Angela Benedetti

Rachel D., who is disabled after a back injury, had an absolutely hideous experience flying on United recently. This wasn’t just one person being careless, or even an encounter with one jerk. This is multiple bad experiences, over and over, on a single flight, involving employees from two airports as well as flight crew; it looks like evidence of a company-wide issue to me. This is inexcusable, especially the attitude of the customer service supervisor toward the end, who said right out that she wouldn’t apologize for anything and didn’t feel at all sorry for what’d happened to Rachel. Wow, I’ll bet she aced Customer Service 101.

Angie

…until there actually is liberty and justice for all. That’s what ten-year-old Will Phillips says, and he’s acting on it, declining to stand for the Pledge at school because his family has gay friends who aren’t being treated equally under the law — who are being deprived of the right to marry, or to adopt children.

Predictably, Will is being harassed for his stance, first by a substitute teacher and (of course) by some of the more nasty and ignorant students at his school. (Although to be fair, this is only elementary school and I’d bet cookies that the students who are taunting and harassing him are just reflecting the views and behavior of their parents, so the shame is on them for not setting a better example.)

Will’s parents support him, though, and got the school administration to admit that he’s not required to stand for the Pledge, that he does have the right to sit through it.

And what about the substitute teacher who tried to bully him into participating, even threatening to get his mother and grandmother (whom she knew, although obviously not very well) on his case? Since he hadn’t broken any rules in refusing to stand for the Pledge, Will’s mother asked when they could expect an apology from that teacher. Well, the principal didn’t see that as “necessary.” Of course not. [eyeroll]

Will has an excellent sense of right and wrong, though, and I applaud his stand, and also his parents for supporting him in doing what’s right. Read more about Will and the Pledge incident in this Arkansas Times article, and more commentary by John Brummett, a columnist with the Arkansas News. If nothing else, Mr. Brummett’s suggested alternate Pledge is entertaining, and unfortunately apt.

Thanks to Indigene on The Phade for the original link.

Angie

Yeah, that’s pretty inflamatory. I’m feeling pretty damn inflamed right now, so I think that’s appropriate.

In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones, a twenty-year-old employee of KBR — at the time a subsidiary of Halliburton, and hey look, they’re hiring — was working in Iraq. Her co-workers drugged her, gang-raped her, abused her so badly her breasts were disfigured permanently, then locked her in a shipping container for twenty-four hours without food or water. She was told by her employer that if she left Iraq to get medical attention, she’d be fired.

According to an ABC News post:

Jones says, she convinced a sympathetic guard to loan her a cell phone so she could call her father in Texas.

“I said, ‘Dad, I’ve been raped. I don’t know what to do. I’m in this container, and I’m not able to leave,’” she said. Her father called their congressman, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas.

“We contacted the State Department first,” Poe told ABCNews.com, “and told them of the urgency of rescuing an American citizen” — from her American employer.

Poe says his office contacted the State Department, which quickly dispatched agents from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad to Jones’ camp, where they rescued her from the container.

Also:

Jones told ABCNews.com that an examination by Army doctors showed she had been raped “both vaginally and anally,” but that the rape kit disappeared after it was handed over to KBR security officers.

Wow, what a shocking misfortune.

Her assailants were never brought to trial, either, neither criminally nor civilly. Why? Because Ms. Jones’s employment contract with KBR states that a victim of sexual assault surrenders the right to prosecute their rapists; all such matters must be taken before a private arbitrator, where there’s no transcript kept and the proceedings are not public record.

And this is by no means an isolated incident. See the links below for more cases, more women who’ve been raped and brutalized and threatened while working abroad for defense contractors, coming forward.

So essentially, if you work for one of these companies overseas, your co-workers can gang rape you, leaving you permanently injured, the company you work for can threaten you with the loss of your job if you try to go home for medical help, their security people will “lose” key evidence of the crime against you, and your only recourse is private arbitration. Your assailants will never see prison time, and there’ll be no official record of what happened.

Or rather, this was the case until last Tuesday. According to a story in MinnPost.com:

In one of the most public tests of his political skills since taking office in July, Sen. Al Franken pushed through an amendment Tuesday that would withhold defense contracts from companies like Halliburton if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court.

So essentially, if a company tries to create an atmosphere encouraging rape and assault among their employees by preventing victims from seeking prosecution, they’re cut off from defense contracts. That’s kind of minimal, but since the only thing these people understand is money, it might just work. Note also that the author of the amendment has only been on the job for three months — way to go, Senator Franken!

But now we get to the part which is relevant to the title of this post. One would think that every person with two brain cells to rub together for mutual warmth would be in favor of this change, but unfortunately that’s not the case. Thirty senators — all Republican, coincidentally I’m sure — voted against the amendment. Is your senator among them? If so, please write or call and tell them what you think of how they voted.

There’s a complete list of how everyone voted on the U.S. Senate web site. This is official, a dot-gov web site; it’s not some unofficial nose-count by a partisan press. Is your senator on the “Nay” list?

Also, props to the ten Republican senators who voted for the amendment:

Bennett (R-UT), Collins (R-ME), Grassley (R-IA), Hatch (R-UT), Hutchison (R-TX), LeMieux (R-FL), Lugar (R-IN), Murkowski (R-AK), Snowe (R-ME), and Voinovich (R-OH).

It’s pretty sad that voting in favor of punishing gang-rape is something worth particular praise, but still, I applaud these senators for voting for what’s right, rather than going along with the Boys-Will-Be-Boys Club.

Thanks to a friend of mine on LJ for giving me a heads-up to this.

More sources:

Celluloid Blonde
Firedog Lake — Ms. Jones says eleven more women have contacted her about similar incidents
Huffington Post
The Minnesota Independent
The Nation — and another KBR rape case.
Politico
Think Progress — this one has an embedded video of Sen. Franken’s speech.
Think Progress — this one talks about three other women who’ve come forward

Angie

LJ User Gwendolynflight, over in the Merlin fandom, decided that she didn’t want to do the work to learn to write and refine her technique and develop her own style. She wanted hugs and pats and e-cookies for her wonderful writing right now. So instead of writing a novel of her own, she grabbed a copy of Jordan Castillo Price’s first PsyCops book, Among the Living, did a bit of editing to change the names and the setting and such, and posted it to her journal as a Merlin fanfic. And of course, she got a lot of applause and e-cookies for it, because it’s a very good story. (Jordan isn’t a particular friend of mine, I don’t even have her journal friended, but we both publish with Torquere Press and I have Among the Living — it’s a good read.)

Of course someone figured out what was going on — ’cause there are fanfic readers who also read original m/m books, who knew?! — and after some incredibly lame excuse-making, the plagiarist took the story down. But check out this screencap and read through the comments. :/

I love the part where Gwendolynflight assures a commenter that “it is completely and fully beta’d.” Umm, right, because the real writer polished it, then sent it to a publisher where a line editor and a proofreader went over it. [eyeroll]

And then lower down where she actually admits that the story is a “fusion” with Price’s PsyCops series. o_O This is where I get the idea that she’s actually just that stupid, rather than a bold-faced thief. Not that being a moron is an excuse, but you know, it’s something different to smack her for.

Then a few comments later where she’s talking to a reader about how dark the story is, and mentions that Book Two is particularly dark, and she’s glad that isn’t turning the reader off. So she fully intended to go on doing this, through the whole series? Once she’d ripped off all the available novels, since she seems to think she’s doing absolutely nothing wrong, I wonder whether she’d have had the balls to, like, write to Jordan and nudge her about hurrying up on the next installment.

Finally, about 2/3 of the way down, LJ user Throwawayreview calls it what it is and clues poor Gwendolynflight that this isn’t a “fusion,” it’s not fanfic, it’s plagiarism. And of course Ms. Gwen has all sorts of excuses, because plagiarism is “a social concept” and not absolute. And later on she says that “plagiarism isn’t an inherent moral wrong – it’s an issue firmly bound up in economic and patriarchal issues.” Umm, right. It’s a weapon of the Patriarchy. So her stealing the actual words of another woman writer and posting them as her own and accepting praise and credit for writing the words another woman actually wrote, is actually Ms. Gwen sticking it to the Patriarchy. Wow, good to know. [eyeroll]

Note that Jordan has no problem with fanfic. She said, in her reaction to this situation:

I’d also like to say that fanfic is an entirely different thing. If a reader said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if Victor and Jacob got a flat tire…?” and wrote that story, using my characters and storyverse but their own plot and words, that would be fanfic. I’ve written half a million words of fanfic; it’s how I learned to write, for good or ill. This re-tooling of Among the Living was not fanfic.

So this isn’t a case of one of the uptight pro writers trying to stomp on the poor fanficcers. Actual fanfic would’ve been fine. Copying a whole freaking novel (with plans for the second one) and swapping out the names and places and a few police procedure details, but keeping the other ninety-some percent of the original author’s verbage is not fanfic, in any way, shape or form. Gwendolynflight is one of the people who gives all fanfic writers a bad name. She’s one of the people whose actions convince the New York publishers and the Hollywood producers, and their writers and their lawyers, that we’re all a bunch of pathetic, talentless thieves who are too lame to write our own stories and get credit and praise and e-cookies for our own work, so we steal from them and pretend their work is ours and claim credit for the wonderful writing we didn’t do. That’s what they think of all of us, and one of the reasons they think that is because there are people who do it in exactly that way. Because that’s pretty much what’s going on with Gwendolynflight.

She’s gone into hiding now — her journal’s been completely locked down, although it hasn’t been deleted. I’m kind of disappointed by that, because it means she might slink back out from under her rock at some point. I’m sure she has her own little group of friends who are all rallying ’round her now, giving her pets and hugs and feeding her chocolate and assuring her that she did Absolutely Nothing At All Wrong, and that all those evil mean people are just being so meeeeeean to her, isn’t it just terrible?! Those bitches!!

But you know, this isn’t the sort of person fanfic fandom needs, any fandom. And if she were eventually to pick up her dolls and flounce away and find a new hobby, I’d be just as happy.

Angie, who’s in no mood to give this idiot any slack whatsoever

ETA: LJ User Pecos pointed this out, from Gwendolynflight’s LJ profile:

This journal is primarily for whinging about school and/or teaching, and for posting the fanfic and fanvids which i occasionally, sometimes, rarely produce. You know, every once in a while.

This woman is a teacher. O_O

Someone named Richard Ridyard has been swiping lines from all over — including from Stephen King — and has just been exposed big-time by Angel Zapata. Thanks to Writtenwyrdd for the link.

One thing which makes this case notable is that, unlike every single other plagiarism case I’ve looked at in the last couple of years, there is no one sticking up for Mr. Ridyard here. Every other plagiarist who’s been shoved into the limelight has had dozens or hundreds of fans who’ve rallied round with their indignation and counter-attacks to let the accusers know just how horrible and mean they’re being. There’s nothing like that here, and I have to say it’s refreshing. Flash writers seem to be all on the same page when it comes to the evils of plagiarism and the need to find it, shine a light on it and stamp it out. Kudos to the flash folks.

It’s also nice to see so many flash editors and publishers saying straight out that they’re deleting Mr. Ridyard’s work from their sites and blacklisting him. (The only publisher which tried to deny the charge was Valentine Publications, where Mr. Ridyard is an editor.) After all the denials of interest or responsibility, and attempts to brush off accusations and queries, and to ignore clear evidence by the larger publishers in earlier cases, it’s good to see editors and publishers willing to take action and state in public that they’re doing so. Kudos to them too.

Angie