The Wrong Hands

Continuing on with my thesis that Second Life is being used to prototype radical antiglobalist movements and the Occupy Wall Street anarchist collective (or bureaucratic-collectivist start-up, my preferred term, to capture the cadre nature of the operation and its entrepreneurial "innovative" start-up qualities -- it even has $300,000 of first-round venture capital now lol):

Compare and contrast this site of The Wrong Hands with a logo with a radical revolutionary fist, and then compare OWS TV -- the same kind of radical revolutionary fist. At the same angle, a very similar drawing, and similar fists. Of course not exact; of course not quite the same colour. But damn similar:

The Wrong Hands logo in Second Life

Occupy Wall Street TV -- NY Logo Prototype

Kinda creepy, eh? When you look at it the first time and think about online life and how it occurs...and how it crosses over to real life...

Now, der, I totally get it that people making radical movements tend to chose clenched fists as their logo -- the clenched fist is an old socialist symbol, so online socialists tend to reach for this old meme (in fact, the woman who designed this logo for OWS TV is even chastised by one of the comrades that she ought not to use old 20th century memes that connote with these past movements but make something simple and generic).

And herr, the likelihood of this woman making the logo in upstate New York who comes down to Zuccotti occasionally, and Tux Winkler, the name of an SL avatar who lives in London or wherever he is in the UK, having anything to do with each other is slim -- maybe even impossible.

But...perhaps they *do* have some one or six degrees of separation somewhere, and that place could be the prototyping of Second Life or the Anonymous feeding troughs like 4chan and IRC channels and pastebins that Tux Winkler, believed to be a LulzSec operative in SL, do in fact share.

It's always worth probing the hypothesis. It doesn't disturb me that it might be "far-fetched" or "unlikely" or that to pose this question means people will screech about tinhats, and paranoia, and needing meds, and having to get out more. When you have memes tossed around and you find similar memes showing up, it's ok to ask questions. It's ok to compare logos and the ideologies they imply and connote.

In the same way, the appearance of pink-suited and pink-bereted security in The Pink Hands, the "radical feminist" offshoot of The Wrong Hands, in the virtual world of Second Life, and the appearance of pink-clad and pink-bereted security in meetings of Occupy Wall Street in different cities, maybe only tenuously related or may have some DNA link somewhere or some one degree of IRC separation. I put it out there to think about.

The pink-clad security folks in the OWS video I wrote about before are definitely not "Guardian Angels" and Hypatia and others are totally wrong. Guardian Angels come from a white, conservative Catholic Polish-American named Curtis Sliwa who wanted to maintain order against mainly black urban delinquents during a time when it seemed you could not ride the subway or buses without risking assault or robbery. As someone who was assaulted and robbed in that era as I tried to climb a bus at night in Jersey City (and had the bus driver drive away when he saw a gang of a dozen youths descend on the scene!), I totally get their motivation. Don't forget this was the era also of "I have five dollars for each of you" and Bernard Goetz. The Guardian Angels wore red and had crosses and berets with their own insignia and did not have politics anything like OWS or symbols like OWS. So it's a competely wrong hypothesis.

The pink berets that OWS is using as security came about because berets, ever since the famous Green Berets and the Vietnam War and the song about them, connote elite security power. We get that. So the pink berets are to connote power and security but with a kind of LGBT flavour and tilt, movement power, not state power. The OWS people in pink are not related at all to the Guardian Angels in colour, style, or ideology. The Guardian Angels are in New York City; the video I have here is from Atlanta. There aren't Guardian Angels in Atlanta. Meanwhile, the OWS talk themselves about those in pink who are keeping order and you can see it in their videos. They are part of the order-keepers in this group which they put in place because they suffered their own problems of theft and sexual assault with all the street people they attracted and their own loons.

The people who made The Pink Hands in SL may have nothing to do with the OWS security pink panthers. But...maybe they do. Again, maybe they are only separated by one person on a friendship list, or go and feed at the same IRC channel troughs or 4chan or ebaumsworld or whatever -- memes are memes for a reason, because they spread through social media. And tracing them and seeing where they show up and asking questions about how they get prototyped is perfectly legitimate, necessary, and hardly something to dismiss by cries of "tinfoil!". If you don't have people who see patterns in society; if you don't have people willing to ask questions about patterns people claim to see, you donot  have an open society and a society able to remedy its ills. So I ask the questions about what I see.

I've written a fair amount on The Wrong Hands in the nearly two years this saga has gone on, at my Second Life blog and you can read about it on the JLU site. What does it boil down to?

Some basic facts and theses:

1. The founder Jim Korpov (who went by many different variations of that name "Korpov" even "KorpovKorpov" and who speaks a kind of strange Google-translated Russian and puts Russian phrases on his profile or on the TWH group, is a hands-on, egregious, serial griefer. He and his band of e-thugs in various groups of b/tards or groups using my RL picture named Prokofy this or that, or various other groups pretending even to be fighting griefers, would endlessly trespass on my sims deliberately, heckling and harassing me and my tenants, spewing particles, putting around dead chickens, crashing the sims, etc. etc.

This is all well known, and it's why Korpov and his other little friends like Robble Rubble are permabanned, and many times over, on various alts.

2. The group itself of some 30 people was never disbanded, but the Lindens know full well that the founder, the founder's subsequent alts, and people like Rubble were all serial, systematic, conspiratorial (i.e. group-planning and intentional) griefers.

Why didn't the Lindens remove the group? Because they may need it to serve as a magnet to collect new alts and see what they do; because the Lindens are hippie libertarian techcommies and have trouble disbanding groups on principle. I've often pointed out that you can hold to the value of the right to association and assembly, but once a group begins to have 10 percent, 25 percent, 50 percent or more of its members involved in crime, why, it's a criminal conspiracy and you shut it down -- and the Lindens even arrive at that conclusion with these persistent "under the radar groups" pretending not to be griefers yet aiding and abetting griefers.

3. TWH were furious that the JLU had the goods on them, tracked them and abuse reported them, using inworld data and whatever they scraped from open sources on the Internet. They hated that because it would lead to their banning -- duh.

Now, I don't favour vigilantism or support the JLU. I think people should police their own land and fake police groups online aren't needed to police other people's land. The Lindens should maintain law and order without these "helpers".

4. Yet the TWH never were able to prove that the JLU actually violated their privacy or their civil rights. They yammer endlessly with these claims and nothing comes together. Their use cases are pathetic -- a JLU member IMing the sister of a griefer dying in real life of AIDS, Deadly Codec, isn't violation of privacy; it's on an open Facebook page for Christ's sake, and she IM'd him back. It doesn't matter if the JLU member -- GreenLantern Excelsior was insincere or trying to get data to play police detective online and "close the case" -- the fact is, no privacy was violated and no harm was done. Tux Winkler repeatedly cites the case of Kalel Venkman contacting Woodbury University administrators about the griefing of the Woodbury goons in Second Life as if this is some kind of crime or invasion or privacy or some "over the top" effort to get Jordan Belino, a notorious griefer in SL (Tizzers Foxchase) expelled from school.

But there wasn't anything wrong at all with someone seeking justice and going to seek remedy and contact Woodbury, when they had been harassed themselves and seen others harassed. Indeed, later Kalel was even harassed *at home in RL with a Halloween visit* . I myself wrote the dean twice because of the constant harassment I suffered and the crashing of sims, etc. The Lindens were either "in on it" or impotent and so the answer really lay in contacting the real authorities. It was more than fine to do so and it was *effective* to do so because I was able to get at least an abatement of griefing for a time by contacting the RL Woodbury University.

The reality here is that Woodbury administrators were remiss and negligent in remedying the egregious situation with their own professor and students, and in the end Linden Lab acted, and acted three times, removing the sims and banning the accounts, of the Woodbury professor and students. So to continue word-salading and lying about this state of affairs as if Kalel Venkman is wrong in complaining to RL university authorities about SL griefers is outrageous. He can and should do this; I can and should do this; anyone should and the failure to do so by others in fact makes them complicit.

The Lindens know this and even Woodbury's VP knows this by now (and their program is closed now; Tizzers is gone and Intlibber is removed from the picture -- the Woodbury administrators finally figured it out for themselves). To be sure, Edward Clift, the griefer professor, is still yammering about unfairness and violation of educational rights, but he's in on the conspiracy so that means nothing. Even the gullible Chronicle of Higher Education has given up covering this fake victimology.

There remain various aftermaths, like the vandalized Wiki entry on me, which makes it seem as if my entire career has been spent denouncing Woodbury griefers *chuckle* but someday I'll get around to remedying this. Wikipedia itself is an act of vandalism of truth and integrity, so it's hard to justify spending much time trying to remedy it until it passes through its sectarian stage.

Venkman is vindicated (as am I) in contacting Woodbury and raising the very legitimate and serious and documented concerns about Belino's griefing; Linden Lab only looks bad by failing to act and having to act repeatedly to get the job done three times due to their own staff's negligence and complicity. Venkman may have had more edge and vindictiveness to his action, I don't know -- if it is true that he sought the expulsion of Belino. What I sought was much simpler: an end to the griefing of me and my tenants by this individual and his pals. What the university did with his status was their business. But reporting to RL authorities when you are bullied and harassed and harmed online and suffer real damages is THE RIGHT THING TO DO and is NOT STALKING and NOT INVASION OF PRIVACY.

It is not that "you give up the right to privacy when you become a griefing suspect." It's that if you grief, and continue to grief, and create an atmosphere of lying about your griefing, you can expect that people can and will and should follow you into real life to report you to the authorities in any way they can to obtain their due and their legitimate remedies from your harassment. No one should have to suffer online harassment; if you harass others on line and pretend then that you can hide beyond your privacy rights, you will not get away with it.

5. Meanwhile, literally tens of thousands of posts were made on threads at Sluniverse.com about The Wrong Hands supposedly targeted by the JLU and suffering civil rights violations. But it was all bullshit. Tux Winkler claimed to have gotten Scotland Yard to chase after the JLU; this was laughable. Apparently Kalel suffered one day of suspension for the "spy prims" on CheerGirl's lawn -- we never hear from her at at all anymore now that Stroker Serpentine has left SL. No JLU has been permabanned; Tux Winkler and other TWH operatives are permabanned as are their alts.

6. To be sure, Zip Paz and some of the other old W-hat/btard whatever goons persist and continue their lying about what TWH really is, and endlessly play the victim on Rodvik's profile, but they are transparently fake, and anyone can see through them. They aren't "datamined" because nothing has happened to them and nothing is known about them. They are forced to keep their griefing at bay on alts or they will entirely lose their tenuous presence in SL. They've all tried in the most ridiculous and transparently manipulative ways to dislodge the JLU from SL -- they failed. Their various strange operations (like the guy Mystic Frequency who was supposed to be revealing to me that Tux Winkler is the LulzSec guy and they are all after him and scaring him in RL) seemed to have failed and died down, although they will be back when they feel the need to stir up trouble and confusion.

7. Meanwhile, Sluniverse showed itself, true to form, to be as bad as the thing it was fighting. The odious Joshua Nightshade used his servers and ability to get at people's IP addresses through their media viewing, and various social hacks, to find out the identity of one person who criticized him and questioned some of his claims about his own dealings with the JLU. Cummere Mayo, who claimed to have law-enforcement credentials and to have contacted RL law enforcers about the JLU was eventually revealed to be some overaged kid living in his parent's basement...or something. Tux Winkler made sinister threats against me of griefing -- and made good on them with alts or cutaways, and also made a thuggish threat against Linden Lab to crash all their servers if they didn't get attention to their fake "privacy" issue. Ugh!

Joshua was no different than the vigilantes he claimed needed fighting -- and of course there was the spectacle of Fred Rookstown, the old head of the griefer group Patriotic Nigras (!), hacking into the JLU stolen dbase, and then having fights with his TrollManual site and getting kicked off, and having other dramas and crises.

Joshua got into some pissing match with Cathiee, who was either an alt or friend of Cummere, and Cathiee got into some wrangle over her effort to have Joshua checked out through a personnel vetting agency. Why this would be a crime is beyond me -- Joshua's RL name Joshua Meadows is well known as he himself has linked it, including on my blog some years ago. His obsessive crazy stalking of me and others is well documented. If someone wants to run a check on him, they are surely entitled to, given the awful things he has done to a number of people. There is no law broken by running routine Internet searches and checks with various dbase services that look up people's criminal records, etc. So what? This is a tempest in a teapot of the sort we've gotten accustomed to with the whole gang at Sharia-Sluniverse, and their outrageously brutal means of stalking and hunting down people they think have wronged them and outing their real lives.

In the end, Sluniverse utterly discredited itself in its crusade against the JLU because it refused to validate the fact that griefers were stirring up the anti-JLU raid in the first place, and then used methods worse than the JLU uses to stalk and harass people.

Linden Lab hasn't done anything in terms of banning any JLU or making grave policy announcements or doing a thing. They promise to roll out, if anything, tools to better fight griefers, not policies to prevent people from taking notes on griefers and comparing them to better fight them, which the griefers pretend is "datamining" and not legitimate freedom of expression and journalism. That it is vigilantism at some junctures doesn't change any of that: there isn't a TOS offense called "making a fake police unit and tracking criminals on other people's lawns".

8. Robble Rubble lies when he writes this:

I could sit here all day naming names of people who had personal information recorded on them or were stalked in world that posed no threat to the JLU and some of whom had no idea the group even existed.

It is a basic fiction of Woodbury/b-tards/PNs/TWH etc that they are "not doing anything" and that they are "only in the group to use the sandbox" and are "just friends with people who grief sometimes but not griefers". They're all in on it. They all lie. Many get caught. Some don't. Some merely enable. It's ok to gather information on them inworld and report them to LL so that they can't harm and harass other people. End of story. There hasn't been a single valid case produced of any "civilian" or "innocent bystander" wrongfully reported. That I'm wrongfully reported in this dbase means nothing, as it is either a report on a griefer using my first name on an alt -- there have been 100s of those -- or some other mistake from long ago (2007) that means nothing and has no validation. The mistake is meaningless as an indication of the status of the data in JLU's dbase: it is largely true, and largely taken from accurate reports of griefers actually griefing. That is all.

9. Tove Stromfield lies up and down. I checked my facts for the last four years, asshole. These people have made multiple accounts to harass and harm me and my tenants and it is all documented and THAT IS WHY THEY ARE ALL PERMABANNED, DUH. You don't need me to prove this; the Lindens, with their server data, proved it themselves and the proof is in the permaban.

The notion of "keep calm" is what griefers trump up so that people legitimately upset by being harassed are somehow minimized, desensitized, spun, propagandized about, so that the griefer can distract from his crime. It's pretty transparently what it is: griefer manipulation.

Of course OWS is about totalitarianism. Every single one of these calls that involves taking over other people's property -- seizing corporations -- dismantling and disbanding democratic representative government and replacing it with "direct democracy" (i.e. executive power like the soviets); redistribution of wealth -- these are all totalitarian planks in the totalitarian system that pretends it is giving "land to the peasants and factories to the workers" but instead brings them Red Terror and hunger and death.

The Pink Hands are only in a game and only a bunch of people playing at "justice," but they also have utterly exposed themselves as totalitarianism by their countenance of griefers and their lies and by their acceptance of the same stalking tactics of Tux and Joshua and others that they claim to be fighting against in the JLU.

10. Cathiee's lecturing of the Pink Hands as if you can actually reform them, and her efforts to gain sympathy are stupid and pointless. These people are cynical nihilists; they are not sincere or truthful. You never reform them; you never change their sinister practices. You can only document, expose, condemn as transparently as possible so as not to become like them.

The Wrong Hands came first in 2010, then WikiLeaks cablegate occurred in November 2010. It doesn't matter if WikiLeaks was founded in 2006; their first round of leaking attracted little attention. Their "Collateral Murder" video got some attention, but it was really Cablegate that made them a worldwide top news story. There are plenty of examples of possible links between Second Life and online collectivist anarchists like Anonymous an LulzSec and Occupy Wall Street -- Barrett Browning himself said he got his start in SL and there are undoubtedly other connections.

 

 

Comments

[Krypton Radio]

A small correction - Cathiee McMillan was not an alt or a shill, just somebody who took a while to understand exactly what was going on and eventually did figure out she'd been lied to by the Wrong hands along with everybody else.

[Laetizia Coronet]

Just search Google for images of "revolutionary fist". http://tinyurl.com/6skdf5b Gee, they all look alike! It's one big conspiracy!

[Hewee Zetkin]

There ARE unfortunately a number of connections. Whether or not you agree with the stances taken by the Occupy movement, it is painfully obvious that groups like "Anonymous" use names like OWS and WikiLeaks to justify all kind of immoral deeds. They do nothing but soil the credibility and integrity of anyone they "help" by hacking or acting juvenile in V for Vendetta masks or what have you. If anyone thinks they are benefiting from the "help" of people like *channers, /b/tards, "Anonymous", the Wrong Hands, etc.--if anyone in the media thinks they are doing a great thing by glorifying such actions--they should think another time or three.

There IS a time to distance yourself from even some who claim to be supporting you. Don't let the muck rub off and spread too thickly. Don't let those fools be the, "voice of the younger generation;" keep in mind the big picture and nature of those involved. Let more reasonable and intelligent spokespeople step forward!