Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

...while walking along the river. For every Nazi the French killed, the Nazis would kill ten French citizens. So how many would the Nazis kill, my grandmother thought, for a severed leg? She and her friends huffed the boot and its fleshy occupant back into the river, and spent the next month waiting to hear how many of them would be shot in the street.

Compared to my grandmother’s problems, there’s nothing I experience online that can compare.... My grandmother’s stories gave me a great deal of perspective.... You have to keep speaking, and fighting for a better future. I’ve had a lot of comments the last few days, after my article about the Hugo wank was published in The Atlantic, about how ‘brave’ I am. The post has generated, I’m told, nearly 1,700 comments (no, I don’t read the comments). I had the very amusing experience of muting about 45 people over the ensuing few days. But when people call me ‘brave’... though I know they mean well, it rankles.... My ‘bravery’ was saying yes when someone asked me to write an article, changing all my social media passwords in preparation for the deluge, spending a few minutes muting people on Twitter, and not reading the comments or ensuing commentary on other blogs.

That’s it.

In truth, my weekend was pretty pleasant. I got a ton of yard work done, spent quality time with my spouse, and worked on THE STARS ARE LEGION. On Friday, I even completed a new book proposal. Busy bees are busy....

Maybe it’s just that I came of age in the feminist blogosphere, where any time you waded into a discussion, you’d end up marking ‘rape threat’ on your bingo card about four comments in. Or maybe it’s that I’ve had three actual people I know with the emotion and means to kill me actually threaten to kill me, so some dudes wanking at the mute wall in my general direction just doesn’t compare.... When you ask me if I’m afraid of the internet, and the self-entitled wanker of the day gaming awards, or the five hundred people who yell at me on Twitter, or some internet personality having a meltdown in my general direction, I think of my grandmother throwing that severed leg back into the river, and I say, ‘You’re kidding, right?’...

This is not yet Nazi-occupied France, my friends. Are there ramifications for speaking up? Sure. Muting people can get tedious. But you’re still more likely to be hit by a bus than shivved by a sobbing internet mob.