Category: How This Here Internet Thingy Works

A Princess, A Dragon, And A Qwerkywriter

Posted on Comments

— by Wombat-socho


Finally scraped enough Amazon gift certificates together to order S.M. Stirling’s The Golden Princess, which is the latest in the series of “Change” novels that began with Dies the Fire. It’s the sequel to The Given Sacrifice, in which Mike Havel’s bastard son Rudi Mackenzie (a/k/a the High King of Montival) dies at the hands of Koreans who have come all the way across the Pacific in pursuit of the Emperor of Japan. Now Rudi’s daughter, Crown Princess Orlaith, and the new Empress, Reiko, must overcome their fathers’ deaths and plunge into the heart of the Death Lands formerly known as Los Angeles in pursuit of one of Japan’s Sacred Treasures – with not only savage cannibal Eaters but, apparently, the evil that once manifested itself in Montival’s deadly enemies the Cutters. Some reviewers at Amazon complained that this book basically just sets the table for the next arc in the Change series, in which we’re acquainted with the sons and daughters of the heroes and heroines of the war against the Prophet as they set off with Orlaith, Reiko and her household guards on an adventure that sounds only slightly less deadly than Rudi’s own cross-continent quest for the Sword of the Lady.
I for one am just as happy to have a book like this now instead of a fat volume thick enough to stun an ox two years from now. Unlike certain other authors I won’t name, but whose initials are Harry Turtledove, I can rely on Stirling not to lose track of his characters or endlessly repeat the same facts over and over again until you want to throw the book out the window. That having been said, while The Golden Princess stands on its own just fine, you really ought to at least read The Given Sacrifice if you don’t have time to read the other nine books in the series.


Also, while I normally don’t review stuff you can’t find on Amazon (because, like Stacy, I am all about the Shameless Capitalism) I am making an exception for Rory Modena’s Sparrowind (available through Lulu, and hopefully soon on Amazon) which is a cute little tale about a nearsighted dragon, the runt of his clutch, who decides to become a knight and hoard books, since he’s clearly not cut out to be a normal dragon. Hilarity and triumph ensue; I would unreservedly recommend this if you’re looking for something to read the kids as a bedtime book, or if you want something light and fluffy with a dash of humor. I’ll be reposting a link for this when it appears on Amazon – but why wait? You can always convert it from EPub format to Kindle or Nook using Calibre – which is freeware.


I was sent a review copy of Auntie Jodi’s Helpful Hints, which reminds me somewhat of P.J. O’Rourke’s infamous The Bachelor Home Companion except that Jodi Adler’s advice is more about high society (interpret that as you will) in LA and New York, and how one deals with the innumerable tedious people encountered there. Some of the advice is serious, but half the fun is guessing which of the many nuggets in this slim volume those might be. In the meantime, it’s a light and amusing read, especially recommended to those fond of snark and sarcasm.


Finally, we come to the Qwerkywriter. Spotted on Facebook in the feed of some steampunk-obsessed friend of mine, I at first mistook this for the USB Typewriter (“A groundbreaking advancement in the field of obsolescence!”) which I had half-seriously recommended to Stacy some years ago while he was struggling with TweetDeck and other annoyances of the 21st century*. Qwerkywriter is just a keyboard, though, without the annoying requirement to actually own an iPad or some other tablet. We can preorder one for just $309 before they hit the market next summer – just in time for the 2016 Presidential campaign, when a durable keyboard like this will be an indispensable asset to the Shoe Leather Campaign Fund! Who’s with me?

* I thought it was this post, but actually it was this post. Welp.


Shop Amazon – Used Textbooks – Save up to 90%

Dear Vloggers: Please Learn to Type

Posted on Comments

Jaclyn Glenn (@JaclynGlenn) is an atheist video performer — vlogger, as they say — whose online presence seems to consist entirely of a YouTube channel and a Twitter account. This presents difficulties for those of us whose preferred medium is the written word.

To explain: I’m a super-fast reader. If you were to provide me with a transcript of your 11-minute video rant, I could skim over it in less than a minute and locate the “money quote,” which I could then copy-and-paste into a block-quote on my blog and discuss it. Alternatively, I might decide that your 11-minute video rant is a silly piece of nonsense that should be ignored. Either way, the difference between (a) the 11-minute video rant and (b) a transcript of your rant is that (b) saves me 10 minutes of time over (a), not to mention the time savings between (c) doing a quick copy-and-paste of a quote and (d) having to transcribe your lunatic gibberish.

Excuse my prejudice, but whenever I encounter a vlogger who does not also have a blog — where they discuss topics in the format of written words — my suspicions run in one of three directions:

  1. This person is lazy. It’s easier for them to stare into their webcam and ramble aloud about their feelings than it is for them to bother writing down whatever it is they want to say.
  2. This person is mentally deficient. They’re so impenetrably stupid they were unable to learn basic spelling and grammar. They express themselves in video performances because if they tried to write what they think, it would be so full of obvious grammatical errors that nobody would take them seriously.
  3. This person really wants to be a TV star. That is to say, their videos aren’t really arguments so much as they are auditions. They hope a TV producer will spot their telegenic qualities and invite them on a cable-news discussion panel as a guest, or maybe cast them in a reality-TV series.

Maybe other people aren’t prejudiced this way like I am, but as a devotee of the written word, this is how I feel about vloggers.

So, all that is a long preamble to Jaclyn Glenn’s video “Atheists- Beware of the Extreme Feminist!” The title intrigues me, but I’ll be damned if I have the patience to watch the whole thing:

Fortunately, four minutes into this 11-minute rant, Jaclyn includes a screencap of a post by atheist blogger PZ Myers, so that I could Google that and find this description of the ridiculous “drama” among atheists that inspired the whole crazy thing:

Here’s the pocket summary: Glenn sets it up as an attempt to, in a comedic way, compare the bickering in the atheist community to arguments about vegetarians. To do this, she acts as two vloggers: for one, she puts on a blonde wig and glasses and makes a bunch of extremist, stupid arguments and demands absolute agreement; for the other, she just plays Jaclyn Glenn, reasonable, compromising, sensitive, egalitarian defender of reason who just wants to get along. In other words, she pretends to be the rational one pleading for unity while characterizing her critics as total idiots.
Really, it’s disgraceful and stupid and dishonest.

Thank you, Professor Myers. As to the question of whether it is Jaclyn Glenn or her atheist-feminist critics who are causing the “drama,” let me just point out this: Jaclyn Glenn has crazy eyes.

Beware of crazy-eyed atheist vloggers. Just sayin’ . . .

 

Tara Carreon Doesn’t Know Why People Hate Her Censorious Douchebag Husband

Posted on Comments

Allegedly the wife of Charles Carreon

When last we left the ongoing saga of censorious douchebag Charles Carreon, the “Popehat Reign of Terror” led to Charles being challenged to debate Ken White over Charles’ proposition that “Distributed Internet Reputational Attack” be recognized as grounds for a lawsuit, which inspired me to remark:

Thin-skinned narcissists who cannot admit error — whose response to criticism is always to demonize their critics, and who therefore automatically externalize blame for their own mistakes — are always doing this sort of thing to themselves in the Internet age.
Look: If you are ever in a situation where your stupidity makes you a target, the correct thing to do is . . . nothing.
Don’t react. Don’t try to defend yourself. Don’t lash out at your tormenters. Just ignore it until it is over. Learn your lesson, avoid repetition of the error, and be glad it wasn’t worse.
People who merely describe your stupidity — however mocking and sarcastic their descriptions — have done you no wrong.

Attempting to scapegoat others for your embarrassment, imagining that you have done nothing to deserve mockery or criticism, is never going to repair the damage you have done to yourself. God gives us the enemies we deserve, and we can learn lessons from such experiences, if we are willing to humbly accept chastisement.

Alas, Charles Carreon is prone to spasms of “pearl-clutching horror” — brilliant phrase, Ken — and so the comedic show goes on.

Last year, when Charles was threatening to sue everyone on the Internet into poverty, his wife Tara Carreon added to the entertainment:

“This is one of the little lying bitches working for Matt Inman,” Tara wrote about an apparently female commenter. In an exchange with another online commenter, Tara “jokingly” (her words) threatened that Carreon might subpoena him and search his hard drive. The bewildered commenter asked why he might possibly be subpoenaed. Tara replied:

For all of that illegal content on your hard drive. You’ll have to seek a protective order to keep your porn stash private. What’s your preference—het, gay, bi, BDSM?

The commenter responded, “Wait. Did you just vaguely threaten to try and out me to the general public using a subpoena and use that as a tool to embarrass and humiliate me? WOW. You, darling, have sunk lower than your husband.”

Notice the conspiratorial motif: Anyone on the Internet saying bad things about Charles Carreon must be “working for Matt Inman,” because it is impossible that this is just some random person who noticed that Charles Carreon is a censorious douchebag.

Notice also the Leninist “Who, Whom?” ethos: Threats that Tara Carreon would consider criminal if made against her or her censorious douchebag husband are perfectly acceptable when made against someone who does not admire her censorious douchebag husband.

OK, so in service of her “Stand By Your Man” act, Tara Carreon has started amassing “research” on all these evil people who call her husband a censorious douchebag, including yours truly:

There’s something really ironic about a guy who was a member of a white supremacist hate group, identified as such by the Southern Poverty Law Center, self-righteously hating on convicted domestic terrorist Brett Kimberlin. It’s as if they were brothers! Except that Brett has gone on to do good, and Robert Stacy McCain has gone on to do bad. Looks to me like Brett Kimberlin should be self-righteously hating on Robert Stacy McCain.
Boy, these guys do talk tough. They want you to know that you picked the wrong guy when you picked them for a fight! They going to squash you!
Mr. McCain has no shame. He just talks dirty, dirty, dirty, just like the rest of the rapeutationists. Their mothers should wash their mouths out with soap! Never has the world seen such an abundance of nasty talk.
And what about his Rodney King doctrine, that anyone targeted by the rapeutationists, better just lie down and not move, as their tormenters continue to kick the shit out of them? What a fascist, anti-democratic attitude.
So, that’s his advice. Here’s mine. Flee from the Internet as if it was the Devil himself, or some day you and your loved ones will be laying in a heap of bodies a mile high, all of you killed by the Internet. The nicer you are, the more likely you will be a target of the rapeutationists. This is a game where the bad guys point the finger at the good guys, and win.

Notice that Tara Carreon just became the umpteenth gazillionth person to call me a “white supremacist,” because everybody can rely on the Southern Poverty Law Center to provide them with truth and, also, a “hate map” directing their spree of violent terrorism.

Notice that Tara Carreon praises convicted felon Brett Kimberlin having “gone on to do good,” depending on your definition of good.

Notice that, three weeks after I last mentioned Charles Carreon on this site, Tara Carreon decides that I need to be profiled among the “tormenters” who “continue to kick the shit out of” poor helpless victim Charles Carreon. And why? Because he bears no responsibility whatsoever for the consequences of his ill-advised decision to send a demand for $20,000 to Matt Inman of TheOatmeal.com.

Tara Carreon ignores entirely — because mentioning it would invalidate the Victim Card she wants to play — that the only reason I ever noticed censorious douchebag Charles Carreon is because my name turned up in his list of “rapers” in the “Popehat Reign of Terror”:

Brett Kimberlin — obtained peace order prohibiting blogger Aaron Walker (Worthing) from writing about him (convicted domestic terrorist, bomber, perjurer; wounded a man so badly he later took his own life; laughed off the judgment; made vague and undocumented claims that he suffered threats from unidentified people; astoundingly vile; terrifyingly sociopathic; leads a contemptible life; crazy; quite evil; victimizer; malevolent; outrageous; despicable; remorseless and amoral psycho; crazy stalker) (Rapers: Aaron Walker, Patterico’s Pontifications; Eugene Volokh; Ali A. Akbar of the National Bloggers Club; Elizabeth Kingsley of Harmon, Curran, Spielberg & Eisenberg, LLP; Robert Stacy McCain)

Homey says, ‘I don’t think so.’

Homey don’t play that, see? You want to throw down, we’ll throw down, but when the fight starts with you sucker-punching me, you’d better by God be ready to bring it, because if I didn’t start the fight, I might feel obliged to finish it. And when you then derogate me for daring to notice your insults — as though I have no honor to defend — don’t whine when you find yourself losing the fight you started.

How does Tara Carreon dare to say I have “a fascist, anti-democratic attitude,” when it was her censorious douchebag husband who imagined he could sue the entire Internet into trembling silence?

Oh, I guess only lawyers have a license to terrorize and intimidate people on the Internet, and if any blogger dares say “boo” in reply, then the blogger must be an anti-democratic fascist.

But you just keep digging that hole, darling. By the time you dig your way to the flaming pit of Hell, I suppose you’ll still be blaming me.




 

‘And It Just Blew Up’

Posted on Comments

Heteropatriarchal slut-shaming? Hell, I thought I was just making fun of a celebrity, until @Andria_XX enlightened me, and she had no idea what hit her when her Twitter timeline blew up with reactions to her Master’s degree in Gender Studies mini-lecture.

So now it’s “cyberbullying” and “rage tourism” of which I’m accused.

Let’s explain to @Andria_XX what happened: Sooper Mexican was searching Twitter for reactions to the Miley Cyrus VMA performance, and found that “heteropatriarchal” comment and Zilla Tweeted it to my attention. I had been working on something else, but once I saw that, I said, “This other thing can wait,” and did a Miley Cyrus post to highlight that ludicrous jargon: “heteropatriarchal.”

That’s not a word normal people use, which is why the question occurred to me, “Who is this person?” And . . . Gender Studies.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

OK, so @Andria_XX had fewer than 200 followers and had never in her life gotten as much Twitter attention as she got this morning.

It’s like when I got Tweeted by Alyssa Milano or William Shatner — except not in a good way — so she freaked out.

But she wasn’t being cyberbullied or stalked, she just happened to be the person who had the Stupidest Twitter Comment of the Day.

Did I mention that @Andria_XX is Canadian? No, but she did:

Actually in Canada, which again is where I live, you can be criminally charged for twitter harassment.

Very well, then. I do a blog post about you. You do a blog post about me. Who is harassing whom, @Andria_XX?

 

‘Distributed Internet Reputational Attack’? Charles Carreon’s Self-Evident Absurdity

Posted on Comments

Charles Carreon on Bloomberg News, March 2012.

Ken White at Popehat continues his reign of terror by offering to debate censorious douchebag Charles Carreon over the latter’s proposal that “Distributed Internet Reputational Attack” be recognized as a tort (i.e., grounds for a civil lawsuit).

Mr. Carreon’s problem is simple: He doesn’t understand how the Internet works. Also, he is a censorious douchebag.

Some writers on the Internet are more popular than others, which is perhaps not the same as saying that the more popular writers are always better writers than the less popular writers, but the saying that “content is king” expresses a basic truth: Someone who consistently cranks out good stuff will usually have more success online, especially if they have a strong sense of what readers want to read.

Ken White has built a large and loyal readership, especially among aficionados of legal lore and First Amendment issues. In addition to his vast legal erudition, he brings to his blog a capacity for diligent research and a lively sense of humor. Among the readers of Popehat are other successful bloggers with a legal background, including the very popular Instapundit. Ken White is, we might say, a blogger’s blogger, and this means that if he sets his sights on a vulnerable target, several other bloggers are likely to join the bombardment.

Charles Carreon evidently does not understand this and therefore, when Popehat helped turn Oatmeal’s hilarious beatdown of Carreon into a viral sensation last year, Carreon perceived this as an injustice which he now proposes to make a tort, “Distributed Internet Reputational Attack.” But who is to blame for this?

CHARLES CARREON IS TO BLAME.

Attempting to evade responsibility for one’s own errors by externalizing blame onto scapegoats is at the heart of Carreon’s problems. To describe the auto-douchebaggification process briefly:

  1. Idiot says, writes, or does something stupid.
  2. The stupidity appears on the Internet.
  3. Bloggers notice the stupidity, make fun of the idiot.
  4. “Hilarity ensues,” as they say. People in comments of blogs pile on further insults, blog readers look up the idiot’s phone number or e-mail address and express in vivid terms their disdain for the idiot’s stupidity.
  5. Idiot reacts stupidly, further hilarity ensues.

Charles Carreon’s reaction to his initial Oatmeal-v-FunnyJunk embarrassment was to double down and double down again. He ignored the First Law of Holes and kept digging, because it evidently never entered his mind that perhaps he was in the wrong.

Thin-skinned narcissists who cannot admit error — whose response to criticism is always to demonize their critics, and who therefore automatically externalize blame for their own mistakes — are always doing this sort of thing to themselves in the Internet age.

Look: If you are ever in a situation where your stupidity makes you a target, the correct thing to do is . . . nothing.

Don’t react. Don’t try to defend yourself. Don’t lash out at your tormenters. Just ignore it until it is over. Learn your lesson, avoid repetition of the error, and be glad it wasn’t worse.

People who merely describe your stupidity — however mocking and sarcastic their descriptions — have done you no wrong.

Consider the example of Jackie Mackie Paisley Passey, who described herself as “a very high-quality woman,” citing the reasons why men should crave her romantic companionship:

I’m sorry if I’ve offended you, but I’m also really sick of getting e-mailed several times a week by delusionally hopeful men who read my blog and think because I am *their* dream girl that I’ll therefore want them too.

Ace of Spades disassembled her with astonishing deftness:

Look, I want to make it clear I’m not saying this girl is ugly, per se. What she is is “plain.” She is what I call “Bad Irish.” The Irish look, but not the Good Irish look. The pasty skin, the elfin features… but not cute elfin, or better yet, hot elfin.
What you’re looking at here is a 5. A girl you wouldn’t notice in the average college or singles bar, except maybe if you had recently quit smoking, and noticed she had a fresh pack of Marlboro Reds held in her (indifferent) cleavage.

And you know something? However humiliated she was by that — and trust me, she deserved the humiliation — Ms. Passey figured out rather quickly that there was no way to “win” it. After an update or two where she tried to explain, defend or justify her stupidity, she walked away and eventually married a guy (“delusionally hopeful”?) and disappeared from the blogosphere.

Is Charles Carreon as smart as Jackie Mackie Paisley Passey?

Stay tuned to Popehat for further developments.

 

The @Popehat Reign of Terror and the Censorious Douchebag Charles Carreon

Posted on Comments

Charles Carreon on Bloomberg News, March 2012.

“See, a legal threat like the one Charles Carreon sent — ‘shut up, delete your criticism of my client, give me $20,000, or I’ll file a federal lawsuit against you’ — is unquestionably a form of bullying. . . .
“Our system privileges Charles Carreon to issue that threat, rather than jailing or flogging him for it. And so Carreon supports bullying like that. He’s got a license to do it.”
— Ken White, Popehat.com, June 13, 2012

Somebody informed me that my name appears in a list of “rapers” who have allegedly victimized Brett Kimberlin:

Brett Kimberlin — obtained peace order prohibiting blogger Aaron Walker (Worthing) from writing about him (convicted domestic terrorist, bomber, perjurer; wounded a man so badly he later took his own life; laughed off the judgment; made vague and undocumented claims that he suffered threats from unidentified people; astoundingly vile; terrifyingly sociopathic; leads a contemptible life; crazy; quite evil; victimizer; malevolent; outrageous; despicable; remorseless and amoral psycho; crazy stalker) (Rapers: Aaron Walker, Patterico’s Pontifications; Eugene Volokh; Ali A. Akbar of the National Bloggers Club; Elizabeth Kingsley of Harmon, Curran, Spielberg & Eisenberg, LLP; Robert Stacy McCain)

This list was evidently compiled by Charles Carreon, whom I’d never heard of before, but who seems to be an infamous douchebag.

Not infamous enough, yet.

Is Charles Carreon a pervert? Does he hang around middle-school playgrounds selling heroin to children? No one has ever made any such accusation against him. Nor, as far as I know, is there any reason to believe that Charles Carreon is a serial killer with a basement dungeon and the bones of prostitutes buried in his backyard.

No, he’s just a douchebag. And a big-shot lawyer.

But I repeat myself.

So there are two humor sites, The Oatmeal and FunnyJunk, and the proprietor of the former site said the latter site was ripping him off. At which point, the proprietor of the FunnyJunk hired Tucson, Arizona, lawyer Charles Carreon to send a letter to Matt Inman, proprietor of The Oatmeal, accusing him of damaging FunnyJunk’s reputation and threatening a federal lawsuit, a letter that ended thus:

Accordingly, demand is hereby made upon you to perform the following remedial acts on or before June 12, 2012:

  • Remove all mention of FunnyJunk and FunnyJunk.com from TheOatmeal.com from your website and any other website over which you have control.
  • Deliver to me a check in the amount of $20,000 payable to the order of FunnyJunk LLC.

I look forward to your prompt response.
Very truly yours,
Charles Carreon

He got a “prompt response,” all right — arguably the most hilarious “fuck you” in the history of the Internet.

Popehat.com proprietor Ken White is a famed defender of online free speech. His immediate response included this:

Their lawyer has just given himself +eleventy in “censorious twatwaffle” on Klout, and the Streisand Effect is looming.
Pack it up and go home, FunnyJunk. This isn’t going to turn out well for you. . . .
Fuck him. He’s vermin. He’s not forgivable. Let any good he has ever done be wiped out. Let the name “Charles Carreon” be synonymous with petulant, amoral censorious douchebaggery.

Indeed, and Charles Carreon cooperated admirably, doubling down over and over — chasing his losses, as a gambler would say. A guy created a site mocking Charles Carreon. That led to threats and a lawsuit and Carreon was eventually handed his own ass in federal court:

Today [April 12, 2013] a federal judge in the Northern District of California granted the motion for fees by the satirical blogger, granting $46,100.25 in fees to the blogger’s attorneys, Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen and attorney and blogger Cathy Gellis. They had been seeking a total of $77,765.25.
Judge United States District Judge Richard Seeborg’s order awarding fees is devastating to Carreon. Judge Seeborg rejects Carreon’s arguments one by one, and finds Carreon’s litigation conduct rendered the case exceptional . . .

 The key to understanding this is Charles Carreon’s sense of entitlement. He is a big-shot lawyer and therefore entitled to a good reputation, so if people say mean things about him on the Internet, Charles Carreon believes he has been wrongly deprived of something that is rightfully his. He whined to NBC News after The Oatmeal mocked him:

“I really did not expect that he would marshal an army of people who would besiege my website and send me a string of obscene emails,” he says.
“I’m completely unfamiliar really with this style of responding to a legal threat — I’ve never really seen it before,” Carreon explains. “I don’t like seeing anyone referring to my mother as a sexual deviant.”

Is Charles Carreon’s mother a “sexual deviant”? I’d never heard that before, but now that you mention it — and hey, Charles, you invited me to your reign-of-terror pity party, remember? — your mother being a sexual deviant might explain a lot of things.

Ken White offers apologies for his reign of terror, but who’s going to apologize for all those hookers who have disappeared from the streets of Tucson in recent years, huh? And what about the epidemic of heroin addiction among Arizona middle schoolers?

No one has accused Charles Carreon of dealing heroin or carving up kidnapped prostitutes in his basement torture dungeon — he’s never even been suspected of such things — and if anybody has a hunch that the hard drive on Charles Carreon’s laptop is crammed full of illegal pornography, they’ve never mentioned this to me.

As for the alleged sexual deviancy of Charles Carreon’s mother, I’ve double-checked that NBC article, and he didn’t deny it, did he?

We know of no actual evidence for any such allegations, and he probably doesn’t have a torture dungeon in his basement, although you never know about such things. Most of Ariel Castro‘s neighbors in Cleveland thought he was just a law-abiding citizen and at least Ariel Castro never threatened to sue a blogger for $20,000.

Charles Carreon is in the Douchebag Hall of Fame because of his own actions. He refuses to accept responsibility for this, however. Instead he shifts blame onto scapegoats, demonizing Ken White and others and, in the process, causing me to take notice of his censorious douchebaggery.

He chose poorly — again.

 

Also, You’re Not Cynical Enough

Posted on Comments

The two most important questions in any contract are:

  1. What’s in it for me?
    and
  2. What’s in it for them?

Caveat emptor. Honesty is the best policy, but you have the right to remain silent. In other words, if somebody offers you a deal and you don’t like the offer, just walk away. You don’t owe them an explanation of why you rejected their offer. “No thanks, I’ll look elsewhere.”

In any negotiated contract, the other guy is always trying to maximize his profit opportunity, trying to get you to sell too low or buy too high. He knows at the outset of the negotiation what is his minimum price to sell (or maximum price to buy), and the question that you have to ask yourself is, “Can I get a better price elsewhere?”

Wages are prices, and your job is always a contracted purchase: You will exchange X amount of labor for Y amount of money.

If you don’t like your job, just quit — no harm, no foul — and seek employment elsewhere. Nobody can force you to be underpaid or mistreated, unless you’re a crack whore with a sadistic pimp, and yet  many people don’t think of their jobs as market transactions.

They do not understand that their labor, their knowledge, their experience and skills are commodities for which there is a demand, so that they can always shop around for the best deal. Instead, people buy into the leftist idea of “workers’ rights” and, rather than just quitting a job they’re unhappy with and looking for a better job, they become disgruntled and start thinking in terms of revenge.

The counterfactual unreality of “worker rights” is to blame, for example, in all lawsuits alleging workplace discrimination. Hey, if you’re working someplace where unfairness and mistreatment are commonplace, just quit and find a job you like better. And if your boss asks you why you’re quitting, you can explain it to him — or not. Remember, you have the right to remain silent. Maybe you can privately explain to your friends (if they ask) that your former boss is a jerk and the company routinely mistreats its employees, but that’s your call.

There are some organizations and individuals I respect, and some I don’t. It’s a free country. Nobody can force me to work for assholes.

Anyway, my sarcastic Twitter response to the Leadership Institute’s Director of Digital Communications Abigail Alger might be wrongly interpreted, if I didn’t explain it. LI is an excellent organization and Abby is a wonderful person, and it is not their fault that (a) I just happened to see that Tweet, and (b) the solicitation of “advice on Twitter to your fellow activists” hit me the wrong way.

Could I explain why it hit me the wrong way? Sure I could, but I have the right to remain silent, and if you make a habit of offering advice for free, nobody’s ever going to pay you for it.

Looking down the staff roster at LI, I see many familiar names, including Josiah Ryan, Gabriella Hoffman and Danielle Saul, and I’m sure they’re just really grateful that I’ve name-checked them here, while Abby’s wondering, “What the hell’s his problem?”

Ask me at a happy hour in Arlington sometime. You’re buying.

 

Bill Schmalfeldt, Violentacrez, Barrett Brown and the Scourge of ‘Troll Rights’

Posted on Comments

“Arrogant sociopathic punks think they can go around threatening people and if you dare say a word back to them, you’re the bad guy.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Sept. 4, 2012

Donald Douglas at American Power reminds me of the deranged cyberstalker’s irrational grievance: “Troll rights.”

A basic problem of online life: People Who Don’t Understand How the Internet Works, No Matter How Often You Try to Explain It to Them.

Back in the day you could — and, in many places on the Internet, you still can — say anything you want to say in the comments. People who habitually frequent such places become accustomed to unleashing their id at will, and believe that this is a basic First Amendment freedom, which it is — as long as the proprietors of the site don’t care what people say in the comments. But one way or another, that online space is owned by someone, and the proprietor makes the rules.

Try going over to Democrat Underground or Daily Kos, spewing out GOP talking points, and see how long it takes them to ban you.

Trolls don’t understand this. They believe that having access to the Internet confers on them the inalienable right to say anything they want anywhere they want to say it, and any site operator who refuses to acknowledge that right is a fascist totalitarian.

To which I customarily reply: Get your own damned blog.

Here in my space, I will say what I want to say and — while disagreement and criticism from commenters is tolerated — there are clear limits to what can be tolerated without destroying the value of the site as a community of readers. Some of our regular commenters regularly disagree with me, and disagree with each other, and that’s OK. But what is not permitted is intentionally disruptive behavior, or personal attacks impugning the character of the hosts or the integrity of the site, which is inevitably the kind of “argument” trolls want to make.

This rule is a matter of hospitality and courtesy. You don’t accept an invitation to a party then show up and start harassing your fellow guests, complaining about the food and saying rude things about the hosts. Well, maybe you do that, but decent people don’t.

If you hate me, there are lots of places on the Internet where you are free to express that hatred. The comments of this blog are not such a place.

The classic example of the troll mentality was Michael Brutsch, a.k.a. Violentacrez, the notorious “jailbait” troll on Reddit.

In the free-for-all environment which the proprietors of Reddit seemingly encouraged, Violentacrez’s domineering id-monster act flourished. There were no limits he would not transgress, no sensibilities he failed to offend, and anyone who tried to get in his way was denounced as a crybaby, a “pussy.”

Well,  it was anonymous, you see?

Except for a few trusted friends, nobody knew who Violentacrez actually was, and so there were no consequences for his deliberately vile behavior until, one day, consequences happened.

One of his “few trusted friends” finally had enough of his outrageous bullshit and narked him out to Adrian Chen of Gawker:

Last Wednesday afternoon I called Michael Brutsch. He was at the office of the Texas financial services company where he works as a programmer and he was having a bad day. I had just told him, on Gchat, that I had uncovered his identity as the notorious internet troll Violentacrez (pronounced Violent-Acres).
“It’s amazing how much you can sweat in a 60 degree office,” he said with a nervous laugh.
Judging from his internet footprint, Brutsch, 49, has a lot to sweat over. If you are capable of being offended, Brutsch has almost certainly done something that would offend you, then did his best to rub your face in it. His speciality is distributing images of scantily-clad underage girls, but as Violentacrez he also issued an unending fountain of racism, porn, gore, misogyny, incest, and exotic abominations yet unnamed, all on the sprawling online community Reddit. At the time I called Brutsch, his latest project was moderating a new section of Reddit where users posted covert photos they had taken of women in public, usually close-ups of their asses or breasts, for a voyeuristic sexual thrill. It was called “Creepshots.” Now Brutsch was the one feeling exposed and it didn’t suit him very well. . ..
“My wife is disabled. I got a home and a mortgage, and if this hits the fan, I believe this will affect negatively on my employment,” he said.

Alas, too late. Within a week, Michael Brutsch was fired from his job.

There are many words to describe Brutsch’s online behavior, but the important word is antisocial — a hostility to rules, a defiance of authority, an unwillingness to cooperate with others. Rules exist for a reason, and if you have a problem understanding why “distributing images of scantily-clad underage girls” is against the rules . . .

Dude, do I even need to finish that sentence? Continue reading Bill Schmalfeldt, Violentacrez, Barrett Brown and the Scourge of ‘Troll Rights’ →