Grimnir Mäyräparta · @GRIMACHU
1st Oct 2017 from TwitLonger
#Mythcon - The 'Wouldn't Rape You' Context
People keep asking, and if you're going to comment, you should really keep up on things enough to know what you're talking about.
The 'I wouldn't even rape you' tweet and comment was an - IMO brilliant - trap, laid for Jess Phillips, giving her enough room to hang herself and expose herself as a dishonest actor. She gleefully threw herself into the trap and metaphorically snapped her own neck - rather than dangling around and dancing the Tyburn Jig for a while.
Background
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Phillips is a nasty piece of work. As well as having been involved in various censorship campaigns - of which she was engaged in at the time - she has laughed at and attempted to block discussion of issues such as the male suicide rate in Parliament several times. She's also compared Cologne's mass sexual assaults with a 'regular night out in Birmingham' her own constituency. None of this would excuse abuse that she has gotten, but it can help explain it.
The Incident in Context
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Phillips was, again, engaged in a round of media attention-grabbing and attempting to push more Internet censorship off the back of what anyone with any Internet experience at all will know are spurious online threats and trolling, not to be taken seriously. Phillips however (selectively) takes such spurious threats seriously and uses them to back her censorship agenda, as many have. Further she likes to pretend this is a misogyny problem, even though men get more online abuse (Pew & others).
The incident in question then, unfolds, like this.
1. Phillips is pushing more online censorship and control on the basis of the trolling and spurious online threats she and others get - though she emphasises women. This is hyperbole, and clearly absurd to any Internet veterans who know these threats are about as genuine as a three bob note.
2. Sargon, and others, take issue with Internet censorship. Sargon crafts a 'trap' message that he WOULDN'T rape her, an 'anti-threat' in order to demonstrate her dishonesty. That she will take the opposite of a threat and turn it into a 'threat'. That she will attempt to use that to further her agenda and that a largely complicit media will go along with it, despite it obviously being the opposite of a threat.
3. Phillips hurls herself willingly into the trap and it goes off exactly as intended. She's exposed as a blowhard, a liar and a hypocrite as are many media organisations that go along with it.
'God' knows I disagree with Sargon on a lot, but like Kekistan's exposure of the absurdity of ID Politics and the dishonesty of groups like the SPLC, this was a master stroke.
To add a little spice on top, Phillips has herself made spurious threats, but seems capable of understanding that they're meaningless when she does it.
"Phillips told Owen Jones in December 2015 that she had told Corbyn and his staff "to their faces: 'The day that ... you are hurting us more than you are helping us, I won't knife you in the back, I'll knife you in the front'", if it looked as though he was damaging Labour's chances of winning the next general election. Responding to criticism about her use of language, Phillips said on Twitter: "I am no more going to actually knife Jeremy Corbyn than I am actually a breath of fresh air, or a pain in the arse".
This makes the hypocrisy and dishonesty even more plain.