Pocket

This Time it's Embarrassing. Requires Hate Returns to her Old Tricks

Let's all laugh at Edouard Briereallard, who is either a sockpuppet for SF's most infamous troll, "Requires Hate", or a meatpuppet follower of hers. Coming across his great screed denouncing Laura Mixon's expose of Ms Hate I called him out as a liar for the things he was claiming about my encounters with Requires Hate.

Mr Briereallard edited my post, as he admits himself in the comments on his page. Just stop and consider the dishonesty of that. The only way he can sink lower is to post fake comments in my name.

So let's assume that all the comments on Mr Briereallard's page are edited or deleted for 'reality control'. We can assume that everything he's written is a pack of lies. He openly admits that he's assuming things about me in his long screed.

One thing is certainly a lie: Briereallard says that Requires Hate only threatened me after I chose to interact with her. My first interaction with her was her, out of the blue, calling for me to be beheaded. At least he doesn't deny that she did call for my murder online, which I would point out to Mr Briereallard is a crime in my country, and in his. He claims to be Canadian, so he should know that 'uttering threats' is a crime under Canadian law:

264.1 (1) Every one commits an offence who, in any manner, knowingly utters, conveys or causes any person to receive a threat
(a) to cause death or bodily harm to any person;
(b) to burn, destroy or damage real or personal property; or
(c) to kill, poison or injure an animal or bird that is the property of any person.

Then he accuses me of stalking requires hate. Apparently because I read her fiction and read posts about her online, and look at her twitter feed when she's talking about me to others (which she's done recently) I'm stalking her. Well then by his definition, she was stalking me, even after I blocked her (she's not blocked me that I know of). I am also stalking the likes of John N Grey, (in that I read just about everything he puts out and so should you), Michael Lewis (author of The Big Short and other books that you should read), Mark Kermode, the EFF, the BBC, wikipedia, a bunch of my own friends on titter, and on occasion Mary Shelley and Sun Tzu, none of whom have taken out court orders against me. Oh, and I'm also stalking myself when I vanity-search my own name. I guess by Mr Bee's definition if requires_hate was to post something up on a billboard, and I read it, I'd be stalking her. When I buy and read the economist magazine, I'm presumably stalking its staff. I've never, that I know of, met requires hate in person, and have had no direct interaction with with her since she called for me to be murdered on twitter years ago. I have contacted one of her new followers to warn them about the person they're dealing with, but it's futile, there's an endless stream of useful idiots out there who are happy to sail their own reputations onto Ms Hate's rocks.

If someone doesn't want the public reading their output, then the best thing for them to do is not publish, hmm? For my case, once someone has called for me to be murdered I will watch out for them, and no self-righteous idiot's in a position to tell me I shouldn't, especially when he's doing the same to me and I have not threatened his life. Lots of people are watching her these days, including I suspect the police.

By his own definition, Mr Bee (I can't keep writing his long name) is stalking me too. He admits he spends his time pouring over the internet researching me. Stop stalking me, Mr Bee! It's not that I'm particularly concerned by this, it's that I hate to see you make yourself look ridiculous.

In a long post in which he criticizes Laura J Mixon's expose of Requires Hate's behavior he says:

"As stated below, outside of RHs criticism of many James White Award stories that year, RH did not interact with Paget until he engaged with her on twitter in May 2012, and RH only mentioned him on her blog when he later wrote a blog post about the twitter conversation."

This is a lie. The original 'Behead this person now' tweet was my first interaction with requires_hate. The tweet did not directly relate to my James White story, but rather to a blogpost I made about attending Eastercon, specifically about a panel I attended and a question I asked. There's at least one fairly major person in science fiction who might remember this, as they commented on the event at the time. Mr Bee is a liar.

Mr Brierellard claims the following:

# From the title of the review post, it seems pretty clear that RH was criticising racism in Paget' s work.

For the record, she made issue of the fact that a character was sat on a batik cushion, which Mr Briereallard knows if he's read the posts, and her followers accused me of a racist portrayal of a character who was actually white, or at least the same race as the main protagonist. This was clearly stated in the story, where Tara, and the Shamaness, are described as being so alike that they could be sisters (though admittedly the accompanying artwork to the story also seemed to get this wrong, which I don't blame anyone for). They also accused me of writing a character (the Shamaness) who was speaking in 'ebonics', i.e. speaking in a stereotypically african-american manner, even though the story clearly stated that the character was speaking in likeness to the 'lurkers' who are broken A.I.s who express themselves by cutting snippets of speech out of the internet and stringing them back into sentences. To be fair, the last time I had to defend myself against these allegations, the people advancing them accepted my argument for my innocence. But here I am having to defend myself again.

You can see me defending myself in the comments here: http://mjstarling.tumblr.com/post/28321952473/finished-reading-interzone-241-tta-press

It's unusual for any evidence to be left with which anyone can defend themselves, requires_hate and her followers have been very assiduous about deleting everything they can. But then the person in question, M J Starling, says they are not a requires_hate follower, and I thank them for leaving this little bit of evidence online for everyone to see.

The story in question was published in interzone 241. I will look into having it published online somewhere so that everyone can see that the allegations made against me with regard to this story, are false.

Mr Bee goes on to make a number of further ridiculous allegations, including that I was 'concern-trolling' requires_hate. He's right that I was concerned at least, I had experienced by my first ever death-threat, from someone who's twitter icon at the time depicted a white person, possibly an infant, stabbed in the head and bleeding. But I don't think my talking to her was an actual crime, was it, Mr Bee, whereas her call for my head to be separated from my body, was.

He then attacks someone else:

"To be quite honest, Worrad's behaviour in all of this is worse than all of what RH has actually done, and I have yet to see a report about him."

HA HA HA HA HA. What a joke. Calling for someone's murder, mutilation, or disfigurement, all of which RH did and Mr Bee admits she did, is an actual crime. Making a mocking video about them, or being blocked by them on twitter, or talking to someone else about them, isn't. As for the hilarious claim that James Worrad tried to sic Vox Day onto Ms Hate, Mr Bee seems not to understand that Requires Hate was at that time an anonymous troll, and no-one knew who she was. What's Vox Day going to do to her, exactly, call her names? Given that Mr Day's real-world identity is out in the open, and that Ms Hate was far more vicious than him, I'd be mostly afraid for Mr Day. Saying that James was trying to 'set Vox Day' onto her in some kind of pitfight even though she was essentially a fictional persona that someone's playing online is like reporting someone to the police for dissing Santa Claus.

"I file this case as both an example of RH being criticised for writing reviews, and of RH possibly using objectionable language that could be interpreted as a threat by a recipient acting to the best of his abilities."

No, Mr Bee, you shall file this case as an online death threat, one of many, that has been witnessed and recorded by the SF community, and we shall file you as a liar, an abuse-enabler and a joke. You are not helping Ms Hate by constantly reminding us that she committed real crimes prosecutable under actual law.

But you know what, I don't think I should be wasting my time talking to the monkey when I can talk to the organ-grinder. I would assume Mr Bee was a sock puppet on the basis that no one could be this stupid, but we know that requires_hate has a number of new followers who evidently are. But whether sock-puppet or meat-puppet, the real person behind Mr Bee is Ms Hate herself, let me address myself to her.

Requires, darling, (you don't mind if I call you 'requires', do you? Only I feel that since you called for my murder we should be on first name terms) what are you doing to yourself? This is beneath you. Sock-puppets, accusations of racism, bitching about people to your acolytes, running around trying to rewrite history, it's so dull, so old-fashioned. Don't you have any new ideas? It's sad to see you reduced to this. You were a phenomenon once, even Vox Day thought you were awesome. People were afraid of you, genuinely afraid in the way that people shouldn't have to suffer. But this is lame. This is like seeing Cthuhlu sitting on a street corner wearing a placard that says "Will dance for food". People are laughing at you now. This isn't going to work, too many people saw what you did for themselves, you can't take back all the things you said. You can't un-threaten people or un-abuse them, you can't just delete all the posts and claim it's all lies. There's too many witnesses and too many screencaps.

And no one's going to stop talking about Requires Hate, and all the things she did. She was a phenomenon, she's an historic artifact now, and people won't stop discussing her any more than they'll stop talking about Ancient Egypt. You can't scare us or bully us into silence. Putting the old scary-mask back on, or a new one, won't work. We've all seen the person behind the curtain, we all know it's you. And getting someone else to wear the mask won't work either.

What you should have done, is spent some time in the wilderness, maybe found religion or something, and then come back and said you'd seen the light. It would've worked, people are suckers for a prodigal daughter. But I suspect you've blown that chance now, at least as Bee. You blew it when you attacked James Worrad in that article you wrote, after having said you were sorry and were going to be better now.

Here's what you should do now:

1. Spin up a new identity. I don't understand why you're so attached to Bee, everyone knows it's another fake. You churn out more fake people than an out-of-control android factory, so why not just create a new one, and throw off the sins of the past? Not everyone gets the chance to start again, and again, and again, so use it. Everyone will quickly click to the fact it's you, but if you don't give you a reason to bring it up, they probably won't, they'll play along so long as you behave yourself.

2. Write. Whatever else can be said about you, I'll tell you this: Whoever's writing the stories can write. Being honest, it's not my thing, but then I don't rate most of what's being produced in SF these days. But put your energies into writing instead of these ridiculous online machinations, and in the long run you'll be better rewarded. Oh, but ease back on the genocide and white slavery, at least for a time. That shit's starting to worry people: they're speculating about what might be behind it, given your history. If it was anyone else they likely wouldn't bat an eyelid, but you're someone with a reputation to live down.

3. Try not to eat your fellow writers. I know this is hard for you. In all seriousness: I KNOW THIS IS HARD FOR YOU. But it always backfires and it's not healthy, normal behavior. I know it might seem like normal behavior among the SF crowd, or on twitter, but that's because SF writerdom is as full of sociopaths as raisins in a fruitcake. It's not normal and it might indicate that you have a condition: would it hurt to talk to someone about it? God knows you can afford it, and it could be that there's a dangerous physical problem behind your behavior: something like that was happening with someone close to me once, and in the end it killed them. Whether it's purely psychological or whether there's a physical component it would be a weight off your mind to get yourself checked out. At the very least you need help with anger management. At the end of the day if you can't keep your claws sheathed then you'll get kicked straight back into the wilderness and eventually people will stop giving you second chances. If you carry on like this then one way or another you'll ruin your own life.

4. Consider who you mix with. Are your online associates really helping you, or are they just spectators at an ongoing carwreck? Some are at least loyal, I'll give them that. But do you want things to carry on as they have been? Maybe you need a new social circle.

5. Profit: You can write, and everyone agreed that Bee was charming, so you can spin up a new identity that can write, and who is charming. After that all you need is patience.

You're going to resist this, of course, you're going to keep trying what you know. But one day soon you'll run out of steam, and you'll realize it's just not going to work. When that day comes, try my suggestions. Do you really want to carry on like this? It's not going anywhere good for you and I don't think it's making you happy, and it's even getting somewhat degrading. A better life awaits you if you choose to pull yourself out of the mire, but to have a better life you have to choose to be a better person.