Back in July the Sunday Times’s FOIs revealed that senior Downing Street officials have had over twenty meetings with Google since the election. Accusations of preferential treatment were thrown around when Hilton, whose wife is a Google VP, did not declare all of his meetings with the group. This is especially murky given that Google are lobbying hard for changes to UK copyright law. Now they have poached a key cog in Cameroon machine. It’s all rather too cosy for Guido’s liking.
The political gossip is of no importance to us — but if Google has really decided to lobby against the UK’s oppressive and publisher-greed-driven copyright laws, then this is excellent news. Prime Minister David Cameron has already acknowledged that Google could never have come into existence in the UK. You don’t get much more business-unfriendly than that!
Here’s hoping that the blocking of Google Books to British people — a block which exists because of publishing industry threats, purely in case some squitty publisher somewhere is deprived of the chance to make a dishonest and tiny buck on a book published before 1923 — will get deep-sixed, and that our copyright law will be reformed in a sensible direction.
None of us object to the creators of original work being able to profit from their labours. But with copyright of life-plus-70 years, we are in the absurd situation where material that was printed in the Austro-Hungarian empire in Latin in 1893 by a publisher that no longer exists in a country that no longer exists by someone dead 60 years cannot legitimately go online in the UK because of quite spurious copyright. The dog in the manger is not a figure who should be protected by law.
(My apologies to anyone expecting emails from me today. I have an appalling cold and will not be doing anything much.)
Some time back I discovered that in 1956 the US government commissioned a translation of the great history of medicine by the medieval Arabic writer Ibn Abi Usaibia. The translation completed by Arabist Lothar Kopf in Israel, was filed, and forgotten. I discovered that it existed quite by accident when I was doing a Google search for something — anything — on this author. It’s almost certainly public domain as well.
Yesterday, to my astonishment, a DVD with photographs of all the pages of the typescript appeared through my letter box. The photographs were taken by Douglas Galbi, who read my notes about this on my blog, hied down to the US National Library of Medicine to take a look, and — we should all thank him! — did the back-breaking task of photographing the whole lot!
Looking at the images — which are better than I would have managed! — I grew rather excited. A very large proportion of the material covers the classical and patristic period. The translation is obviously a very sound piece of work, as you can tell at once by reading it. This is a text that begs to be online.
I converted these into 7 PDF’s — the translation is almost 1,000 pages — and have sent a copy to Adam McCollum, Librarian of the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library. Adam is an excellent Arabist, and interested in the author. He’s promised to take a look and verify the general standard of the translation, and also whether it includes all the material in the Arabic text.
Meanwhile we really need something other than a gigabyte of PDF’s. I was in negotiation with the NLM for a copy, and we’ll see where that goes. In a sense it’s unnecessary now; but something monochrome and rather smaller might still be useful.
I’ve also posted a job on PeoplePerHour.com to see if I can hire some data entry skills. I’m offering 40 GBP for 100 pages. I did look at OCR, but OCR software tends not to like typescript, and the number of errors was sufficiently high that I’d rather someone else corrected it. Alas, the days when I could do such things myself seem to be gone, and I just do not have the time.
UPDATE: I have modified the job, which has yet to be submitted, hours later. It looks as if no-one on PeoplePerHour works at the weekend! The delay is rather unwelcome, but useful in this case. Because I have tried OCR again, and got rather better results. The images that I first tried at the start of the book were not as good as those later on. This book is OCR-able, so I have revised the ad with that in mind. Eight hours at £5 an hour ought to cover quite a lot of OCR proof correction. Although I do have a memory of once trying to hire people, long ago, and being disappointed at how slow they were. Hum. Maybe I will do this after all.
A couple of interesting articles have come my way today.
Tommaso Leoni has written an overview of the textual transmission of the works of Josephus.[1] This reads rather like a summary of secondary literature, rather than a piece of new research, but, since much of that literature is in languages which anglophone scholars tend to avoid, I suspect his article will be very useful and will be the unacknowledged basis for much new work.
In particular he highlights the value of the indirect transmission, via lengthy quotations in authors like Josephus. There is also a valuable discussion of the Latin material. I was delighted to see a reference to my friend Wade Blocker’s pioneering translation of ps.Hegesippus, which I uploaded at his request back in 2005.
Now I’ve written digests of material about the manuscripts online myself, so some of the material is familiar to me, but one section of the article caught my eye:
The complexities of the manuscript tradition become obvious if we consider a most interesting piece of evidence, the only papyrus of Josephus, Pap. Graec. Vindobonensis 29810, published by Hans Oellacher in 1939. It is a fragment, unfortunately in poor condition, containing the text of War 2.576-579, 582-584 (overall, no more than 112 words in whole or in part). Despite its brevity, which makes it unwise to draw general conclusions about the quality of the other extant witnesses, the importance of this papyrus should not be underestimated, since it goes back to the late third century C.E., and thus it antedates the oldest manuscripts by more than six hundred years. Th e most striking aspect of P. Vindob. G. 29810 is that it diff ers conspicuously from all the manuscripts collated by Niese and Destinon, showing no clear similarities with the group PA, nor with the group VRC. Th is fact suggests—as Louis H. Feldman has rightly pointed out—that even the text of the War, which is usually believed to be in much better shape than that of the Antiquities, is less secure than Niese had supposed and still in need of further emendation.
Interesting, but perhaps not unexpected. The Greek mss. are all 10th century or later, and doubtless derive from one or two uncial copies extant a century earlier. But the papyrus could easily be a ‘wild’ text, for all we know. It would be interesting to learn more.
The other article was a discussion of the so-called Mithras liturgy,[2] in reality one of a number of spells contained in a Greek magical codex (PGM IV) which used the name of Helios Mithras as one of the power-names. Stoholski’s article is useful to the general reader since it provides something of a summary of the state of the question on the value and content of the material, before going on to discuss the presence of extracts from the Iliad before and after it. This latter question is only of specialist interest, but the summary was useful.
In other news, a DVD with photographs of an interesting unpublished public domain translation came through my letter box this morning. I made up some PDF’s of the photos, checked that I had all the material, and added some bookmarks. More about this when I have got past some curious political issues. But what I will need, I think, is someone to enter the text into a Word document. It’s too long for me to do, and OCR doesn’t handle typescript that well.
A second European bookseller ordered a copy of the Eusebius book from Chieftain Publishing today. This is nice to see. Meanwhile the statements of sales for August (all via Amazon) appeared, and were reasonable, if not spectacular. Not much sign of new orders following the Patristics Conference, tho. It reminds me that I need to do some marketing of the paperback. I just have not had the time.
I also started thinking about the possible content of the new Mithras article that I want to put online, and some technical ideas on how it might be done.
But I’m much too full of cold today to do very much. All the same, I thought that I would share these articles with you. It was a beautiful day, cool in the morning but red-hot 26C at lunch. I know that September often involves a lot of sunny weather. Here’s hoping!
[1] Tommaso Leoni, The text of Josephus’ works: an overview, Journal for the Study of Judaism 40 (2009) 149-184.
[2] Mark Stoholski, “Welcome to Heaven, Please Watch Your Step”: The “Mithras Liturgy” and the Homeric Quotations in the Paris Papyrus, Helios, Volume 34, Number 1, Spring 2007, pp. 69-95.
An email from my old Wikipedia account alerted me to some pointless dispute going on there. So this evening I went onto the account and shut off further emails and made sure the account was dead. There is no purpose in sensible people attempting to contribute to Wikipedia, since it is really a collection of hearsay edited mainly by teenagers with loads of time, no judgement, not much education and nothing better to do. Any malicious teenager with a grudge and no morals can simply delete your work, and hijack your efforts to tell a lie; and sooner or later, however obscure the subject on which you write, one of them will do so. A couple of such villains wrecked the Mithras article some time back. Such children tend to believe simultaneously that Wikipedia is the highest and most reliable authority on all subjects; and that it is perfectly OK for them to change it, in their ignorance, to say whatever they want it to say. Such confusion of mind is rather charming, really.
But in the couple of years that I was maintaining the Wikipedia Mithras article, I acquired quite a stock of solid knowledge of the scholarship — unusual for me, since I spend most of my time with primary sources — and I have been musing on whether I should digest that knowledge into a page, or perhaps several pages, on my site. It might be useful to people if I did. Obviously I have copies of my work, so could base it on the last honest version of the Wikipedia article.
I’m not sure that I want to do it in quite the same format, tho. Also the content and approach might be different. In the Wikipedia article, before it was wrecked, I took the view that I would express no opinion of my own, and simply allow the scholars — people who publish peer-reviewed material and specialise in Mithras studies — to speak, and I would verify, even then, what they said and omit it if it was not backed by adequate primary sources. The curse of Mithras studies is the waffly hearsay that goes around, and such a severe approach is quite necessary for anyone who wishes to know the facts.
But on my own pages I could, perhaps, express my own opinions. The difficulty with this, however, is that I am not a scholar, and, ultimately, my opinions are worthless to the reader. What I had in mind, rather, is to put up an image of a tauroctony and explain its parts and features. This, surely, would be useful to anyone who sincerely wanted to know about Mithras, and something that I could do from my own knowledge.
I’m also not quite sure how the page should be structured. I like a fairly flat structure, and perhaps the system of tabs used by the Wikimedia software should be adapted. I’ve also learned rather more about Persian Mitra than I knew back then — I was starting to prepare to rewrite that Wikipedia article, but won’t do so now — and possibly there should be something connected to that.
Nor was everything in the article, as I left it back in February, all of the same standard. I verified everything that I could, of course, and tried to ensure balance, comprehensiveness and accuracy. But some of the material was really not very interesting to me, and I didn’t really go into it. Possibly I should omit that material.
We’ll see. I have many other things to do, and in truth my life offline at the moment prevents me taking on any real projects online right now. I will mull it over.
More than a month ago I obtained paper copies of Brockelmann’s great but flawed reference volumes on Arabic literature. Seeing only a page or two on the Arabic biographers of Mohammed, I was moved to try to scan these, and then turn them into English.
Well, it’s been one heck of a fight! The abbreviations were incomprehensible, and the material so densely packed that even Brockelmann himself got confused about his number sequences (I have seen two cases so far where his numeration of works by an author gets out of sync), and his text was evidently unreadable to his typesetters as well. Worse yet, there is no obvious way to merge the data in the “supplement” with the main text.
But I did it. And the material is now online, here. Enjoy, if you can!
It’s not quite finished. That’s because I simply couldn’t understand some parts of it. My German is weak, and my knowledge of Arabic literature and the bibliography for it is non-existent. But I did what I could.
The PDF is a useful thing. If you have a copy of the editor software, Adobe Acrobat, you can do many useful things. I got hold of Sickenberger’s study of the catena of Nicetas a couple of days ago. Because I had Acrobat, I added a set of bookmarks for the bits I wanted. I translated them, as and where necessary. In the process I started to gain an overview of the work. I also OCR’d it, which gives me the means to use Google translate to work on the content. I also have Christophe Guignard’s French description, which helps a lot!
The catena of Nicetas on Luke, as you remember, is a medieval commentary on the Gospel of Luke, composed entirely of chains (catenae) of quotations from the Fathers. It was probably written between 1100-1105, although Sickenberger thinks 1080 AD. A list of the manuscripts in which it may be found — for it has never been published — is something that I have long wanted to have. As someone more used to dealing with texts composed in antiquity, I find that it is quite strange to find an extant copy so close to the date of composition!
A. Mss. of the complete catena
1) The oldest and most complete manuscript is the Vaticanus graecus 1611 (= V), written in 1116-7 AD. It is written on parchment, 38.5 x 30 cm, and contains 320 folios. The end is missing, however, as are two quires from the interior. But originally it contained the whole catena, and nothing else. The catena is divided into four books, and the date on which each was begun and completed is given in the colophon to each book, except, of course, for the last where the loss of the end portion includes the loss of its colophon. The copying was started on 11 June 1116 and book 3 was completed on 19 May 1117. The page layout is unusual, however. The text is laid out on each page in the shape of the Greek letter Π. At the top of each page, the text is given in 12 lines in a single column of full page width. But then it splits into two columns, initially of 28 lines each but increasing as the manuscript goes on to 29 from fol. 168, and then to 30 from fol. 201. The names of the authors of each extract are given in red ink. These are placed usually in the margin, but sometimes in the body of the text. Red ink is also often used for initials, and for text quoted from the gospel. The book hand is a cursive minuscule, probably all by one person. There are numerous abbreviations, some of which are expanded in the margins by a second hand of the same period. There are some corrections by the copyist himself, but in general the copy was made with great care. A more recent hand added an index on fol. 1v. Opinions vary as to the origin of the manuscript. There seems to be a link with the monastery of Rossano in southern Italy, founded in the 12th century AD, but it may have been brought there from Constantinople by the abbey’s founder, Bartholomew de Simeri. This is the manuscript used by Angelo Mai for his extracts of Eusebius and other authors in the 1820’s, and is undoubtedly the most important.
2) Paris Coislinianus 201 (C), paper, 15th century, contains the whole catena on 605 folios, 28.5 x 21.5 cms, each of 35 lines. The author names were written in red in the margin, but are now very pale. The division into books is not retained. The text is so clear that despite its recent date Sickenberger considered the manuscript more usable than any other for text critical purposes (presumably in the absence of an edition). This manuscript also contains the 57 extracts from Hesychius, and seems to be a descendant of the Iviron ms., judging from various features of the text.
3) Athos Iviron 371 (I) and manuscript 466 of the Metochion of the holy sepulchre of Constantinople, now in the National Library of Greek in Athens, are two halves of what was once one manuscript, parchment, 12-13th century, 24.5 x 19 cms. The Iviron ms contains 626 folios, but only the first 409 are original. Interestingly, after the division of this manuscript into two halves, in 1576 someone added paper quires to the back of the Iviron manuscript and copied the missing section there, probably from the Constantinople ms itself. Again author names appear in the margin in red ink in the original portion of the Iviron ms. But a distinguishing feature of this manuscript is that someone has added some 57 extra extracts under the lemma “of Jerusalem” which Sickenberger says come from a commentary by Hesychius of Jerusalem. The manuscript has been extensively corrected, apparently by the copyist.
B. Manuscripts of the first half of the catena
Parisinus graecus 208, paper, 14th century, 406 folios, 30 x 21.5 cms, which once belonged to Cardinal Mazarin, and also has the interpolations and alterations of the Iviron ms. However there are some differences from the Coislin ms., suggesting that it is a cousin of the Coislin ms, rather than an ancestor or descendant. The ms. is missing the start of the catena, and only contains the first part of it anyway. Author names are in the margin.
C. Manuscripts of the second half of the catena
Athos, Vatopedi 457, parchment, 13th century, 585 folios, 33.5 x 24.5 cms, each of 31 lines.
D. Manuscripts of book 1 only
1) Vatican gr. 1642, parchment, 12th century, 295 folios, 36.5 x 28.5 cms, each page has two columns each of 30 lines. It is a copy of V.
2) Vindobonensis theol. gr. 71 (=L), 12-13th century, in Vienna, 424 folios, 30 x 19.5 cms, only contains book 1 of the catena. It does contain some lacunae, notably the first 9 folios. It is the work of two copyists, the second and more careful copyist beginning work at fol. 80. The first indicates the names of the authors in the margin; the second in the margin or in the body of the text. Initials are written in red ink. The manuscript was bought in Constantinople by Augerius of Busbecke, as a note on fol. 1 and f. 242v indicates, and is of oriental origin. It is in general very clear and readable, except for the first word or two of the first line of each page, where water seems to be responsible.
E. Manuscripts of book 2 only
1) Angelicus gr. 100, from the Bibliotheca Angelica in Rome, parchment, 12th century, 32.5 x 22.5 cms, 343 folios. The beginning and ending are missing.
2) Florence, Mediceo-Laurenziana, Conventi Soppressi 176, parchment, 12-13th century, 314 folios, 33.5 x 24 cms. The manuscript is mentioned by Montfaucon in his Diarium Italicum (Paris, 1702), p. 362, lines 37-39.
3) Monacensis gr. 473, bombyzine, 14th century, 416 folios, 24.5 x 17 cms. Once belonged to the town library in Augsburg.
4) Casanat. 715 (formerly G II 9), paper, 16th century, very pretty manuscript. On folios 3-319 it contains book 2 of the catena of Nicetas. The incipit and explicit are the same as those in the Florence copy, indicating that this is a copy of it.
Analysis of the tradition
Sickenberger considers that the tradition divides into three families.
V is the representative of the first or Italian family, and descended from it are Vat. gr. 1642 and also Monac. 473 (14th c.)
The Vienna ms., L, is the main and only complete representative of the second or Byzantine family, although Ang. 100 (12-13th c.), Florence Laurentianus conventi soppressi 176 (12-13th c.) and Athos Vatopedi 457 (13th c.) are cousins to it, rather than children. Casan. 715 (16th c.) is a copy of the Florence ms.
Finally there is the “interpolated” family, where the Iviron ms. I plus the Metochion ms. is the best representative, from which C and Paris gr. 208 (14th c.) are descended, and of course the second part of I (fol. 410-626) copied from the Metochion ms.
Devreesse divided the mss. differently, however, but with much the same results.
There are also secondary witnesses to the catena, because it was inevitable that so large a work would attract abridgement.
The first of these abridgements is the catena published by Corderius. This is found in two mss. The first is the Venice Marcianus gr. 494 (13th century), which is very faulty. The authorship of extracts is often mistaken in this. The second is the Monacensis gr. 33 (16th century), which seems to be a copy of the former. Balthazar Cordier made a Latin translation of this catena, using a copy of the Venice ms., which he published at Anvers in 1628.
In the 14th century, Macarius Chrysocephalus, metropolitan of Philadelphia, composed a catena on Luke, in which he made use of copious extracts from the earlier work of Nicetas. A manuscript may be found in Oxford, in the Bodleian, Barrocianus 156 (written in 1344).
Guignard also mentions that an unpublished Latin translation exists of the whole catena of Nicetas, made from the Vatican manuscripts, and today at the Biblioteca Nazionale centrale (Rome), mss. 1742 and 1743, which was made at Sant’Andrea della Valle. I must confess that I wish I owned a copy of this!
Let me end with a copy of Sickenberger’s stemma:
Stemma of the manuscripts of the catena on Luke of Nicetas
None of us object to those who create original works receiving payment for their labours. But those of us who place stuff online — usually stuff long forgotten, where the creators have never received much, and are in any case long gone — find it a real problem. The problem is that copyright has become too extensive, too all-encompassing, too much under the control of the publishing lobby and too little sanity-checked.
I had an email today, which drew my attention to some remarkable posts. There is a useful discussion of copyfraud here, the practice of claiming non-existent copyright. The penalties for this piece of malevolence are negligible, and I have never heard of a prosecution for it.
The author also points out that major corporations are not only quite willing to borrow content from bloggers and others who contribute their efforts for free. Those corporations go even further, and demand that the bloggers indemnify the corporation for its “risk”! That is, a major corporation, stuffed to the gills with money and lawyers, transfers all the responsibility of compliance and all the financial penalties to those whom it uses. Rightly is this called exploitation.
But which of us has the power to clean out this cesspit of vested interests?
For many years Network Solutions has been the place where my domain names are hosted. They were, in truth, a company that I trusted. Many internet hosters and registrars are cowboys, and it is nearly impossible to find good people. Once you have found them, you stick with them.
But my liking for Network Solutions has got rather frayed down the years, for various reasons, and, as I blogged two days ago, that trust evaporated on Monday after they started making difficulties about transferring Tertullian.org to another company.
There is a curious sequel to the story, however. Last night I received an email from someone at Network Solutions, telling me that their social media team had spotted my comment and handed it over to this person to address. She made use of the telephone number — without my permission — to call me. But for some reason she hadn’t reckoned on the time zone and so the call went to voicemail. Then I got an email.
Now I have no real animosity towards Network Solutions, so I thought that I would take that call. I was quite prepared to explain, as a customer, why all my domains were being transferred elsewhere one by one, and why I felt that the company was no longer on my trusted list. I do have rather good reasons, after all; and a sensible company would want to know them. This afternoon the call came through.
The call was a delight, as Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice might have said about the effusions of his pompous but foolish nephew, Mr. Collins. I didn’t get asked any of those questions. Rather the call was to help me “understand” why I was wrong to be annoyed at their failure to transfer my domain when I asked them to. Some of the explanations were most interesting, as they say.
Firstly I was told that Network Solutions really does intend to force all its customers to ring up when they want to leave. It really does. The reason given is that there is a great deal of domain name fraud going on, and fraudulent attempts to transfer out domains; and so the company wants to verify that the account holders really are behind the request, by checking personal details. That this gives their call centre the chance to give you the hard sell is not, apparently, the motive at all.
Secondly, apparently I was wrong that it is an utter pain to renew a domain. What I said, rather officiously — for I wasn’t asked to — that, when the company sends you an email asking you to renew a domain, and you click on the link, that what you expect is a minimum number of clicks thereafter to hand them your credit card details. What you get, instead, is a page full of irrelevant advertising. You hunt around for a link saying “ignore this and continue”, which you find off-screen at the bottom. With relief you click this, only to be presented with yet more rubbish. And you do the same, and get the same, getting more and more frustrated all the time. But apparently this is not a bad thing, as I had suggested. “I don’t agree”, she told me. Customers really do want to page through all this crap in order to give Network Solutions money. Lots of them are naive, I was told, know nothing about computers, and so are glad to buy a set of services at that point, even though they have owned the domain name for years. And anyway if I didn’t like all that very helpful material, there was a button on the top right to bypass all this.
Thirdly, the obligatory call to the call centre also gave Network Solutions the chance to improve its service, I was told. Keeping customers on the phone, at international call prices, is valuable to Network Solutions in order to obtain feedback. No doubt she would have told me that the customers forced to telephone would be positively thankful for the chance to contribute to this company’s business development in this way, but for some reason that was not said.
Silly me! How fortunate that I did not embarass myself further by explaining why I didn’t want to give their company any money any more. So that’s all right, then. Sadly I remembered that I had an urgent meeting at that point, and had to forgo further jewels of thought.
I think I will go off and do a bit of internet banking now. And no, I shan’t have to ring up someone to allow the bank to make sure that I am who I say I am before I transfer money.
Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist
Academic publishers charge vast fees to access research paid for by us. Down with the knowledge monopoly racketeers
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You might resent Murdoch’s paywall policy, in which he charges £1 for 24 hours of access to the Times and Sunday Times. But at least in that period you can read and download as many articles as you like. Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier’s journals will cost you $31.50. Springer charges €34.95, Wiley-Blackwell, $42. Read 10 and you pay 10 times. And the journals retain perpetual copyright. You want to read a letter printed in 1981? That’ll be $31.50.
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Murdoch pays his journalists and editors, and his companies generate much of the content they use. But the academic publishers get their articles, their peer reviewing (vetting by other researchers) and even much of their editing for free. The material they publish was commissioned and funded not by them but by us, through government research grants and academic stipends. But to see it, we must pay again, and through the nose.
The returns are astronomical: in the past financial year, for example, Elsevier’s operating profit margin was 36% (£724m on revenues of £2bn). They result from a stranglehold on the market. Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, who have bought up many of their competitors, now publish 42% of journal articles.
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What we see here is pure rentier capitalism: monopolising a public resource then charging exorbitant fees to use it. Another term for it is economic parasitism. To obtain the knowledge for which we have already paid, we must surrender our feu to the lairds of learning.
I endorse every word, every punctuation mark of this article. Gaudeamus! It is great to see this in the mainstream press.
This racket needs to stop. Why should I work for pay in order to fund the profits of these people?
Once they performed a useful service, and their charges related to it. Now, in the age of the PDF, their costs are tiny and their greed insensate.
The internet has always been a rough place. People feel anonymous, and feel able to behave in ways that they would not dream of doing offline. Because it’s “only words”, people used to think that it didn’t matter. Accidental rudeness is easy online, where there is no body language. But as long as the internet has existed, the practice of “trolling” has left behind some very upset and hurt people.
There has always been malice online; but more commonly those online were generally from the same background, generally with a certain degree of civilised upbringing. The really nasty, cold, deliberate, calculated attacks, designed and intended to cause pain to the victim, were a rarity.
In recent years this has changed. Group lynchings online have become far more common, as access to the web has extended enormously, and the age of some of those contributing has dropped. Those desperately sad cases of teenagers driven to suicide online in Facebook should tell us that something horrible is happening. It happens when the pleasure of online interaction is deliberately twisted, like a knife, so that logging on becomes a worry, not a pleasure. I have seen this kind of murderous attack in Wikipedia myself, and it doubtless goes on far more than I know about.
I have seen, over the last year or two, increasing evidence that this technique is being deployed intentionally. I have started to think of it under a specific name: giving someone an internet beating.
We need to wake up, and realise that we’re not in Kansas any more. The technique is used because it works. The object is to give so much pain to the victim that he or she stops using the web, leaves the forum, dares never speak about the subject again. It’s organised, premeditated, and not different in intent, nor in any important respect from getting a gang of people together with sticks for the same purpose. The main difference is that the victim can’t call the police.
Today I read on the eChurch blog of an internet beating is being handed out to Stacy, a young Catholic mother, who complained that she couldn’t even go to the park with her toddlers without being confronted by a pair of gays who had decided that a public park in front of the children was the place to fondle each other. As she rightly observed, such conduct was a public statement, and a provocative, spiteful one. It was made in the knowledge that a lot of people there would object, and was designed to insult, to swagger, to say “we can do this and you can’t do a thing about it”. She naturally did not want such displays in a public park — paid for by us all — in front of her toddlers. And who would?
What happened next was sickening. She was handed a cyber-beating. The comments on the post promptly filled up with vitriolic hate and abuse, intermixed with the usual poisonous types who aid and comfort these cyber-thugs by blaming the victim for “provoking” the assault, expressed in fake-polite terms but with exactly the same agenda. Any attempt at rational discussion was drowned. Apparently she even received death threats. When this was reported, the beaters promptly blamed her for this too. Bullying always blames the victim, so this was classic.
I was truly bewildered as to the ferocity, quantity and nature of the comments on the self-injury post, until one commenter pointed me to Stacy’s original post, in which she’d closed comments.
Well, talk about quantity and ferocity of comments, I’d seen nothing until Stacy posted her recent blog, a few hours ago, entitled: You duped me, O LORD.
There are currently a whopping 328 comments!
It transpires that news has spread onto a prominent atheist forum and the hoards had simply hopped across to vent their spleen.
Good for Lisa. If you saw someone being given a beating, and you had the power to come to their aid, wouldn’t you do so? It could be you being beaten and stabbed. It has been me, recently, and nothing depressed me more than the refusal of others to help.
Stacy had a perfect right to object to public homosexual behaviour — I share her sentiments completely, as does most of the population of this world. If gays object to being hated, don’t be hateful, don’t parade your vice in front of people you know might well object. Do to others as you would like them to do to you. It’s really that simple.
Is it accidental that it is atheists and gays doing this? I fear it is not. Since these creeps apparently want to stifle criticism, let us tell it like it is.
It is entirely in keeping with my experience of atheists online that they should be active in this vile pursuit. A rational person would ask just why disbelief in God involved endorsement of a hideous vice. Logically there is no connection, of course. Except that, in reality, their atheism is merely hatred of Christians, and the atheist will endorse whatever the Christians are opposed to; indeed will try to force, by violence, the Christian to endure. There have been and are decent atheists. There are a great number who are murderous vermin.
Nor is it a marvel that this is a “gay rights” issue. From this pressure group I have come to expect no less than the most atrocious bigotry. This, if you remember, is a practice that was detestable to almost everyone, that was legalised under the pretence that “what two people do in private is their own business”. The determination by this lobby to silence any criticism, any discussion other than warmest approval, has brought to Britain the first arrests of clergy on religious grounds since the corrupt and brutal persecutions of the Restoration period.
Everyone opposed to such violence — call it what it is — should support Stacy. We must not let her fight our battle unaided. And we should support her without resorting to weasel words like “I don’t agree with what she says but she should have the right to say it.” To say this is to compromise with the intimidators, to tell them you’re afraid that they will attack you too. Let’s not. Let’s give these thugs the finger, and endorse heartily someone who had the courage to stand up for what they believe in.
I shall, of course, be moderating comments on this post.
UPDATE: The first four hate comments duly arrived overnight!
