Typical griefer effigy scene in Second Life, where my effigy is "cooked" by giant chickens, I am given a Soviet flag and Obama poster to harass me, and various objects are copybotted. Also featured is my picture from an interview I did for Wired critical of hackers.
The lengths some creeps will go to silence you on the Internet!
Today I come back home to a slew of messages about a hate post by somebody who made a parody account against John Schindler, the former NSA analyst who is a professor at the Naval War College
This followed an attack on email, including Schindler's work email -- a guy calling himself "Tailgunner Joe" wrote to both Tom Nichols, another professor at NSA, and Schindler, for the express purpose of discrediting me.
I think what must have thrown him into a hate frenzy is that Tom Nichol simply tweeted that while there were many tinfoil hat comments in response to his recent post, I had some good analysis. Just that -- a simple tweet, hardly anything, and this hater went into attack mode.
In the emails, this creep brought up Second Life, the "AIDS journalist" video and other elements that I refute regularly in my "Advice to Google Witch-Hunters" column. It's an old story.
I thought "Tailgunner" might be one of my regular stalkers related to Second Life -- perhaps it was Taco Rubio (Charles Callistro of Louisville, KY), who served in the USAF, who was a regular inworld and outworld persecutor of me for years and years.
The picture used on my Wikipedia -- itself a work of vandalism regularly vandalized -- and in the XXTwitterWar Committee attack -- is cropped from a series of pictures his friend Chadrick forcibly took of me, where Taco put his arm around me and Chadrick to make it look like we were "friends". We aren't, of course. I don't object to photos being taken of me because I'm a public figure and I'm for free speech, but I point out that this was a picture taken to harass me. It was taken at the Second Life Community Conference in Chicago in 2007, and Taco -- a long time antagonist because of my critical blogging about favouritism at Linden Lab, makers of Second Life -- was furious at me because I blogged about the scandals in the organizing committee. His friends the convention organizers had not only run a deficit, but tried to make the musicians sign an agreement that would basically turn over all their intellectual property rights to the orgcomm and enable them to resell it. The musicians were so furious they quit en masse, and as a result, we had no live music at the event. I was among several bloggers and journalists who covered this scandal.
This was the same orgcomm that decided to ban me from the conference for my long-standing criticism of Second Life's elite, but also this conference's mismanagement. Interestingly, when the famous tech blogger Robert Scoble, whom I had befriended on Twitter, heard about this, he denounced it as horribly close-minded in a column in the San Francisco Chronicle. Then I was suddenly restored the right to participate. I expected trouble when I got there, but it was eclipsed by other dramas -- like a Linden Lab staff person, a long time buddy of Taco's, punching out one of the top-paying enterprise customers in a bar. Yes, that was Second Life!
Taco and his pals kept a grudge, and I think he/they are the ones who created my vandalized Wiki -- not only the picture used lets me know that, but some other clues. Either he, or that Linden Lab staffer, who had long been harassing me inworld and out and who tried to "friend" me for a time but ultimately, I blocked him on Facebook because he was so creepy and violent.
I would like to think Taco has now stopped his anonymous griefing, since he has settled down with a wife and child and a steady job and has better things to do, but you never know with people like that.
If it isn't not him or one of his Phreak Radio buddies, then it could be the Woodbury University goons, of course, a California commuter college digital arts course where the professor and the students all decided to harass me for years -- again, because I blogged critically of their destructive antics inworld, racist and anti-gay attacks in the 4chan style, and also protested about their budget waste and wrote to the vice president of the college. Linden Lab seized their simulators -- not because of my protest but because of numerous other violations of the TOS which they committed and far more serious offenses -- on three separate occasions, or four, and they kept re-spawning alts -- even this week I had a bunch of them at my rental houses again with the same racist "little black boy" shtick, and particle spewing with posters of Osama bin Ladn. Lovely.
Some other candidates might be RevJimJesus who harassed me also for years on end, although I think has stopped -- and then this Mr. X, who began attacking me on Streetwise Professor's blog claiming falsely that I was La Russophobe, another blogger who is definitely not me or my alt. I do not blog with any anonymous alts; I want the credit for my blogging and I stand by my views.
The common theme of this handful of stalkers is that they want to discredit me as a thinker to others who might read my blog -- and bully me into silence. Obviously, this has never had an effect in the more than 10 years I've been blogging.
Lately, as the Internet topics I've been blogging about for years now have become more mainstream issues and even national scandals like the story of Snowden and the NSA, and as I've also expanded into blogging more about my region of expertise, Eurasia, I've picked up more hecklers (like Joshua Foust) who mine Google for stuff they can "get" on me and use to harass me -- and usually they recycle the same tired memes that I "hate gays" or "am a racist" or "am living in a psychiatric institution" -- all untrue, of course.
This latest attack feels a lot like Mr. X, who also goes by the name SenorEquis1776 and other handles, and seems plugged into the survivalists' movement. But it picks up Russian terms and Second Life memes in the way of my past stalkers, so I don't know if it is a tag-team or chance use. Lately I've noticed that some of the most vicious stalking of me in Second Life -- where a creep with a series of Woodbury/The Wrong Hands type names puts up effigies of my real-life self, with broken glasses, or bloody chopped up limbs or head, or being roasted over flames, etc. Lovely! Although those soft of attacks abated once Soft Linden (himself a creep who banned me from the bug tracker) finally got to work identifying who it was and hash-banning them.
In any event, some people tell you "not to feed the trolls" and not to reply to smears. I disagree. Even some feminists are coming to disagree these days. I'm for fighting back. Accordingly, my rebuttal:
o I don't know either Tom Wolfe or John Schindler personally and I have no affiliation or relationship with them. I merely follow them on Twitter and retweet or favourite some of their statements because I agree with them. They are part of a small group of people who are critical of the Snowden affair, as I am, independently of them. I also don't agree with everything they post. I appreciate the deep knowledge of Russian intelligence machinations that both of them bring to the task of analyzing Snowden. A lot of what they say professionally dovetails with what I have learned practically in the field as a human rights activist about the nature of the KGB. I've learned a lot from them about world history and the intelligence agencies.
Like a lot of people, I never paid any attention to the NSA until now, and am learning about it along with the whole country. My basic take on the NSA is this: it is a legitimate and necessary agency that operates with checks and balances from Congress and the courts and its programs are lawful. The US has real enemies of an extremely malicious sort, both non-state like Al Qaeda and the Taliban and state such as Russia, China, Iran, etc. No one has convinced me that Snowden's revelations are anything but part of an ongoing radical assault on the nature of the state itself by anarchists, focusing only on America.
o (From an email attack) No, I am not a paid troll for the NSA. I have nothing to do with any intelligence agency of the US or any other country. I am not paid for my blog, it is a labour of love. It is not a commercial blog and any ads merely offset the costs of the blog itself. I don't represent any organization when I blog, it is all for free. Therefore please do hit the tip jar, I'm a single mother with two children and lately have a lot of medical bills since my son's severe accident. Thanks!
o Yes, I worked as a consultant (not a staff person) for the Ford Foundation in Russia in the 1990s. No, this has nothing to do with the CIA and Ford had nothing to do with the CIA at that time or currently. The reference is likely to a relationship Ford had in 1967 with some CIA programs. The CIA used to infiltrate cultural programs to try to fight communism abroad, but eventually this was called out and discredited it as a method, although the need to fight communism openly was still acknowledged, and then Ford picked up some of these programs. There are numerous books and articles written on this subject. Just because you oppose communism and work for human rights in communist countries doesn't mean you "work for the CIA".
o Yes, I have an avatar named Prokofy Neva in Second Life, and this has been not-news for the nine years I've been in SL since my avatar was long ago linked to my real name, and it is linked on my blogs. I still blog under this name on Second Life and occasionally post to tech fora with this name. There is nothing anonymous about this name.
o No, I have not been "caught in flagrante" in Second Life on this or any other account because I do not use Second Life for cybersex nor do I have any relationships in Second Life. I have a small struggling rentals business there and also have maintained portal sims for foreign-language sims and religious sims. I used to run a popular Friday-night discussion group for years on tech issues and virtual worlds, which I maintained despite being constantly harassed and crashed by Woodbury and others, and ended up having to drop several years ago due to taking on extra jobs.
Since people have such a prejudice about Second Life I can only repeat: I am not a sex scandal in Second Life. Having a male avatar even if you are a female does not make you a sex scandal. It's been interesting to me over the years to find out how much you can be harassed by having even a virtually transgendered identity -- and the people who harass you the most often turn out to be gay men or transgendered m2f avatars, as it oddly happens. I fully support LGBT rights. I am not anti-gay. I oppose the suppression of free speech and association by radical gay activists or any other type of activists.
o I do not oppose journalists with AIDS or hate anyone with AIDS -- this is just a provocation. The Youtube video made by Joshua McKracken aka deadly codec, who died of AIDS some years ago, was made in response to a blog I did expressing doubt that he had AIDS. The reason for that doubt is that Joshua led a group called the Patriotic Nigras (!) in Second Life which attacked other people's sims with racist and anti-gay memes, shouters, particle-blasters, etc and crashed the servers. Given his propensity for regular tell-all confessions, some true, some not, it was appropriate to question his latest sensation.
Sadly, he died of AIDS and all his mother has to remember him on YouTube his his hate message to me. Therefore, she regularly writes to me and complains about my critical blogs, as do others trying to exploit this theme, and I regularly have to tell them all: I do not hate people with AIDS or gay journalists with AIDS or anything of the sort. I blogged about a controversial public figure in Second Life who crashed servers and who ran a racist, anti-gay group who used to shower sims with posters of Jews crying at the wailing wall and the word AIDS stamped over it -- that sort of thing. Naturally I blogged critically about this phenomenon, which is a typical 4chan/Anonymous spin-off. Naturally I was suspicious of claims made by a person who did this, so I did what reporters do: I asked questions. A typical tactic of Anonymous is to play dumb and pretend to be outraged at things that they themselves do as a way of smearing critics.
o Tailgunner Joe quotes Summer Seale as some source to discredit me. That's wild -- as the reason she wrote a blog denouncing me in 2009 is because I criticized child avatars in Second Life -- I think they're creepy, and despite their claims, are indeed often related both to griefing and to child pornography which is banned of course. Seale herself appears as a naked, greased avatar and now has some other appearance (was it a robot?) attacked me, and I fought back. This is the sort of thing that people say you shouldn't do, because if you "feed the trolls," then your blog fighting back is taken out of context.
I do not care. I think it's important to fight back when people try to smear and silence you.
Basically, all of this crazyiness is designed to try to discredit me for my ideas critical of the radical and anarchist hacker movements. The hackers who chronically harass me don't like my valid protest about their vigilantism and their methods antithetical to democracy and human rights. So these valiant Internet freedom-fighters respond by trying to shut me up by any means possible -- smears, lies, attacks, crashing of servers, bombarding with spam bots, porn spamming on Twitter, and then doxing, phone calls in the middle of the night, sending pictures of my house, vandalizing of my Wikipedia entry, etc. This is what happens when you fight back.
But here's the thing -- people who use these methods self-discredit. While some people may turn away from you and believe some of the crap, or feel like even if it isn't true, they just don't want to have anything to do with you because it's weird, some people get that the person doing this to you is pathetic and lame. Those who mine their persecuting screeds for material are just as bad as they.
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