Wow, this is *absolutely appalling*. Absolute hypocrisy!

I wrote about the adult supervision showing up at Registan, in the form of a seemingly senior colleague of a university academic who came to — properly, in my view — call him to account for his snarky responses to people and his lack of accountability.

To be sure, she focused on the lesser issue of his writing style and not on the appalling fact of his disparagement of a Russian investigative journalist trying to find out about Zhanaozen, which The Exiled has rightly called out and which I also answered in line-by-line detail (and never heard back from MHP).

When she accused him of dragging in her university to a foul dispute with Joshua Foust of Registan, I understood this more generically (not being an academic); that the "idea of the university," and the ideal of intellectual discourse had been undermined by his entire intervention — totally dubious — on behalf of Foust.

Of course, I should have realized they don't think that way — hilariously, they saw her invocation of some kind of sense of accountability — which I wish had been more for his taking part in this appalling takedown of a Russian journalist than for his writing and snarkiness — as inappropriate.

As you can see here from my long account of getting locked out of EurasiaNet, the trigger was these two academics coming and tattling on me to my boss. I didn't do anything wrong. I criticized their thesis, legitimately, as I had my legitimate posts on Registan but merely been banned. Both of them harassed me on Twitter claiming my article had "sloppy statistics" — it was bizarre, as it reported accurately a simple fact of a surge of membership in Uzbekistan on Facebook. These two are uber creepy in so many ways. Are they junior Fred Starrs in training, more sophisticated for our cyberspace age? They complained that somehow, my discourse was inadmissible — because I fought back when they harassed me over my legitimate and necessary critique of their work. My characterization of Kendzior with a mild slight — "Registan's office wife" because that's precisely what she is, catering to Foust and Hamm and others — became grounds for denunciation of me to my boss — in an effort to get me fired, which was successful (my contract was not renewed).

That's downright scary, that this defense-related website and these creepy academics with views that play into the hands of intimidating regimes and Western naysayers and which I rightly took to taks, can cause me to lose my livelihood. It's truly awful. I never thought I'd experience anything quite like this in my life.

Here's what this total two-faced hypocrite writes scolding another for doing what she did to me:

Maybe it is different at IU or in folklore studies, but in my discipline and at my university, grad students treat each other as colleagues — (dash) with respect.

Oh, I guess if I'm not an academic, I don't count then.

And here's what Foust wrote:

First, in an absolutely nauseating, disingenuous claim, he makes it sound like his own disparagement and MHP's denigration of Elena, the Russian reporter, was merely a sidebar to MHP's desire to protect Foust from libelous remarks about his associations: "He was also very explicitly concerned with how Elena Kostyuchenko’s reporting was being, in his mind misused, to attack me."

What a load of crap! MHP spent an entire post undermining Elena's reporting, in part through his mistaken translations.

Your comments seem to miss an important aspect of blogs: they can be whatever the fuck you want them to be. Know why? Because they’re blogs. No one edits or controls them, and Michael can figure out for himself if your complaint that he included both an intro and outro is really the CRIME AGAINST WRITING that you make it out to be. But really, grow up — you’re being petty. Complain about organization and argumentation all you want (really, I’m all about letting people sink or swim here) but at least make your complaints about something real and not your clutching your pearls because he had the temerity to bold a section title you wouldn’t have.

4) This is the major one: Michael is not bringing CEUS into this. You are, and frankly, the batshit insane assholes who think he’s a secret employee of Chevron, or whatever, are doing that. Place blame where it’s due — and that’s not on Michael.

This, from the man who has spent weeks harassing me, had me banned from Registan in cahoots with Hamm, and who was lobbing tweets up to the front page where I published in order to deliberately create a fake frenzy and get me fired.

Batshit insane, truly, to write that I'm "very very very very misogynist" (!) because I…called his suck-up Sarah an "office wife" to the website — not even to a person. It's just incredible.

Now look at what Sarah hypocritically says to this fellow academic that she and her brood at Registan are attacking:

The only person here who is making CEUS look bad is you, Elise. I assume, since you bring up your academic affiliation so frequently, that you intend on making a career as a scholar. I pity those who have you as a teacher or a colleague. A good teacher – and, as Katy correctly noted, a professional colleague – would not use a public blog as a forum to harshly critique someone’s writing. A good teacher and colleague would make a sincere, private offer to help that student with his writing, and not condescendingly lecture him on punctuation after he had been the victim of a cruel attack by another blog.

That's the sort of creepy argumentation she tried to use on me — that I alone was responsible for tarnishing the web site where I worked. Huh? She and Katy spent days disparaging me in really strange and inexplicable ways, merely because I challenged her thesis here. 

Kendzior goes on in even more condescending vein:

If your post was truly meant to offer critique and guidance, then you have a lot to learn about how to be a good teacher and scholar, not to mention a good person. (A good person, by the way, does not refer to and distort comments made on a private Facebook page, which you also did to Michael.)

I agree with you that this post is embarrassing for CEUS, and I have spoken with alums who felt similarly. But everyone felt like the embarrassment was you, not Michael. I’m not going to respond to anything else on this thread, but you are welcome to email me privately. I am happy to offer tips on your writing too.

I don't know anything about CEUS; I don't think anything about what Elise has written is embarrassing; she came on a website to apply some adult supervision to MHP who in my view, was behaving like a high-schooler writing 11th grade essays and beating up somebody he barely knew merely because they had beat up his friend — stupid high school gang warfare.

Horribly — is Registan one of those EST type cults? — this poor Elise concedes that she has a lot to learn as an instructor and a human being and backs down. I'm really appalled at what I see here. It is so Soviet. It is so very, very Soviet.

How do people get Soviet in America?!

Now comes Katy Pearce — fresh from just denouncing me to my boss!! —

And moreover, PERSONALLY, I’d be deeply saddened if one of my classmates chose to respond to me in such a public way. Classmates/future colleagues should have your back.

Little Ms. Solidarity, eh?