A world turned upside down

The Carreons largely seem baffled about how they entered this crazy, upside-down world. All Carreon did with his initial letter was what any lawyer might; the harm here, the real bad behavior—couldn't everyone see that it was being driven by Inman?

Matt Inman is a sadist, a cyberbully, a liar, and an Internet terrorist. Here, HE DID THE BAD THING.

Put aside the rightness or wrongness of any particular party here for a moment and try to imagine how this would feel. We've all been in situations where we suddenly look around a room in shock and disbelief as people look at us with loathing—when we know it's exactly the opposite! The sense of a world gone off the rails is bewildering. It's infuriating. Tara Carreon actually sums up the feeling well:

I mean, it's so fucking absurd. Every moral virtue that is rightly on our side, they claim for themselves. This is truly the Devil reciting scripture.

From the Carreons' perspective, this whole controversy exploded out of thin air—Carreon demonized after a lifetime of service to the good and the just, by a bunch of anonymous Internet trolls and commenters.

These little cannibal kids think they're so brave, standing up for the sadist Matt Inman, tearing a good lawyer's name apart, a lawyer who is practically a saint, who has worked for the underprivileged and poor his whole adult life, while they post anonymously. If they're so brave, then why don't they post under their real names, and give us the opportunity to tear their names apart? Put up hate sites using their names? Because in this new fascist "Internet" world we live in, the anonymous people deserve free speech, while those with names, deserve to have their identities destroyed. That is so American—not!

This could have been the start of a worthwhile post on the nature of Internet anonymity and bad behavior, a topic certainly deserving of thoughtful writing and analysis. Unfortunately, when the world looks upside-down and you're trying single-handedly to right it, situations look extreme and so extreme comparisons get made.

Like I said, they are our modern-day "Hitler youth," and Matt Inman is their Hitler—not even the person Hitler, just "Hitler's port-a-potty." [A term Inman used in an interview to describe his Twitter feed.] And they're proud of it. They think it's funny. They think they can take any racist, bigoted, regressive idea and legitimize it by putting it into a cartoon.

In case you didn't get the message, it appears again later: "Matt Inman seems to be the de facto leader of the modern American Hitler Youth," Tara wrote. Also, she suspects he hates women and is a "terrible misogynist."

The question, in Tara's mind, comes down to just how much bad behavior one has to accept on the Internet. Certainly, the Internet feels like something different from the regular world in Tucson. Stir up enemies at home and you're unlikely to be called names by more than a few people at once; stir up a fight online and you might be attacked at once by thousands, if not millions—and in the most offensive possible terms. And people keep suggesting that the Carreons just sit back and let the tidal wave crash into them.

"The KKK is coming at you," Tara writes, "and instead of fighting back, you are advised to just take it. That's what Matt Inman's bunch wants us to do."

Painful as it might be, sometimes there's real wisdom in just walking away from a fight, even with hateful names ringing out in the air behind you. Because it's hard to see how trying to out-name-call the Internet, even just to prove a point, is going to help the situation. But Tara gives it a pretty good shot.

These phaggotish, conspiratorial, childish, dorkish, baseless, mindless, shameful, dumb, aggressive, jealous, reprobate, obsessed, mad, clueless, shockingly delusional, completely lost and in trouble, bottom-of-the-barrel, short-sighted, dumb-fuck, ranting, Un-American, contemptible, obnoxious, embarrassing, incompetent, bizarre, constipated, bankrupt, hypocritical, stupid, fearful, carnivorous, wolverine, ranting, foaming at the mouth, bullying, lying, paranoid, no-better-than-the-mafia, smeghead, scumbag, cretinous, lazy, delusional, demented, narcissistic, pathological, extortionistic lunatic, thuggish drama-whores, poised on the edge of a precipice, hoisted by their own petard, their holy fucking shitballs burning inside a biplane careening toward the Statue of Liberty, rhinos raping chinchillas dressed up in unicorns' undergarments, who deserve every bad thing that happens to them, having to learn their lessons the hard way, and who I wouldn't even piss on if they were on fire (they believe in name-calling at TechDirt) claim that these types of statements are not actionable because they aren't "false facts," just "satire." Where is the dividing line?

"We're going to have to sue them all"

The Carreons have been in this situation before. "It's not the first time we've been targeted as sacrificial victims," Tara wrote. "We were targeted by the entire Buddhist community when I told them to go fuck themselves, for being nihilists, elitists, and authoritarians."

As for what comes next, it's clear that Charles Carreon's lawsuit isn't going away. This week, he expanded on his initial complaint. Tara warns that the scope of the lawsuit will be broadened as Carreon unearths new names of those who have impersonated him online.

And we're going to have to sue them all. There are a lot of people just dying to be sued on this one. If you don't have a lawyer in the family, I would recommend you start getting concerned about this now. For yourself, friends, loved-ones, and fellow-citizens. This is a lynching on the Internet frontier.

What's remarkable about the entire case is just how clearly it's driven by personal animus. A certain form of Internet culture—think 4chan's /b/ or much of Anonymous or The Oatmeal—has elevated crass speech and thought into a positive virtue. Names get called, words get said, and topics once unmentionable in "polite company" have become everyday memes—and no one's supposed to get bent out of shape about it. This is just the way we talk now.

But words sting as much as they always did offline, and the anonymous speech of the Internet means that they can suddenly pour forth in an overwhelming torrent. When directed at individuals, especially those who don't accept the speech conventions of these communities and don't consider their "humor" to be funny so much as offensive, people get angry.

Plenty of people are angry here. FunnyJunk's mysterious backers, upset when Inman got into a war of words and pictures with them in 2011, were angry enough to hire a lawyer to go after him almost a year later. Inman was furious about the request that he, the one whose cartoons were being reproduced without attribution on sites like FunnyJunk, be asked to pay $20,000, and he responded with memorable bile to Carreon. Now Carreon and family feel like victims in their turn. Where Inman turned his anger into pictures and a $200,000 fundraising drive, Carreon has turned his into law. As he put it in verse: