A small town in Ohio, Steubenville. Photo by Dougtone.
I see that the Cleveland Plain Dealer is one of the local papers covering the Steubenville rape case of course, and they are covering the series of demonstrations that Anonymous has been planning.
At one point I read that Anonymous was planning a demonstration on February 23, which happens to be Soviet Army day, but now I see they seem to have put the demonstrations for the first week in March around the time of a trial hearing -- February 23 was some other "day of rage" about 2nd amendment rights or something.
This is the comment I put at Cleveland.com:
I
hope that justice will be served and that those who assaulted the
victim will be prosecuted. Rape is a serious matter and "rape culture"
is indeed an issue that has to be challenged.
But justice is not served nor victims vindicated and protected by promoting vigilantism. And that's what we're seeing with the hackers' collective Anonymous and some of the celebratory press coverage of this destructive movement that seems to have only tuned into them yesterday and haven't followed their exploits over the years.
First of all, Anonymous is merely engaged in reputational laundering with their action #JusticeSec, as their roots are in 4chan, some of the most horrendous violent porn against women, and they have a long history of years of tormenting particularly young girls and women on the Internet. So they're hardly the people to be claiming to be wearing any white robes here in a crusade against rapists. It sure doesn't diminish support for real-life rape victims to point out that Anonymous hackers have engaged in online virtual sexual assault -- neither should be endorsed.
The Anonymous operatives also replicate the same vicious logic of "rape culture" when they say that if they disagree with someone, or someone doesn't share their views about this case, or they suspect someone of involvement or cover-up, that they're entitled to hack and dox and harass and embarass them "just because they can" because it is possible to do.
When someone like me or other bloggers or journalists question their behaviour, they go after them like junkyard dogs and then you really see how they talk to women:
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2013/02/a...
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2013/02/h...
I think the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the other local press needs to report the antics of Anonymous in harassing and bullying anyone who tells the truth about their roots and their other hacking and harassment antics. They do not get to launder their reputation in Steubenville, and distract from their poster boy, Julian Assange, who refuses to appear before Swedish police to answer questions on rape charges.
You do not want to live in a world where Anonymous runs your "justice" -- they will come for you next.
And while some journalists seem to think these amateurs have accomplished some sort of investigative feats here, real reporters should be the ones checking the stories and how they are gotten, and they shouldn't celebrate bullying and vigilantism from these "justice-seekers". And the real justice system needs to function to bring durable justice. Chief among our civil rights is the right to face your accuser before a court of law before a jury of your peers, with an adversarial defense. When you deal with men in masks, you are unable to do that.
But justice is not served nor victims vindicated and protected by promoting vigilantism. And that's what we're seeing with the hackers' collective Anonymous and some of the celebratory press coverage of this destructive movement that seems to have only tuned into them yesterday and haven't followed their exploits over the years.
First of all, Anonymous is merely engaged in reputational laundering with their action #JusticeSec, as their roots are in 4chan, some of the most horrendous violent porn against women, and they have a long history of years of tormenting particularly young girls and women on the Internet. So they're hardly the people to be claiming to be wearing any white robes here in a crusade against rapists. It sure doesn't diminish support for real-life rape victims to point out that Anonymous hackers have engaged in online virtual sexual assault -- neither should be endorsed.
The Anonymous operatives also replicate the same vicious logic of "rape culture" when they say that if they disagree with someone, or someone doesn't share their views about this case, or they suspect someone of involvement or cover-up, that they're entitled to hack and dox and harass and embarass them "just because they can" because it is possible to do.
When someone like me or other bloggers or journalists question their behaviour, they go after them like junkyard dogs and then you really see how they talk to women:
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2013/02/a...
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2013/02/h...
I think the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the other local press needs to report the antics of Anonymous in harassing and bullying anyone who tells the truth about their roots and their other hacking and harassment antics. They do not get to launder their reputation in Steubenville, and distract from their poster boy, Julian Assange, who refuses to appear before Swedish police to answer questions on rape charges.
You do not want to live in a world where Anonymous runs your "justice" -- they will come for you next.
And while some journalists seem to think these amateurs have accomplished some sort of investigative feats here, real reporters should be the ones checking the stories and how they are gotten, and they shouldn't celebrate bullying and vigilantism from these "justice-seekers". And the real justice system needs to function to bring durable justice. Chief among our civil rights is the right to face your accuser before a court of law before a jury of your peers, with an adversarial defense. When you deal with men in masks, you are unable to do that.
* * *
The appalling treatment meted out to be by gangs of JusticeSec operatives and cutaways has been documented and hopefully serves as a deterrent. I will be interested to see how both justice is served in Steubenville, and how the local media covers or doesn't cover the problem of Anonymous and their harassment of actors in the local drama.
It used to be that some townships forbade demonstrations by people in masks or who had covered their faces -- this was their way of preventing demonstrations by the Ku Klux Klan. Of course, we can recall the famous case of the ACLU defending the rights of the KKK to march in the suburb of Chicago, Skokie, IL. There's a book by Aryeh Neier, then head of the ACLU, called Defending My Enemy.
In any event, I will be interested to see if there are counter demonstrations, better coverage by the press, etc.
I don't have the capacity to research the story itself as Lee Stranahan of Breitbart News and others have done. I realize they are taking up the issue of whether the story is even true, whether the girl was even raped in the legal sense, whether there were even more than two football players and all the rest. I can't get into these aspects of the case, which the conservative press has taken up because I don't have the ability to do the research from here for free as a blogger and no one needs me to do it, it's not my expertise. Just looking at what I've read in the trustworthy media, like the New York Times, I would take the side of the victim. Yes, I may have been duped by the liberal media, but I don't think so.
The rape video of the young man boasting about his comrades raping the girl is an appalling artifact of modern Internet life. It's hard to know even where to put such an awful thing. "This girl is as dead as Caylee Anthony?" What to say of such a horror?!
But for a student of Russian culture and world fairy tales and epic poetry, you can see where the bawdy tale takes its place in literature so to speak, if you can prevent from vomiting, and you can see that it is like a faint echo of the rituals of some ancient peoples. I thought for example the Meryans, a native people of Russia, about whom a film was made; after the beloved dies, the widower spends time describing in epic and obscene form the sexual exploits of the woman -- as a form of ritual. Again -- a rough approximation, a flailing effort to try to find the genre for this modern MIPS breakout...
The only redeeming feature of that otherwise horrendous piece of humilitaing phone-video porn is that during the young man's recounting of just how dead the girl is -- "as dead as OJ's wife" and so on -- some of the other boys in the room, admittedly, not very robustly, say, "Hey, don't say that, she could have been your sister". Or, "Hey, that's wrong, you shouldn't say that". It's weak, but even that glimmer of conscience coming from today's Internet-bred youth is still, well, something. What those modern knights of the smart phone should have done, if they were chivalrous -- or just plain decent human beings -- is call the police, as the girl was in danger -- and rape is wrong. Some raise the issue of "where were the girl's parents". Well, where were the boys' parents, too?
If you are the ACLU, however, you'd be compelled to say, if you weren't preoccupied with government snooping or CISPA or anti-bullying (a curious thing for the ACLU to have picked up, given its history as a maxed-out civil libertarian group defending the rights of tobacco companies to advertise -- and taking their money) -- is that as awful as the rape video is, it's protected speech. You can't show that it incites imminent violence -- it is made after the unfortunate girl is taken away by their peers and she is not there. Otherwise, there might be a case.
And isn't that like so much of social media criminality? Otherwise, there might be a case. The speech against me, doxing me, harassing me, revealing private information, speaking obscenely to me, threatening me -- this is all protected speech. Interestingly, Lee Stranahan is now trying to take to court one of his serial, persistent persecutors -- and I wonder if it will get to court, given the great protections for free speech in this country.
When will the Steubenville story get the ProPublica treatment?
The appalling treatment meted out to be by gangs of JusticeSec operatives and cutaways has been documented and hopefully serves as a deterrent. I will be interested to see how both justice is served in Steubenville, and how the local media covers or doesn't cover the problem of Anonymous and their harassment of actors in the local drama.
It used to be that some townships forbade demonstrations by people in masks or who had covered their faces -- this was their way of preventing demonstrations by the Ku Klux Klan. Of course, we can recall the famous case of the ACLU defending the rights of the KKK to march in the suburb of Chicago, Skokie, IL. There's a book by Aryeh Neier, then head of the ACLU, called Defending My Enemy.
In any event, I will be interested to see if there are counter demonstrations, better coverage by the press, etc.
I don't have the capacity to research the story itself as Lee Stranahan of Breitbart News and others have done. I realize they are taking up the issue of whether the story is even true, whether the girl was even raped in the legal sense, whether there were even more than two football players and all the rest. I can't get into these aspects of the case, which the conservative press has taken up because I don't have the ability to do the research from here for free as a blogger and no one needs me to do it, it's not my expertise. Just looking at what I've read in the trustworthy media, like the New York Times, I would take the side of the victim. Yes, I may have been duped by the liberal media, but I don't think so.
The rape video of the young man boasting about his comrades raping the girl is an appalling artifact of modern Internet life. It's hard to know even where to put such an awful thing. "This girl is as dead as Caylee Anthony?" What to say of such a horror?!
But for a student of Russian culture and world fairy tales and epic poetry, you can see where the bawdy tale takes its place in literature so to speak, if you can prevent from vomiting, and you can see that it is like a faint echo of the rituals of some ancient peoples. I thought for example the Meryans, a native people of Russia, about whom a film was made; after the beloved dies, the widower spends time describing in epic and obscene form the sexual exploits of the woman -- as a form of ritual. Again -- a rough approximation, a flailing effort to try to find the genre for this modern MIPS breakout...
The only redeeming feature of that otherwise horrendous piece of humilitaing phone-video porn is that during the young man's recounting of just how dead the girl is -- "as dead as OJ's wife" and so on -- some of the other boys in the room, admittedly, not very robustly, say, "Hey, don't say that, she could have been your sister". Or, "Hey, that's wrong, you shouldn't say that". It's weak, but even that glimmer of conscience coming from today's Internet-bred youth is still, well, something. What those modern knights of the smart phone should have done, if they were chivalrous -- or just plain decent human beings -- is call the police, as the girl was in danger -- and rape is wrong. Some raise the issue of "where were the girl's parents". Well, where were the boys' parents, too?
If you are the ACLU, however, you'd be compelled to say, if you weren't preoccupied with government snooping or CISPA or anti-bullying (a curious thing for the ACLU to have picked up, given its history as a maxed-out civil libertarian group defending the rights of tobacco companies to advertise -- and taking their money) -- is that as awful as the rape video is, it's protected speech. You can't show that it incites imminent violence -- it is made after the unfortunate girl is taken away by their peers and she is not there. Otherwise, there might be a case.
And isn't that like so much of social media criminality? Otherwise, there might be a case. The speech against me, doxing me, harassing me, revealing private information, speaking obscenely to me, threatening me -- this is all protected speech. Interestingly, Lee Stranahan is now trying to take to court one of his serial, persistent persecutors -- and I wonder if it will get to court, given the great protections for free speech in this country.
When will the Steubenville story get the ProPublica treatment?
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