What’s your opinion on the topics addressed in this fictitious article?

Stalkers are 100% bad and there should be potent laws in place to stop them in their tracks.
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But when the titles of stalkers and predators get dubbed on guys that are jerks we begin to see more gray than black. There are plenty of example of people, men and women that use this charge capriciously for purposes of revenge or just a power play. Sure the guy in the article is a jerk but does the author slide down a slippery slope talking about him being a predator or a stalker?

I think the author chose the wrong words for the piece. She should have said he’s “targeting” specific types of women, instead of “stalking”. Don’t people sue over that type of thing these days? I also think the guy is a douchebag.

I think the writer is an angry douche-bag.

Seriously, “Pretty, smart educated female writers in their late 30’s to early 50’s with children. This information pretty much confirmed my suspicions.” Who doesn’t find women of that description attractive?

It seems like a jealous rant from a guy who has been friend zoned.

I don’t really understand. Is this a pretend journal article or is it just fiction? As a journal article, it fails. There is no research, no sourcing, nothing but editorial comment. Quite simply, it is not journalism.

As fiction, it is also lacking. It shows no real understanding of the characters. There is no apparent protagonist.

What this is really is polemic, and as polemic, well, it preaches to the choir. If you are singing in that choir, I’m sure this seems interesting in some way. Maybe it points to a problem that the person thinks exists, but is happy to find others with the same problem. I don’t know if there are any such people out there. Personally, I find it most like fantasy than any other form of fiction. This is not something I believe exists in the real world. If it did exist, I doubt that many people would even consider it a problem. Certainly not a crime. In my opinion, a person who would consider this a crime is a kind of person who does not accept personal responsibility for her life. She blames everything on someone else.

But it’s all about markets. Find someone who is willing to buy it, and you’ve made a sale. If you can sell your writing, they you’re a writer, in my book. In the interests of fair disclosure, I am not a writer and therefore my view on this is based purely on my status as a reader. Which is to say, nothing I have to say about this matters. But you knew that anyway.

I completely agree. I have an additional question though, is there more going on here? At first glance this all just seems silly and contrived and a foolish exaggeration. Are there broader motives going on here?
Step back a little and look at some peculiarities that are occurring throughout the author’s introduction, the narrative and the entire dialog of reviews.
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First let me note what I found peculiar, the author is almost doing too much talking so to speak.
This is fiction, this is fiction, and this is fiction
Then in the introductions and throughout all the review everyone talks about someone specific. What a huge contradiction and make the statements of it being fiction look terribly disingenuous.
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….. Ever hear this proverb:
……………Like a maniac shooting
……………flaming arrows of death
……………is one who deceives their neighbor
……………and says, “I was only joking!”
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Next the author is again talking too much about how the conclusions, general consensus and pulse of the gathered crowd of reviewers have become something onto itself.
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In the book The 48 laws of power it is explained that what must be considered is the result of someone’s action and not there stated intent.
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Then of course there is the slippery slope she takes the reader down, but that’s obvious.
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So what am suggesting?
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Let’s jump back to the sharpest part of this narrative, the accusations of this man being a “stalker”. She also uses the word predator but I think I can make my point breaking down the description of a stalker:
Going to Wikipedia we find an extended definition and explanation. In the middle of all this we find this paragraph.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberstalking
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“By anonymous online mobs
Web 2.0 technologies have enabled online groups of anonymous people to self-organize to target individuals with online defamation, threats of violence and technology-based attacks. These include publishing lies and doctored photographs, threats of rape and other violence, posting sensitive personal information about victims, e-mailing damaging statements about victims to their employers, and manipulating search engines to make damaging material about the victim more prominent. Victims are often women and minorities.[citation needed] They frequently respond by adopting pseudonyms or going offline entirely.[16] A notable example of online mob harassment was the experience of American software developer and blogger Kathy Sierra. In 2007, a group of anonymous individuals attacked Sierra, threatening her with rape and strangulation, publishing her home address and Social Security number, and posting doctored photographs of her. Frightened, Sierra cancelled her speaking engagements and shut down her blog, writing “I will never feel the same. I will never be the same.”[17]
Experts attribute the destructive nature of anonymous online mobs to group dynamics, saying that groups with homogeneous views tend to become more extreme as members reinforce each other’s beliefs, they fail to see themselves as individuals, so they lose a sense of personal responsibility for their destructive acts, they dehumanize their victims, which makes them more willing to behave destructively, and they become more aggressive when they believe they are supported by authority figures. Internet service providers and website owners are sometimes blamed for not speaking out against this type of harassment.[18]”
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Let me add a statement about the atmosphere of this online community.
– Members are creating and hiding behind multiple profiles.
– There are signs of relational aggression occurring (mean girl/boy) activity
– I can quote someone as saying I’m going to create a fake profile and teach that person a lesson
– Then of course there are all the “jump on the band wagon responses
– The person she was eluding to has become notorious, she “mistakenly” wasn’t cyptic enough when she eluded to him in the original version, but changed it, not quite fast enough before it was known who it was.
– This man has left the community in same.
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This all just stands in contrast to the standards fluther maintains and excellent attention to fair moderators. This is a fine example of how bad it gets without those standards and moderator oversight.
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This leaves the final three questions:
What’s the verdict that this was intended and deliberate?
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Has the victims advocate become a Stalker?
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Finally, if some of her followers pursue vindication, surrounding similar behavior in this community, is she culpable?

There is just something that is so off about this entire story (and indeed, this question) that I really just want to keep my distance. There seem to be all kinds of hidden agendas and games playing going on. The rules are hard to figure out without more context and investment of time. Indeed, I suspect it’s really just another version of high school, and the rules are that we need drama. Doesn’t matter what the drama is about, so long as there is drama and opportunities for building in-groups and identifying and ostracizing outsiders. It’s the kind of thing that really bored people do.

There is no stalker, and no victims advocate. You might call them that, and they might think of themselves that way, but it doesn’t make it so. It’s just a minor drama of people aligning themselves with each other or against each other.

There also is no verdict. I don’t believe anything was deliberate except the desire to stir up drama. I have no problem with people stirring up drama to entertain themselves. But in this case, it is a particularly insipid drama and it’s hard to drum up an enthusiasm about it. It’s not something I ever would have paid attention to except that you invited me to.

By the way, why did you send me this question?

Finally, if anyone pursues vindication, then they are an idiot and deserve whatever happens to them. It’s like pursuing vindication for an ant walking across a leaf. Like I keep saying, this is insignificant drama and the only reason anyone would pursue “vindication” would be if they were so god damn fucking bored out of their minds that they would kill themselves if they couldn’t find something to get worked up about.

I say all this, @choreplay, assuming this is just an academic exercise for you and that you are not personally involved in these events. They are just something you managed to notice in your travels on the net. Obviously, if you are one of the characters in this drama, then I was just joking. My comments are not personal. [insert insincere smiley face here]

@wundayatta, thanks for so much for you time on this. I actually messaged a lot of jellies to get some help on this question, but few answered, I guess because, as you’ve stated there is a lot of silly drama involved and just didn’t draw a lot of fluther response.
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I say with a smile, no, I am on the outside of all this mess. It intrigues me how some people can manipulate and draw attention from whole groups of people. I’m not a manipulative person and therefore am just not equipped to participate or sometimes protect myself from any behavior like this.

I still think there is a fascinating group dynamic going on in that fictitious article, but maybe I need to ask fluther in broken down questions.

I think most would agree that cyber stalking is a big deal, and I think most people would agree that is important to recognize how to recognize it.

But like I said they need to be written as individual questions.

Again thanks for your time.

I honestly found the whole article confusing. It was like a hall of mirrors.

First it starts with an apology which I see as a thinly veiled way of the authors covering their ass against libel for “calling someone out” the first time they published the “story”.
So it’s a fictional journalistic expose masquerading as a public service warning masquerading as creative writing?
How much is truth and how much is fiction? I found it to be very manipulative.
It didn’t hold together as a journalistic piece. It was insinuating that the person spoken about was a manipulative player with a bonafide personality disorder, was exploiting the trust of all these women etc. That may be true, but a player who doesn’t follow through but just reels you in and drops you is insensitive and deceitful but hardly qualifies as a stalker. There were no details of any of the relationships and how they had progressed, how emotional in tone they had been, how much trust and confidences were exchanged or how many promises were made. There was no evidence that the so called stalker had lied about himself, only that when he was caught he changed his online identity to avoid fallout.

Is there such a thing as a NRHJ? you can make up a catchy new name for any set of behaviors that you want. I doubt this one is in the DSM-IV.IIt’s more like pop psychology. (I think I read something about it in Cosmo, no, then again, maybe not) It may be a facet of other deeper psychological conditions like narcissism that fall into the category of personality disorder. If the person were seriously ill they would be a psychotic stalker and then these women would have way more to worry about than just hurt feelings and sense of rejection and loneliness. Is NTHU the same thing as being in love with love? If so, there are a lot of people who have it. They better get help fast before the police are out after them.. Or is it approach avoidance that we’re talking about? I’m just trying to point out that the author tries to paint something as a new form of cyber stalking when it’s really nothing new, being online just widens the net you can cast. There’s lots of fish in the sea and this guy is trying to get to all of them before he dies, lol.

As far as a lot of he reactions to the piece, they sound like the writer penned them herself. It sounds like a mutual admiration society. If this is the “best thing” these people have read in Writer’s Cafe I doubt that Writer’s Cafe is worth my time. I read (skimmed) about 4 pages of the comments and I found a good comment saying pretty much the same thing on about the 3rd page.
I quote:“My guess is that our culture that demands instant web browsing while holding a meaningful conversation (without eye contact) while ordering over priced coffee and bemoaning wall street greed and political corruption does not afford time for things like thoughtful reading extended essays or making in formed decisions in a voting booth. Whew! Glad to have got that out.”

My guess is that to cultivate meaningful discourse with honest efforts in review one would have to begin a dialogue directly with anyone that is willing to invest in another’s work rather than self interested seeking adulation. I decided early on that this particular site is more of a mutual adoration society but have cultivated some meaningful and inspirational conversations outside of the site. Of any real artistic review and editorial content suggestions regarding my actual publishing efforts regarding the novel I am working on I have found none. I actually have been quite absent here as I find my time here a wasteful distraction from my goals. But we all need our leisure do we not?

I don’t really know what to make of comments like this one:
“You are perhaps the sole individual who I believe could watch network news safely, in that your opinion would not be made or broken by the information presented as facts…”
HUH?? Don’t confuse me with the facts! Got sarcasm? If you are trying to critique someone making a snide remark is not the best way to do it. Or is this person trying to say that the person would have journalistic integrity and form their own conclusions rather than just believing what they’re told? It’s not clear to me. Whatever.

I find it sad that there are so many lonely people in the world. They are looking for human connection and looking for it online is like a minefield. But to be an adult you have to learn to make your own judgements. Theere are some slick, smooth operators that will try to game you. Once you know that you take the precautions you need to defend yourself. If he wasn’t targeting children or teens I don’t see this as anything but typical hurtful behavior. Part of life. Smart women are not immune to being gullible and being drawn into liking someone who is not being honest with them. There’s emotional intelligence and then there’s degrees and book learning. As my husband a great skeptic likes to say “you have to get up pretty early in the morning….(to pull one over on me)” But many people are way more trusting.

The author has edited her writing and taken out the word starker. That solves 90% of the problem as far as I am concerned.

The piece is still weak in that the author really doesn’t do any reporting. No digging. No investigation. In theory, the author could have detailed her own story, but she didn’t. She just gave the outlines of a story, which no editor of a real journal would stand for. It’s high school journalism.

The problem isn’t just the editorial leanings of the author; it’s really that the author is a bad journalist, and also a bad fiction writer. Nothing hangs together. Nothing really makes sense. The author doesn’t show; she tells. What this story needs is a real story. It needs characters that we are introduced to and that we learn intimate details about. We need to be given reason to care about the characters in the story.

Right now there are no characters and no reason to care. I mean, this is really quite pathetic. I don’t know how you found this story, nor what got you interested in it, but I’m surprised it did catch your interest. The only thing I could imagine was that you were somehow involved, either as author or as a character in the story. But since you assure me this is not the case, I am truly baffled as to why you thought it was worth asking fluther about. Why are you interested in it?

@wundayatta, I’m involved in this community and my contention was that the whole thing was a deliberate attempt to incite trouble against this particular individual. There is buzz in the community about who it was, and it is likely deserved, BUT my concern is even further removed from that individual situation.

My concern and central interest in this whole thing is the capricious use of the phrase stalker. Which has since been omitted.

I didn’t want this inappropriate behavior on her part to contaminate the whole community. So it’s my stake in this community over all that draws me to this situation.

@choreplay Ah, but then, how do outsider’s opinions help you?