not my posting. Sorry, an imposter. Most posters have a syntax, a flow to their writing. I am not responsible for some other mooks bullshit. Take it someplace else.

Any person who has been physically attacked by a person of the opposite gender at a vulnerable time in their life, especially childhood, is going to have a tough time being sane when the full weight of the insanity of the blogosphere comes down on them.

Especially when it's the opposite gender coming down on them, virtually or otherwise.

If you've never actually worked through your own trauma, you have no idea what it's like to actually puque this stuff back up and take an adult look at it. It puts a rather busy life on hold and can make a person physically ill in the process. Ill as in auto-immune disease ill. I'm not talking headcold here.

My point is that we need to accept that some folks are going to be really sensitive to threatening behavior and are going to seem to be overreacting to our words and content. I think once you've done the kind of work required to get over this kind of stuff, you realize that there's not a snowball's chance in hell that most people are going to be able to do more than stir up an angry hornet's nest by going into therapy and overcoming the strong sense of victimization that goes along with unresolved trauma. It's just too hard and we're fighting the bell-shaped curve on this one.

When boys get angry, they want the fight to be about physicality and physical power. When girls get angry, they want the fight to be about communication and the power of people banding together to fight a common foe.

Guys, it's not a fight that's worth winning; more often than not, you will lose. Gals, mental cruelty is no way to garner support from a world filled with angry man-pigs and chimpanzees who think everything that's shiny is worth picking up.

The neo-cons are noticing this derisive sentiment in the blogosphere and using it to whip their "promise-keeper" base into a frenzy, and to further wedge and divide the rest of the populace against itself.

Can everyone agree that men shouldn't physically threaten women under any circumstances and that under no circumstance should women do that thang you do that turns the lives of men into a desert wasteland? That should be everyone's commitment online and in life. If you don't pick up the weapon, you won't be sorry for the damage you do.

Regardless of who gets paid more, who has the jobs, or who is smarter, we are all equals. The opposite sex will always be able to tear us a new one. That's the way it is. All victories in the battle of the sexes are imaginary and temporary.

That little ditty probably extends to all donnybrooks of any composition. Rage against the person in the mirror and leave the machines alone for a while.

... misogyny is so often the default programming language

LOLROFL!!!

Everyone knows misogyny is an operating system, not a programming language.

And Sierra is overreacting. Totally.

... why would someone want to be an imposter of you?

Look, here's another one where you talk about your wife: http://letters.salon.com/mwt/feature/2006/08/24/career_women/view/index21.html?show=all

The way I see it, you're either lying now, or you were lying back when you wrote these other posts. Either way, it simply confounds me why someone would want to invent these elaborate back stories about themselves on the internet. What's the fun? Perhaps you can tell me.

Clockwork Smurf, love this analogy:

Like city dwellers for millenia it is up to all of us in internetberg to avoid eye contact and be about our business whenever possible, and cease our conversations with the crazies as soon as we realize they are such.

Street-smart for the internet age.

pull your head from your ass, didn't write that one. I have had a few mooks who posted as my screen name. Not my responsibility. Take it someplace else.

All the usual and expected discussion rages on as I expected, but when I read the Broadsheet entry, I immediately noted that the conference info (where she was to speak) was readily available in her blog.

In retrospect, that might not have been a good idea, but in a technical blog, I wouldn't think twice about noting professional activities such as this one.

And if she subsequently received vicious verbal and physical threats, then she probably decided against going someplace she had already admitted as a planned trip.

In my mind, that sounds like discretion, not paranoia.

The history of the internet has the same cycle regurgitated over and over.

1. Geeks open up a new virtual communication space. They don't put in too many rules because they just want to get it to work. They fill it with odd geeky stuff.

2. Cool people get turned on to the new space by their geek friends. A golden age occurs where people excitedly talk to each other. Lots of dreaming happens where people talk about the new space changing the world.

3. The masses show up, turned on by the cool people they see using the space. The space gets over-crowded with voices.

4. The trolls arrive. They mess everything up by driving every discussion straight to the gutter. The space becomes too hard to filter the interesting content from the acrimonious flaming. The geeks are pretty much conflict averse, and they don't like crowds, so they go and open up a new virtual space...

This has repeated with email, net-news, AOL forums, Salon TALK, MySpace, etc.

I predict that soon there will be a new cool place where smart people are hanging out. People will start investing their life into expressing themselves in that space instead of Blogs, etc.

Just don't tell the trolls...

P.S. Kathy Sierra rules!

You seem kind of rude, defensive even. I think i'm being reasonably polite. Still doesn't explain why anyone would want to post under your name. There are plenty of names to be had, why take someone else's?

Why not just admit it, and explain to us what the fun is in this game you play? I honestly don't get it.