If you stand up and be counted, you will experience attack, probably mainly in the form of people smearing you as mad. That just happens to virtually everybody that takes a stand for justice with any kind of entrenched status quo. Don't believe me? Who on earth are you following?
Notwithstanding the efforts of those grappling with libel law reform to protect freedom of speech, and those working on the mental health bill who are trying to reduce the stigma of mental health, it still seems that the slur of "you're mentally ill" does the rounds quite nicely even among the professional classes, among "skeptics", and even, as I've had to document recently, among people with high professional connections in the field of mental health!
In fact, as the whistle blowers continually show, the proliferation of accusations of mental ill health, combined with a total vacuum of evidence to support such "opinions" can actually be seen as a good indication of exactly how threatening any particular point of view is to the status quo, whatever power elite is involved.
Clearly, if they had any actual evidence that they could use to cast you in a bad light, they'd be using it to bury you properly, not making facile smears hoping to stigmatise you out of existence.
Still, there's no doubt that being smeared in this way can be very damaging and recent debacles on Twitter between @mrsNickyClarke and @cookdandbombd, (which I still can't get to the bottom of as I can't see that there was any disagreement in the basic premise that bullying people is undesirable), the addition of the Twitmob makes it all the more unpleasant. This example, should you have a look at it on Twitter, does illustrate how polarised things can become, and can easily result in the undemocratic exclusion of those with legitimate interests in the same field, with a consequent loss of representation to all those more vulnerable people who actually need it.
But at least these two people have thousands of followers to make comforting noises. What about if you haven't? In my case, I was already being blocked, and flamed, when I arrived on Twitter as a active participant last year, and I've built up from there, with it all still going on.
Yesterday for example, Alicia Hamberg wrote on another one of the blogs that has blocked us from replying, and what she wrote was defamatory regarding the pernicious allegation of a local woman that the police themselves are actively smearing the mental health of myself and my husband right in our local community. I've covered this fully before so will pick up here where we politely requested that she evidence these slurs or remove them.
Here's the letter we wrote to Ms Kingston.
"Dear Ms Kingston
It has come to our attention that you have made public, derogatory and defamatory statements regarding our mental health online.
Following your complaint to the police about us, during which you allege that a police officer himself made defamatory remarks about our mental health in the course of his duty, you then yourself posted those comments onto the internet along with further comments stating your own agreement with them.
Both of these actions are defamation.
We now require you to retract those statements, and correct the defamation you have posted unless you can provide medical evidence to back up your comments and opinions about our mental health.
This is to inform you that if you do not remove this material from the internet within 21 days, we will begin defamation proceedings against you."
The simple fact of the matter is that we would never even have known about the complaint to the police (nearly two years ago) at all if Charlie Kingston hadn't recently thought it would be awfully clever of her to go and boast about it on Alicia's blog.
We didn't know about the complaint before because the police didn't follow it up, which just shows how pathetic the whole thing was.
Nevertheless, Dan Dugan of PLANS was prepared to publish this from Alicia yesterday on his site where, having objected to the last mobbing, we are banned from defending ourselves or correcting false information.
"If you still think what Angel and Steve are doing has anything to do with
that Steiner school and what happened (or not) there, I was contacted by a
parent who got to know them *after* the Steiner school. This parent has now
been attacked and threatened for comments on my blog and asked me to
removed them urgently because s/he can't stand it, given that s/he lives in
NZ and has a family."
So basically she is describing a situation where someone we don't really know any more, has published defamatory comments about our mental health that she alleges came from a police officer in the course of his duty, but on receipt of our letter asking for evidence, she's been forced to remove them, because she hasn't got a bean to back up any smear whatsoever.
But Alicia's rage at any law protecting us from such smears, frames our understandable objection to thuggery as the "attack" and makes it sound as if we are somehow continually harrassing the pernicious complainant, whereas in fact we've sent her one polite letter (above), and haven't even clapped eyes on her for nearly two years.
Oh dear, how infuriating that a polite request for evidence exposed the allegations as a load of unsubstantiable rubbish!
If you can overcome your comfirmation bias for a moment and ask yourself, would you object to someone alleging that the police were smearing your mental health in your own neighbourhood where you live with your children? Oh but the poor smearer, she "can't stand it" because, wait for it "she lives in NZ" (go figure), and, sniff, she has a family.....
Surely, if someone is prepared to boast about how they have tried to stir things up for us locally with the police, they shouldn't really be surprised when we politely object.
So far from her assertion that our demands are beyond what any human being could meet, it seems clear that Alicia just doesn't want us to be accorded ordinary human respect. She's livid that she's had to remove some unsubstantiated defamatory smears about us. It's just not fair that she can't just duff people up viciously because she doesn't like them. Why can't she just put the boot in whenever she wants - it's outrageous!!!.
And that takes us back to the original point I made at the top, because why on earth do these supposed critics want to be able to smear and defame people who cannot defend themselves in the first place? Why should they need to do that, if they had any actual evidence to back up their point of view?
They've already had to put disclaimers out admitting that their attacks on us are all purely speculative, i.e. they're a load of spiteful rubbish cooked up just to make themselves feel big and strong and with the intention of causing damage and distress and to make us shut up and go away. Their enthusiastically expressed contempt for Human Rights for taking us seriously, doesn't really show them in a brilliant light either, but in the absence of any substance whatsoever, it seems it will have to do.
The reality is that their behaviour is no different to any other power base that wants to keep the status quo, that moves through my timeline every day.
And they're using exactly the same tactics that all the other bullying establishments use.
Ban us, block us, smear us, and maybe we'll stop. The hope that's being expressed by this anti-democratic group is that these heavy-handed reactionary tactics will somehow prevent us from being democratic communicators who are becoming increasingly skilled at presenting our documented facts, complicated interrelationships, and conflicting points of view in the increasingly dominant platform of video. Instead of taking advantage of that, they just want to destroy it.
But the reality is of course, that although 'the treatment' is extremely unpleasant, these jokers will end up having done us a favour. They've exposed themselves as being prepared to viciously mob parents coming out of Steiner, with nothing to substantiate it except their own xenophobic speculation using their followers as an unwitting cyber-mob.
Well we all get better at what we practise, and by banning us from replying in the places they mob and defame us, they have actually forced us to increase both our documentary and publishing skill-set and our output, making us do more and more of what we're getting better at, simply to keep up with documenting all their mobbing behaviour.
What the whistle blowers have taught me, is that, all this is "normal" when you threaten a status quo; whistle blowers are always "mad", and often, if not usually get it from both sides.
And as hard as 'establishments' like to dish this stuff out, the bullying tactics they are using will only work if the target succumbs to being victimised by behaving like a victim and running away, which is not something that these highly principled types usually do, knowing that it would be a shark fest before they started, although most do express surprise at the level of viciousness they have to endure.
But in the end, anti-democratic behaviour 'belongs to' the people doing it. It's their own values that they're selling down the river, not ours.
Dan on the PLANS site has yet again broken his own 'ad hominem' rule that is right on the front page of his site, and in this case allowing personal and defamatory attacks on people who aren't even allowed to respond. Well it does say it only applies to subscribers, but when it happened when we did subscribe as well, so clearly we're exceptional in many ways. But in true 'bystanding fashion', nobody else will address this behaviour publicly, mind you, with such hysteria and venom from Alicia, it must require guts.
Going back to the point I made at the top, here's a classic example of the "we've got nothing on them, they're a threat to our clique, let's just say they're mental" school of political thought.
The absurdity of Steiner 'critics' wishing that parents taking a school through due process would fail, praising the school for doing all the things that they elsewhere criticise Steiner ed for doing, smearing the mental health of people who the Human Rights Commission are supporting in the first ever HR mediation in Steiner (big clue), hasn't dawned on these 'intellectuals' yet, but that's ok.
It never usually does until it's too late, and the world can see the anti-democratic tactics the status quo uses to hang on to power at all costs, at which point....well it's all going on everywhere isn't it, so why should a comfy, cosy power-base in the tiny niche of Steiner criticism, be any different?
Wanting power over others to maintain your comfortable status quo isn't confined to politics, health, education, class, or even a type of people and we've stumbled, quite by accident, on an amazing example of such a defensive reactionary clique, just like any other.
So, having observed that this is just another example of the same old anti-democractic power-grabbery going on everywhere, we'll continue to take a step back and to document the evidence, and should any of these people, only one of whom I've ever actually had as much as a conversation with, decide to communicate politely, sanely and democratically, none of them are blocked, and I'm always ready. :-)
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