsequently had to deactivate & take herself off social media.

Yes, you are correct. I was definitely wrong in that regard. 

 

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6 hours ago, john said:

Sarah Dessen, on the other hand, tweeted a good (and unlike the university, correct) apology acknowledging precisely what happened.  So much props to her for that.

 

5 hours ago, Raja said:

I'm glad to see her acknowledge that she was out of line

While Dessen’s apology is more direct and slightly less mealy-mouthed than the apologies of the other authors involved, it still elides the worst of her behavior. She apologized for posting a screenshot of a critical quote. She did not apologize for excising the rest of the quote, which contextualizes the criticism, nor did she apologize for egging on the dog pile that followed. To me it just doesn’t read as contrition, but rather as a piece of boilerplate damage control.

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33 minutes ago, Myshkin said:

 

While Dessen’s apology is more direct and slightly less mealy-mouthed than the apologies of the other authors involved, it still elides the worst of her behavior. She apologized for posting a screenshot of a critical quote. She did not apologize for excising the rest of the quote, which contextualizes the criticism, nor did she apologize for egging on the dog pile that followed. To me it just doesn’t read as contrition, but rather as a piece of boilerplate damage control.

Memo to self. When in the mood to trash someone's literary efforts, stick to SA literature. SA being Senile Adult. 

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2 hours ago, Myshkin said:

To me it just doesn’t read as contrition, but rather as a piece of boilerplate damage control.

Yeah, I agree. It also does not mean that much that it  only came after outlets like The Washington Post, Slate, Guardian & Jezebel started reporting on the incident. The authors were happy to double down before that.

 

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Almost none of it reads like real regret or apology to me, just damage control. If she thought she was in the right in the original incident, I don't see what's happened or been revealed that changes that - she just didn't get the response she was expecting (as far as I can tell, nothing but unconditional adoration is acceptable) so now there's attempts to save face.

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13 hours ago, Datepalm said:

I somehow stumbled across this yesterday and am now fascinated. I agree with Raja's take (the fuck any of this is equivalent, and the college should have held its ground) but what really gets/intrigues/infuriates me is the self-serving ideological puritanism of the whole discourse. You know what, even in the worst possible read of the student's actions, even if what the pile-ons thought was going on was actually going on - a brazen hater deliberately joins an elite committee to promote - nay, dictate! - to an entire college a loathing of Sarah Desssen, aha! - Well, so fucking what? The ease, thoughlesness and immediate fluid reflexiveness all these people picked went to the misogyny, devaluation of girls, devaluation of themselves, etc with, is the part I find troubling and infuriating.

That's the real fucked up part about that.

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12 hours ago, Raja said:

Yeah, I agree. It also does not mean that much that it  only came after outlets like The Washington Post, Slate, Guardian & Jezebel started reporting on the incident. The authors were happy to double down before that.

 

And, of course you have some authors, like N.K. Jemisin, who refuse to apologize at all.

 

NM: she did, although it is kinda mealy-mouthed.

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You guys are heartless. It was a good apology. Whether you find it sincere or not depends on your level of cynicism but the right words are there.

Her fault wasn’t that she didn’t quote enough of the article.  Her fault was that she misunderstood her role in response to criticism and that she misused her platform, both of which she explicitly acknowledged.

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The dangers of lemming-ing!  :rolleyes:  

https://www.vulture.com/2019/11/famous-authors-drag-student-in-ya-twitter-controversy.html#_ga=2.224089179.173397997.1574096134-320916811.1574096134

Quote

 

.... Nelson, now a graduate student, told Vulture in an email that she felt her quote had been taken out of context. Less discussed on Twitter by Dessen’s supporters were the books Nelson preferred to Dessen’s. “I followed my evaluation of Sarah Dessen’s work with a rationale advocating for three other books that I felt better addressed relevant social issues: Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat, and When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi,” she wrote to me in an email, noting that the original Aberdeen News article had left out her reasoning for why she’d advocated for other books. “These three books are beautifully written and push readers to stand against the racial inequality that the judicial system perpetuates, to consider the heritability and influence of tradition and trauma, and to contemplate what brings meaning to one’s life. These themes are relevant not only in the current social justice epoch, but they are especially meaningful and important for university students who, as emerging adults, are often engaging with social issues with a newfound sense of agency and urgency.”

Nelson studies linguistics — specifically, online harassment. “The irony has not evaded me,” she wrote. She is currently in the midst of fall semester finals, and declined to talk about how it felt to live inside the center of a raging Twitter storm. “I can summarize my experience as the following,” she wrote. “Since I actually have a scholarly interest in online aggression, it’s been a really interesting experience to observe how people use language to frame the issue and to express their perspectives in so many different ways.” ....

.... By Thursday, after the university had apologized, the backlash to the backlash was in full swing. Many accused Dessen of punching down, expressing their bafflement that so many famous authors would go after a student. “I will not use my platform to directly go after someone with less power,” wrote Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, who focuses on race in children’s and young-adult literature. “If your life and career is about young people, you’d know that’s bullying.” “Y’all come on,” tweeted Tressie McMillan Cottom, a 2019 National Book Award finalist. “It’s a student on a common book committee. It’s a thing that stings to read but it is not a political statement. This is so wrong.”....

 

Even Jemison apologized for piling on, though her apology is really hard to parse -- as in to whom is she apologizing to and for what!  Meaning that the pile-oners didn't know what/whom they were piling on and even why, not really.

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7 hours ago, Lord of Rhinos said:

And, of course you have some authors, like N.K. Jemisin, who refuse to apologize at all.

 

NM: she did, although it is kinda mealy-mouthed.

Yeah, Jemisin’s apology had a big fat “if” in the middle of it, but worse than that she later went on to blame the fact that she hadn’t apologized sooner on “the media”.

Jennifer Weiner’s apology though was the worst of the lot. In it she sets herself up as righteous for defending her friend, who was insulted, and defending female oriented fiction, which was assaulted. She apologized for allowing her (already established as righteous) emotions blind her to the “power inequity” of the situation, which resulted in her making someone “vulnerable to bullying”. So you see, she’s clearly not a powerful asshole who bullied some grad student for daring to have a critical opinion; she is in fact a Good Friend and Valiant Crusader whose wholly righteous actions may have vaguely, and of course unintentionally, contributed to making someone vulnerable to bullying. And let’s not forget that Jennifer Weiner is the author who tried to draw a direct link between this one person’s critical opinion of one YA author and the horrendous crimes of Larry Nassar. 

But at least Weiner bothered to write an apology. Jodi Picoult and Celeste Ng just retweeted Roxanne Gay’s half-assed apology.

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Holy fuck, what rabbit hole of weaponized tears have I fallen down? This gang of popular authors, invoking Larry Fucking Nassar of all fucking things, doubling down with some "fuck that bitch"ery on initial public reaction, and slowly deigning to post "sorry if this girl was hurt, I was being mean because I'm such a good friend to this famous, well-compensated narcissist who dug up a years-old story about a tiny school to victimize herself" shit-ass apologies... Which of course only came about when WaPo and Slate took notice of their dogpile. Fuck all these people.

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17 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

Oh, this should be good. What are you speaking of?

Mainly this: https://twitter.com/nkjemisin/status/1194659743828234241?ref_src=twsrc^tfw|twcamp^tweetembed|twterm^1194659743828234241

Jemisin telling twitter uses they are like Fox News Anchors for defending Nelson: https://twitter.com/RozalinaB/status/1195164056606433280

Apology: https://twitter.com/nkjemisin/status/1195745641768652800

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wow, that Jemisin thread was a bigger car crash than Prince Andrew trying to explain he was friends with Epstein for the business contacts.

still, she writes good speculative fiction I guess ...:mellow:

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7 hours ago, john said:

wow, that Jemisin thread was a bigger car crash than Prince Andrew trying to explain he was friends with Epstein for the business contacts.

still, she writes good speculative fiction I guess ...:mellow:

Jemisin will Jemisin.  You can take that to the bank!  :D

Alpha, now used to, so expects, her knees to be kissed, by one and all.  If I say or do, it is right even when it turns out wrong.

Began watching the attitude develop when I was still active in the scene, witnessing the development whilst occupying the same physical spaces with these writers (I've dropped out of it all together now, as too busy with scholarship for anything else). Back then it manifested in the humble brag manner.  Now the humble is all gone.

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