We're not talking about the increased restrictions on the medium that was supposed to be a freewheeling exchange in the public square. But, yes, there is that. No, we're talking about the large numbers of sites that keep shutting down.
Delilah Boyd and her site A SCRIVNER'S LAMENT are sorely missed. Anne Zook's PEEVISH . . . I'M JUST SAYING is also missed. Centrists needing to be fed DNC talking points passed off as personal opinion no doubt miss Jude Nagurney Camwell's IDDYBUD and Chris D. Andersen's INTERESTING TIMES. Jude was infamously non-anti-war. Remember she's the one who told readers that Cindy Sheehan's Camp Casey wasn't about ending the war, Cindy just wanted an answer to her question. Yes, Jude was that far up the DNC's ass. Like many loser women, she was a John Edwards cheerleader in 2008. But there is worse -- for example, the always undemocratic and authoritarian Latoya Peterson. She is not missed nor is her blog RACIALICIOUS.
Remember her? She's stopped blogging, thankfully, and found another tit to suck off of -- she's at the intersection of hip-hop and AI these days. Artificial intelligence? That may be the closest to actual intelligence that Latoya ever gets. Ava and C.I.'s "TV: Hermetically sealed 'independent' media," back in 2010, detailed the snit fit she got into when Marc Steiner and Normal Solomon expressed the option of someone challenging Barack Obama -- a primary challenge -- in 2012. That, Latoya insisted, was "tantamount to a betrayal." As Ava and C.I. reported:
After Norman's agreed with Steiner, Latoya is pronouncing the idea "tantamount to a betrayal." What? Yes, according to Latoya, if Barack is challenged, it would be a betrayal. At this point, she once again wanted to speak for Latino voters. It was a thread that just didn't die throughout the broadcast which should have been billed as For Latino Voters Who We Won't Allow To Speak For Themselves. It would be a betrayal "disappointing us," she said including Latinos in her 'us,' and "you need to give this man a chance!"
While David Swanson tried not to look at anyone and awkwardly sat in silence, Norman had the good sense to challenge her, "Well where is the betrayal? Are you saying he betrayed us or we're betraying him if we don't give him a second term on a silver platter?"
"I don't think we should give him a second term on a silver platter," insisted Latoya -- apparently eyeing plastic trays at the Dollar General instead. "I think we need to hold him more accountable. But I think if White progressives were to say, 'Okay now we're going to chuck this Black guy, we're going to get somebody else in, we're going to find an Edwards that doesn't have a scandal . . .'"
She never came up for air and we don't serve in her court so we'll cut fat mouth off right there to inject some reality. No one had identified a potential candidate -- not as male or female, and certainly not the race, How telling that Latoya automatically assumed it would be a White man. And how stupid is she? Edwards' run for the presidency wasn't brought down by a sex scandal. That scandal was covered up and only exploded long after he'd shut down his campaign. In fact, if he hadn't hid out in a hotel bathroom, he probably could have gotten away with the scandal. (Edwards, while married to Elizabeth Edwards, had multiple affairs. One such affair produced a child.)
Norman would point out that the candidate could be an African-American. To which Latoya wanted to insist, "We could take Rosa Clemente seriously." We could.
We suppose we could.
In 2008, we certainly did. Check the archives. Rosa Clemente was named as Cynthia McKinney's running mate July 9, 2008. Basically four months later, the 2008 election was held. That's approximately 16 weeks in which she could have been covered as a candidate. This site publishes weekly. Check our archives and you get approximately 40 results, the bulk of that during the period when she ran. If only 16 articles had appeared mentioning, we still would have done a strong job covering her run -- especially since everyone writing for this site except for us declared for Ralph Nader in the election. This wasn't a McKinney-Clemente site.
"We could take Rosa Clemente seriously," Latoya Peterson insisted. But we did. We already did.
By contrast -- you knew there'd be a "by contrast," didn't you -- Racialicious?
Latoya Peterson's site has about five articles. Three of which mentioned Rosa during the time she was running for office. Well two. One of the three mentions was actually in a comment to an article by Latoya -- an article that didn't mention Rosa. Well one. See both September articles that show up in the search? Latoya didn't write about Rosa. People leaving comments did.
November 3, 2008, Latoya writes, "It's the day before November 4th [Election Day], and it occurs to me that we have not provided much coverage to other candidates outside of Obama." She claims that "my lack of posting does not mean that I have not been paying attention" to Cynthia and Rosa. But she calls Rosa "Afro-Latina" and Rosa rejected "Latina." We wrote about that during the 2008 campaign. So obviously, if Latoya didn't know that she wasn't paying attention. She appears to have written her only article solely because Women's Media Center did a piece on the campaign. (Finally did a piece on the campaign. We actively campaigned offline to get WMC to do a piece on the historic campaign. It required a lot of screaming and the threat that we'd do more pieces like this one online if Cynthia's run wasn't covered.)
"We could take Rosa Clemente seriously," said Latoya -- apparently unaware how many of us already had.
Latoya, by contrast, refused to take Rosa seriously.
Don't push your blame off anyone else, Latoya, you own up to it.
But owning up would require growing up and that's why we have to talk about how tokenism is hurting the left. Norman -- and only Norman -- tried to fight back against Latoya's idea that Barack must be handed a second term and her lunatic assertion that Barack not getting a second term would be a betrayal. As he pointed out, "The people being foreclosed, they don't care what race the president is, the people in Afghanistan who are dying don't care what the race of the president is."
Latoya was having none of it, insisting, "It's not just about the race of the president on its face. It's a lot of the symbolism. It's about reciprocation. It's about feeling like Black people who are part of a political president. It's about little Black kids being able to touch Obama's head and say, 'My president has hair like me.'" And on and on she continued.
We don't need it. If her maturity level is such that the nation need suffer two terms of Barack Obama so that some mythical child can touch his head, that's on her and her stupidity and her immaturity. She sounded so much like Cokie Roberts in the late nineties insisting Bill Clinton must resign "for the children."
Barack's not even Black, he's bi-racial. Will Latoya tell those mythical Black children rushing up to touch Barack on the head -- that is a racist image Latoya's promoting -- that Barack's mother was White? Will doing so make it hard for these mythical children? Is that why we have to lie? As part of some grand social engineering scheme?
2008 was the year the crazy ran free which is why C.I. dubed it "2008: The Year Of Living Hormonally." And it is when so much went wrong, but we'll come back to that.
Over the weekend, we were surprised to learn that FEMINSTING was no more. There's been no announcement but how else to explain a daily site that hasn't published anything new in six months?
That's almost when they stopped Tweeting as well. To be clear, they reTweet near daily. But the last Tweet FEMINISTING bothered to write was months ago.
Joe Biden officially joins the presidential race today, after a long decorated career of promoting white supremacy and misogyny. Thread:
FEMINISTING closing shop is sad. SHAKESVILLE? Time to hoot and holler?
We didn't know the site or Melissa McEwan until 2008 when e-mail after e-mail began pouring in from African-American woman who had brief online encounters with Melissa. Brief? When she replies to your comment with an attack and bans you, that's brief.
Shakesville, it turned out, wasn't an online community, it was a city in northern Guyana. A cult, in fact, with Melissa presiding. And it became so obvious that a TUMBLR account sprung up just to document how abusive Melissa had become.
Joanna Mang (THE OUTLINE) traces the demise of SHAKESVILLE and zooms in on 2008:
But somewhere around the 2008 election, under the pressure of moderate popularity, Shakesville suffered the Internet equivalent of a collective psychotic break.
I suppose you could blame Barack Obama. Liberal bloggers of the aughts were first and foremost anti-war; we hated the Iraq invasion, we were discouraged by Bush’s re-election, we were queasy at the flag lapel pins and all that Lee Greenwood shit. Then two things happened: the financial markets crashed and a charismatic senator from Illinois dazzled us with new promises. Jacob Bacharach, who blogged at Who Is Ioz? during that time (and is also a current Outline contributing writer), recently told me he believes Obama “successfully co-opted the liberal heart of the anti-war/anti-Bush coalition and incorporated it into his movement.”
At some point in Obama’s first term, it became clear that the war in Afghanistan would not end; Guantanamo would not close; the Bush Administration would not pay for torturing prisoners. Air strikes in Libya and Yemen and drone program expansion confirmed that Obama would wage war with fewer combat troops, but he would wage it nonetheless. Distracted by domestic concerns, a large part of the online left gave up. Progressive blogging slumped as readers moved on to Facebook and Twitter. At Shakesville, the sea change was punctuated by some serious internecine drama.
In early 2007 McEwan was hired, along with Amanda Marcotte, who was running the liberal blog Pandagon, to blog for the John Edwards presidential campaign. Both were soon forced to quit after Catholic activist Bill Donahue called them bigots and lobbied for their removal . The incident made national news and McEwan achieved what I assume was dizzying notoriety, not least because it attracted a wider variety of troll to her blog and inbox. According to former Shakesville contributor Litbrit, when McEwan tried to move the blog to a new domain, it was subjected to DDOS attacks. She was doxxed and reported that she received rape threats. It is perhaps unsurprising that an air of paranoia became increasingly palpable at Shakesville. (McEwan did not respond to an email requesting comment for this piece.)
In a November 5, 2008 post titled “Great Expectations,” McEwan praised Obama’s victory and urged optimism from the community. What resulted became known to former Shakers as the Great Meltdown.
It’s easy to assume that McEwan, Dr. Frankenstein-like, built a monster she could no longer control, but when I read through that thread now, I don’t see an over-abundance of negativity. I see, with the exception of a couple smartasses, people skeptical of the country’s ability to reform itself after eight years of jingoism and war, and a few PUMAs who thought the nomination was stolen from Hillary. The mods wouldn’t abide this, and all hell broke loose. In the comments, McEwan appeared exasperated, claiming to be “hanging on by a thread.” She threatened to quit blogging forever. Readers departed en masse. According to Google Trends, searches for “Shakesville,” which reached an all-time peak that September, had by December dipped by 50 percent. This is about the time I myself stopped reading the site entirely.
In June 2009, after a few comment thread blow-ups and several days without posts, the blog’s 14 contributors posted “‘All In’ Means ALL of Us,” a manifesto intended “to address what we see as an ongoing and extremely problematic pattern within our community.” The pattern was the rampant disrespect of McEwan. They called on Shakers to “bring your vocal, visible support to Melissa (and other contributors) when you see others disrespecting them” and pledge to respect her as “acknowledged leader.”
The result was, in Shakes-speak, a clusterfucktastrophe. The first comment, and most upvoted, got right to it: “Is this a blog or a freakin’ cult?” Many Shakers pledged to be All In and promised to participate more, but a significant number reported being turned off and insulted. Readers fled to other blogs and Facebook to vent and regroup. According to a screenshot sent to me by a former contributor who asked to remain anonymous, McEwan emailed contributors asking to be kept apprised of negative comments about her. But many offending Shakers never returned.
It's a shame that so many refuse to get honest about what took place in 2008.
A few people warned what was happening then and prior. We'd noted that becoming David Brock was not the answer. But that's who so many of us are now -- including Jane Mayer -- a hit man for a partisan reasons, a liar. We didn't need to become David Brock to win elections but lying's always easier than doing the hard work required to show people a government that truly represents them.
The independent internet is fading. Maybe it will come back to life?
We hope so..
But we survey the landscape today and it's depressing.
So many are gone. Some walked away like Carolyn Kay (MAKE THEM ACCOUNTABLE) and some passed away (BARTCOP comes to mind). A freewheeling internet meant that even a Melissa McEwen could have some value.
A Scrivner's Lament, Delilah Boyd