Amy Siskind of the New Agenda: Safety for Women (unless they disagree with ME!)

Welcome to day eight, I believe it is, of Snarkopolitan's unexpected revival in the face of an insane little man's decision to urge his barking mad readers to play bloodhound and "out" me, doing their best to publish my real name and actual address on the web. This although I have never done anything to him, most especially never "outed" him, or anybody.

That being the case, I have decided, at great personal risk, to publish his picture, that his physiognomy be available for study to other innocent people.

Proprietor of Shillbuzz with Exhibit A
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It seems he is having a continual party over there at his place in the form of a witchhunt/blegathon (that's a blog begging for money, for those of you who are not aware of all internet--Hi Mom!--traditions).


What is the shortest day in the year? The day between Harvey Bilk's last fundraiser and his next one.
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I got my own graphic and gory tabloid front-page treatment full of fervid, ludicrous speculation that would have made Jonathan Swift pinch himself: was I funded directly by the DNC? Who ran me? How was I connected to an assortment of other hapless innocents? How were they connected to everything? Shillbuzz even ran a chart of the web of lack of connectedness that seemed to have been drawn by the Underpants Gnomes from South Park; at the heart, where the connectivity should go, it is just "?????????" It looks like it was drawn by somebody who had no idea that when you connect the dots, you're supposed to end up with a picture. Because it was:


A taste of crazy cocktail courtesy Shillbuzz's Moonbat Mixologist
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Since, in their eagerness to hunt me, these ninnies have posted names of people in my apartment complex (and married me to one of them, because there are only 6000 people in my complex, and they knew the names of two!),I am not comfortable linking to great rattling nutjob Harvey Bilk's Emporium of McCarthyism and Dubious Fashion Criticism, Shillbuzz. If you desire to see this lunacy for yourself, you can just put poor old neglected Snarkopolitan into a search engine. What comes up is entirely astonishing considering:

1. that this blog was moribund, stagnant, que pasa nada mas, in the weeds, bereft of life, inert, and, what really distinguished it from Shillbuzz, I wasn't posting on it. At all. Since MARCH of last year.



2. if this blog got fourteen hits back in the day, then it was a good day. My server would probably have gone down at twenty hits; it's Blogger's basic, and you may have noticed that even commenting is a heroic act merely because Blogger can't handle your request the first time, usually. You have to ask everything twice, while it stands there like a sulky teenager, blinking at you and wishing it were somewhere else.



3. it was really just for myself, trying out this and that; a comic strip, a painting, some commentary of an obvious, amateurish sort, because I was just a private person. Not that the content was private, but it wasn't meant to be scrutinized through a prism of no-holds-barred political machination and dirty tricks; I could have been writing about tomatoes or grandchildren, but I didn't have tomatoes or grandchildren.
   

In other words, this is not a DNC/ACORN/SOCIALIST tentacle reaching into the blogosphere, and I had no interest (and still don't) in the private life of one of the planet's most tiresome manufacturers of acid reflux-flavored "snark," Harvey Bilk, Lord of the Flies at Shillbuzz. In fact, the private life of which he complained he had been robbed when he was exposed by somebody unconnected with me, was about as private as a ticker-tape parade, in that he was on TV and in the paper in his capacity as a political operative, yammering away about defeating Obama, a position hardly likely to win many friends in Chicago.

The Shillbuzzers took to their assignment of routing out all the information they could regarding me like an ex-husband takes to the tree outside his ex-wife's window with his Loompanics manual. Some of them obviously were aching to exercise talents that had gone wanting since their spouses got that order of protection. They went through my blog, pausing to use my father's last illness to try to pinpoint my age, and sniffed at the drawings in my Flickr account. "Cartoonist," one said. "Couthless," said another.

Nevertheless, the Get Polly page ran out of steam, and was pushed, thankfully, off Shillbuzz's front page, almost by design it would seem; stories that had run before, like the very popular Class V Crass article (another gloriously idiotic pool of Buzzbile aimed, as usual, at Michelle Obama, where she is labeled an angry affirmative action Sasquatch and poor drunken fifties housewife Mamie Eisenhower is held up as the model of deportment).

In fact, there was a certain verticality to the flurry of posts thrown up by Shillbuzz; all that was missing was a picture of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. So with one last half-hearted swipe at advertising giant Saatchi and Saatchi, the entire screaming mimi about the conspiracy against Harvey Bilk was over faster than you can say "Cyber-stalking is a Fourth-Class Felony."

So the hysteria had died down, my good name had not lately been coupled with the affectionate designation "b***h," and I began going whole hours together without checking the Get Polly page to see whether they had done rifling through my father's last illness (scroll down)in their compassionate Shillbuzz way.

And then along came Amy. Siskind, that is, the erstwhile feminist Spokeswoman for the Voice of All Women whether they know it or like it or not, the New Fourth-Wave Woman's Group, the New Agenda. Their mission statement includes "Safety" for women, which is also part of their somewhat tortured acronym, S.O.U.L. Not that there is anything objectionable about a women's group focusing on Safety, Opportunity, Unity and Leadership, but a visit to the blog posts shoehorned into those four categories will often yield disappointing results: under "Unity," today, for instance, the subheading was, "It's very complicated." "You bet it is!" I said, and clicked, only to find that the article was a review in a rather querulous tone about a Meryl Streep movie called, "It's complicated." It had not the slightest thing to do with Unity.

Unity, is, in fact, the New Agenda's main platform. They are a "non-partisan" woman's group, with the express intention of getting women elected, no matter what their beliefs: just elect'em, and let constituents sort it out later, or what I call, "tissues before issues."

Toward a more perfect union: Shillbuzzers and TNA

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I have had plenty of tangles with Amy Siskind, the founder of the New Agenda, over her unwavering support of Sarah Palin, someone I consider no better than McCarthy in a beehive, although fortunately she turns out not to have his work ethic. That Siskind is a pawprintless PUMA with something of a national platform, doesn't help matters.

We have clashed on threads at Huffingtonpost, where she or someone very favorable to her is able to wipe some but not all negative comments, and we've clashed at the Daily Beast and More magazine, (sorry, can't link to specific comments, but the whole disaster is fun) where she has no power to delete, and where her coterie of regulars can't save her from general puzzlement if not downright scorn. About the only place outside of her own blog that's safe for Amy is the blog No Quarter, home of smear-peddler Larry Johnson, inventor, merchandiser, and non-producer of the infamous Whitey tape. There she cross-posts her articles to much more acclaim than they receive at any of her big media outlets.

Siskind is, or is trying to become, head of a nationally known womens' organisation. She is in print and on television, visible, nameable. She is a public figure. When she decided to seek this leadership role, she couldn't very well do it anonymously. A large amount of negative commentary has been aimed at her, sometimes by me. This is what comes with taking a public position: criticism.

I am not a public figure, and I blog anonymously. I do this because I'm not seeking public office, because I used to write about where I live, and I disguised the people I wrote about too. And because though the internet is full of good people in my experience mostly, even those whose politics I don't like, there are a few unhinged loons out there who don't know when to leave it onscreen. One such is the nasty piece of work who set his swarm of underoccupied $hillbuzzers on me and others of my friends and acquaintances,purely on the strength of that cluster of ???????'s on that truly wacked map of the tangles in Harvey's addled brain.

Although we have political differences, the one issue on which it ought to be possible to get women to come together is safety, which, as I have emphasized, is the first initial in the New Agenda (or NAG, as I like to call them) acronym of empowerment. Women's safety. Notice, I'm kind of hitting the word SAFETY fairly often here, you notice that?

Good. Because, just as the Get Polly post was sinking into the blessed second page of oblivion at Harvey's One Stop All You Can Hate Shack, a friend of mine went back to one of the first Shillbuzz spectaculars, and on that thread, he found this comment from New Agenda Founder Amy Siskind, which I have, as per custom, dressed up to relieve the ghastly expanse of stupidity and meanness:


That, in case it's hard to read, is the great womens' safety advocate offering to send data mined from her site and those for which she writes to a cyberstalker. She applies the term "gang of thugs" to women who don't support her point of view, and tell her about it in no uncertain terms, online. Using words. That appear before her on a flat screen. For this, she will send our IP addresses, I assume, to Harvey.

For to disagree with Amy Siskind fully merits being called a "b***h" by strangers, having people combing through the phone book looking for your real-life 3D address, and throwing nonsense terms like "defamatory" around, when Siskind has merely been confronted with the faultiness of her own reasoning.

My IP address couldn't possibly be more specific than what has been rooted up by the $hillbuzzers already, and IP addresses are easily changed. So Amy Siskind's attempt to be Quisling For A Day is for nought. But the underhandedness, the sense of entitlement (speaking against me is punishable by law!), the vengefulness, and the sheer foolishness (along with a goodly part of the right-O-sphere, she did not do even the slightest verifying before committing herself online to an unethical act) should be instructive for anyone who thinks Siskind could be a credible leader in the womens' movement.