“Édouard Brière-Allard” is the pseudonym of a writer who on Sep. 1, 2015 posted a nearly 56,000-word essay in defense of Winterfox and purporting to “debunk” the Mixon Report.
FFA first discussed it here, briefly, and then in more depth here. One nonny summarized it as follows:
It wasn’t that bad!
Winterfox is sorry now, mkay!
Winterfox is the real victim here.
Here are private emails that are not creepy at all to share.
Everything is lies! ALL LIES!
Appropriation is wrong, except Valente.
Other people could be worse, so there.
Winterfox is the true Social Justice Warrior. Applaud.
Commenters on File 770 were not impressed, either. Nicholas Whyte, who is not “the biggest fan” of the Mixon Report, said he thought EBA’s piece was “full of special pleading and shares some of the same methodological problems as Mixon does.” Ursula “Red Wombat” Vernon, to the great amusement of one nonny, wryly observed, “It’s like they tried for gaslighting and couldn’t figure out how to get the knobs to work.” Various other commenters noted that WF can be observed slinging vitriol on Twitter even today, which makes EBA’s assertion that her misdeeds are all in the distant past ridiculous.
The Gish Gallop. This nonny notes that the EBA post begins with a discussion of the Gish Gallop, a debate technique named for creationist Duane Gish that consists of “drowning an opponent in such a torrent of small arguments that the opponent cannot possibly answer or address each one in real time.” Another nonny considered this a splendid example of projection. And Requires Hate Record Anon added that they’d “accused Asymbina of gish galloping back a few months ago,” which augmented the theory that Asymbina was behind the EBA essay (see below under “Who could it be?”).
Belittling of Winterfox’s harassment of named individuals.
Minimizing and misrepresenting Winterfox’s destruction of 50books_poc. This nonny points out how EBA purposefully misportrays what happened in the community: The mod, Sanguinity, claimed that WF’s continual behavior had a chilling effect on the comm, but EBA elided Sanguinity’s comment to imply it referred only to three comments from WF. EBA then continued,
Moving forward, intra-community disagreements would be more severely moderated in order to prevent a situation where a person would be intimidated into not participating for fear of having an opinionated and respected community member publically disagree with them. All we are left with is the appearance of community adjusting its norm in the face of disagreement and finding a new balance. There is no evidence that RH continued to comment negatively.
Nonny: “This is too fucked up! After having insisted for three paragraphs that Winterfox’s trolling of 50 Books POC was nothing but 3 comments that was civilly dealt with by a minor rule change, he then quotes RH’s apology” [to author NK Jemisin].
The invocation of Gamergate. Essentially:
Ridiculous nitpicking. This nonny mocks EBA for his jesuitical picking apart of how Mixon used the word “random” in her report. “Gosh, it’s almost as if Mixon were using the common, colloquial definition of the work instead of the precise term used in mathematics. You know, the same definition as the rest of us!”
Dishonest math. Mixon said in her report that she had chosen not to discuss 18 cases of harassment by Winterfox that, in her words, lacked hard evidence. EBA implies that she included them anyway and that therefore 36% of the cases she discusses in the report are “false positives.”
Lying about who outed WF and when. EBA:
[Liz] Williams claims that by September 2014, BS had been “outed” on a James Nicoll post, and apparently “admitted to being RH”. As we will soon see, this is also impossible to reconcile with the fact that Nick Mamatas only outed RH in October 2014 (following Tricia Sullivan’s October 3rd admission that she had emailed editors about RH/BS), and that James Nicoll’s post reporting this fact was made on October 10th 2014 (see below).
A nonny links to this thread in an early-September post by James Nicoll that supports, rather than demolishes, Williams’ assertion. The nonny adds, “No, BS hadn’t admitted the connection in public yet, but Williams’ e-mail doesn’t say that she did, and may not have been meant to imply that she did. That phrasing applies just as easily to ‘she admitted it in correspondence with someone else, and I’m passing it on to you.’” And while EBA claims that the Nicoll post was part of the first Google hit for “nicoll winterfox,” the same nonny provides a screencap demonstrating otherwise.
The OP of the first FFA discussion thread noted that EBA has no web presence anywhere, except for comments in two posts by Jim C. Hines. Commenter JJ on File 770 also noted that EBA had left a few comments on ScienceBlogs but, beyond that and the comments at Hines’ place, was nowhere to be found. “I think that this is just another one of RH/BS’s sock puppets, and I will disregard accordingly.” MickyFinn agreed, noting that “RH has already made as much use of sockpuppets as Lamb Chop’s Play-Along.”
Severian asked, “Anyone find it odd that there were a bunch of approving tweets linking to Édouard Brière-Allard’s piece so soon after it was posted on September 1st?” He says that the length of the essay makes it unlikely that any of its linkers had actually read it. “Which would explain why they didn’t notice the James May-level rhetorical acrobatics evident in just the first few paragraphs.”
According to this nonny, EBA “identifies himself as a straight white Western man at various points in the tl;dr essay.” Some nonnies thought that, perhaps, a WF supporter assumed that taking on such an identity would give them more credibility.
Nonnies at first suspected hardcore WF defender Asymbina/Asymptomatic Binary of being the author, as “Rambling, badly-supported, and blustering over thousands of words to say nothing is her typical MO. It's more than a little creepy to see her pretend to be a white man protecting a WoC, as the main crux of WF's arguments is to point at white people attacking this poor, innocent WoC.” Another nonny observed, “I find a lot of superficial similarities between the style of this report and AB’s defenses of BS.”
After Ann Somerville quoted that first nonny on File 770, fellow commenter XS said they also thought that EBA = Asymbina “rings a bit too true.” However, yet other commenters who know Asymbina and her wife — NelC, Nate Harada, and Bruce Baugh — felt reasonably sure it wasn't her. Harada asserted, “Asymbina has never hesitated to defend BS/RH, at length, using her own byline and I firmly believe she would consider it deeply personally dishonorable and dishonest to hide behind another identity to do so.” Baugh, who said he thinks AB is “getting played like a theremin” by WF, also stated that he doesn’t believe she’s “the sockpuppeting type.”
A nonny floated the theory that the author might actually be Winterfox editor and complete jackwagon Nick Mamatas. However, as of this writing there is a greater suspicion that the author was actually Jaythenerdkid, based on her interview with Winterfox (see meme discussions).
Nonnies assumed that either Winterfox paid “Allard” a lot of money to write this tripe or that she blackmailed the author into it. “I’m not sure I’d do that for my best friend, and the likelyhood of WF being anybody’s best friend is pretty low.” A few nonnies wondered if this were a shot at a 2016 Best Fan Writer Hugo.
To say that EBA’s essay infuriated many nonnies would be an understatement.
“WF and her circle misquote all sorts of things that don't mean what they think. Exhibit A: Eduard de Saukpoupee.”