So last night, as the internet explosion over Justine Sacco was petering out, I got a series of tweets from Meghan Murphy.
Ironically, in light of what follows, I can’t quote them since she’s (I assume unrelatedly) locked her account, but the gist went something like this:
I was a hypocrite, she suggested — that word I remember clearly — because the previous night I had demanded that she strike several quotes from a controversial blogpost she’d written earlier in the week while saying nothing about others’ unethical use of quotes from her.
Here’s the piece in question, if you missed it. In it, Murphy had argued that “Twitter is a horrible place for feminism … a place where intellectual laziness is encouraged, oversimplification is mandatory, posturing is de rigueur, and bullying is rewarded … a place hateful people are drawn towards to gleefully spread their hate, mostly without repercussion.”
Further down in the piece, Murphy had quoted from an essay by Ngọc Loan Trần in which Trần had articulated “calling in” as an alternative to calling people out for their bad behavior. Calling out, Murphy suggested, was an “unproductive and a fear-based response.”
Trần’s original piece, though, had offered “calling in” as an alternative to calling out only in situations in which the two parties’ “common ground strong enough to carry us through how we have enacted violence on each other.” In a disclaimer at the end, Trần reiterated that the essay was “specifically about us calling in people who we want to be in community with, people who we have reason to trust or with whom we have common ground,” not about how we
