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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Lol this story has so many phases.

Phase 1: NYT Mag story comes out, bunch of blue checkmarks on Twitter are like "Wow, Dawn is a B, Team Larsen" unprompted. Lots of people like/agree with these posts.
Phase 2: Something smells off to some folks, they dig around, those chat transcripts get widely circulated, suddenly a lot of people who liked/agreed with the blue checkmarks are like "Oh."
Phase 3: Some people get way over-obsessed and start harassing not only the blue checkmarks but even some of the people who were pointing out issues with the original story in Phase 2. So now even some defenders of DD are like "whoa, stop -- ya'll are crazy."

It's too much! Yes, it's a more nuanced story than the NYT's article original represented. Yes, Celeste Ng seems like a real B at this point. Yes, Dorland got done dirty by Grub Street, Larsen, Kolker, and those damn blue checkmarks. But also.... people need to dial it down. Yelling at people online and treating this as some kind of showdown between a saint and a villain is not the way. Everyone in this story is flawed, including Dorland. There is no clear "winner" here and trying to anoint one was the whole problem with the initial reaction to the story.

I say this as someone who think Larsen was the instigator here, but can relate to aspects of both Larsen's and Dorland's experiences. I've been bullied/ostracized by a group of people who thought they were too good for me. But I've also had someone go after me beyond any reasonable measure simply because they were Big Mad and I know how helpless Larsen probably felt as Dorland was calling all her employers and publications and demanding they destroy Larsen. Like, it's all not great. I still think Larsen to some extent brought this on herself (with the help of the CMs who look worse and worse every day) and should have just written a better story about the same subject but less obviously based on Dorland. But she didn't murder someone! People need to take the intensity down from 11 to like a 4.[/quote]

Aside from a couple clearly unhinged Twitter accounts, I don't think there is a lot of people truly in Phase 3, but I do think a lot of the blue checks who jumped in at Phase 1 are trying very hard to claim that people in your Phase 2 are actually in your Phase 3.[/quote]

This is what made me realize we are in Phase 3:

[twitter]https://twitter.com/dancow/status/1448016066731458568?s=20[/twitter]

Dan Nguyen is one of the people who started Phase 2 and was like "hey hold up guys, the NYT article distorts some stuff here and Dorland is actually not the villain." Like he was very helpful in clarifying these things and defending Dorland. But if people are DMing him about how the CMs are like Nazis (much the way someone in this thread compared SL to Harvey Weinstein, which was way over the line) then, yes, people are taking it too far.[/quote]

No argument there, but that seems much more unusual than the tweets from the blue checks trying to minimize things. There will always be unhinged people (they were there in Phases 1 and 2 also), and the presence of a few of them doesn't take away from the attempts to make people in Phase 2 sound like Phase 3.

All in all I think it is disturbing how much some blue checks have circled and continue to circle the wagons here. Do I think Dorland did everything right? Absolutely not. She seems like a flawed person with real issues. But this isn't a "both sides" thing either. As it turns out (for instance) Kolker has written a lot about sexual harassment in the past. Can we still trust that reporting? Is there a conversation to be had about men depicting women as crazy? But I see on Twitter a sort of "well, they are all crazy so let's stop talking" approach and I think that is just an attempt to stifle conversation.[/quote]

This is exactly my read as well: attempts to make one-off  aberrant responses seem the norm in order to let people who have been as vicious as Ng and Gay say whooooa I’m just trying to raise money for refugees and I’m being harassed; my mom is sick. It’s so dishonest.[/quote]

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