As I write this, only 12 readers have posted comments on Soj’s amazing blog, Flogging the Simian, in response to her announcement that she is hanging up her keyboard.
I know everyone’s attention is focused on hurricanes and marches, but I’m still shocked at the muted response.
(Continued)
On her web site, here, Soj says she’s shutting down FTS and retiring from most other blogging activity.
The truth is that someone decided to ruin all the fun for all of us and butt their nose into my private business. I’ve always had my two lives separated – my offline world and my online one. That’s the way I wanted it and that’s the way I set it up and I’ve got my own reasons for it. And someone decided to ruin all the fun and be a smug ass about it and go to incredibly great lengths to find out where I “live” online. And they managed to do it, and now they’re all snide about it.
This happened on Tuesday I think, and I’ve been sitting here all week trying to figure out what to do about it. I love writing, I really do – it’s not even about the money or the “job” of it, it’s part of who I am. But I can’t do it if I can’t write in peace. Everyone else in my offline world knows this and respects this. But it just takes one bad apple to spoil the barrel I guess, right?
So what does this mean? It means it’s over. It means it’s finished. Kaput. FTS and everything I’ve worked on for the past two years is gone. I’ve spent all week trying to figure out a way I can do keep this place but I don’t see how I can do it.
I’m not sure what this means, except that we’re losing a very important voice. Anyone with ideas about how we can help her out?
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So effectively immediately, this blog is no more. And you won’t find me writing on the frontpage anywhere else either. I’ve written emails to them and explained it as best as I could because it’s not their fault. Not at all.
I asked people in my offline life to stay out of my online world and everyone did it except for one person who supposedly “cares about me” and everything else. Well fuck that.
Someone who does care about me says I should just move somewhere else, pick a new name and start over. Well no thanks, because who knows when it’ll just get compromised again. So I think I’ll pass. So no more blogging, although this physical site will stay open and I’ll add a search bar or something because you might want to read the archives for whatever reason.
As I read her decision, Soj decided to stay in Romania and made a choice for her private life. A sacrifice too great for herself and the community who loves her and her writing.
I do hope in time we’ll meet her again.
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no word there yet?
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I’ve alerted many people to this. Soj thinks that the problem will go away if she stops blogging? Does that mean she was somehow threatened if she continues to speak out?
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Yes, she wrote to me to say that she could not continue to post anymore but did not give me any details.
It’s very sad news.
And Fran, it makes you our supreme news gatherer now!
by Jerome a Paris on Sun Sep 25th, 2005 at 02:00:43 AM PDT
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This is extremely sad news. Soj has made a significant contribution to the world of progressive blogging.
I’m not sure that there’s much chance of persuading or cajoling her into continuing: she has made it clear that there are various things in her past in the US that she needs to leave behind. It sounded like there is a genuine personal security angle to wanting to remain anonymous.
So Soj, we wish that you didn’t feel that you have to do this, but we respect your decision, which is clearly not taken lightly.
in solidarity, pax!
I am so sorry to see you go. You have blazed a trail that many others will follow.
Never fear – the banner you had to lay down will be picked up and carried forward. I hope you will find another outlet for your amazing writing talent.
We will all miss you, hope we meet again, peace and love to you –
I am very,very,sorry to hear that.Having been caught up in other things,I hadn’t been to FTS for awhile and hubbo lost all my bookmarks-grrr- so I missed that announcement. Sounds like a -err- personal vendetta of some sort.That is unfortunate,but also part of net existence.If she says enough is enough,well then,enough is enough.Still sorry,though! Soj’s series on Nick Berg got me started reading and looking for her stories.
What a huge loss this is to the blogging world. One can only hope she picks another screen name and finds her voice once again. This is very sad news.
unsolicited advice for her, and anyone else for whom it might be applicable.
Keep online and offline activities completely separate and unconnectible.
Do not use your real name online, or any other information that could identify you.
Do not tell anyone in your offline life your online identity, or your online activities, and do not tell anyone in your online life anything about your offline activities.
The internet is like a public place, but on steroids. You would not go to your mall with your phone number and address printed on your tshirt. Why? Because while most shoppers at your mall are fine upstanding people, if there is just one person there with bad intentions, he can see your tshirt just as clearly as all the nice people.
Reporters without Borders has even made a guide to help people maintain their online privacy, you can get it from their website, I think.
So if a new blogger appears, and you think it may be soj, enjoy the thought privately, do not post it, and do not email that blogger and beg to be taken into confidence. Just enjoy what people write. That is who they are, not their asl.
Oops… too late.
I have heard that certain front pagers that behave like jackels … thye have access to IP addresses and from that they can find your name…from there where you work and live… it is those who have that kind of access are the ones who are abusing trust… and then they become paranoid of their ture identities being found out.
At the very least, they can find out where you are geographically and who you get your Internet service from. Everything else is fairly easy to trace down from there, especially with Google.
This is Yet Another Reason to not continue posting on sites where you’ve been given reason to distrust the administrators or operators. Boo has been absolutely fabulous about this – even when people disagree vehemently with him, he treats them respectfully and doesn’t abuse his position to get back at them. Other sites where the operators ban people at the first sign of dissent – such as DailyKos or Free Republic – one must be careful about.
There are ways to anonymize yourself such that even your IP address isn’t useful – go through a blind proxy run by someone you trust, for example – but that’s not always an option.
Although it probably isn’t the case for many of us, my own online and offline lives overlap to a great extent. I’m much more likely to be harassed or threatened because of my “real world” identity than because of this one; it has happened from time to time, and most likely will happen again. But I still maintain anonymity online out of concern for others in my offline life, and most especially for my coworkers who didn’t sign up for this gig.
Trouble can come fast and seemingly out of nowhere, so thanks, DT.
Duct’s comment is the reason I don’t participate in any
“tell us about you” diaries. It is naive to think that
only good people are noting the personal information revealed.
Google is archiving every post. It is also the reason I post on DKos with another ID, to fool Google.
That said, I believe I have already given too much information about where I live. Ooops.
mysteriously yours,
please forgive me, but I havent gotten the entire meaning of all of this. I have read her sometimes here, but I can not believe that someone has let someone else do them in. I do not know her reasonings for all of this, but I certainly wish her the best and hope that she decides to come here to us and talk sometime. I always enjoyed hearing what she had to say. What, if I may ask, is so covert about her blogging?
“What, if I may ask, is so covert about her blogging?”
Is that is part of what she wants to keep secret.
This is very bad news, I always enjoyed Soj’s posts. Hope she managed to find another outlet for her work that maintains the offline anonymity she craves.
I don’t know what soj is going through but it must be pretty awful for her to silence her voice here in the internet community. A terrible loss for her as she has said before this is a passion of hers.
And for me personally as someone who read in particular her daily briefings at Eurotrib an incredible loss to my understanding and learning about the world. I still have one of her last diaries here in my saves..a fascinating diary about the ‘Creel Commission’.
I hope she is well and safe.
i didn’t coment on FTS but did send soj an email of thanks for all her blogging (i’m going to miss those PDB’s) and good wishes for whatever she is doing next.
what a shame
I did not comment on her farewell message, either, being unsure whether she would be accessing her blog due to her own problems.
Ductape F’s advice is excellent, I think. I hope she does come back, in whatever form, with any name at all. And though we will not know her and should not ask some new poster if we are reminded of soj, that’s the best gift we can give soj unless she tells us otherwise.
My hope is that this breach of privacy has not put her in danger otherwise. And I hope that if she needs help from this community, that she is able to ask, and receive.
A sad day.
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An excellent diary by Kid Oakland and futher comments by BooMan.
We’ve seen, in the last weeks, some bad news for our corner of the blogs.
Soj is folding “Flogging the Simian” after having her identity probed by a nosy colleague…Arthur Silber folded “the Light of Reason” because he could not make more than $200 a month on it and received so little appreciation from the “A-list” blogs…Marisacat was banned from dailykos…which for those of you weren’t there in the early days would be like Booman announcing, one year from now, that he had banned Susanhu…
Since secrecy and a private life seems to drive so many bloggers, we need to be able to navigate that situation. You see, the privacy that so many online writers crave is also the source of so much of the bad behaviour others exhibit. It’s easier to “throw bombs” when you are wearing a mask.
Further, I think we need to understand that writers like Arthur Silber….major voices who worked diligently to provide content for their readers…need to be nurtured in this medium in some way.
We need our Billmon’s and our Digby’s…and our Soj’s and Marisacat’s. We also need our “big wigs” and our “A listers”…to show more appreciation of the collective efforts of the many….both readers and fellow bloggers.
Simply put: I know, speaking as ‘kid oakland’, that my work would dry up in a vacuum. I need readers and fellow writers to do what I do. No blogger should pretend that this isn’t true That any of us, somehow, sits above the scrum. We don’t. None of us does. That is the beauty of the blogs. Those are its Socratic roots. The readers are the most important part of blogging. We forget this at our peril. It is the first rule of online writing.
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Oui, thanks so much for these links.
How many blogs can one person read and support?
Geez, I’m getting tired of being preached to.
for taking the time to link to the LSF piece I wrote on the banning. A month after it happened and only done due to harrassment. Being harrassed I mean.
You try to “out” people and slander them as something they are not, you get banned from DailyKos, then proceed to slander the person you outed because you are angry,
And now YOU claim to be the victim of harassment?
I find it most ironic that you have the nerve to post in a diary about “privacy” when all you do is obsessively seek to “out” people based on paranoid delusions.
Oy!
ELSEWHERE!!
We don’t play this here.
Who the fuck are you?
I’ll fucking speak my mind to defend myself whenver and wherever I want briannanabanana.
Defend yourself from what?
I was mocking your name brianna – bananna!!
Trouble with my typing – ROTFLMAO!
you have every right to defend yourself.
I am not even up on all this Marisacat stuff and I’m not taking sides at all.
But please try to keep as much of this crap off this site as possible. I don’t need third-hand flamewars here.
And that goes for anyone else that wants to bring it here too. Including Marisacat.
I didn’t bring anything here.
If you allow other posters to link to flame war diaries (see above), and their ilk (Marisacat) to praise them for doing so, then you need to accept that those who are in the middle will address it.
And you tell me I have the right to defend myself, but I should keep this crap off your site?
Huh?
Personally, I find the fact that you are telling me to keep this stuff off your site laughable, when I didn’t even bring it here.
( By teh way, wheres’s the note to Briannaabanana and Marisacat and the guy that linked to the LSF diary and started all this here? Yeah, I thought so.)
I also find it ironic how you bring and start your own flame wars at Daily kos by transferring diaries from here to there and cursing people out and bitching and moaning about the way Dailykos is run, and then you get in the middle of this when I’m simply defending myself?
I guess you take the trash talk to Daily kos but like to keep your own hose clean and pristine?
Whatever!
I never even come here since I realized a long time ago it was just marketed as home base for disgruntled Kossacks.
So, if you wanna ban me, be my guest 🙂
Duh?
What are you ten?
you — why are you so damned defensive about someone asking you if you are a staffer for Shumer?
Wouldn’t somebody without a serious fucking problem just be able to say “no” and move on? I mean where is the slander? What is your fucking problem?
Your whole characterization shows you don’t know what the fuck you are talking about.
My fucking problem is Marisacat’s obsession with the banning and bringing me into it as if I had someting to do with it. I could give a shit if she got banned. I had nothing to fucking do with it. I was actually shocked when she was banned. But she continually posted about it on LSF with statements and innuendos about me and my role and fabrications about past statements I’ve made – over and over and over (and still lying that I was a staffer – as if she has a fucking clue).
I simply sent her an e-mail to set the record straight, but when it got posted on LSF my friend actually became incensed and since he is a snarky writer who tears down people for a living, I gave him my blessing to enter the fray on my behalf (personally it wasn’t worth my time, but I knew it would amuse him and others). And, I might say, he did a very good (and hysterical) job of it.
So whenever this topic comes up you’ll hear from my side. No matter where the fuck it is.
Actually, I read the threads ondKos and on LSF, so I know exactly what I am talking about — if you are NOT a staffer for Shumer, then how has she “outed” you in any way? You say you are a phramacist, so fine. Who cares one way or another?
Well your last comment once again shows you aren’t paying attention.
First of all, I never said she “outed” me. So, obviously you didn’t read well enough. From what I hear, and have been told, ONE of the reasons she was banned because “asking” someone if they work as a paid staffer or information like that is a tactic used to intimidate and discredit posters and, therefore, not allowed. I guess for people who haven’t been around awhile, a question like that from Marisacat could be intimidating and I do see their point.
Personally, I’ve seen Marisacat flying around on her broomstick and bouncing around Daily Kos like a fart in a jar for the last year and a half, so I knew what I was dealing with. I just laughed off her question about being a staffer and posted my reply with my real profession (not that I cared to really share it, or it was any of her fucking business, but I did nonetheless) in order to go on record with the facts.
So, Brianna banana, pay closer attention next time and you won’t have so many misguided questions.
if it has anything to do with this site here. I remember that she was associated with it. There was some kerfuffle about it at this blog (Booman), right at the time of the DKos exodus.
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Blogging is Like Frying a Small Fish ◊ by soj
Soj’s Romania :: on EuroTrib :: and consumption.
I just wanted to say that the picture under my name in the header there is one I myself took (I was surprised to see it!) from the lovely city of Braşov.
If you’re ever in Romania, you should definitely visit and the coffee shop I took the picture from is also quite nice as well (with a gigantic aquarium – quite lovely).
Pax
Night and day you can find me Flogging the Simian
by soj on Mon Jun 13th, 2005 at 02:41:30 AM PDT
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Yes, go read it if you haven’t already.