If you followed Anonymous' hack of Burger King yesterday, you noticed what wildly racist and stereotypical tweets and pictures were posted -- stories of black employees shooting up drugs in the bathrooms and liberal use of the N-word. This is the hallmark of Anonymous culture; these are the same people who bought you the man with the Afro hairdo saying "Pool's Out" and numerous racist memes. The tweets are removed now, but go and Google it and see any tech blog coverage of this phenomenon. Anyone who has followed Anonymous especially around 4chan knows this. That this hackers' cult is now whitewashing itself with various socially-active causes (named "ops") doesn't mean its nasty essence changed.
And Anonymous is very adept at playing the racism card opportunistically, despite its own notorious and blatant and outrageous racism on display in ops like the Burger King hack. No, it does no good saying that Anonymous is a looseknit movement of opportunistic and spontaneous people who just use it to do whatever, so that no one of them takes responsibility for what the whole hive does. The fact is, it has a rigid hierarchical structure, it has leaders, who are sometimes arrested, and it consciously decides to culture jam -- either jamming with racist stereotypes when it wishes, or jamming with faux-horrified accusations of racism when it wishes. Both are manipulative methods to gain power and influence, and nothing more.
So right now I'm undergoing an onslaught of harassment from Anonymous, so one of the ways it is trying to discredit me and my blogging is to accuse me of racism.
And as Anonymous is an open-source harassment toolkit that anyone can grab on to in order to settle scores, several anonymous people who ordinarily don't take part in Anonymous operations are exploiting this onslaught of harassment to also join in to the accusations that I'm a racist. The accusation they tried to drum up last week that I "hate gays" or am "cruel to people with AIDS" was starting to fall apart when they read the real story of how I merely covered a troubled griefer online who in fact used anti-gay and racist memes in his attacks on Second Life, who then claimed to reform but then later died of AIDS under mysterious circumstances. There was only so far they could go with this smear, once they read the guy's own articles and other articles about him, and realized it was a case of researching and writing about Internet histrionics and Internet hoaxes, not some hate campaign -- in fact I support LGBT rights. I may have differences with some tactics used that attempt to take other people's rights of freedom of expression or association away on the road to LGBT equality, but I'm for such equality and for gay marriage and all equal rights. So those harassing me have found they can go only so far with trying to trump up this story and seem to have dropped it, but will figure out to wield it again when they find a fresh audience.
So now they're trying to "racism" card, that ever-ready staple of American political life which the left wields as a club particularly against the right, and as I have found, anyone who doesn't agree with them and challenges them. Those heckling and harassing me for my views critical of copyleftist, online hacker movements and opponents of cybersecurity who tend to minimize terrorism find that if they can impugn my reputation as a human rights activist by invoking "racism," they can seem to discredit me. They gloat that they are merely using my own writings to make me self-discredit, but of course, maliciously and tendentiously portraying these. If I felt honestly that anything I wrote was racist, I would delete it or apologize for it. But I don't.
The people who are accusing me of being "racist" are largely accusers I cannot face -- most are anonymous or Anonymous. They have deluged me with tweets and blog posts making this false claim and demanding accountabilty from me invoking universal human rights standards, but they hide behind fake names and are unaccountable. While some of them have persistent pseudonyms, their real identities are not connected to the accounts. To be sure, one particularly "irascible" defense analyst, Joshua Foust, is picking up this claim, but the rest of his cronies are keeping their identities hidden.
It's telling that the people making this smear of me are not identifying themselves, and Foust, the one who has has a long history of harassing and heckling me, even accusing me of "lying" on Twitter for my accurate reporting on Central Asia. The people making this accusation are not black, but white; the people making this accusation are not in organized anti-racism groups or movements, but not in any human rights groups that I can tell.
They are making this claim to try to discredit me in the eyes of any colleagues or peers in the human rights movement where I have worked for many years, because if they can succeed in doing that, then they can attempt to discredit my valid critique of them and their views as antithetical to human rights. That's all that it's about, and in that sense it's not worth bothering too much about, but I will take the time to post this refutation, especially because some of them think that I somehow need to correct my statements or apologize or rectify something they feel is politically incorrect -- and I won't be doing that.
Although the harassment I have suffered over the last 10 days has subsided, several opportunistic hecklers who joined in with Anonymous using the same hashtag #opcatzhunt (!) persist; one has made an account @opcatzhunt and admitted he is the same person updating the account @grumpcatfitz which was made to parody me last year.
And now the security analyst Joshua Foust has also picked up this heckling, and likely he and/or Nathan Hamm or other hecklers from Registan.net have joined him. Interestingly, they both seem to have more time on their hands as they have both become freelancers in the last months. Foust announced that he would be looking for a job starting in March, and Registan stepped up its advertising for consulting work. Then I noticed Hamm was appearing at conferences as an "independent scholar" and now describes himself as a "freelancer" on LinkedIn and is no longer with the defense contracting agency. I wondered when these people would be decoupled from the establishment, and it seems sooner rather than later, but who knows, maybe they are only being groomed now for greater glory. In any event, they continue to pester me.
As I noted, they picked up the story of the "AIDS journalist" who accused me of cruelty; actually, because of the prevalance of Internet histrionics, the community had trouble believing him; as a blogger I checked his story and wasn't convinced it was true when I had no confirmation. In the course of researching his story, I put some of his awful chat, including his racist remarks on my blog -- while this was quoted material, @opcathuntz apparently has trouble seeing where the quotes are.
But the attacks against me as being "racist" stem not only from that case, but from several blog posts in which I frankly discuss the problem of the Republican Party and their failure of their digital team and GOTV program. I said very plainly that Romney used Democratic Party operatives as his digital experts, and consulting firms with Obama supporters, and that they didn't put their heart and soul into the work for him, obviously, and this was a mistake. I said that the Republicans had to stop simply buying what they believed to be the best talent in the business -- Democrats -- and stop using firms with young people voting for Obama (or Ron Paul) and just laughing at them -- and keep their digital work inhouse, with loyal people dedicated to their cause.
Say, that's what Obama did, and it worked for him. His digital analytics people were all inhouse, hugely dedicated, voting for him, and utterly devoted to him. They also all happened to be white, with only a few exception for support personnel, as often happens in Silicon Valley.
As anyone can read in my past blogs, I didn't blame either the failure of ORCA or black people (!) for Romney's loss in the elections -- he lost for a number of reasons having to do with his own failings but also the ability of the Obama operatives to seize the narrative and pump up three big themes successfully with an uncritical public: a) Romney, although a modest Morman businessman, was Little Richie Rich and hated poor people (the 47%) and was evil and exploiting people and causing their factories to close and wives to have cancer; b) Romney was supported by Republican leaders who wanted a war on women and wanted to take their sexual freedoms away and right to birth control and abortion; c) Republicans were suppressing the vote for minorities and disenfranchising blacks and Hispanics. To the extent that any of these narratives were true -- and they had elements of truth in each one of them which made it possible to turn them into full-bore propaganda programs -- large numbers of people believed them.
Anyone can go look up the texts in question and pour over them and render their analysis, but let me try to get people to focus on matters of principle.
Let's go over what we could all agree on is racism:
1. Advocating or practicing discrimination against black people in employment, housing, etc.
2. Making disparaging remarks about black people as a race or using racial slurs.
3.Maintaining suspicion against blacks as people and suspecting them of crimes.
Let's go over what most people would agree is not racism, but "progressives" might disagree and *might* call racism because they realize the value of provoking neuralgia around the topic:
4. Even talking about race at all related to any subjects, but particularly gun control, crime and politics.
5. Reporting that there are large numbers of black people who commit crimes and those who are mainly the victims are other blacks.
6. Noting that 96% of blacks voted for Obama, which means only a very tiny number - 4% - did not vote for Obama.
Now, if you think any of these last three things are "racist," there is little to debate with you because you have accepted such a rigidly PC and extreme notion of what is "racist" that you can't be reasoned with -- you oppose the truth. If you're going to see racism in these positions of stating the truth, there is little hope that you'll ever be taken for sincere, and you'll likely have a propensity for taking this extreme notion of racism and applying it to any blogger you don't like.
So let's now look at the policies that might ensue from any of these beliefs. If you believe in the first three premises that we can all agree are racist, you would believe, for example, that George Zimmerman had the right to have a weapon and use it to shoot at Trayvon Martin in the "stand your ground" doctrine of deterring a perceived trespasser. I actually don't believe that, which puts me at odds with Liberty Lynx, an avid gun enthusiast who also happens to have a black son. (She has not explicitly expressed approval of Zimmerman's act, but she stands by his right to own and use a gun, that's where we differ.) I happen to take Trayvon's side -- just because there had been a series of robberies by blacks in this neighbourhood doesn't give vigilantes the right to shoot a black kid running across the lawn. I'm not for vigilantes or "neighbourhood patrols". I'm for having law-enforcers, not civilians having and using guns. To every question of "what about the Second Amendment," I reply that the Second Amendment never seemed to have intended to enable moms to buy assault weapons that their mentally ill violent video-playing teens could grab to massacre 27 people, and we need to review this seriously.
It was in this context that Liberty Lynx, who is a libertarian but not of the Ron Paul sort, accused me of "near" racism. I oppose guns and don't think safety is improved by having them, especially the assault weapons. I think crime with guns would be reduced with reduction of guns. This isn't a popular view with Libertarians - they get absolutely crazy and furious on this topic as I discovered. But I won't be dissuaded by endless arguing over this -- I oppose guns.
In a discussion about the more than 500 gun deaths in Chicago, which were not deterred despite strict gun laws, Liberty Lynx linked to an article about how black people mainly supported gun ownership. I responded with the tweet that this was understandable, given membership in gangs by some and the desire to oppose gangs or have protection from them by others. After all, my belief in the second category is based on the fact that the crimes of violence are mainly against other blacks, not whites.
As we read from this study publicized in the Atlantic, precisely the success of law-enforcement decapitating some of the gang leadership, there are smaller fry having a tendency to fight more with each other.
I think if guns are illegal, no one should get to own them, and even blacks needing to protect themselves from gang warefare should not be exempt. I think the police have to deter guns, not civilians. These are my views; they happen to coincide with the views of many liberals and "progressives". And I think that's why some of my Libertarian debaters on Twitter get so livid about my views counter to theirs -- on other issues like criticism of Russia, or criticism of criminalized hacker groups or WikiLeaks, they are in full agreement. They aren't on this issue, which they see as a "freedom" issue. I see it as an "unfreedom" issue, in which many people lose their lives because others insist on having this "freedom" -- it's a classic Art. 30 issue, where people use one right to take another right away from others.
Now let's take another issue where I differ with conservatives and Libertarians, which flow from my beliefs: attitudes towards social welfare, preferential treatment, and set-asides. I personally don't oppose such programs and believe they need to remain in place for blacks and other minorities who historically suffered discrimination. After all, it has only been about 150 years since slavery was ended. That is actually not a very long time. It was a great evil and has been rightly appraised as a crime against humanity. Therefore the rectification of that historical wrong is required and the outcome of that institutionalized system needs to be opposed. I don't believe in the "reparations" that the extreme left proposed at the Durban World Conference and which President Obama himself denied were the appropriate response to this injustice. But I do believe that extra social programs for families and at-risk youth, special opportunities for minority business contracts, university admissions policies and so on, are not really about "reverse racism" as some believe but are necessary given the continued lagging behind of blacks in America in areas of health, education and work. I just think these are the programs that we as a country need to do, and I think these should be decided in each state, and to the extent possible, at the federal level. Naturally, someone might take an opposing view, and some Libertarians do, but then I would expect their opposing view on the *policy* that should flow from deciding what is racism in elements one through six above would not make them racist in any sense, simply conservative. That's all.
Now, let's come to the topic that has been most neuralgic of all, both for hard left geeks and right-leaning Libertarians -- and those like @larussophobe who claims she isn't a Libertarian (I guess some Libertarians of the non-Ron-Paul variety like to call themselves Whigs or classic liberals or something else.)
Digital analytics of the scientic sort which Nate Silver made famous taught us assiduously, through endless media coverage, that 96% of all blacks in America voted for Obama; their polls supporting Obama before the election were similar. So that means 4% of voting blacks did not support Obama, and either wrote in a candidate or imagine, even voted for Romney, although he was viewed as the embodiment of the "racist" Republican Party.
I'm not the one who invented demographics as a weapon, or digital drilling as a weaponized science; Obama For America did, Nate Silvers did, Jim Messina did, and the Democratic Party even before in campaigns against Bush. This demographic scientific profiling isn't my invention or wish; indeed, we can see how it plays out viciously and nastily in politics when the left ridicules and harasses and harangues Nikki Haley, the conservative black congressman who replaced Jim DeMint. See, because of this "4%" factor, the left can claim that any black politicians on the right must not really have the support of even his own constituents, since it can't be statistically possible, given the black support for Obama, that they would then support a Republican, even locally -- there must be some gerrymandering or voter suppression or some manipulation, so the reasoning goes. The left uses this "4% science" viciously to harass this minority congressman; LaRussophone uses it to harangue me with much the same misplaced sense of rectitude and Sesame Street political correctness in service of her agenda. It's all fine if people have their different agendas, but using the race or women or gay card on top of that to try to gain silence and suppression of views is despicable.
So precisely because this man isn't politically correct, and no one will give him or the black community as a whole the benefit of the doubt -- always assuming that there might be that 4% chance at least that they are not supportive of Obama/the hard progressive line -- that I report on this harsh reality and its implication for politics.
And that implication is that sadly, although the GOP might desperately need to recruit more black members and leaders and campaign workers, they will find it nearly impossible, given the demographic reality of the 96%.
Now, being a liberal, I'd like to think that the GOP might reform, might recruit more members, and these rigid and harsh demographic checkgates devised by scientific data-drillers might yield to reason, and it might be that blacks who voted solely on the basis for race might vote for a conservative candidate like Herman Cain, if one is found, or blacks who voted for a leftist ideological slate might chose even a white candidate, if they fit their views, if that white person happened to be running against a black person. Sure, anything is possible.
Yet the reality of real life -- not my chosing and not my invention -- is that we have this 96% demographic placed in front of us. In Silicon Valley, the 4% have even less a likelihood of appearing, as it tends to be a climate that rewards the left and the socialist perspective -- furthermore, there are very few African-Americans in the computer field, precisely because Silicon Valley firms just have not been as good at making an effort to recruit them as other industries, and tend to feel they have punched their minority recruitment tickets by hiring women, or Indians which are highly represented in the field. So that's that.
Therefore if I say that a digital analytics consulting firm has a) the former director of Al Gore's 2000 campaign in it b) likely Obama voters, then *for these reasons, not literal race* that they will not do a good job making Romney's aps, this is a report on reality, not an advocacy of racism or an endorsement of racism or some racialist comment. I simply refuse to believe that reporting on reality can be such a thing.
There are some -- like LaRussophobe -- who finds it so in opportunistic ways. Her championing of anti-racism never, ever stretches to her own ugly diatribes against the Russian people who *as a people* are always failures, malign, etc.
LaRussophobe has always treated me strangely. Although so many of our views on Russia are similar that some people think I *am* her (I most definitely not, and I think there is more than one female or male behind that account), she has always taken a bemused, elitist attitude toward me as if my status as a mere nonprofit worker and translator, not a professor or government official, makes me ill-equipped for political battle. Well, that's life in the big blogging city. There will always be people who use pseudonyms and claim they seek a "better world" free of prejudices related to race, religion, or social status, yet replicate all these things even worse online in their virtual worlds.
LaRussophobe is particular petulant now because I described her as a Libertarian, due to her ardent pro-gun views and views supporting unrestrained capitalism. She views herself as something else. So she decided to climb on and heckle me as a "racist," saying that I "must apologize" (!) for writing that we should view blacks as having a 96% chance of being Obama voters and supporting Obama's platform. She wants me to go on living in a fictional and politically-correct world (PC in the way that she isn't on a host of other topics, i.e. her own vile racism against the Russian nation in countless hateful screeds about the people as an allegedly sub-par nation or ethnic group). She demands that I retract my statement that if we look at digital analytic specialists who happen to be black, we can't assume they are Obama supporters and on the left politically; we must go on nurturing the fiction that they might be Herman Cain or his supporters.
Well, sure. And the tooth fairy might come tonight. It's all good. Yes, we should hold out hope for the 4% because it actually means a path of diversity and freedom that I think some blacks don't live in now, as they fear that if they oppose certain views, they will be seen as "race traitors". I think if we as a country keep working at social programs and advances that right historical wrongs -- which I don't think are so far back in history, as we can be reminded of by seeing the "Lincoln" film recently -- that this diversification of views -- capitalism vs. socialism -- will begin to occur. I think it is as inevitable as the other demographic drill being exploited now by both Democrats and Republicans -- the findings of the Pew Charitable Trust that 18-20 year old Hispanics tend toward socialist views and 30-40 year old Hispanics tend to favour capitalism. Why? For the simple reason that they own homes or businesses and not school loan debt.
Droves of people on Ars Technica and Little Green Footballs picked up my blog about the need for the Republicans to stop using Democratic digital analysts because their heart wasn't in the campaign, and tried to use this to smear me as crazy, racist, out of touch with reality, a conservative blah blah. They tried to make it sound like I was blaming Romney's failure on "sabotage" (I wasn't; I was merely for keeping an open mind about this as one hypothesis); they tried to make it sound as if I was either blaming blacks for Romney's failure (!) or that I was for discriminating against blacks and not giving them jobs -- ridiculous.
And that's because they didn't like the two premises that I put forward:
o that geeks are inherently unreliable as helpers for any Republican campaign because they are not ethical and tend to the political left (or the similar extreme Ron Paul Libertarianism); whatever reliable conservative geeks there are who may exist are decidedly in a tiny minority;
o that Democratic analytics experts did not in the end help Romney win the election and he should find dedicated, inhouse Republicans.
You know, do it the way Obama did?
Neither of these statements are about race, but about a class of professionals in the computer business and the need to do damage control and due diligence. Now, someone might object to making prejudicial, blanket statements about a class of people, but that's another debate. While it would be nice, again, to live in that idealistic and fictional world that treats all people as operating in good faith, the reality is that with the huge prevalence of Anonymous hacking everywhere, and the huge propensity of geeks as a class to wink and nod and even applaud them, no computer professional can automatically be seen as reliable. If you don't like my prejudicial remarks, you're welcome to debate them and slur me as prejudiced in any way you like. I'm not going to be changing my views on this very deep problem of geek unreliability in our society, that has gone from a few hundred hackers mainly celebrated and lionized by Bruce Sterling and Stephen Levy in the 1980s to more than 7 million today deciding everything in our society from our jobs to our social life to our health to our elections.
Geeks didn't like my first premise, even though some of them confessed it was true. They all know they tilt to the left, and they all know they as a profession have never really signed any ethics code. None of them or their "standards-setting organizations" have ever vowed as a class of professional to oppose and stop DDoSing, doxing, and other vile behaviour as unethical. They know that full well. They don't deny it. If anything, they minimize or even excuse these antics by their fellow geeks in the next cubicle. Doctors and lawyers have ethics enforced by professional boards; computer programmers do not.
That's why most of them didn't launch into a tirade about my prejudice against an entire class of people -- geeks -- but tried to re-focus on my alleged "racism" against blacks. That works better to distract from their own unreliability and refusal to govern themselves and enforce ethical standards.
They also know full well that Obama himself didn't invite Republicans to do work for him; he also didn't try any equal-opportunity-employment in his own campaign's digital operations, but took the pasty-white purple-hair nose-ringed types from geekdom that had the reputation of being the most badass, awesome coders.
So this conversation for me is pretty much over. I am not going to keep repeating myself in defense against these allegations, but just link to this blog post. If someone comes up with some new argument or has some really serious allegation that they wish me to respond to, or if I see someone is blatantly misrepresenting my position in ways I haven't covered in this blog post, I will answer in the comments.
The reality is that the people making these claims against me aren't interested in stopping racism, really. They are not interested in helping to cope with the aftermath of historical wrongs. They aren't interested in telling the truth of the situation so that durable solutions can be found. They are only interested in trying to silence and humiliate somebody whose views they don't like because they are interested in keeping their power and influence.
Jillian C. York
@jilliancyork
James Losey
@jameslosey
Alex Trebechdel
@drunkpiano
Asher Langton
@AsherLangton
AK
@AnatolyKarlin
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