Wow, this is terrible, the famous Nick Bilton of the New York Times who writes about gadgets had an article up about online bullying -- it was mainly about poor Justine Sacco -- and he mentiond Anil Dash in it and Dash got the mention removed.
Awful, awful.
Shame on the Times for that.
But it's likely to go down the rat hole and no one will ever do anything about it.
Fortunately, this has been documented by the imperturbable Loren Feldman, who is not scared by these people's threats and has always maintained his independence.
Anil has tweets up which Loren Feldman reproduces, expressing outrage that Bilton wrote about his "anger" without first clearing it with him (!), and he ended up getting himself removed from the column.
Loren wrote a comment about this on the Bilton alticle but it didn't show up. I did, too, linking to Loren's blog, and I doubt it will clear the NYT censors, either, because they hate comments that talk about flaws in reporting itself or start something with the journalist himself.
So that's when you write to the Ombudsman, and I will be doing that, even though I know in advance she will not do a thing about it.
There are some people in Silicon Valley or Alley -- Anil Dash is in the Alley -- who are influential and powerful enough that they just get rid of the criticism about them. Paul Carr is one, as we saw. He could cover for Mark Ames of the old The Exile, who bragged about having sex with a 15-year-old girl in Russia -- bragging in his book that was never described as "fiction" -- and claim that Mark Ames is just telling tall tales. Except Mark Ames himself doesn't claim this, because if he did, then everyone would find his supposed gonzo journalism a lot less gonzo. Even as fiction, it's awful, and the sort of thing that if it were somebody else, Paul Carr and Anil Dash would be going crazy, as would Jillian York. But since it's not, and it's one of their own, they are silent. Disgusting.
One thing that always happens in these cases is that if you keep criticizing, they end up accusing you of being sexist or racist. I've had this slur slung at me from both Carr and Dash. First Dash let me know that he "intervened" to make sure my blog wasn't removed when he was at this blogging platform Typepad (!) -- to let me know I was "on sufferance". Ugh.
Then, I was given a "test" -- Dash sent me a link to a forum taking him down in the most racist and outrageous fashion. I'm supposed to spend my days condemning that, but I can never speak about "black crime" in our neighbourhood --- we live a few blocks from each other -- he in a lot nicer place than I do -- because, see, I would never speak of "white crime" (so he thinks) and therefore I can't speak about something that even Obama himself, in his speech, discusses, and in critical terms.
Indeed, I'm going to follow up on this soon in a blog post about anti-Indian sentiment that I think is growing in this country as Indians assume more public and powerful positions. And I'm also going to talk about how some of them have really bad ideologies and really bad behaviour and we have to be able to call that out without being charged with "racism".
So Paul Carr picked up the Wikipedia vandalism and the nonsense about my remarks concerning Romney's digital people not having their heart in the job because they were Democrats voting for Obama (um, no, I didn't claim black people put bugs in his software to make him lose, derp) -- and Carr, too, reached for this discreditor of claiming I am "racist".
This is how these people are, and the only thing you can do is keep calling them out, keep documenting, keep trying to name and shame.
There's a good comment on Loren's site, too, showing the sub-tweets that Dash does (his favourite thing to do is put a DM in my Twitter, then unfollow me so I can't answer him).
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