Heavens to Mergatroyd: More great stuff from James Burke

Why are those Tumblr accounts saying nasty things about me?

If you did a Google search on my name to find this website, you might have seen in the search results a few Tumblr accounts make nasty claims about me. The two most prominent Tumblr accounts are by a woman who refers to herself as "mentally ill" - the "Mad Gastronomer" and Mikki Kendall who was briefly an Internet celebrity before Michelle Goldberg (now at the NYTimes) wrote an article in The Nation that mentioned many people considered Kendall a bully.

Back in 2009 I argued with some friends of theirs on Facebook about whether or not John Lennon and Yoko Ono were racists. I said no they were not. So Kendall and "Mad Gastronomer" and the gang decided it would be fun to smear me as a racist for daring to disagree with them. And thanks to the relative uniqueness of my name, and because Tumblr is a standards-free media organization, they can get away with it.

In fact, I've been running a website, Pinkerite, devoted to criticizing systemic racism and race pseudoscience for the past five years. I've always been opposed to racism. But it doesn't matter- Tumblr allows this kind of insane character assassination, which has now gone on for over a decade.

The lesson here - don't believe everything you read on the Internet, especially from vindictive extremist weirdos.

Monday, September 19, 2016

More great stuff from James Burke