The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Just a Random Coincidence

Posted on | December 15, 2014 | 39 Comments

Stomped a troll over the weekend. Stomped that troll into itty bitty teeny tiny troll smithereens, calling him out by his IP address in Beaverton, Oregon. Hadn’t seen a troll like that one in many months. Usually Wombat smashes ’em with his trollhammer before I see ’em. Wombat doesn’t bother to tell me, so I never even know about it.

Today, I see another troll, with a similar message, using the fake email address [email protected] and saying he is “someone that knows you well. I got your number bitch boy.”

As James Carville like to say, if you see a turtle on top of a fence post, you know it didn’t climb up there by itself. That’s a way of saying that some things are obviously not coincidental, and so you might want to check out why these “coincidences” keep happening.

The troll today used a French-based “anonymizer” to mask his home IP address and when I checked, I found that the IP of that particular anonymizer had only previously appeared once in the comments here during the entire time we’ve been using Disqus.

Turtle. Fence post. Some assembly required.

It was July 11, and the story was about some “Stupid Vicious Criminal Scum” who murdered a taxi driver for $5. The troll’s comment:

Life without parole? This country is in dire need of prison, and sentencing reforms. We won’t see them though because private prison companies are getting rich at tax payers expense off of these inmates. They all become cheap labor. And what exactly is the point of our penal system besides cruel, and unusual punishment? It certainly isn’t rehabilitation. It takes messed up people, and then messes them up some more, and then we wonder why our recidivism rate is so high? Look at Norway: 20 year max for murder, conjugal visits, prisoners are shown respect, and made into responsible members of society, and their recidivism rate is 30%, while ours which treats inmates like animals has a recidivism rate over 60%. We’re obviously doing something wrong, but the law and order pricks in this country will never do anything to change it.

Hmmm. These damned turtles just keep sprouting wings. That comment is an argument for leniency in criminal prosecution. Guess what? All three of the posts commented on by our troll friend in Beaverton, Oregon, were about the criminal prosecution of . . . ?

Sexual deviancy.

So now it’s Monday. I post about Satanic murderers in Texas, and a troll using this French anonymizer (IP 62.210.74.186) and the fake email [email protected] decides he needs to tell me he is “someone that knows you well. I got your number bitch boy.”

Do you have my number, troll? Because if you think you’re smarter than me, you certainly don’t know me well, but please remember two things: 1. Karma’s a bitch, and 2. I don’t believe in coincidences.





 

Comments

39 Responses to “Just a Random Coincidence”

  1. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 15th, 2014 @ 7:06 pm
  2. joethefatman
    December 15th, 2014 @ 7:35 pm

    I keep missing these things. I guess I need to read more of the comment threads. But then I tend to wind up writing something stupid or at least intemperate…

  3. Adobe_Walls
    December 15th, 2014 @ 7:36 pm

    So my instincts regarding the critter in the previous post was correct.

  4. Adobe_Walls
    December 15th, 2014 @ 7:38 pm

    What’s wrong with being intemperate?

  5. joethefatman
    December 15th, 2014 @ 7:44 pm

    I’m an a$$hole, but I don’t need to keep proving it all the time.

  6. kilo6
    December 15th, 2014 @ 7:52 pm

    looks like that IP/ISP is fairly active with the trolls

    http://www.stopforumspam.com/ipcheck/62.210.74.186

    62.210.74.186 appears in our database 357 times

  7. Adobe_Walls
    December 15th, 2014 @ 7:57 pm

    You need to embrace it. Whenever one of the many people who’ve told me I was an a$$hole I usually reply, ”yeah and I’m good at it”.
    We are who and what we are.

  8. M. Thompson
    December 15th, 2014 @ 8:14 pm

    Being the responsible type, I thought of calling it a troll, but then, I remembered Don’t Feed the Trolls, they have more time than you.

  9. joethefatman
    December 15th, 2014 @ 8:42 pm

    Embrace in meat space, yes. Online, no. I have to make sure my online footprint doesn’t cause my girls grief in their future. Or my wife in her present and future.

    And since this cold, flu, death or whatever is kicking my butt, I’ve got to leave it at that. Y’all have a great evening and don’t tear up the place too bad.

  10. Alan Markus
    December 15th, 2014 @ 8:45 pm

    Don’t have a lot of time to do the research, but I am sure you will find the person at one of these places:

    Oregon CURE – Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants

    Thursday, October 23rd, 7-8:30pm

    Beaverton City Library, 12375 SW 5th Ave, Beaverton, OR 97005

    Oregon CURE invites you to a community education event and discussion panel about how adults in custody and their families and friends can successfully navigate the prison system. The four panelists include two former adults in custody, a mother of an adult in custody, and a former DOC employee.

    A push for prison reform: Changing the way we look at crime, communities and mass incarceration
    Look in the comments – maybe there is someone you can identify by their style of writing.

    The other day you alluded to this person having porn on his computer – if there is a God, maybe the troll is an exconvict who is in violation of his parole by being on a computer.

  11. Alan Markus
    December 15th, 2014 @ 8:48 pm

    By the way, if anyone is so inclined – I got these by Googling “Beaverton Prison Reform”. I need to go “motivate” my child to get going on homework, so I don’t have the time to do this right now.

    Happy Troll Hunting!

  12. Alan Markus
    December 15th, 2014 @ 8:56 pm

    Here’s a comment by someone named “Rurality”:

    The penchant for “punishment” exhibited by the conservatives on this comments section is truly nauseating.

    One even applauds the privatization of prisons. I’m glad I don’t live in the same self constructed prison these people live in.

    Mandatory minimum sentencing is an abject failure, and is contributing to the death spiral of our nation

  13. theoldsargesays
    December 15th, 2014 @ 9:29 pm

    “I have to make sure my online footprint…”

    You could always try to mask your online presence using a French anonymizer. (Just don’t cross RSM while doing so.)

  14. Zohydro
    December 15th, 2014 @ 10:17 pm

    Nolite troglodytarum nutrire!

    I read that somewhere…

  15. Dave Mears
    December 15th, 2014 @ 10:20 pm

    Punishment, heck, prison is there to make you serve as a warning to others. Same theory for all punishments with a public aspect. Drawing and quartering was public- not because of the little addition the humiliation added to your punishment, but to publicly demonstrate what happens when you break your oath to the king. Prison isn’t really there to reform prisoners, except in the same way that it reforms society itself: if you don’t want to spend time here, don’t do the sort of things that we make you spend time there, for. I mean, it is nice when people reform, but if it was just 3 warm meals and a bed with conjugal visits, entertainment, etc, who would it really deter? Some people would commit crime just to have a lifestyle upgrade.

  16. Zohydro
    December 15th, 2014 @ 10:28 pm

    Y’know, there is a statistically notable segment of the population in every prison which does not find being confined in brutal conditions with only others of the same gender for company to be any particular hardship…

  17. Wombat_socho
    December 15th, 2014 @ 11:24 pm

    Well, not much point in bothering you with the mundane details of the troll patrol. Most of them aren’t even remotely as interesting as the loser you stomped, to be honest.

  18. WJJ Hoge
    December 16th, 2014 @ 12:08 am

    I suspect that you’ll see more from that troll until the 8th of January when a certain set of reply memoranda are due to a certain court. After that, he may be busy again.

    Also, I don’t think that your troll would really like Norway. They require that conjugal visits be made by someone over the age of consent.

  19. RKae
    December 16th, 2014 @ 1:55 am

    I know this will tag me as “raaaaacist,” but here goes…

    I’m sick of people using Scandinavian countries for any sort of comparison on social issues. They have nearly homogeneous populations. You’ll never see a Ferguson-styled uprising in Norway, because they don’t have a subculture to riot; and the “white cop killed a Gentle Giant” situation never pops up in the first place.

    This is changing, however, with Muslim immigration.

    In Sweden, nearly 100% of rapes are Muslim perp and white victim. Native Swedish men simply do not rape anyone. And, like I say, you need a subculture (or several!) to produce the sort of prison population you get here in the US.

    There’s something to be said for a culture of very subdued people. I heard a joke once about Finnish people:

    Q: How can you tell when you’re in an elevator with a really outgoing Finn?

    A: He’s looking at your shoes instead of his own.

  20. Daniel Freeman
    December 16th, 2014 @ 2:10 am

    I tell myself that every day. Sometimes it even works.

  21. Adjoran
    December 16th, 2014 @ 2:37 am

    How is spraying perfume around going to help?

  22. Daniel Freeman
    December 16th, 2014 @ 2:41 am

    I’ve heard that as an actuary joke. The Swedes have an epithet “stubborn as a Finn,” the Finns won their freedom by playing the Russians and Swedes against each other, and they have as many or more saunas as people. (The sauna has a national importance for where people used to begin and end their lives.) They’re non-Indo-European, belonging instead to the Finno-Urgic linguistic/genetic/cultural group, and I think that most people really don’t understand them.

  23. Daniel Freeman
    December 16th, 2014 @ 2:52 am

    If nothing else, a French atomizer would make you smell less like your butt.

  24. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    December 16th, 2014 @ 3:03 am

    I don’t think the Finns understand the Finns.

    But they know how to work wood.

  25. K-Bob
    December 16th, 2014 @ 4:17 am

    Not that we are only willing to hold his coat or anything.

  26. K-Bob
    December 16th, 2014 @ 4:18 am

    Double entendre that all you want, folks!

  27. Anon Y. Mous
    December 16th, 2014 @ 4:20 am

    You might be right about your troll, but I would say that basing it on which proxy service he is using is very thin. There are all kinds of lists of servers, and it is very easy to just go to the list and grab whichever one is currently performing well, or is from whatever country you prefer. E.g.:
    http://www.publicproxyservers.com/proxy/list1.html

  28. RKae
    December 16th, 2014 @ 5:50 am

    Exactly! Embracing the fact that you’re an asshole is why the internet was invented!

  29. Dana
    December 16th, 2014 @ 10:21 am

    The obvious, but thus far unasked question is: why ban trolls at all?

    Sometimes they’re just plain stupid, and stupidity is uninteresting, but not all opposition is stupid, and sometimes it can be interesting. I look at the quoted comment:

    Life without parole? This country is in dire need of prison, and sentencing reforms. We won’t see them though because private prison companies are getting rich at tax payers expense off of these inmates. They all become cheap labor. And what exactly is the point of our penal system besides cruel, and unusual punishment? It certainly isn’t rehabilitation. It takes messed up people, and then messes them up some more, and then we wonder why our recidivism rate is so high? Look at Norway: 20 year max for murder, conjugal visits, prisoners are shown respect, and made into responsible members of society, and their recidivism rate is 30%, while ours which treats inmates like animals has a recidivism rate over 60%. We’re obviously doing something wrong, but the law and order pricks in this country will never do anything to change it.

    and saw some reasonable debating points. Is life without parole a wise policy? I believe it is — and I am an opponent of capital punishment, which makes the option of life without parole absolutely necessary — but it is a reasonable question. The point about Norway’s recidivism rate (had it been properly sourced) is a valid one, and ought to be open for debate.

    On my poor site — which every one of Mr McCain’s readers ought to be reading daily! — I’ve banned exactly one person, and that was solely because he personally knew a couple of the regular visitors, and made threats concerning their jobs; it was not due to his political positions at all. (He subsequently managed to get himself banned at Patterico.)

  30. Kirby McCain
    December 16th, 2014 @ 10:38 am

    I’m surprised Amazon hasn’t rented out that forehead.

  31. RS
    December 16th, 2014 @ 12:21 pm

    “Troll” is used as a shorthand descriptor for a variety of behaviors. Some people just want to stir the pot and will post provocative/inflammatory remarks on any topic without any coherent underlying philosophy. Then there are the irrational true believers, whose rhetorical quiver consists of the arrows “ad” and “hominem”. There are those who have legitimate arguments, but insist upon seeing mala fides in the opposition regardless how principled it is. Finally, there are those who are just nasty human beings. who wish to inflict their misanthropy upon the rest of Humankind.

    Like you, the highlighted comment didn’t seem particularly offensive to me, but those that were deleted may have veered into nastiness. Criminal justice reform is a topic worth discussing. Over my career, I’ve seen it first hand on both sides, prosecution and defense. There are problems, and most of them are caused by politicians who view “tough on crime” stances as easy points in an election year. A “one size fits all” approach has not been particularly effective in a lot of cases.

  32. Finrod Felagund
    December 16th, 2014 @ 2:16 pm

    Try reading and posting on the Daily Caller for a while and you’ll understand why trolls need to be banned with extreme prejudice. One of them actually followed me here and got banned for its trouble.

  33. Sparafucile
    December 16th, 2014 @ 2:22 pm

    I followed you here 😉

  34. RS
    December 16th, 2014 @ 3:29 pm

    Some years ago, when I had a blog (general interest, nothing overtly political, 30 or so visitors a day), I attracted troll from a different site, who proceeded to post various nasty things about my family. Comment moderation didn’t work, as my email filled up with vitriol. When I’d had enough, I called in a few professional favors and in 48 hours had every bit of personal information about the individual involved. I put together a packet and mailed it to her home address with a copy of the letter which would be sent to her employer the next time she visited my pages. (She’d occasionally used a work computer.) Suffice it to say, that was the end of the problem.

  35. Daniel Freeman
    December 16th, 2014 @ 4:10 pm

    Your mastery of the ethics of doxxing is remarkable. You must be a philosopher.

  36. Paul H. Lemmen
    December 16th, 2014 @ 6:03 pm

    Heh. Nailhead, meet hammer.

    ??? ???? ?? ?????? ? ?????????????? ???? “?????????” ?? ?? ??????? …

  37. Paul H. Lemmen
    December 16th, 2014 @ 6:11 pm

    Heh. I’ve seen it from the inside as a pre-trial detainee where I was the 15th man in a 10 man cell and later, as a convicted federal felon in a minimum security work camp. I deserved what I got (and more in my opinion) and I feel that sentencing guidelines are too lenient.
    But that’s just my opinion.

  38. RS
    December 16th, 2014 @ 6:23 pm

    Interestingly enough, my blog consisted of a lot of philosophical musings, literature reviews and the like. It was fun, but eventually, I couldn’t keep it up, though I wrote 3-5 times per week for about 7 years.

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    December 18th, 2014 @ 3:10 pm

    […] Just a Random Coincidence […]