Category: Blogging

A Few Words About The FMJRA

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— by Wombat-socho


People get confused and angry about how the FMJRA works now and again, so I thought I’d take a couple minutes here and explain how I do this, for the benefit of people who haven’t figured it out on their own and/or want to know more so they can get whatever ego boost and additional traffic come from being the A-Number One Top Linker for the week here at The Other McCain.


I. Except on rare occasions when I’m too sick/distracted/deranged to handle it*, the FMJRA is my bailiwick. Whining to Stacy or Smitty will get you nowhere. Don’t whine to me either. I hate whining.


Secondly, the FMJRA is driven by a couple of reports that WordPress generates. Unfortunately, WordPress occasionally misses links from other WP and TypePad blogs, and completely ignores Blogger. So if you’re linking up a storm but not seeing your links in the FMJRA, you may want to keep track of your links in a text file and send them to me by midnight Friday so I can include you in the Great List of Links. I refer to this approach as “doing it the hard way”, because it requires some effort, as opposed to letting WordPress do all the work for you.


2A. No links to Tweets, Facebook posts, LJ entries or anything else that doesn’t have theothermccain.com in its URL. None of these will be counted. No exceptions.


2B. As a corollary to Rule 2, no links to posts before the previous Saturday will be counted. For example, if you send in your links this Friday with some links to posts from last week (ending June 14) those links will not be counted.


C. Please do not confuse Rule 5 links with the FMJRA. Sending your links to the wrong mailbox makes the wombat sad.


C(2). If you are going to submit FMJRA links via e-mail, for the love of Christ PLEASE do not mail-bomb me with a separate e-mail for each link or post; collect them into one big e-mail instead. Mailbombing makes the wombat angry and prone to deprive you of your linkagery, as EBL can attest.


IV. Click on the Amazon ads at the bottom of the FMJRA and buy stuff. Help keep the Gruel Fund stocked and the Diet Coke Keg well filled! Also, hit the freaking tip jar! Only with your help can we beat back the Godless Commie Hordes and preserve our purity of essence, only to ruin it again every week with Soylent Green‘s Rule 5 links.


I hope this clears up some of the confusion and makes your job of submitting links easier. Remember, more links = more traffic = happy bloggers.
DO IT.


*On those rare occasions, the FMJRA returns to the capable hands of the Admiral of the Afghan Seas, whose duty it once was to compile this mess before the arrival of the World’s Youngest Blogger.


Imaginary ‘Rights’ You Don’t Have, You Sad and Disgusting Troll, Bill Schmalfeldt

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Bill Schmalfeldt: Somewhere, a carnival is missing its sideshow freak

“Schmalfeldt is forever burning bridges behind him as he careens from disaster to disaster caused by his antisocial personality. He never accepts responsibility for his failures, always externalizing blame onto his scapegoated enemies.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Feb. 20

“The State of Maryland has answered you, Mr. Schmalfeldt. It has told you: No, John Hoge does not have to answer your questions or read your statements, however you choose to deliver them. Not in tweets, nor in any other way. Maryland has answered your questions, sir. It has gathered up your statements. The authority you like to claim — in imperatives to others — has now been turned on you.”
— Becca Lower, “Bill Schmalfeldt, You Must”

Life is not fair. Some people have necks and some people don’t and — rather than seeking gainful employment as a carnival sideshow attraction — The Amazing Neckless Troll Man seems to be under the impression that his problems are our fault. He is wrong, as usual.

Saturday, while I was busy working on a 2,000-word article about Edward Snowden for ViralRead, Bill Schmalfeldt showed up in the comments of two Friday posts — “Peace Order Against Bill Schmalfeldt: A Defeat for the ‘Troll Rights’ Movement” and “Hoge’s Victory Lap” — in an apparent effort to win in the court of public opinion what he could not win in the Circuit Court of Carroll County, Maryland: The right to use the Internet to harass people he hates.

If all of Schmalfeldt’s comments have not yet been deleted, they will be, and I offer apologies to all our commenters who now, because of the disappearance of Schmalfeldt’s comments, may appear to have been arguing with someone who is not actually there. And, let’s face it: Bill Schmalfeldt hasn’t been “all there” in a long, long time.

Attempting to convince a madman that he is out of his mind is a hopeless task, and it’s best not to encourage Schmalfeldt in the delusion that he has anything to say that any sane person is obligated to notice, much less bothering to refute the kook. Nevertheless, here’s part of the “argument” Schmalfeldt made in one of his comments:

It’s actually quite humorous, the responses I’ve gotten. And quite revealing about your nature and your temperament. . . . You’ve been told I’m crazed and evil, therefore I am crazed and evil and that’s the end of the discussion. I deserve to be defamed and mocked with dishonestly cropped pictures.

“Dishonestly cropped pictures.” The loss of self-awareness indicated by that complaint speaks diagnostic volumes about the nature of Schmalfeldt’s derangement. Perhaps it is unnecessary to remind readers of what Bill Schmalfeldt once did with a photo of Sarah Palin:

Schmalfeldt created that Photoshop of Palin bleeding with a stake through her forehead to illustrate a post he wrote under his “Bill Matthews” alias at the Examiner. We need not rehearse here all the hateful acts of self-destructive madness Bill Schmalfeldt has engaged in during his sad descent into gibbering lunacy. It will perhaps be sufficient for anyone new to this psychiatric case-study to know that Schmalfeldt was banned from Daily Kos because of his writings about anal sex.

Go read it for yourself. I double-dog dare you.

Having lost the privilege of posting his demented ravings at Daily Kos, and having been similarly banished from contributing to the Examiner because of his habitual dishonesty, now this monstrous pervert wants to hijack the comments at this blog to claim victimhood.

Well, no. And there’s this: “Stalkers have no right to directly address you after they have been warned to cease and desist.”

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing about trolls like Bill Schmalfeldt.

The myth of “troll rights” is a persistent and dangerous delusion. You can write what you will on your own blog, Mr. Schmalfeldt, but the fact that no decent, honest or intelligent person cares to read your blog is not my problem. Likewise, the fact that the only use you seem to find for your Twitter account is to harass people you hate — not my problem.

Schmalfeldt’s problem can be described in two words: Bill Schmalfeldt.

Good luck fixing that problem, sir. It seems to be beyond repair.




 

 


Hoge’s Victory Lap

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After his stunning courtroom triumph today over the atrocious troll Bill Schmalfeldt, John Hoge recounts at length exactly what kind of atrocious troll Bill Schmalfeldt is:

On 14 February, I received 40 tweets in less than one hour from @BreitbartUnmask ranting about Lee Stranahan, Aaron Walker, and me. Just after midnight on 15 February, I posted a notice on this blog and on Twitter addressed to @OldUncleBastard, @BreitbartUnmask, and @OccupyRebellion demanding that they stop communicating directly with me.

Now this relates to two sections of Maryland law, Harassment (§3-803) and Misuse of Electronic Communication (§3-805), that Hoge had read and which apparently Schmalfeldt hadn’t.

Understand this: It is one thing to say mean things about someone, but another to say mean things to someone.

The use of e-mail or Twitter to communicate hateful messages to someone — when the recipient has demanded that you cease such communications, notifying you that further messages will result in a complaint under the above sections of the law — is quite foolhardy.

And . . . Bill Schmalfeldt is quite a fool.

Such a fool is Bill Schmalfeldt that he supposed he might bring legal action against Hoge — don’t ask me to explain that — and listened to some of his online friends (including “Breitbart Unmasked”) who encouraged him to think that he, Schmalfeldt, was actually a victim.

Sadly, no.

Friday afternoon I talked to a friend, an attorney of no small reputation, who was somewhat skeptical of the use of Maryland’s law in this manner, which he felt might establish a bad precedent — a chilling effect on free speech, as it were. And so I began to say in a very serious way, how deeply I was concerned about the possible infringement of Bill Schmalfeldt’s First Amendment rights.

Then I laughed and laughed and laughed.

After I’d finished laughing — it took a while, I gotta tell ya — I eventually went over to Hoge’s blog and hit the tip jar. Everybody should.

And then you, too, can laugh and laugh and laugh and . . .

 

Peace Order Against Bill Schmalfeldt: A Defeat for the ‘Troll Rights’ Movement

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Bill Schmalfeldt of Elk Ridge, Maryland

John Hoge has the peace order granted today by Maryland Judge Thomas Stansfield, forbidding Bill Schmalfeldt from contacting Hoge.

People who have followed this story know that, in June 2012, Schmalfeldt began cyberstalking Aaron Walker, whose legal conflicts with Brett Kimberlin had become a subject of widespread public attention. From there, Schmalfeldt steadily expanded his target range to include all of Walker’s supporters, including Hoge. By November, when Schmalfeldt took over the pro-Kimberlin site “Breitbart Unmasked,” he made himself a general nuisance. Schmalfeldt’s vicious attacks on Lee Stranahan’s family were particularly distressing. Did I mention that in July 2012, Schmalfeldt created a “Dead Andrew” site to mock the late Andrew Breitbart and disparage Breitbart’s conservative colleagues?

Trying to get judges to understand how the Internet works has proven problematic in the long struggle against Team Kimberlin. Today was a rare victory, as Aaron Walker reports:

Tae Kim showed up as Schmalfeldt’s attorney again, and did present the argument that electronic harassment is not harassment.  The judge rejected that out of hand.
It is also worth noting that Schmalfeldt was also subpoenaed to produce documents.  He refused to comply with that, a fact that Hoge’s able counsel, Zoa Barnes, exploited repeatedly to show that Schmalfeldt didn’t respect the law.
So the case was pretty straightforward from there.  Barnes established that Schmalfeldt had been told repeatedly to stop contacting Hoge and despite being told by numerous people (including a judge), he just kept going, even up until last night.  The judge found the conduct to be harassment, comparing it to junk mail, and granted the peace order.  For the next six months, Bill Schmalfeldt will be prohibited from contacting Hoge by any means.  He can talk about him—that is his First Amendment right—but he can’t actually contact him.

Something else Aaron Walker reports: Brett Kimberlin showed up in court for Schmalfeldt’s hearing.

This is something Schmalfeldt will not explain — this is what the document subpoena was about — because the facts would not likely be flattering to Schmalfeldt’s patron. It is a reasonable surmise that Schmalfeldt’s communications would show the extent to which his harassment of Hoge, Walker and others was undertaken with the encouragement of Brett Kimberlin and Kimberlin’s associate Neal Rauhauser. Walker and others believe they have been the targets of an orchestrated campaign of harassment aimed at Kimberlin’s enemies.

One might argue that Bill Schmalfeldt is merely a nutjob, but Kimberlin’s presence at today’s court hearing certainly suggests that the focus of Schmalfeldt’s madness was not entirely random.

Check John Hoge’s blog for further news.




 

 


Who’s the Liberal: Hannity or Coulter?

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Sean Hannity has a bad habit of interrupting and hectoring guests he disagrees with and, in the case of the “Gang of Eight” immigration bill, Hannity has evidently decided that criticism of Marco Rubio is impermissible. This led to an interesting exchange Wednesday night:

Hannity asked [Ann Coulter] what she would do about the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants who are already in the United States.
“This is a total fraud and a fig leaf that the American people can’t sleep at night,” Coulter responded, “because the situation is exactly the same today as it was –”
“You’re not answering my question,” Hannity interrupted. “You’re like a liberal.”
Ooh! That got a reaction.
“No, you are like a liberal, making a silly argument,” Coulter retorted. “It’s a straw man argument. Nobody cares. This idea that it’s an emergency, it’s a crisis — it’s preposterous. The same thing will happen as is happening now.”

You can watch the video at ViralRead. And obviously, Coulter is right: Hannity is “like a liberal,” because he is letting his emotional empathy with Marco Rubio overwhelm facts and logic. Also, he’s “like a liberal,” interrupting and hectoring his guest.

 


What I’d Like To Hear From @DMataconis

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by Smitty

Over at The Liberty Papers, we have what amounts to an intriguing anti-SoCon rant:

Perhaps my biggest problem with fusionism in its current incarnation, however, is the extent to which it demands that libertarians silence their criticism of their so-called conservative allies in the name of “unity.” Even if one accepts the argument that libertarians and conservatives are on the same side when it comes to economics, there is no denying that there are significant differences between the two sides on many issues. The most obvious, of course, are social issues such as gay marriage, the drug war, pornography, and, for some but not all libertarians, abortion rights. In addition to that, it’s generally the case that libertarians have a far more restrained view of what proper American foreign policy should be than conservatives do, even in today’s era where conservatives suddenly seem to have become anti-war when the war is being led by Barack Obama. Based on those differences alone, the idea that libertarians and conservatives are just two sides of the same coin is clearly false.

It is true that there are some Evangelical absolutists who have their hobby horses.

It’s also true that a more Federalist read of the Constitution doesn’t concern itself with activity below the state level. Absolutely, Amendments 13-15 ended slavery, but what’s occurred due to Progress, and the unratified Second Bill of Rights, is that we’re now One. Big. Honkin’. State. We can all be unhappy that personal sexual and relational matters have to play out in contentious, Procrustean struggles in DC.

And this is precisely the way the Ruling Class prefers things. Keep the proletariat all thumb wrestling over whether the government is in your (lady|man)parts, or in your wallet, while the Federal Reserve-fueled vote-buying schemes continue apace, and liberty dwindles.

I should think Mataconis has enough low animal cunning to sense the game afoot. While I’m a SoCon’s SoCon on a personal level, even the most “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” Evangelicals have got to be honest about the Constitution: it was States delegating powers to a Federal government, not a tool whereby I can enforce my personal taste for post-infant baptism by full immersion on everybody, Christian or otherwise*.

What I’d propose in lieu of the poo flinging is:

  • A focus on areas of agreement on the enumerated powers that we need to drive back toward.
  • A de-emphasis on the personal hobbyhorse issues. Marriage management isn’t a federal task. I don’t need a federal law to know the score on abortion. I’d prefer libertarian indifference prevail toward those states that I could not live in for cultural reasons.
  • A sober realization that our government has become as odious as the British Parliament of the 1700s. We can hang together and prevail in time, or hold the divisive course and hang separately. The Josephus types who’ve already cut their deals will continue to be no help.

And to all of the new Tea Party folks, let me pass on a warning: the two ears, one mouth rule applies. There is much to learn about the sordid realities of our government, as it’s deviated well off course. Relax. Focus the passion on sober, positive deeds that advance the Constitutional ball. Screaming about Barack Obama’s Martian birth certificate and obvious status as a High Priest of Cthulhu is ONLY ABETTING HIM.

I know it seems counter-intuitive, but spend some time studying. The history of How Things Got So Jacked Up is important if you want to help in ways that are actually constructive.

It’s easy to get pissed off, disgusted, drop some F-bombs, and leave. But half the recovery battle is showing up; the other half is staying engaged. Your foe has massive endurance. Our task is to execute Gramsci’s Long March through the Institutions in reverse. Stand by for a multi-decade struggle. Homeschool your children. Teach them right from wrong. Teach them history. Teach them to reject the corrosive Postmodern piffle passing for thought these days.

But don’t expect instant gratification.

*Smoochies to everyone who recoils at my conservative read there. 🙂

‘Oh, My God. They Were Everywhere’

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Young stars circa 1987: Corey Haim (left) and Corey Feldman

Apropos of recent controversies, Pete Da Tech Guy quotes a 2011 interview with former child actor Corey Feldman:

“I can tell you that the No. 1 problem in Hollywood was and is and always will be pedophilia. That’s the biggest problem for children in this industry. … It’s the big secret,” Feldman said. . . .
“I was surrounded by [pedophiles] when I was 14 years old. . . . Didn’t even know it. It wasn’t until I was old enough to realize what they were and what they wanted . . . till I went, Oh, my God. They were everywhere,” Feldman, 40, said.

In that interview, Feldman was talking about his former Lost Boys co-star: “There’s one person to blame in the death of Corey Haim. And that person happens to be a Hollywood mogul. And that person needs to be exposed, but, unfortunately, I can’t be the one to do it.” I reacted to Pete’s post with my habitual sarcasm:

But then I realized: Corey Haim can be reached for comment, via the “Corey Haim’s Notes on the Afterlife” series at Protein Wisdom. The dearly departed even offered his perspective on “Free Kate”:

I don’t usually weigh in on terrestrial politics, but the truth is, if  I’d been arrested every time I got a hand job from some underage kid who wanted me to sign his Lost Boys t-shirt, there would be no Dream a Little Dream, much less its (in my opinion) criminally underrated sequel.
Sometimes the law is just stupid — especially when it threatens to get in the way of art. . . .
American society really needs to get over its sexual hangups.

Please excuse “Corey’s” attitude. Sometimes dark sarcasm is the only sane alternative to screaming rage. As to this oft-heard argument — that “hangups” about sex are our real problem — it was in a 1999 interview that A Return to Modesty author Wendy Shalit offered the best rejoinder: “I don’t have hangups. You’re just a pervert.”

 

 


Do They Still Teach Presumption Of Innocence In Law Schools, @DMataconis?

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by Smitty

Ol’ Doug:

More importantly, though, I think it’s a mistake to say that the protections of the 5th Amendment, or to broaden the argument any of the protections granted to actual and potential criminal defendants under the 4th, 6th, and 7th Amendments as well, were primarily designed to protect the innocent.

I realize that I’m unfit to question your JD-ness, but didn’t Presumption of Innocence kind of inform Law as we (at least once) knew it?

On a superficial level, that simply isn’t supported by the text of the Amendments themselves, which apply to everyone in all situations.

So, the lack of enumeration of every contextual assertion informing the Bill of Rights supports pretending that the first 10 Amendments lack any? I forget where in Amar’s book, but he mentions the sequence of the Amendments, itself, as significant. They are all addenda to specific articles in the Constitution proper, and could have been physically interwoven with the document, just as they are logically. In summary, the Bill of Rights is a gripe list about what happens when power is concentrated excessively. Not dissimilar from our current situation.

Indeed, the 5th Amendment’s right against self-incrimination doesn’t require that there actually be a pending criminal case or investigation, or that the testimony in question take place in a court proceeding connected with criminal charges. As long as their is a possibility that what someone says in a public forum, be it a criminal investigation or a deposition during the course of a civil trial, could potentially used to bring charges against them and prosecute them for a crime then the person being questioned has the right to invoke their rights under the Amendment. It’s not a question of being “guilty” or “innocent,” it’s that the Amendment exists to protect individuals from the state compelling them to testify in any situation, including a Congressional Committee hearing.

OK, so “the government can’t beat it out of you” has evolved into “you don’t have to play”. Right.

I guess that’s the point of a jury of the peers, then: to listen to all of the back-and-forth and render a conclusion. Pleading the 5th on a seemingly trivial issue is going to come across as: “Guilty”.

One can be an IRS apologist to the extent that they have a task that is impossible to accomplish defect-free at the outset, and then point out that there has never been a reasonable reform mechanism.

I understand Lois has pled the Fifth. I even believe she believes she’s innocent, as much as #OccupyResoluteDesk believes he’s Christian. Once accepts these assertions at face value.

The danger to the Fifth Amendment and its protections is a lack of fundamental reform. Lois, herself, is a footnote, and resisting the urge to personalize all this, tempting though it be, is paramount. Alinskyism is false.