This is an official warning to Pitchguest.
As many readers know that in all of FTB, I have one of the more relaxed comment policies here. Despite many myriad claims to the contrary, the people who have been banned or been warned have gotten such warnings due to breeching EVEN the more generous comment policy that I do have.
I normally do not post such letters in the blog, however knowing that Pitchguest is part of the Slymepit has effectively forced my hand. Should I post this solely via E-Mail, my words can be twisted to fit the narrative that FTB is filled with blood sucking ghosts and howling demons of the wastes.
Everyone gets a chance here, to be kicked off my blog you really have to break the rules and be unrepentant about it. The people who have been banned have all received warnings and failed to change. The only person who was outright banned was clearly unlikely to change his ways and directed a series of personal attacks on me and my family. To be banned here is to be realise
Melody Hensley is an executive director of CFI who’s called other people shit, too, including trying to get a YouTube video deleted by throwing her followers at it.
Judging by the photoshop brigade and their current work you will forgive me for assuming that said video was probably not all that nice and probably breeched various rules of youtube and/or good taste.
She’s called other women “sister punishers” and when it came to emphatise with a blind man at a CFI sponsored convention, when the blind man complained about lack of accomodation for the disabled she said, and I quote, “I know how it’s like be disabled because I once broke my ankle and I couldn’t go upstairs.” Granted the blind man comes off as a whiny diva who seems to expect things on a silver platter, but that still doesn’t excuse Hensley on just how enormously stupid that comment is.
And this means it is acceptable to not only conduct a campaign of harassment but also to pretend to be a charity and utilise the good works of the charity to denigrate and bully another person?
An utterly incompetent woman who’s unable to take criticism in any form, whose psyche is so sensitive she develops PTSD from Twitter. PTSD? Pretty damn serious. You don’t fuck around with claims of PTSD. So if Melody says she has it, we better believe it. However, if she has it, and her ailment originated online of all places – Twitter, specifically – then maybe she should stay away from Twitter? Moreover, soldiers who come back from warzones who’ve developed PTSD get panic attacks from fireworks. (Or as you say, from the various things you say the trigger first came from.) So how is it Melody can safely browse online, on Twitter, on Storify (which she has claimed is a tool for harassing people [like from @Elevatorgate]), respond and sometimes even address her so-called “harassers” and be completely fine?
Did you read my post?
There are soldiers who survived the worst that war could throw at them and who broke down at the sight of something as common place as an abandoned toy. PTSD is not about a single traumatic incident but can be about the slow grind of your mental state.
And you did not read my post. How you fight your monster is upto you. There is no hierarchy of PTSD. My PTSD is not better than hers. We do not engage in debates to rank the validity of trauma.
I am triggered by fireworks because I have come from a warzone. I however have responded to therapy and indeed dealt with my triggers in my own way. I avoid that which I can but I am not averse to setting off fireworks despite not enjoying them to the level of others.
Soldiers who came back from warzones do retreat from public life to avoid their triggers and it isn’t healthy for many. If the trigger for an individual is something banal then there is nothing they can do to change it. If it is something specifically aimed at them such as the people who terrified me when I was a lot younger by bursting balloons then such behaviour is not normal but a special set of circumstances designed by the art of human hand to trigger. Soldiers who fear explosions may not be able to stop Bonfire Night but they can at least expect people to not chuck cherry bombs at their feet while walking through town.
And we call that bullying.
Must I force you to face your fears solely because you are a jerk?
As for sensitive psyche?
I may have PTSD but it is not indicative of a sensitive psyche. It is indicative of experienced trauma and the association of things with the memory of trauma and reasonable anxiety associated with the trauma being expressed on a permanent basis.
I know for a fact that most people cannot do what I do. They may say that they can but there are enough people who have tried and failed or tried and decided to just give up. PTSD does not mean your psyche is weak and I know that I have not only lived through things that are horrible but also still do so.
We do not know anything about Melody. We really do not. You are making a grandiose assumption about her PTSD as an untrained layman. I would not make assumptions that you do as a trained medical person and I am sure that a specialist in the field of psychiatry and indeed traumatic psychology would not make such a clearly layman guess at the aetiology of her PTSD.
You have been defending the actions of someone or a group of people who thought it was acceptable to use the victims of acid attack to harm and harass a person just because they disagreed with her and her friends.
You didn’t care about ASTI. Do you think this is just about the atheist or about them too? You didn’t care about the charity in question, the things the victims of vitriolage have faced or their struggles. Do you even understand why I am irritated by this and why people think it’s bad?
ASTI to the people who made this and by extension you due to your defence of them are not an organisation that does great work but a tool to beat down someone you didn’t care for. You may say that you care for the victims of acid attacks but frankly your actions seem like you only care for them unless you need to win an argument on the Internet then they are just another acceptable tool.
You may think Melody deserves this and that’s bullying at it’s simplest.
But you never really stopped to think whether ASTI deserve it.
I know the anti-FTB lot will yell “FREE SPEECH” and other things but here is the long and short of it. You may personally have not engaged in bullying but you are justifying the bullying of someone else by others who you affiliate with. The utilisation of ASTI and your ignoring of that problem is probably because you have no real defence for that thing.
This is an official warning. Knock it off. You are harming a lot of people.