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A Letter to the Ravelry Community
Ravelry is an online knitting and crochet community, a tremendous resource of knowledge and expertise, and the go-to place for its millions of members all over the world for both selling and buying, online knitting, and crochet patterns. It probably won’t come as a surprise to you that politics, when they infect the site, list heavily to port.
But Ravelry has just put itself at the very top of my [expletive] list. I know several members here also belong to Ravelry, and I’d like your help in getting the word out (if you agree with me). Members can contact the site here. I’ve also sent an email to info – at – ravelry – dot – com, which is an address I’ve used in the past, although I can’t be sure it’s still live. Given my Ravelry user name (which has been the same for years), I’m not expecting a chummy response. Still, I have shelves full of knitting books, a huge stash of yarn, and lots of other things to do. I expect I’ll survive.
Published in GeneralDear Ravelry:
I have just read the following announcement on the home page of Ravelry:
“We are banning support of Donald Trump and his administration on Ravelry.
This includes support in the form of forum posts, projects, patterns, profiles, and all other content. Note that your project data will never be deleted. We will never delete your Ravelry project data for any reason and if a project needs to be removed from the site, we will make sure that you have access to your data. If you are permanently banned from Ravelry, you will still be able to access any patterns that you purchased. Also, we will make sure that you receive a copy of your data.”We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy.”
This is disgraceful.
Ravelry is perfectly within its rights to require that its members remove overtly political messages from their patterns, comments and projects. To say that NO political messages of any kind, in support of any candidate (Trump, Biden, Weld, Obama, Sanders, Clinton . . . ) are permitted or supported on the site. You could go further, and say that no overt support of any social or political agenda of any kind is permitted. You could say that no patterns, comments or projects projecting any sort of racist or bigoted, or divisive points of view are allowed on the site. And if Ravelry would like to criticize Donald Trump, the politician, as someone it does not care to support, it may do that too. And whether or not I agreed with your stance, I’d respect it.
But Ravelry has crossed the line. To state unambiguously that Donald Trump’s supporters are all white supremacists is a disgusting and libelous falsehood. That is the statement that Ravelry has no business making. My personal political opinions don’t and shouldn’t, matter to you. I don’t put them on Ravelry, and no-one else should either. (I’m not even an American Citizen so I can’t even vote.) But if this policy isn’t reversed, I’ll be cancelling my Ravelry membership. I don’t go to Ravelry for the politics, and I won’t be staying around for the insults.
I’m not going to support or participate in an organization that disrespects and calumniates tens of millions of people, a few of whom are my friends, and who I know perfectly well are not white supremacists, or any sort of bigots, in this way.
Your entirely inappropriate, disgusting, libelous, false statement, needs to be expunged from Ravelry’s site. Immediately if not sooner.
I’m looking forward to your response, which I hope will be that you have re-written your policy in a fair and non-partisan way that doesn’t egregiously insult a considerable proportion of your membership, good people who have done nothing to deserve it, who are not in the least racist, who don’t have a white supremacist bone in their bodies, and who, along with you, condemn bigotry in all its forms, but who nevertheless happen to support a politician you don’t approve of, for reasons you can’t be bothered to understand. You are the bigots here. You are the ones maligning millions of innocents, for the despicable actions of a few. You are the ones who should be ashamed. And yes, I’ll say it, because as a foreigner, perhaps I expect more from the citizens of this great country than they sometimes expect of themselves: You are unAmerican.
Please correct this egregious overreach, and do it swiftly. The personal opinions of your members are none of your business, and you should respect that. I only wish I didn’t know your own opinions now, or the contempt that you have for a large proportion of your membership, and the lengths to which you’re willing to go to make that contempt known publicly.
I hope you can summon the common sense and intestinal fortitude to right this appalling wrong.
You should be ashamed of yourselves.
RightWingKnitJob, TKGA member and Ravelry member (for now)
Every Republican is accused of Racism. Par for the course.
Whoa! GrannyDude is back! Yeah!
They would be perfectly within their rights to ban *all* political discussion; indeed, I belong to at least one discussion group with such a policy. But when they issue a one-sided ban like they just apparently did, it seems to me that they are making an in-kind contribution to the Democratic Party and ultimately to whoever that party’s presidential nominee becomes. Are they going to report this contribution to the FEC?
Gleichschaltung is a German word which means “coordination,” “making the same,” “bringing into line.” It was a term much favored by the Nazis, who used it in the sense of “forcible coordination.” Under the Nazi regime, all aspects of society–all organizations ranging from major professional associations such as those representing the country’s legal profession, down to to folk-singing groups and small local hiking clubs–were subjected to Gleichschaltung. Not only was there to be no criticism of National Socialism in the explicitly political sphere, there was to be no truly non-political sphere at all. Everything had to be about the propagation and strengthening of the ideology of National Socialism.
As I noted at the above link, “political correctness” is basically a contemporary American form of Gleichschaltung. And there is a lot of it.
See also my posts on The Politicization of Absolutely Everything and Life in the Fully Politicized Society.
I really think Ricochet should have the occasional “woo hoo!” instead of just an ordinary like. Say, for comments like this one.
Actually, it’s O’Sullivan’s first law. 1989, National Review.
I completely forgot that I have a Ravelry account. You cannot get into the site without joining and last Fall my daughter wanted me to look at some patterns. So I looked at the responses to this new policy. From viewing the latest 100 of over 7000 comments, 98% are in favor of this policy and are congratulating the directors for their courage in standing against hate. The few dissenters, objecting to being called white supremacists, or asking about free speech, are quickly dismissed. It appears that the consensus is that if you support Trump for anything, you obviously support his racism and hate. Therefore there is no place for you at Ravelry. Several have made/promised contributions to make up for those who have decided to leave.
Overall, on any of their discussion boards, there were not more than 27000 posts (fiber games, your ugliest finished object)- and of course it could be a certain number of the same people posting multiple times as on the Trump thread. This Progressive demand to think and express yourself in lockstep with a certain political point of view even when the group (should have) nothing to do with politics is insidious and a danger to a free society. But I suppose if you are racist you don’t deserve a free society.
Doing my best. Don’t know for how much longer . . .
Ravelry claims 8 million members. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s about right. I also wouldn’t be surprised if a good number of them aren’t active at all.
I use Ravelry as a source for patterns, and occasionally to research techniques. It’s a very nice site. I’m also a member of The Knitting Guild of America, and I’m engaged in their “On Your Way to the Masters” knitting certification program. That requires a Ravelry membership. I’ve already told them that I’ll quit Ravelry (which is a free membership) if this isn’t sorted out to my satisfaction, and that I’ll quite TKGA (a paid membership) if they insist that Ravelry membership is essential to completion of the program. This is total [expletive].
The Wikipedia entry which explains a little about Ravelry is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravelry. I gather, from other things I’ve read, that money comes mostly from members (I suspect members who sell patterns, yarns and services) who place ads on the site.
Ravelry isn’t going to care if occasional members like me, or one-time signer-uppers like @juliana quit. The only thing that would “hurt” them, I think, is if the people who are signed up with them as vendors start to bail. Frankly, I don’t think that’s likely, given the “woke” vibe of an awful lot of them. It’s pretty clear that this has stirred up a hornet’s nest, though.
Here’s the WaPo article on Ravelry. I can’t read the whole thing, because it’s behind their paywall.
Actually, they have a policy on conduct:
be respectful
These rules are for the safety and comfort of everyone. Breaking them is not tolerated and will result in your account being restricted for a number of days or completely removed:
Seems like they violated their own policy on respect. But what else is new. I came there for knitting patterns not for abuse. There are plenty of other apolitical knitting patterns out there. I’m sure of it.
No hobby site is safe. The things they’re doing at YouTube and Twitter and Facebook to censor conservatives over the past couple years? They’ve been doing that at smaller hobby sites for at least a decade. I’ve lost count of the number of conservatives who have been banned from http://www.boardgamegeek.com by the zealously left-leaning site moderators.
They totally violated their own policy on respect. And now they are crying, like the children who murder their parents and complain that they’re orphans, that it must be someone else’s fault.
I just wrote to them and deleted my account. I accused them of violating their own code of conduct and questioned how banning half the country is making the site “inclusive to all”. But, as I’ve noted elsewhere, such people are immune to irony. But seriously, what an unnecessary and stupid thing to do. It’s a knitting site, for God’s sake.
Bravo.
Is it me or are the people screaming the loudest about Trump’s alleged racism and white supremest philosophy the whitest of the white? Now there are members of the professional grievance class that make this claim – but it’s always the white liberals that treat it like a five-alarm fire, even if there’s no smoke.
The story has made the local news in Portland.
https://www.oregonlive.com/nation/2019/06/knitting-website-ravelry-bans-users-from-showing-trump-support-says-its-support-for-white-supremacy.html
And PJMedia.
https://pjmedia.com/trending/8m-member-craft-site-ravelry-bans-support-for-trump-undeniably-support-for-white-supremacy/
Looks loke its getting a goodly amount of coverage. I’m glad.
This is actually the second Ravelry related post I’ve written. The first had to do with one of the vendors from whom I’d purchased a pattern some point. It’s fairly representative of a significant portion of the whole: http://ricochet.com/597143/im-barefoot-and-hopping-mad/
If I had read your first post (sorry!), I wouldn’t have been so surprised by this one. Woke people only exist only to ensure that you know they are woke. Otherwise, what is the point of having all that virtue?
But according to the pjmedia post you provided, Ravelry provided some clarification to their policy:
It’s a shame really, because all they had to to was frame it neutrally-no political discussions here- and I (and I suspect most) would have fully supported them. But that would not have signaled their virtue sufficiently, so it wouldn’t do. Oh well, I doubt I’ll miss my membership much. I’m already dusting off my old Vogue knitting books.
Nope. Not buying it. The statement, “Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy” is on the Ravelry home page, and on what I suppose is this “clarification” to their policy.
Until they remove that, and apologize to Trump supporters everywhere, anything else they say should be viewed as mere rhetoric, and bad faith rhetoric at that.
Here is some more of their “clarification:”
So if they think your profile is pro-Trump they’ll delete it or ban you. If you’re writing on a political forum and you let slip that you’re inclined to view Trump, or at least some of the things he does, favorably, they’ll remove what you’ve written. And any patterns or projects that you describe that can be viewed as “Trump supportive” will be hidden from view.
Nowhere does it tell me where I can go, or what I can do to complain about the numerous “[expletive] Trump” knitting patterns I mentioned earlier.
It is a one-directional policy aimed at Trump supporters, all of whom Ravelry deems “white supremacists,” with no recourse for Trump supporters to stem the abuse delivered to them. How long does anyone thing a pattern for a dishcloth with the words “[expletive] Fauxchohontas” knitted into it would last?
There’s a “Trump Butt” washcloth pattern. How about a “Buttigieg Butt” washcloth pattern. How long would that last?
A couple of the “Trump” pattern names are so vulgar I can’t figure out a way to make them SFR and describe them here.
I can’t find anything remotely similar when I type “Obama” in the search field. Either Ravelry is purging the thousands of vile patterns submitted by Trump supporters, or Trump supporters are falling down on the job.
Clearly though, some of the “Hope Hats,” the “Inspiration Scarf” and the “Hope and Change Gloves” that appear on the “Obama” results page were the work of Obama supporters. And that seems to be perfectly OK.
“MAGA” patterns? None. No cheerful hats. No cuddly scarves. No warm gloves. One pattern for a hat with the words spelled out. Don’t expect it will last long once the licensed snoops go on patrol.
More from their clarification:
Got that? You’re a white supremacist. Shut up.
Now, several people on the forum say they can’t understand why Trump supporters (and there are many weighing in) are offended. They are resorting to the old, “this isn’t about you, this is about Trump” dodge.
They are arguing in supremely bad faith.
“Do not believe them.” (h/t Baghdad Bob)
I remember this one–in fact I was looking it up, trying to remember whether I’d heard about it here or from another fellow knitter. The “we’re so sorry for hurting the feelings of indigenous peoples by calling their footwear what they call it” idiocy stuck in my brain and craw. Sounds like there are enough of us who knit, crochet, etc that we could start at least a Ricochet interest group and share patterns and tips. And I’d love to cruise around knitting. In my dreams. There’s a photo of me somewhere, lounging on the deck of a cruise ship in port in Juneau (my hometown–I had a friend who worked on the ship), knitting a scarf. Pretty nice way to spend a sunny afternoon.
I’m a quilter, not a knitter, and have encountered groupthink mentality there as well. I quit buying from Missouri Star Quilt Co. when they issued a political statement joining in some leftist feel-goodiness; likewise Modern Quilt Guild with their handwringing over some perceived slight of some endangered underclass and their gushing “we’re better than this” letter that made me puke. It’s the fact that these businesses have to bring politics/political correctness to the forefront rather than just selling me/involving me in their product/service that needs to have no divisive slant. Can’t we just enjoy our hobbies and entertainment–movies, sports, etc.–without having to be on the “right” side? It’s so tiresome.
Again, the highlighted text is a defamatory statement. I suspect it is actionable. I think Ravelry needs to take it down and issue a retraction and apology. Otherwise any Trump supporter can sue Ravelry for defamation. I think this could be handled as a class-action suit, and I don’t care if payment is just a coupon for $1.00 off if the lawyers take Ravelry for a mint.
At some point, the real violence will erupt, and the nation will come apart if this goes on.
With on side claiming the other has no right to speak, it will move to no right to exist. Then the attacks will come. We already see it on the fringes.
Then, when being physically attacked, people on the right will fight back to defend themselves. When the police stand back, and let mobs of the left destroy businesses, mug people, and act like they already do on college campuses, the right will start using violence to defend itself.
As the tit for tat goes on, with elected leaders on the left calling for more, and using their power to not protect people on the right, it will get worse and worse. In the long run, we will have sectarian style fighting across the nation, with the government finally using violence to stop only the right, not the left. That will fall apart, as their own instruments on violence fracture and refuse. Those that do will find that they are not protected forces among a compliant population, but the British trying to get back to Boston after Concord.
The urban areas will be controlled by the left, through violence, that is supported by the left. The rural areas will be under the control of whomever is in at the moment, but the left does not have the manpower to control them all. I expect cities to quickly find themselves with no food, Venezuala style.
It is going to be horrible. I hope to be out of a city by then.
This is in the media and the culture everywhere.
With the constant barrage of anti-Trump everywhere, it makes you wonder how he’s even polling at 40%.
Did you know that asking people if they’re citizens is white supremacy too?
https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/23/us/supreme-court-census-citizenship-blake/index.html
But those driving this better be careful. A lot of people are going to start deciding that if they’re going to be accused of it anyway, they might as well embrace it.
I hope it doesn’t come to that. The degree of polarization does not auger well.
I think that’s a very real risk. And, at the end of the day (as people are fond of saying), it’s hard to see how meting out this sort of treatment to a group of people who’ve done nothing to deserve it will do anything other than harden the resolve of people who might be on the fence. Ravelry and rpg.net have (probably on the basis of expert and financially well-lubricated advice) decided that the term “white supremacist” is the one that will do the trick, and the one people fear most, so I look to that being the term of choice going forward.
I have long thought that Trump needed to do a better job shoring up the support of the fence-straddlers, and that running a moderate, relatively sane-looking Democrat against him in 2020 could spell trouble. If Joe Biden is trying to Occupy Main St (TM) in that regard, he’s doing an execrable job, and he’s taking at least as much fire from the extreme Left as he is from Trump. More, probably. Because if AOC and company are going to take him out, why should Trump expend any energy on the matter.
I can’t see how actions and statements of the sort that Ravelry is making will do anything other than drive the fence-straddlers in Trump’s direction, for the reason that you state. And while I hope that extremism in the form of identity politics doesn’t come to infect the Right to the extent it has on the left, or that people on the Right do not move to the fringes, it’s hard to see how this ends well, or at the very least how it doesn’t get worse before it gets better.
Here is the rpg.net post on which the Ravelry “policy” was modeled. This is what you get when great minds ponder what to do about Trump supporters for “over a year.”
Here’s a rundown, via some excerpts (emphases added):
The list of policies are followed by a list of citations purporting to show why Trump and his supporters are being singled out, with links to reports of his greatest hits. I won’t enumerate them all, but “mocking the disabled,” “banning transgenders from the military,” “stoking fear and violence,” “dog whistles” and so on feature prominently.
In one sense, I do applaud rpg for clearly stating that “formal political neutrality is not tenable.” They’re not trying to be fair, and they admit it. As far as they are concerned, “support of Donald Trump or his administration” is prima facie evidence of hate speech, and it’s banned.
I can see how the issues playing out on a gamer site could make for heated, and perhaps, on occasion, unpleasant, interactions. People go to such sites (I suppose) in order to role-play, and talk about role-playing, and I suppose, if you’re an enthusiastic Trump supporter, or an avid Socialist, those opinions will out, and they will color your presentation of yourself. It seems to me that’s part of the deal. They’ve gone off the rails, though, with their demonization of tens of millions of their fellow citizens as white supremacists, so they can ban their opinions (and only theirs) as prospective hate speech before they open their mouths. (While apparently remaining oblivious to the irony there.)
But at least rpg isn’t playing the “we’re being totally fair,” game. Ravelry is still pretending to that end.
So basically, their policy is, if you’re a Republican or conservative or support Donald Trump, you’d better shut up about it, keep your head down, and never publicly express your views. Or you’re banned.
That they can say this is neither “endorsing the Democrats nor banning Republicans” is hilarious. And that they think someone will believe that.
I’ve run into this “policy” many times on multiple message boards over the years. I guess this dirty little internet secret (leftist control of online speech) is finally making its way into the mainstream.
I suspect that’s already happening.