Wednesday, February 3, 2010

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.
The Face of Harvey Bilk, Lord of the Flies At Shillbuzz
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).

Harvey's Bilking Machine
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:

Shillbuzz Smileynoia
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."


SAFETY ONLY UNDER LOYALTY

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:

Safety for Women Unless They Disagree With Amy
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.
Cyber-stalking is a felony

16 comments:

  1. Siskind is a fool, a tool, and a thoroughly contemptible woman -- just like her idol, Sarah Moosehunter. What's gonna be funny is the next time she goes on Daily Beast and More and we can paste in those screen caps of her saying "Right on!" to cyberstalking and harassing women. Stay in your kitty den, Amy. I guaran-damn-tee that we're not going to back down from challenging your public lies and hypocrisy.

    The Green Lantern (why not?)

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  2. Looks like the post over at Harvey Bilk's House o' Hate 'n' Harassment has been scrubbed. Screen caps are wunnerful things, aren't they? They can live on forever and ever and ever ...

    No One As Nasty

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  3. Lantern, or as I like to think of you, SuperAwesomeWoman, screen caps are marvelously versatile; they go with any decor, can be dressed up or down, and cannot be wiped clean with a damp cloth.

    However, Amy's perfidy is still there: http://hillbuzz.org/2010/01/29/an-open-letter-to-anyone-attacked-by-trolls-and-puma-hunters/#comment-118037

    Shillbuzz publishes more open letters than Readers' Digest publishes lame jokes. Pretty good for an outfit that is the lamest of jokes itself.

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  4. Ah, looks like Gimme's paste of that link got cut off over at the MORE thread, where she made an excellent point that we, as commenters, are obliged to abide by the terms of service on webs site and not abuse access to confidential information. One hopes that HuffPo, More, and Daily Beast will be sufficiently squicked out by Siskind's Encyclopedia Brownshirt tactics to stop giving her a public forum, since she demonstrably cannot be trusted not to abuse that position for felonious purposes.

    Lantern

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  5. The shillbuzzers have focused their wonderful top notch sluething skills like a laser beam onto Senator Barbera Boxer, in my home state, trying to out all of her finacial supporters, directing their minions to shame them into not donating using harrasment as a tool! That might work in Chicago and Massachusets but it aint going to work here, drive your white windowless van back to boystown where you belong Hatvey Bilk cause your old ass is not wanted here! We love Boxer and Feinstein and that aint gonna change.

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  6. Anonymous, luckily, their "sleuthing" skills are not so much laser-like as appliance-bulbous. Unfortunately, they'll happily publish the names and numbers of completely uninvolved individuals whose names are homonyms for some of their targets; the former president of my co-op, for instance, who has never heard of Shillbuzz, Harvey Bilk, and doesn't even use a computer.

    I don't think boystown is especially keen on Shillbuzz; hence their ability to sit home and crank out so much wilted word-salad.

    I hope Boxer votors send the buzzers away with a flea in their ear.

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  7. Wonder how Siskind will like it when hundreds of journalists -- many of them actual committed feminists -- on my professional listserv are made aware of her pro-cyberstalking stance. (If you're reading this -- Hi Amy!)

    Raise the Green Lantern, the Paddles of Life Are in Full Force!

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  8. Green Lantern, Siskind messed with the wrong superhero when she messed with one with a professional listserv.

    Please give my best to your sister Green Arrow, btw.

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  9. Or maybe Amy should learn something about journalism. Or feminism. Or ... well, about anything other than being an "inadequate white female" who is too psychologically maladjusted to handle criticism by parrying with superior facts and logic, and prefers to spin all opposition to her narcissistic "voice for all women" horse-hockey nonsense as "enemies" who must be outed and vanquished.

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  10. Oops, my secret is out!!!

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  11. Yeah, Lantern, and it was so closely held, too. Well, while this place was being swarmed I thought it prudent to protect those mindless insects for their own good; had any of them decided to buzz you in person, the *SWAT* would have been heard from here to Argentina, and cleaning up the goo would have been quite a superhero's chore.

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  12. Well, in case the Shillbuzzers are that dense, I guess they should know that the professional journalists I know include many who would find a story about a political blog that is trying to engage in cyberstalking and making threats to other bloggers worth checking into, especially with a Chicago angle.

    And Now We're All Green

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  13. Though it is kinda hilarious that you have an entire BLOG entry devoted to her cowardly neo-fascist antics, and yet I'm the one who is banned by the Fightin' Feminists at More.com. (Or, more likely, by the bubble-headed Carrie Bradshaw wannabe intern in the understaffed online marketing department who quailed in her knockoff Manolos at Siskind's shrieks of "Will no one rid me of this troublesome commenter!?!?")

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  14. Kerry, what can I tell you? When the blog was a ghost blog with tumbleweeds and cobwebs, I was a demon socialist Axelrod agent. Then, I actually reveal the snake beneath the cheery smile of a semi-national spokesmodel for specious nonsense, and---nothing! YOU get the axe!

    She'll whack me eventually

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  15. Golly, if only Amy Siskind had the same power to move the electorate, or the suits at CBS, or ... anybody, really. I suppose Amy is addicted to Fail at this point, which explains her embarrassing girl-crush on Sarah "Always be Sucking" Palin, Ex-Governor McQuitterson.

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    ReplyDelete