Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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)
Also, She, don’t leave willingly. Force them to ban you and create a martyr.
Never forget that every knitter comes armed with several very sharp sticks. And it has long baffled me that circular knitting needles are waved through onto planes at TSA checkpoints, while my toenail clippers are viewed with suspicion, and still usually removed:
And then there is this. Please share. (Warning, some NSFW words.)
https://rightwingknitjob.wordpress.com/
@henryracette. You know you want one.
When the sectarian violence starts, I wonder who will come out on top.
I hope it doesn’t come to that. I have an almost limitless supply of sharp sticks and garottes, though.
See? Madame Defarge! Are you also constructing guillotines?!
I’ve posted this before:
My aunt and uncle used to go to the free concerts at West Point. She’d sit on a blanket and knit before and during the performance. After 9/11, she was prevented from bringing in her knitting bag. Security was worried that a little old lady could commit a hijacking. Of a military academy. With knitting needles.
As of now, they’ve banned discussion of the policy. And no-one’s responded to me since I sent the response below to someone who accused me of lying by saying that I had spent money and bought patterns on the site. (They are very hung up on whether I’m a troll, or a bot, or some sort of shadowy figure sent to plague them).
Patterns you download can be stored in your “library.” They don’t have to be, but they can, so they are available and are online. This person (whom I won’t much quote directly) accused me of lying about my purchases because said she looked in my library and there were “no patterns.” She then said it looked “almost as if” I might be talking “shite” (no idea if that’s a banned word this side of the pond) and that I should run for PM of the UK, because “talking shite” was a prerequisite. Here is my response (at the bottom is a jpg I attached of the first page of my “library.” No one’s engaged me since:
I think that news organizations who are dismissing this as a tempest in a teapot, or a bunch of old ladies (of both sexes) with their panties in a bunch, are missing the boat. The people who’re being singled out here are very average, very everyday people. They’re not some dark-webby, 4chan, extreme alt-right folks. Or even some weird and obsessive gamer types (ducks). It’s your grandma. And your auntie. And your piano teacher. And the clerk at the grocery store. And others in the mainstream of life.
Ravelry is serious about this. We should be, too. And so far, news coverage on the Right has not been.
Thank you for the pattern. We certainly don’t need Ravelry. I liked your idea (or was it someone else’s) that we just start a Ricochet knitting group where we can discuss conservative ideas as they pertain to knitting. I’m not sure what those are, but if we try hard, we’ll find some.
Are you not?
Heh. Thanks for thinking of me.
Actually, I don’t like the acronym. It sounds just a little too culty to me — and it’s an ugly neologism. I find Make America Great Again less problematic, and a little easier to defend as an idea separate from the current President.
And I’d never wear a knit hat.
I think it’s a valid concern.
Well, she was my aunt, after all. She had a wicked riposte.
That’s very typical. Come up with a crazy policy for banning people. Ban people who disapprove of the policy. Ban people from having any discussion about the policy.
I’ve seen it so many times on so many forums.
It’s not my favorite acronym either, but spelled out, it won’t fit on a hat.
You don’t know what you’re missing.
That’s probably true of a great many things, where I’m concerned.
Michelle Malkin just wrote about this: https://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2019/06/26/antitrump-crafters-a-decadelong-unraveling-n2548992
She gets it too.
Talk of ‘push back’ and ‘backlash’ is tantamount to sucker-punching a guy and yelling, “Help, help, I think that dude is going to attack me!”
You mean like, “I thought he was going to hit me so I hit him back first?”
And now picked up by the New York Post’s Bob McManus: https://nypost.com/2019/06/26/now-even-knitting-has-to-be-political-in-trump-age/
I may have said somewhere up above (I know I said it somewhere) that I don’t think the Ravelry story can be dismissed as a bunch of old ladies (of both sexes) poking each other’s eyes out with their knitting needles and tying themselves up in knots about the best way to do a left-leaning (it’s always a left-leaning) double decrease.
Because the people who’ve been maligned before ever they open their mouths to say something civil, the people whose perfectly acceptable speech is being hobbled here are people like you and me–moms, grandmas, aunties, the choir director at the local church, the school lunch lady, and men who knit (some of the best knitters I’ve know are men). They’re being made to feel uncomfortable and bad about perfectly good and decent opinions that they’ve held all their lives, by a bunch of jumped-up little social justice warriors who’ve appointed themselves hall monitors and who are patrolling the Internet shutting down any speech they don’t like.
If you have five minutes, here’s a perfect example: https://fringeassociation.com/2019/01/07/2019-my-year-of-color/.
Read this lady’s nice blog post from January of this year (or just skim through it). She’s nice, no? She sounds like someone I’d like to have as a friend. Perfectly ordinary, decent, nice, woman. You can just see that in her post which screams, “I’m perfectly normal!” “I love life!” “I love everybody!”
Then scroll down, skimming, the first half or so of the comments. They’re charming, right? Excited for her. Just lovely. Then search the page for “Alex says” (zir first comment is 1/7/2019, 7:56 pm) and see what happens after the swarm shows up.
It’s truly disgusting. Finally, the nice lady closes comments, but not until she’s been forced to grovel and apologize for the offense she caused with her wholly inoffensive post.
We’ve all seen plenty of examples of the bullying, censorious, self-righteous leftist, so I will spare myself the unpleasantness of looking at this one.
Those of us who are able, because of our temperament and/or our circumstances, to stand up to the bullies and call them out, and to speak our minds without worrying if it offends them, need to do so. Not only here on Ricochet, but in real life as well.
Hmm. Certainly can’t see anything over which to get offended in that.
Oh, for [CoC]’s sake. What a knob. I’ve felt like that just moving to different places in the same country.
Alex’s “idea,” to characterize it as charitably as possible, is apparently to be offended for other people on their behalf. This also happened a year ago, when a young lady named Keziah Daum wore a Chinese-style dress to her prom. This was of course “cultural appropriation” and roundly criticized by everyone — except for the Chinese, and their reluctant situational ally, Jonah Goldberg. (Gosh, I miss that guy.)
“Alex” needs to check his “white savior” complex. (See, Alex? We can do it too!) Stay in your lane, bro.
I had a six month gig in Oklahoma. Met a guy who was about 5′ 8” in both height and width, no discernable neck, and a pickup truck with Choctaw Nation license plates, a “NRA Life Member” bumper sticker, and a full rifle rack.
Felt like home.
The left has perfected the White Savior Complex. They will be outraged on behalf of any group they believe needs their protection. It’s so . . . infantilizing.
Probably a good thing I didn’t tell the good folks on Ravelry that I grew up in the West African equivalent of the British Raj then. That would really cook my goose! Or maybe not, they’re probably all vegans.
Last time I looked, they were still busy virtue-signalling their disapproval of yours truly, who they accused of being a poseur, a sock puppet a hack, and a bot, and of lying about my decade-old membership there. When I said I’d purchased many patterns and books from the site’s vendors, they accused me of lying. When I uploaded a screenshot of my profile, showing the purchased patterns and sundry other information, they accused me (twice) of photoshopping it, and again accused me of “talking shite” and lying. (It’s the screenshot I posted in comment #99 above. Took about 24 hours before my original interlocutor gathered up several like-minded friends and got on my case again.)
Last night they really went to town. Entertaining on the one hand, yet terribly sad, petty, pathetic and stupid, on the other.
The combination of this post and Gary McVey’s latest has me thinking about actions that could be taken.
Back in the early blog history conservative blogs would form groups of commenters who would respond to alerts to keep people like the author mentioned above from being swarmed under. I’m wondering if that’s a tradition that could be brought back. Although I do wonder how it would work on a third-party blog.