TL;DR (too long, didn’t read): The person that was posting here as LauraMcLaura (for months) was a troll that had hacked her account. The real LauraMcLaura did not make those racist remarks. However, the real LauraMcLaura, and her sister, JennaMcJenna, are still completely bat crap crazy, racially insensitive, insecure turds. It’s always hilarious when 30-year-olds act like 14-year-olds, yes? OH! And be sure to scroll down for the link to JennaMcJenna’s post about this. It’s hilll-arious. And be sure to check out their twitter feeds (here and here) for even more butt-paralyzing wankery.
———-
Ah, blog and Twitter drama. I’ve pretty much escaped it thus far, with a few minor exceptions that barely counted. I mean, if you give your opinion and toss in a few colorful worlds, obviously it’ll get a reaction from someone. Which isn’t a bad thing at all. Reactions are what this is all about.
So a while back I posted about the debate on the masjid by Ground Zero. This was before it was politicized and turned into a major issue. This was back in the halcyon days of (the charade of) religious tolerance, when the majority of Manhattan residents favored the masjid and Islamic center.
My post was simple, and, of course, colorful. I do swear when I write, although I don’t swear that much in person, but at the end, after setting forth my argument, I told anyone that persisted in making racist arguments about it to get f–ked.
What can I say? I get ticked off. And I felt that if, after reading my lengthy post, certain racist thoughts persisted, then there was nothing anyone could say that would change that person’s mind anyway. Hence the colorful remark – because those are only used when there’s absolutely no benefit or purpose to drawing out the discussion any farther.
Susan Cartier Liebel had an interesting response to my post. She posted a long, rambling remark about how she was reading a magazine article about the sexual abuse of minors in the Catholic church. Immediately following the article was a full page ad with a picture of a mostly naked toddler. She argued that the two things on their own were just fine but in combination they created new meaning that was horribly offensive and just plain wrong.
Just like putting a masjid near Ground Zero.
After all, according to the founder of Solo University or whatever the hell it’s called, there’s nothing wrong with masjids. There’s nothing wrong with Ground Zero. But when you put them together, you’ve got something that is horribly offensive and just plain wrong.
Naturally, I took great offense to this. And I immediately figured out that there was no point in arguing with her. She’d persist in the racist and ignorant construct she was clinging to, equating an entire religion with a few madmen (guess that means all Catholics are sexual predators, right?). There was absolutely no point in saying anything else to her. So I basically said that the post stood for itself, and I referred her to the last two lines. Which advised her to go do colorful things to herself.
Susan took offense at this and complained about my tone, which, of course, is the bull crap kind of thing you say when you have nothing else to hang your hat on. If anything, it amused me. I still occasionally harass her on Twitter, because I am a bad person.
Here’s the pertinent part: After Susan posted her reply, Laura replied and agreed with her, reiterating the same ignorant and Islamophobic arguments. I’m not all that sensitive, and I certainly don’t take myself too seriously (um, I squeal about shoes and argyle vests here – of course I don’t take myself all that seriously), but I’ll be honest: seeing such ignorant, disgusting comments teh first time was bad enough. And then to see them repeated just ticked me off even more. So I repeated my earlier suggestion, this time to Laura.
The problem, however, was that apparently it wasn’t the Laura I thought it was. The Laura that responded on this blog, let’s call her TrolLaura, listed her name as Laura, her URL as the real Laura’s blog, and so on. The pertinent details for posting comments on blogs were all there. Because of that, I presumed that TrolLaura, who listed Real!Laura‘s site as her site, was the Real!Laura.
To repeat: apparently, the Laura that posted here with those hideous comments wasn’t @LauraMcLaura, but was attempting to successfully pass herself off as such.
This was quite a while ago. In that time, I’d gotten a couple more horrible comments from TrolLaura. I had a policy from the first day, when I started this blog, that I wouldn’t ever delete anyone’s comment if it wasn’t spam. Even if I didn’t agree with that reader, even if that reader’s comment was ignorant, and even if it was downright hateful. I just didn’t want to. Everyone gets to have his or her own opinion; whether I agree with it or not is something else entirely.
And I stood by that…with the exception of 2 comments that TrolLaura allegedly made. They were so….disgusting and horrible that I honestly couldn’t stomach them after I read them. All comments that are posted to this blog sit in the Pending queue until I get online and get around to approving them. I always approve all of the ones that aren’t spam, asking me to buy Viagra or whatever. But when I saw those two comments on two different occasions, sitting in my Pending queue, both from “Laura,” who was actually apparently TrolLaura, it was just too revolting for me to post. If that makes me a weak-skinned hypocrite, then I am one. I honestly couldn’t fathom what could make anyone say such vomit-inducing, hateful things, and I don’t like recalling those comments.
I’ve heard a lot of really racist stuff in my life. Some of it directed solely at me. It started when I was 5 years old, attending school in one of the wealthiest Boston suburbs with a nationally renowned school district. I was the only minority child.
Yeah, any sensitivity and urge to go crying to Mommy you might have gets worn down to something cold, hard, and resilient when you deal with racist remarks every single day. From your peers. As a goddamn 5 year old. I dealt. And then, as I grew older and found myself in a private Islamic school where everyone was just like me, I repressed.
(And then in the first year of law school, I remembered it all again and just sat in the corner for two days. I think. The memory is kind of fuzzy and colored with the urge to stab.)
So I can handle racist remarks. I have been handling (and repressing) them for quite some time. But the two comments I deleted were honestly the most vile bits of speech I’ve encountered in a long time. Possibly ever. And I will not be repeating them. Ugh.
Ever since then, I despised the person I believed was the Real!LauraMcLaura, who was apparently actually a troll. Just could not stand. If she ever commented again on my blog I left it up but recently gave in to the urge to tell her, yet again, to go screw herself.
I have certain buttons that, when pushed, really set me off. I’ve been working on it.
I snarked off on Twitter about her racist remarks and tagged her in the tweet. This was apparently the first time the real Laura McLaura had heard of this mess and she was very confused.
To that end, I apologize to Laura for leading my readers to believe that she was the one that made those remarks, when it was actually a troll that had fooled me into thinking it was her.
But here’s where things get even more interesting. Or even more high school, depending on your interpretation.
Apparently, my repeatedly (okay, twice) telling Laura to go screw herself constitutes hate speech, at least to Laura McLaura. The REAL Laura McLaura. Yes. My telling her to go screw herself is hate speech.
I said on Twitter that I had nothing to say to that. It was more like there was nothing I could say to that. I have my own issues with hate legislation, but that’s not what I’m getting into.
In response to this, you better believe I’m drawing the white-person-vs-person-of-color line in the sand. You better BELIEVE it.
Because, trust me, white people, for all your bawwing about reverse racism, you do not understand proper hate speech. I doubt you even can. You do not understand what it’s like to be ridiculed, discriminated against, labeled, disparaged, excluded, and any other slew of verbs, on the basis of nothing more than the color of your skin or your religion or the fact that your name sounds just a little too terrorist-y and it makes the nice people uncomfortable.
You think calling someone a bigot for making bigoted remarks is hate speech? You think saying ‘fuck you’ counts as hate speech?
News flash: FUCK YOU.
Perhaps, if you really think that, you ought to be told to get fucked more often. Clearly, you’re in dire need of the shock.
Laura, I’m sorry you were mortified by the racist comments someone posted at you and I’m sorry that someone was posting as you, period, but that’s out of line. This little clarification on our parts doesn’t seem to be having the ‘let’s hold hands and skip through meadows’ effect that this sort of thing usually does, and that’s okay. It’s okay to ‘fix’ one disagreement by creating another on different grounds.
As for the “you should have known it wasn’t me” argument, I’m afraid I should not have. In the words of the great Michael Scott, what part of shorn’t don’t you understand?
We do not know each other. We do not go to school together, we are not in constant contact, we don’t know anything about each other. Twitter and Facebook and our blogs just allow us to fool ourselves into thinking we do. I do not know anything about you, Laura, except that you are a law student, you’re very intense when it comes to studying law, and you’re passionate about women’s rights and committed to the fight against domestic violence.
You don’t know anything about me except that I’m a Muslim, a law student with a near-rabid interest in Labor law, an animal lover, and that I love steaks, root beer, cigars, and training dogs.
It is entirely possible for people with certain values and beliefs – justice, empowerment, etc, like yours – to harbor other beliefs that seem completely contradictory and counter-intuitive.
You would hardly be the first person to have surprised me like this. I have many friends who have absolutely shocked me with their radically divergent beliefs. I have friends that are devout Christians, help pack food for low-income seniors every week, and are as sweet as all get-out, and so loving and nurturing and forgiving…and then I learn that every night, they pray for God to kill Barack Obama.
You would not have been the first person I know with whom I share certain important social and political and moral beliefs except for raging Islamophobia. We’ve come to realize now that it was a troll. My point still stands. You would not have been the first person I know who, like me, was committed to our justice system, flawed as it is, and hoped to enter the fray one day soon, but was an absolute bigot when it came to the rights of people that weren’t like him/her.
So, no, I should not have known better. Because I didn’t base my characterization/perception of you on presumptions. I didn’t presume that just because you were so committed to women’s rights that you were also, for example, a hard core liberal and therefore necessarily in support of Muslims building a masjid near Ground Zero. I try not to make those presumptions about people; I always have, since so many have made such presumptions against me when I was far too young to be able to understand the battle or defend myself.
As for your worries that I deleted your comments in which you defended yourself, I had not and I would not. All comments on this blog are posted pending moderation. When comments are posted, they sit in my little queue until I approve them. Like I’ve said, I have approved all comments but spam and those 2 particularly vitriolic ones. I was on the train when you posted those comments, and because I lack a fancy phone, didn’t have internet access. When I came home, I collapsed on my bed because I’d been up since 4AM, as I usually am during Ramadan. After sleeping for a half hour, it was time to break the fast. After the fast comes prayer. After the prayer comes a quick bite before more prayer (tarawih, exclusive to the month of Ramadan). After that prayer comes exhaustion, and sometimes some time on the computer.
I can hardly be around to check my queue 24/7 and approve comments. Just because I can’t doesn’t mean I’ve deleted them. That assumption irks, even though you had no way of knowing my opinion about not ever deleting comments.
As for the post that Jenna McJenna put up about this, there’s really nothing I can do at this point but laugh. As the author of an email I received titled simply, “Holy fucking Jesus fucking what?” said in a fictitious reply to the Gruesome Twosome (thanks Homer Simpson, and your undying hatred of Patty and Selma): You know the only constant thing in your steady stream of fucked up flame war/turd throwing/corner pouting troll bologna is you!
Couldn’t agree more.
Laura asked that I take down the comments the troll posted. Fair enough. I agreed and sent her back an email saying that the confusion was unfortunate, blah blah blah. Thennn I logged onto my Twitter and saw her and JennaMcJenna’s constant stream of bullshit. And, surprisingly, I somehow misplaced my charitable spirit at that precise moment. Where the devil could it have gone?!
I tweeted both of them a couple replies on Twitter, and sent Laura an email with an additional reply about the troll remarks and Jenna’s post. After reading it, I wanted that post gone, before I stabbed something. (I mean, my stuffed animals, all 4 that I have ever owned, are just wayward tufts of cotton at this point, you guys.)
And then, this morning at 4AM when I awoke to eat before the fast, when my mind is either at its sharpest or its most screw-everything-est, I decided, no. That post should stay up as a testament to JennaMcJenna’s rampant, galloping idiocy. I want to be able to link to it and be like HAHA LOOKIT THIS GUY. Because it really is a great reminder. Of a lot of things.
I have not heard back from Laura McLaura in more than 12 hours. The comments stay up until I do. Your move.
That’s about it. I doubt we’ve actually solved much, but at least we’re a little more clear now as to where we both stand. Which is something. Better to despise each other based on principle rather than a troll-based misunderstanding.
:)
From now on, the only trolls worth my attention. (Are they supposed to be terrifying?!)
