"You willingly put yourself in the public eye. You also shot your mouth off. Take responsibility for your actions and buck up. You are not the first or the last liberal who stepped in their own excrement.

-- Mr. Middle class citizen"

This is exactly the kind of response one would expect from a knuckle-dragger. Hope you can keep your hands out of Amanda's excrement.

buh bye

Matthew,

Progressive liberal commenters complained all the time at Pandagon about the sexist, bigoted, racist misandrist commentary.

These commenters were banned and had their comments deleted.

Prior to Amanda showing up, Pandagon had a free open commenting system. Within a few short months, Amanda had instituted a moderation system. New comments are held and not posted. If they fit the groupthink, Amanda okays the commenter. Once you go outside the groupthink, you are history and your comments fit for deletion.

This is reinforced by Amanda and her coterie using the words troll, fascist, godbag, nerd, mra/fra (for men's rights activist), misogynist, etc. And then they start in on catty sexual commentary. This is applied to men, to women, to gays, to lesbians, anyone that disagrees with the group think.

If you use google you can find people at other forums remarking on this, and asking why the prominent liberal blogs are not calling out Amanda for the hate speech she promoted at her blog.

Edward's should never have capitulated so easily. Unfortunately, there is no way I can support him for the highest office in the land if he has no firm foundation on which to stand. Defending you should have been a priority.

You should never have quit.

...to the real world.

There are a number of letters here to Marcotte stating that she hasn't taken responsibility for what she has written.

Huh?

She's taken full responsibility for what she's written. Her ultimate act of taking responsibility was resigning from the Edwards campaign. She is explicitly standing by her writing and not apologizing for any of it. What more can anyone possibly ask of her? She's a hero.

Dear Edwards Blogger #1 -

You had to go because the keyword in John Edwards' current adventure is PRESIDENT: a candidate for PRESIDENT of the United States cannot employ people who spew...

"What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?" (June 14, 2006)

"I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and f**ked her against her will - not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out. Can't a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anywmore without getting all wound up about it? So unfair." (Jan. 21, 2007)

Political Campaign Lesson #101: When you work for a political campaign, check your religious and racial rage at the door. John Edwards is candidate for President of the United States not Paris Hilton Country. And, dearie, the job is all about Da Boss. He's the star and he was always the star. It's about Boss Man, always Da Boss. Not you. Never you while he pays your salary.

Lesson #102: Keep it clean. Never post words that need asterisks after the first letter. The asterisk is the most underrated symbol in literature. Those little itty bitty spines of that tiny asterisk will sting you. Political operatives who use itty bitty words like C*** become radioactive to employers, as in your pal Misty's self-declared alias "Queen C*** of F*** Mountain." "Play Misty" for the eternal optimist, Misty, who seems to believe there's a good context to be found in icky.

Lesson #103: When you're working for a presidential candidate and you attack Mary, the Mother of Jesus Christ, and the circumstances of His birth and what if "Plan B" happened, it's akin to telling the world that Da Boss (aka the Guy You Work For) employs folks who want to delete the most universally celebrated eveent in the history of the world... CHRISTMAS! John Edwards was your boss and Mrs. Edwards gave him permission to say so. That is, until someone in that house wised up and decided to go to Plan B on your job.

Lesson #104: Never be cute about rape and never ever be cute about the color of a woman being raped. Not nice. Not funny. Not smart. Blog posts like that will follow you all your professional life even if you think the server crash deleted your post and no evidence remains. You can blame the software for deleting the Duke thing from your blog but, girl, when the server went down, your blog's deletions kept floating in the blogosphere and somehow landed in a laptop in Heaven and, well, up there They know how you feel about Da Big Guy and Holy Momma. Amanda, your Duke statement will be around long after you're gone from the Edwards campaign. Eternal life, ya know?

Lesson #105: Leave God alone. He rules. He rocks. He don't like ugly.

Amanda,

You are indeed guilty of deleting comments and banning anyone who disagrees with any of your positions at Pandagon. This includes many progressive commenters who found your over-the-top commentary offensive or inane, and when they would deviate from your agenda, their posts were removed and they were banned.

Your oft-demonstrated idea of free speech means that YOU are free to say whatever you like, yet no one else deserves this privilege unless they happen to agree with you. Real progressives understand your true colors, that of a intolerant bigot pretending to be one of the good guys.

H. Marsden

Many of us have to be anonymous in this forum because, sadly, we are involved in family court.

We are trying to share the custody and share the parenting time of our children, and we know too well how the courts and the court psychologists use stereotypes to victimize the fathers (and the children.)

This does not mean we are anti-feminists. Feminism use to be about lifting both sexes and freeing them from stereotypes. Amanda believes that "the patriarchy is to blame for everything", and she has said that the child should be with the parent that brought it up. She firmly believes that if a man goes back to work and leaves the child with mom because mom can breast feed the child, than the man has given up any right to ask for a shared custody later on. She has said, just before banning me.

Because of the ridiculous nature of the way charges are laid out in court, there are many of us that keep our names anonymous. Though fathers' rights groups can have good resources for fathers, if it becomes known to the lawyers and the judge you are a member of a fathers' rights group, it puts you in a corner for the undeserved stereotype is that of an angry man that doesn't want to pay for child support.

Child support IS an issue, but in no way is it the fundamental issue. The fundamental issue is our ability to share custody and have a significant share of our children's time so that we can parent them.

Amanda, who is young, and never married and never divorced, spreads the stereotype and curses out fathers' rights activists left and right. But she has no real experience or knowledge of family court. She is her grandfather that used to curse the darkies and fear how they wanted to date his daughter.

So we keep anonymous for that reason.

And we keep anonymous because the liberal blogosphere is lucky to have some very good, progressive young writers that also buy into this stereotype or are otherwise afraid to call Amanda out on her nonsense.

Calling out a self-proclaimed feminist on her sexist bullshit is the third-rail of the progressive blogosphere.

Top tier bloggers like Duncan Black, Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Digby and others should be able to see through the nonsense. But for the most part they too are young, and inexperienced with divorce and families and family court so they don't recognize yet that the systemic inequalities that some men complain about are in fact terribly real and really terrible.

As we do participate in these blogs with a name, we are forced to keep anonymous in Amandas and here. Why? Read the comments at Pandagon. Read how dissent is greeted with insult, with sexist comments. How dissenters are demeaned, dehumanized, and blamed. Look at how academics and well known intellectuals like Michael Berube have also signed onto these tactics. If we wish to participate in blogs in a meaningful way in other issues, than we are forced to partition off that side of us that has been deeply hurt by the courts as well as by the Amanda Marcottes.