![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phoenix64I'll say one thing about the Open Source Boob Project: it sure did a great job of keeping my mind off of Pennsylvania and the Democratic quagmire yesterday.
Which is part of the reason I'm going to risk talking about it here. I'm not going to post any links - if this post is the first you've seen of this mess, take it as a sign that the gods don't want you getting wrapped up in internet drama.
I think that there is a lot about what actually happened both before and after the pins that was skewed out of proportion. I think this is in no small part due to the original piece not being worded more carefully (and for being such a big shot around LJ, you'd think The Ferret would be a more aware writer than that). That is not to say there weren't problems with what actually happened, I just think there were some things that ended up looking worse than they actually were. I suspect that even though the wording suggests otherwise in places, no one who was a complete stranger to the group was involved without some knowledge of what the group was doing (ETA: nope, The Ferret did say quite specifically that people who were in fact, absolute strangers, were approached - my mistake). I don't think it matters a great deal that women were doing a lot of the touching and that men were open to being touched.
I think that there were huge problems with the idea of wanting to make this some kind of expanding social experiment. The many reasons for that are explained in several places, and I'm not going to go into them here (though I will say that really, a lot of the discussions this has generated are kind of nifty). I think part of the problem is that the attack of the larger idea got wrapped up in attacks of the events described, and the defense of the events described got wrapped up in defense of the larger idea. And I actually believe that in this part of it The Ferret was less of an ass than some people associated with him and the actual events.
I have never, in all my years around LJ in any of my journals read The Ferret regularly, even though there have been a lot of people I've liked who thought he was pretty cool. I didn't think of him as fabulous before but I didn't think he was the devil incarnate either. My opinion of him has not changed a great deal. But my opinion of some other people has certainly been affected.
Which is part of the reason I'm going to risk talking about it here. I'm not going to post any links - if this post is the first you've seen of this mess, take it as a sign that the gods don't want you getting wrapped up in internet drama.
I think that there is a lot about what actually happened both before and after the pins that was skewed out of proportion. I think this is in no small part due to the original piece not being worded more carefully (and for being such a big shot around LJ, you'd think The Ferret would be a more aware writer than that). That is not to say there weren't problems with what actually happened, I just think there were some things that ended up looking worse than they actually were. I suspect that even though the wording suggests otherwise in places, no one who was a complete stranger to the group was involved without some knowledge of what the group was doing (ETA: nope, The Ferret did say quite specifically that people who were in fact, absolute strangers, were approached - my mistake). I don't think it matters a great deal that women were doing a lot of the touching and that men were open to being touched.
I think that there were huge problems with the idea of wanting to make this some kind of expanding social experiment. The many reasons for that are explained in several places, and I'm not going to go into them here (though I will say that really, a lot of the discussions this has generated are kind of nifty). I think part of the problem is that the attack of the larger idea got wrapped up in attacks of the events described, and the defense of the events described got wrapped up in defense of the larger idea. And I actually believe that in this part of it The Ferret was less of an ass than some people associated with him and the actual events.
I have never, in all my years around LJ in any of my journals read The Ferret regularly, even though there have been a lot of people I've liked who thought he was pretty cool. I didn't think of him as fabulous before but I didn't think he was the devil incarnate either. My opinion of him has not changed a great deal. But my opinion of some other people has certainly been affected.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-04-23 04:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-23 06:02 pm (UTC)I also don't think this post has done a very good job of expressing my own anger at some of this, but for some reason I tend to keep placing myself in the role of the person saying, "Yes, that was shitty, but there are a lot of distortions of the truth going around about why it was shitty and that's not OK either". Whether it's intentional or not, I loathe spin. I want people would get upset over the reality of something rather than someone else's interpretation of the reality, and I hate seeing people who are basically on my side of a dispute making my side look bad by arguing a fiction.
*sigh* I'll be over here looking longingly at my hidey-hole.
no subject
Date: 2008-04-23 06:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-23 06:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-23 06:19 pm (UTC)