On mocking

Given the all-too-common experience of women on the Internet to daring to say anything controversial at all (death threats at the mild end), I suspect an awful lot simply wouldn't dare to mock, no matter how assertive they were in real life -- even if the people being mocked were too nice to do that sort of thing, *and* all the onlookers were too nice, the threads are archived, so the bottom-feeders who trawl the Internet looking for that sort of thing could find it *years* later... and then the death and rape threats would start again. It is true that coding mockery would seem unlikely to produce the sort of tsunami of threats that comments seen by the bottom-feeders as 'uppity' in other spheres do, but until a year ago I'd have said the same about posts on knitting blogs (and I'd have been wrong).

I'd be inclined to say that no adversarial scheme can work for women on the Internet as long as people like that are around -- this is the fault of the bottom-feeders and their vile opinions, but nobody likes getting threats like that. I suspect only a legal framework robust enough that people like that no longer feel that they need fear no consequences would suffice to stop them -- but we *have* a legal framework banning the sending of death and rape threats: the problem currently seems to be that the police can't do anything useful when faced with thousands of them from all over the world. And in the absence of a single world government and police system I'm not sure how to fix this.

Personally, I don't care. I've been on the receiving end of mocking, and while it's not always pretty, it certainly motivated me quite a lot.