There’s been some discussion going around about the recent AutoAdmit lawsuit that was recently filed, and since I previously read about some of the details on Feministe a few months back, I thought I’d share my own take on it here.

You know, let’s face it: The Internet is not a safe place. There are some whacked out loonies on this box that would give even steely Chuck Norris the creeps (…ok maybe not Chuck Norris, but you get my point). Yet the women involved here (whether they were parties to the suit or not) had an unfortunate tendency to post their real names and upload pictures of themselves online, whether in galleries like Flickr or other settings, and sometimes these photos could be a bit, uhh… alluring.

They certainly had a right to do so if they wanted to, and to say that their actions meant they were automatically “asking for trouble” is plainly sexist to me. The problem though is that their behavior also exhibited a sense of naivete as to the dangers of posting personal information about yourself online, especially if you’re an attractive looking woman. I can understand their grievance here however, that if a guy can post details about himself and not get any flak for it, then the same should hold true for a girl.

But that’s not reality. Hell even I’ve been threatened to be sued, stalked, my server hacked and God only knows what else, and I’m a GUY. That’s partly why I don’t reveal too much about myself and use a pseudonym for blogging.

Even more, nothing superbly made the point as to the dangers of exposure on the Internet, than the recent hoopla over a certain high school pole vaulter who had suddenly become a Google trend and the topic of many rude and coarse discussions, all because of ONE professional photograph that had been taken of her (and no I’m not giving the name or posting a photo, so sod off horndogs). It all underscores the sad reality that the more info you post about yourself online, the more you leave yourself open for tremendous attack (or unwanted attention), no matter what gender you are. So as much as it might pain some proud feminists to do so, please, for your sake, be wise when posting content of a personal nature on the Internet.

Now let’s examine the other side of the equation, how some of the commentators at AutoAdmit treated the female law students in question…

I think here I’ll simply reiterate what I said on Ann Althouse’s blog (edited for clarity):

No offense Ms. Althouse, but you (and other law professors like Reynolds) basically flipped off the female law students in question and dismissed their initial fears out of hand, while completely glossing over the stalking elements of the AutoAdmit threads. If you showed any true sympathy for their plight as you claim, it must have been in passing, because that certainly wasn’t the impression I had when reading your thoughts on the subject.

The threads didn’t merely contain off the wall comments, but disturbing material that encouraged criminal behavior and put the targeted law students in legitimate fear for their safety. You had much to say about the students’ fear of being able to find work as a result of this mess, but to THIS you offer few, if any words of genuine sympathy.

While I personally do think a degree of it is hyperbole, including the issue of whether these threads could dramatically affect their career goals (it may or may not), there are other issues to consider, and even if the cause of action to bring suit lacks merit, it may be because the plaintiffs in question saw no other recourse. They asked that the threads be taken down, and as far as I know the administrators flipped them off (even now). The refusal to remove threads that discussed rape fantasies, listed addresses of the victims, encouraged quasi-paparazzi behavior (and God only knows what else) may be an exercise in free speech in your view, but it also showed a gross and utter lack of common decency. Yet for all this talk about copyright issues and damage to career prospects, etc., little has been said about the more disturbing (and yes violent) elements of the AutoAdmit threads here. Ciolli not only lost his job offer over it (as it appears), but he may have also inadvertently opened the door to the introduction of new case law (presuming this lawsuit actually has wheels) that could potentially assign some degree of culpability and liability to the administrators of Internet message boards for the future, all because this asshat refused to do the right thing in the first place. Insane laws always get started like this too. Because one jerkwad couldn’t be bothered to do the right thing, the rest of us have to pay for it.

In regards to free speech, some may remember the pressing issue of whether simply posting a list of home addresses to abortionist doctors on an anti-abortion website (and nothing else) constituted legitimate free speech. Yet to what purpose would this serve? That it might come up on Jeopardy one night? Compare this to posting the addresses of the female students on AutoAdmit and then making rather umm, rude suggestions on what to do with that information. Is this still protected free speech?

Such issues of free speech is a grave subject not to be taken lightly. But what some of the AutoAdmit members did was incredibly atrocious, and if we can agree on that, what then should have been the proper recourse, if not this lawsuit? From this side of the valley the answers collectively seem to be: just ignore it.

Are you kidding me? If candid snapshots of me were posted on an hostile forum complete with my home address and healthy discussions on what Big Bruno would like to do to me once he gets his hands on me, I’m supposed to IGNORE this? I think I can understand now why some feminists might not like conservatives very much.

It’s also surprising to see law professors who are charged with teaching proper legal analysis to their students, analysis that requires a careful evaluation of ALL sides, would resort to making treatises that would be so obnoxious and embarrassingly one dimensional in tone here.

Law professors. Ugh. The scummiest kind of lawyers indeed.

You know, it does seem to me that some of the blogging law professors’ reaction to the law students’ complaints have been obnoxious to say the least, and it’s unfortunate to see them have an overbearingly overexposed presence in the blogosphere. But then again what other occupation pays you a 6 digit salary with a work week of only 8-10 hours and the possibility of tenure, (which curiously enough leaves you all the time in the world to blog?)

It’s hard to decide what direction I’d like to take this blog in, which might have something to do with the fact that my life currently has no direction either.

The best I can do now is simply blog my thoughts, and see where it goes from there. I enjoy blogging, but my writing can suck hairy monkey’s smelly butt if I don’t keep at it on a regular basis. In the meantime, I’ve been continuing to explore how I can use social networking sites to publicize my blog, so as an experiment, I submitted a few law school related posts of mine to a variety of sites. After watching my traffic for the past 24 hours, I noticed StumbleUpon and Reddit appeared to draw the biggest crowds. In fact I was floored by the amount of traffic I was getting from them. Getting my posts Digged though only resulted in a handful of visits, but then again, Digg only appears to be news, politics and technology oriented, and I simply don’t have much to contribute in those areas right now. My blog is more personally oriented, and my interests usually lie in topics relating to Society, Crime and Punishment, Offbeat News, Dating and Religion/Spirituality. It’s not likely then that I’ll be using Digg often, if at all.

Reddit was awesome though, with a continuous stream of links that I actually found myself interested in reading. One of the things I didn’t like about voting oriented sites like Digg was that the content you found was almost always something everybody on the planet already knew about. Big deal. Personally, I got my fix from reading newsworthy items that for some reason or other never seems to make the news (or even a mention on some of the more popular blogs out there). Maybe it’s just a vanity thing, but I feel better informed this way (not to mention that it provides a more unique depth to my site by blogging about news items not covered elsewhere).

It’s nice to know now that if I blog a particularly good post, there exists a few outlets from which I could legitimately promote the articles I write. Not that I’m going to submit every inane piece of writing I ever put up here mind you (up to and including my latest bathroom experience), but certainly on those occasions where I experience a random moment of clarity and blog something that might actually prove useful (or entertaining) to outside visitors. I can’t get people who game the system though. I heard of one guy using a script for automatically submitting his pages to StumbleUpon and I can only wonder, why? These shameless asshats completely ruin it for the rest of us.

Anyhow, now that I’ve gotten hooked on StumbleUpon and Reddit, I’ve been exploring other social networking sites as well (excluding of course MySpace and its copycat clones). Some seem to revolve around a specific theme that I found little use for (like researching networks tailored for members of academia), while others were merely less popular clones of some of the more prominent networks out there. There were a significant number of bookmarking sites as well, but for now I decided to limit my membership to Yahoo’s My Web and Del.icio.us. I’ve also known about blogging communities like Xanga before, but I’ve only recently discovered that the makers of MovableType had also created a similar community called Vox, which seems at first glance more tightly designed and aesthetically pleasing than Xanga. Xanga had been the place I would have gone to in the event that I could no longer stomach the anguish of maintaining the backend of my own blog, but who knows, Vox might actually prove to be a better choice if it comes to that.

Other sites were unfortunately so cryptic as to their purpose that I’ll have to give them a harder look before deciding whether they’re worth joining or not. And finally, I think it’s become obvious that I don’t much care for the more generally oriented sites like Facebook, Bebo (and that Space that shall not be named). They’re like online ghettos offering little more than juicy tidbits that prospective stalkers would just love to know. No thanks.

I’m kinda hoping that by jumping around all these social networking spots (and settling into the ones I like), it will all in some way help me find my niche, streamline my blogging style and give it some actual direction, so I can at least refrain from merely cluttering it up with the meandering thoughts of my completely useless and boring life.

But until then, I’ll just have to stumble along.