Only just catching up on the current online activism taking place using the #MooreandMe hashtag on Twitter? Not quite sure what it’s all about? It’s not about assuming that Julian Assange is necessarily guilty of sexual assault, although some people are trying to frame it that way to try and make all those tweets go away.
Hoyden commentor Meg Thornton (aka megpie71) has put together a huge #MooreandMe link collection, and I believe is still adding to it:
- Source Materials: links detailing the background on the sexual assault allegations against Wikileaks founder Assange and the disinformation about those allegations that has come from his legal team and been uncritically repeated as fact far and wide, even by journalists, documentary-makers and celebrity feminists who are supposed to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time when it comes to fact-checking and nuance.
- Sady Doyle on Tiger Beatdown: links to the relentless activism of Sady Doyle over the last week in holding Keith Olbermann, Michael Moore & Naomi Wolf to account for their credulous repetition of factually incorrect claims to their huge audiences and their refusal to publicly acknowledge and apologise for their errors of fact and publicly retract them. She is also calling them out for naming the accusers and thus endangering them – there are people out there threatening to hunt them down and rape them “properly”, and some of them could well be serious.
- Rape Apologism and 101 Stuff: links explaining why the trivialising and shaming of the Swedish complainants against Assange is reinforcing rape culture, and if you’re taking part, even if you think you hate rape, then you too are reinforcing the rape culture where women are clearly shown over and over again that making a complaint against a non-stranger rapist could well be at least as and possibly more traumatic than the rape itself, because our culture doesn’t really believe that rape victims matter, because if it did people wouldn’t be so quick to make excuses for accused rapists when it’s someone they know/admire.
- Comment and Opinion: (both professional and amateur): links to some of the sharpest writing about this issue
- Places to send Donations: you could donate to victims of sexual violence to counteract some of the harm that is being done to past, present and future rape victims by the perpetuation of rape myths in public commentary surrounding the Assange allegations. Many trans* friendly organisations listed. You might also like to donate to Bradley Manning’s defence fund.
- Other Related Linkfests: exactly what it says
This is an amazing piece of work. Thank you, Meg.
I started doing some #MooreandMe tweeting yesterday, concentrating on the time period when Sady might reasonably be expected to be getting some sleep in her own timezone. I encourage other downunder feminists to join in once it’s midnight in the Eastern Time Zone in the USA – keep the hashtag alive around the clock.
Categories: ethics & philosophy, gender & feminism, social justice, violence
Quicklink of the Day #2: #DestroyTheJoint excludes voices of women with disabilities 
Friday Hoyden: Gillian Triggs 
Hands up anybody now who’d trust Rolling Stone to tell their story? 
Signal Boost: Beatrice Mtetwa 
Hoyden About Town 
Thanks Tigtog!
If anyone else has a link or three they’d like to pass on, I watch comments not only on the Dreamwidth side, but also on my InsaneJournal account (which also has a copy of the post)
<a href="http://megpie71.insanejournal.com/55181.htmlhttp://megpie71.insanejournal.com/55181.html</a> – The InsaneJournal version.
This also seems like it might be an appropriate place to yell out a big thank you to people like tigtog, Meg, Sady and Boganette (in the eye of a completely different twitterstorm), who I feel are putting themselves forward to take the hit for the rest of us by publishing important activist material and then filtering out the inevitable subsequent hate-mail before we see it. THANK YOU.
I’ m much luckier than Sady or Boganette (I don’t know how much hate mail Meg gets) – we really get very little hate-mail here. I’m sure that’s because we are infamous banhammerers who only want an echo chamber 🙂 Also we are not particularly prolific Twitterers, so we don’t get the persecution there either.
Speaking of how crucial Twitter has been in holding public voices to account, here’s a great summary of how #MooreandMe was so effective in busting some strawmen re the Assange allegations and changing some of the discourse on rape myths and consent. (nb includes hateful tweets from anti #MooreandMe tweeps)
Also, in good news: Michael Moore was asked some hard questions by Rachel Maddow and ended up saying some of the things we all hoped he would have said in the first place:
Maybe Sady can get a bit of sleep tonight, although I don’t think she’s finished with challenging those recognised names who have fucked up around this issue.
No hate-mail so far. Either that or it’s disguising itself extremely well as spam (so I don’t even see it).
I’ve been twittering for three days, and I tell you, I don’t know how Sady did it. It was honestly sending me up the wall with all the triggers and such. But it was important. I don’t know what’s happening now, whether people will try to keep the dialogue happening, but I definitely need a good long break from it.
On the upside, I met so many amazing people, and actually got singled out by Keith Olbermann at one point. If I’m lucky, I’ll be in his BLOCKED, SIR club. 😀 I really do hope he gets the point eventually, he’s a likeable ranter. Or, well, he was before this mess.