Wired State

Google Should Do Business with the US Military - and Reasonable Tech Leaders Explain Why

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Google server room. Photo by Brian Ussery

So there's a weepy story in Wired about the Googlers all aghast that their company was going to do business with the US military with their new AI tech. 

More than two years ago, Googlers pulled together as employees, using internal social media on the job to organize -- with management's encouragement -- to fight Trump's travel ban Of course it's  in their business interest to combat such unjustified restrictions, as Google relies on a lot of engineers from other countries who come here on H1 visas. It was an example of how the Google is like a state within a state -- like Google's help to the Obama team to win the presidency. Here's a company that in the US, only in the last year or so began to employ worldwide (98,000) something approaching the number of the people that General Motor employees (173,000) (all the big IT companies together don't equal the manufacturing industries in the US, even with a lot of jobs shipped abroad) The tech industry supplies jobs to highly-skilled engineers pretty much, and not a lot of jobs to ordinary people as traditional industries have -- they its left flank has an outsized influence on politics.

Obviously, Google needs to keep growing -- the cultic belief in growth is the foundation of all these big IT companies -- they try to get into China and fail and come back; they try to get into the Cloud even though Amazon and Oracle beat them to it -- they're even now instituting the social Darwinism of cutting pay and raising bonus percentages for sales of their Cloud services.

Google isn't a philanthropy or a democracy -- it's a business, even if (as I've often said) it's a business sort of modeled after the Soviet Knowledge Society seeing as its mission putting into effect the vision of H.G. Wells and Maxim Gorky to make a total encyclopedia of the world's knowledge accessible to ordinary people. Of course, they get to pick which knowledge is important and the People see first...

But like other tech companies maturing over the years and learning that they need to curb their misogynist and racist bro culture and need to do things like "make a profit" and "sell products" not at a loss, Google has had to grow up and talk to the Man. Much more lately, with all the concern about privacy and undermining of elections.

Google Should Accept US Military Contracts

I personally see absolutely nothing wrong with Google or any company accepting contracts with the US military or any part of government.  To be sure, that means dealing with the awful Trump administration, which I didn't (or 90% of Googlers) vote for, but these deals are longer term than any one president and in this case are about America's national security. America is a liberal democracy, even under Trump -- we still call ourselves that because of the massive media and civic response to the racism and misogyny of Trump that still curbs his excesses -- and brings us the hope of replacing him with a Democrat. Even if you think Trump has done such damage that no cooperation with the government is possible (what, farmers should cease taking subsidies? We should forego accepting Social Security? No more roads should be built and our nuclear weapons shouldn't be maintained?), you still might contemplate that there are worse things out there -- look at the leaders of Russia or China or Iran or North Korea.

There is nothing inherently wrong with Amazon or Google helping the government with AI or any capacity needed in the military. If they believe their tech is using the commit human rights abuses at home or abroad, they need to do due diligence and not just talk in rabid, hysterical generalities like the anti-ICE movement which Google employees now take part in. If you don't like the policies on immigration this administration has -- I don't -- trying to attack or disrupt or dismantle ICE won't change them -- would you like Trump merely to use the National Guard to perform the same services? ICE definitely commits abuses, like all government agencies, but in a democracy you campaign and litigate against them and change law and policy -- you don't destroy them like an anarchist. It's not a solution as you are left then only with totalitarian anarchists running things instead of a system of checks and balances.

Isn't Internal Social Media a Huge Time-Waster Costing the Company Money?!

Reading this piece, I can't help thinking that the real problem here is the tolerance for internal social media in the company. My God, what a boondoggle! Do other companies have such nonsense? I can't imagine IBM or Wendy's allowing this madness. Slack is bad enough, if they use them. Letting employees post all day about all kinds of topics unrelated to their work is supposed to be part of this genius theory, whereby you give individuals total intellectual freedom and they produce tech better and innovate more often and productively. Even the Soviets understood this with their sharashkas in the Gulag or the closed cities like Arzamas-16 where Dr. Andrei Sakharov helped build the Soviet hydrogen bomb. We get that.

But social media isn't about creative geniuses doing the hard work of thinking alone at their desks and writing or coding on their computers, wrestling with the material. It's about gabbing with others. Much of the social media madness at Google is about forming various affinity groups based on politics or sexual preferences or lifestyle or hobbies and then expressing on internal boards about them. Madness. Time-wasting. Crazy collectivist boosterism.

Google Should End Internal Social Media

Google should just end all this sillyness. Not only does it fuel animosity and division and lose worker time, it creates reams of data that become a liability once published outside the company. End it!

Imagine, G+, which they had to retire in shame because nobody but a few big photographers who needed free photo storage and free advertising used it. Ordinary people like me who tried it in good faith found that we were in the company of the worst of the worst of Silicon Valley tech culture which isn't only about bros, but about "benevolent dictators" and their "fork or GTFO" mindset. If you criticized anything about Google, or criticized specific Google public figures, they would come after you and threaten you with expulsion from G+ -- and with all their products integrated you wondered if you could get banned from Google Drive or Gmail as well. It was among the harshest climates I've seen on social media, with horrid geeky assholes coming on and harassing people like me who criticized Silicon Valley before its time (now its more fashionable and tolerated) or whose politics didn't jive with the extreme left or libertarian "cosmic engineers".

Google could really put all of this tangled mess out of its misery by just closing all internal social media and encouraging staff to use regular outside social media, with or without their own real names, with a pledge that no one would be fired for what they said on social media with a few very tightly-defined and realistic exceptions, like "exposure of proprietary information" or "incitement of imminent violence."

And this will help put an end to the insubordination that lets a few thousand vocal extremists seize the mindshare with a few lefty journalists and guilt-trip the company into getting out of AI with the military.

One Tech Leader Advocates Cooperation with the Military

I could go on about this, but to my surprise, someone in the industry already has, and compellingly so. While looking  up the real person on whom the Silicon Valley character Keenan Feldspar played by Haley Joel Osment, that weird but loveable round-faced robot boy in the movie AI, I discovered it was Palmer Luckey, inventory of the Oculus Rift, the famous rig to view Virtual Reality, which is a "space" that has springs and winters periodically in the venture-capital world and which is now in a downturn. Even so, millions are still being made and it's not going away.

Palmer Luckey and co-author Trey Stevens has said a very real thing about tech giants and their bowing to their minority of extremists among their employees: "Silicon Valley Should Stop Ostracizing the Military."

Indeed.  The Internet itself grew out of the US military (DARPA) and is a big customer for all the big tech companies -- why all the hand-wringing?

The United States can no longer take this technology leadership for granted. Its adversaries worldwide are marshaling their tech capabilities, often compelling their best scientists to unify behind the goal of achieving preeminence. Putin in September 2017 said that AI leadership was a means to become “the ruler of the world.” China has vowed to achieve AI dominance by 2030. Moscow and Beijing are aggressively pursuing full-scale tech collaborations between the public and private sectors. Meanwhile, much of the top AI talent in the United States is working on things such as ad optimization. That might contribute to the U.S. economy, but it does nothing to protect against competitors who are using their best and brightest to bolster their militaries.

By all means, let’s debate the ethics surrounding any new technologies with military applications. In one of the knottier dilemmas involving AI and the use of force, we agree with many others that the decision to take a human life should not be made without human direction. But an essential part of ensuring that technologies are used ethically is ensuring that the terms are not dictated by authoritarian regimes. For the United States to set ethical norms and assert a moral high ground, it must first hold the technological high ground.

 

Exactly. I couldn't have said it more succinctly or compellingly.  Why should Google engage in leftist political extremism at the behest of a small faction of only 4,000 employees out of some 100,000 worldwide? Even if there 10 times as many, Google management has to do what is good for business -- and customers -- and if they polled their customers, most would agree that they should do business with the US government rather than ceding the ground to Russia or China or worse. Why is this even a debate?

It's not a debate because rational voices like Luckey's aren't heard -- I didn't even notice this piece until a year later -- and because too many journalists fear being uncool with the tech bros or their own colleagues and won't look around outside the noisy faction causing Google leadership heartburn. But why, indeed, despite their failures in China, can Google still work on a Chinese search engine -- that would have to be censored -- and scorn the US military?! And if you don't want to hear that point from me, here it from Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Google will have only itself to blame for canceling the contract and losing out to Russia and China in the AI race but we all need to care because it harms our country's security. This can't be a question left to only Trump to ask.

Biased Media

And frankly the tech reporters of major media like the Post are also to blame, but not seeking out alternative industry opinion to the faction within Google! Like the VR guy who published later on their pages -- but they could have gone within Google itself, quite frankly. 

At least Wired admitted that plenty of tech companies still want US military contracts -- sure they do! They just haven't spoken out as much and neither their leaders or employees have gotten the ear of the liberal media.

Let me show you how Microsoft does it, which actually sells a useful product and doesn't harvest your data in large quantities to sell ads:

Just last month, Microsoft workers wrote to CEO Satya Nadella and company president Brad Smith, asking them to cancel a $479 million Army contract that would let soldiers use Microsoft’s augmented-reality technology, HoloLens, to train for battle. “We did not sign up to develop weapons, and we demand a say in how our work is used,” the letter read.

Nadella rejected their demands in an interviewwith CNN, saying, “We're not going to withhold technology from institutions that we have elected in democracies to protect the freedoms we enjoy.” The response drew scrutiny from Nadella’s fellow technologists and even prompted a New York Times columnist to compare tech military contracts to Dow Chemical’s development of napalm during the Vietnam War.

I have to go see if this same NYT columnist cared as much about Russia's invasion of Ukraine or bombing of Syrians or China's arrest and killing of the Uighurs as they do about US use of napalm in Vietnam.

I also wonder as an aside whether Microsoft's use of Yammer as an internal social media has reached the epic proportions of Google's madness.

Workplace Organizing

I do want to say that while Google management should be free to make their business calls as to whether to work with the US military or China for that matter, and that issues of national politics should be kept from disrupting daily work life, and not encouraged on internal social media to the point that management cannot govern, the issues of labour conditions are different. These are rights. Spouting off about what you think of the Man and the Bomb are not in a private company. That's where freedom of association comes in -- for the company.

I would solve the problem of Google working with China by not working there; as for the US military if that's your belief, then don't work their either. See how that goes. But when it comes to Google's tolerance of sexual harassment in the workplace, and its insistence on internal arbitration before seeking outside legal intervention, employees should organize all they want. They don't need the internal company social media for that -- why would you entrust your adversarial organizing, your workers' rights struggles, to a corporate chat program or board?! 

Women at Google -- who are in a distinct minority -- organized and battled management over the internal arbitration issue and won. That's a valid example of employee solidarity and action that's reasonable. Using the means of internal communications to rally about all sorts of outside political issues or the company's decisions perceived as unethical is not. Too much of that struggle is coopted and diluted anyway, regardless of what you think about it. If you think Google shouldn't help the US military, then you would think no tech company should and you should be organizing more substantively by lobbying legislators or trying to get elected or writing or demonstrating in public, not in your Google cubicle (or padded room with nerf balls and organic herbal tea and healthy snacks).

The organizers succeeded, but then three quit and claimed they had suffered retaliation for their protesting. Google denied this, of course. It's hard to know what the real story is but we all know employers don't like whistleblowers even if they make changes due to them.

Nitasha Tiku, author of the Wired piece, seems to imply at the end of the article that the internal social media and routines like structured dialogues between employees with grievances and top leadership were not in use by the extremists anyway. 

Over the past three years, the structures that once allowed executives and internal activists to hash out tensions had badly eroded. In their place was a new machinery that the company's activists on the left had built up, one that skillfully leveraged media attention and drew on traditional organizing tactics. Dissent was no longer a family affair. And on the right, meanwhile, the pipeline of leaks running through Google's walls was still going as strong as ever.

Late this June, Project Veritas, a right-wing outlet specializing in stings and exposés, published a slew of leaked documents and snippets of hidden-camera footage from inside Google. One of the items it posted, as if evidence of Google's supposed bias, was a “Beginner's Guide to Protesting” that Google employees had drawn up around the time of the travel ban walkout back in 2017. Next to the document was a message and a link. “Do you work in Big Tech?” it said. “Project Veritas would love to hear from you.

Well, welcome to the real world.

 

GamerGate is Only Part of the Story of Extreme Nihilism Online

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Screenshot by Whirly Fizzle of a 4chan "particle attack" in the virtual world of Second Life.

 

Five Years Since GamerGate

So apparently it's the five-year anniversary of GamerGate, as we learn from a shiny retrospective article in the New York Times, with distracting, annoying arrow graphics that I guess are supposed to feel like "a game."

 

The events that started Gamergate began 5 years ago today. We put together a package with a series of pieces from @sarahjeong @BriannaWu @BostonJoan and myself that trace its influence on the internet and politics today. I hope you'll give it a look. https://t.co/oMghdN9Qss

— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) August 15, 2019

I read through the pieces and they're all fine, but I should explain why I never got involved on either side of GamerGate.

The immediate reason was that GamerGate more or less started in August 2014, but I was terribly busy then, covering Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a war that had become more graphically tied to Russia in that summer when Russian soldiers' ID had been recently found in the Donbass and the Battle of Ilovaysk was fought with thousands lost -- which ended with Putin promising a safe retreat but then Russian soldiers and Russian-backed combatants shooting at fleeing Ukrainian soldiers.

So social media skirmishes didn't feel that important to me.

And I felt that while I generally took the side of the feminists, those complaining about the culture of political correctness had a point, as well. I think the writer Cathy Young has done an excellent job of covering GamerGate critically in this vein (and Google her other pieces to understand how some of the protagonist "Social Justice Warriors" fueled this fire). I felt I couldn't add to it without a lot of careful work -- and some times in life you need to let issues pass.

But there was more. When I saw the first few rounds of this, I felt like it was deja vu all over again. I had already been blogging about virtually the same issues for years before that in my Second-Life related blog. Because all those hateful, misogynist, racist, vicious assholes that became known to the world in GamerGate were already long since known in the gamers' world, and specifically Second Life, a virtual world that is an open platform and not a game, but which comes out of the culture of Silicon Valley geeks that spawned the GamerGate nihilism.

And I felt that I simply couldn't wade in and try to explain to people that the harassment of feminists and gays by these extremists was not the only story -- nor was it even about the obnoxious political correctness of the SWJ zealots. The extremism was only the most visible part of a story that meant a culture threatening all of us. So much of the press coverage and comment on online harassment takes the form of featuring vulnerable groups who have suffered, and that's fine, but I feel it misses the larger story of how this can engulf any of us or all of us. That realization shouldn't detract from the victims and their vocal struggles but encourage more human solidarity. Sadly, it generally has the opposite effect, and the nihilists have been able to play on that, as I shall explain.

Virtual "Griefing"

I experienced horrific harrassment, known as "griefing" in SL, just like these women, but not because I was a female game developer or a prominent feminist. I'm only a very moderately prominent translator and human rights activist.  I actually had a male avatar in SL, although many knew my real identity as a woman because I was a critical blogger and spoke to mainstream media. One of the ways my identity was outed 15 years ago was because I was critical of just this very awful culture -- and doxing was the way people like me were intimidated from continuing to criticize geek culture -- which is the seedbed of GamerGate and much else.

I say "people," because I think this isn't only about feminists or women -- although I'm all for women's rights. I think it goes much farther, and it's frustrating to see GamerGate and other similar topics like Steubenville treated as they are only about feminism -- women shamed or harassed or even raped in real life. When the 8chan and related mass shooters who have been affiliated with this awful culture go out and massacre people in real life, they don't only kill women -- they kill men and children. too. Yes, there have been some useful articles pointing out that misogyny and domestic abuse of partners or family members are often part of the mass shooter's profile. But that's not all of it, and I get tired trying to make this point.

They kill everybody, and their ideology isn't just against women, or racial minorities, or LGBT, but really anybody who gets in their way who is for a civil society or just happens to be a random bystander and not part of them.

Jump, Tor Will Save You

And some of the most sophisticated channers play on the very keen interest in women and gays as victims to lie about their harassment of people for other reasons. I vividly recall the story of the female Tor developer (about whom I wrote in my samizdat book because she was once on staff of Linden Lab, creators of Second Life). There was a man who used a pseudonym on Twitter who was critical of the extremist geeks around Tor who were soft on hackers like Manning and Snowden, indifferent to copyright, and fierce about using DDoS attacks or doxing to harass or out critics of their way of life. He was among the few vocal skeptics about Tor's exaggerated claims for privacy or social change to be achieved by this software that was curiously first incubated and still funded today by the US military.

So this man who was just a blogger made a sarcastic crack to this Tor dev -- the kind they might make themselves.  When she posted something about going up in the Washington Monument, he wrote something like that she "should jump off and open Tor, it would break her fall". Everybody who had watched him criticize Tor -- the program and the elitist hacker culture around it -- and her angry responses knew that this was just a sarcastic joke. It wasn't urging her to really jump off a real building. It was an attack against her Tor evangelism, not her womanhood. You know, it was virtual, the way hackers always say everything online is? 

But seeing an opportunity to exploit Twitter sentiment, this Tor queen relentlessly tracked him down, and used various hacker tricks to delve into his photos posted, which is one way to geolocate a person or find more about them. Eventually she discovered his real identity -- he was a pharmacist in New Jersey, not "one of them" -- not in the world of corporate- or government-funded coding and even hacking for fun or profit to "make a better world".  So she contacted his employer and claimed falsely he had written a sexist, violent thing on line. She rallied all the feminists to gang up on him. It cost him his job. 

Tor's Jacob Appelbaum

I know what that was like because the way I first found out about Jacob Appelbaum, the aggressive and popular Tor evangelist for many years, was when I simply questioned his claim on Twitter that the infamous Apache video, which supposedly portrayed callous American soldiers gleefully killing people and even deliberately shooting and wounding children in a van in Iraq. I said -- actually, much as the New Yorker implied only it was more cool for them to do so -- that the video presentation was tendentious and misleading -- and in fact the soldiers mistook the journalists for combatants because they travelled with armed men, and they had no idea there were children in a van (later helped by a US soldier as it happened) because they could not see into it. (Look at the video. You cannot see into it. If soldiers later said it was a terrible idea to bring your children to a battlefield (it was) and pick up wounded combatants (it was), that doesn't mean they could see into the van -- they commented after the fact.)

For my sins, I was deluged with 20,000 hate posts on Twitter that came in incredibly fast, from real people in Jake's posse and botnets that he wrangled. My blog site was bombarded and I began to get all those nuisance phone calls in RL. I was amazed at the deluge. This is how they did it. They used force to drive people offline who disagreed with them. This was very familiar to me from SL.  Now it was in RL.

Ultimately, years later, it came as no surprise to me that the board of Tor fired Jake after multiple #MeToo stories involving his sexual harassment, shaming and even rape of women and men. There were dozens of cases. The Tor dev on Twitter who had ruined the life of the young pharmacist over his "misogyny" wasn't among those who called out Jake. That's the irony.

To me, it made sense that someone who used force, and massive harassment and shaming online in a debate could carry this into real life into bullying work colleagues and even sexually harassing them. Why is this so hard to understand? No, it doesn't mean everybody who crashes your blog server is a rapist, but some are and it goes together. It's the culture. Pay attention. And when I tried to get this across -- that Jacob Appelbaum, helper of the felon and fugitive Snowden, as not only a misogynist but a threat to anyone and to civil society as well, it didn't fit. #MeToo is how this can be understood now, and only that way.

Why the Griefers Went After Me

In the virtual world, I became a target not for feminism, although as I said, I support women's rights. The reason they decided to go after me is because first, I expressed enormous revulsion at what some of them had built in Second Life on their sim -- or simulator, a representation of an island or contiguous mainland where you can put buildings or trees or furniture or animated objects like cats or moving vehicles. They made a replica of the World Trade Center on 9/11 with people falling and dying and put slogans like "I'm falling for you" which outraged and saddened many people on the SL forums. The developers of SL did not remove this objectionable content -- they felt there should be free expression -- like Twitter or Facebook -- and they didn't think even if it offended families who lost their loved ones or just any caring person it didn't matter. 

When I said Linden Lab shouldn't allow the incitement of violence -- which in my view for a private company need not hew to a strict First Amendment jurisprudence but include the glorification of terrorism and nihilism about violence -- I was singled out for attacks.

So some 14 years ago, when I made a 4th of July picnic open to the public on a sim where I had a "Coney Island" style build with a boardwalk and picnic tables, these griefers - day-old alt accounts with names like "Mohammed" who were hardly Muslim --  flew airplanes around the site and then hurled bombs on the location with scattered a lot of fire prims, i.e. objects looking like fire which then crashed the sim. 

And then they never let up for years and years -- about seven, I reckon -- where they harassed me, put giant caricatures of my RL self on sims and feigned obscene acts -- even showing dead versions of my RL self with broken glasses nearby, like Piggy in Lord of the Flies. 

They bombarded the sims where I had built a community with people who shared the cost of the sim by paying rent, spewing particles with pictures of sadistic acts, anti-semitic slogans and memes, racist images, abortions, and so on.  They mocked Bill Cosby and his Jello ads (long before his own sexual abuse was prosecuted); they mocked Jews by the Wailing Wall; they claimed AIDS was spreading. Early on, I was the first to make a community where LGBT were welcome, and where people with organizations opposing violence against women and helping victims could have free storefronts. These areas were deluged with "grief prims" -- objects on physics that scattered all around and crashed the sim, forcing people to move out.

So they attacked not just those in certain readily-identifiable vulnerable groups, but those who abuse-reported such acts, or who criticized them and demanded action to stop them.

The Enemy of Society

Because I was vocal about publicizing these attacks -- which had little reaction from Linden Lab at the time (and later I found out even involved some of their staff and friends of their staff in those early days), other victims of attacks told me they experienced the same thing but they feared talking about it. There were designers with dress stores who were bombarded with fire prims and had their items copied ("copybotted" as the expression went); there were Christians in Bible studies; there were people who happened to make a Middle American style house with a white picket fence. They didn't know what hit them. I found some people who were middle-aged and were experiencing the "wonders" of online gamer culture for the very first time and were outraged and bewildered about how to stop it.

Soon I realized that likely I had come to their attention even before the 9/11 incident.  Once when I had seen a bunch of people goofing around on some land for sale by Anshe Chung, one of SL's "land barons," putting up giant penises and the usual litter and slogans ranging from obnoxious to racist or anti-gay, I abuse-reported it. Anshe would leave "autoreturn" turned off on her land because she wanted to enable prospective customers to measure their houses before buying. But this amenity only lead to griefers -- who are always looking for holes in the system like this to abuse - to put out junk. 

These griefers drove customers away -- although the amounts of loss were measured in dimes and half dollars. But they also drove away friends and blogging colleagues who disagreed that publicizing this was the right way to go. And they drove away people who used to come to a regular discussion group I ran every Friday, both people I knew and members of the public who just responded to a notice.

So while they were the ones who should have become the outcasts for cynically making falling 9/11 buildings or harassing a wide range of people from born-again Christians to gays to fashion merchants, they made me the outcast because I "didn't know how to have fun" and "took myself too seriously".

Why?

The New Totalitarians

Because they want to run the Internet their way, and discourage even violently anyone who views the uses of it differently.  So those truly advocating free speech and free association for any purpose, whether religious or commercial or sexual (i.e. not just for "sandboxing" and "creativity" and extremist hate speech), were enemies of the people. This is why I call them totalitarians. They are ruthless.

That is, people who tried to create and sell items, or engage in commerce even at this small level, or who had public discussions increasing knowledge and participation were all anethema to the worldview of these creeps. They thought everything on the Internet should be free and never sold and happily stole copyrighted items (which is often the only way they ever got expelled from the world, only to re-spawn again on alts and get banned again). They zealously believed that people who tried to do serious things in this virtual world -- "srius biznez" they sneered -- anything from Bible Study or self-help groups for the disabled or political discussions -- should be stopped so they wouldn't take themselves seriously. The Internet should only be for anarchic, riotous fun, and if the servers got crashed or an artist's livelihood was stolen -- so what? The Internet had to be made free...BY FORCE.

I got this insight from a long-time writer about SL whose avatar name was Urizenus Sklar --  in real life a linguistics philosopher named Peter Ludlow who is now disgraced with a campus sexual abuse case which bore many signs of a witch hunt with the usual lack of due process. He was not a friend, and I used to argue vehemently about various virtuality issues -- he tended to be forgiving of the griefers and even provide them haven under the theory that they were "innovative" and "interesting to study". But he did grasp that they were about Bolshevik-like control -- achieved by blocking others from a whole range of activity they didn't like, through force.

The Enablers

And that attitude among scholars -- I would call them "the griefer professors" was all too common. They would fawn over these vandals -- the company should have really pursued prosecution of them for all the real income they lost -- and call them "transgressive" or berate their critics who wouldn't let them "poke fun" and "took themselves too seriously". A hallmark of these goons was what Uri called "word salad," i.e. gabbling distractive nonsense or outright lying about their real deeds. They would insist that they were only poor minority students in a commuter college who were engaged in "study" and accuse people who abuse-reported them of being "racist" -- but they were all white boys, the children of wealthy parents in many cases, some even wealthy themselves. Some went on to get high-paying tech jobs in places like Intel.

It wasn't about scholarship -- although they dragged the Higher Chronicle of Education into their insane false narrative and many other blogs by sociologists or articles in mainstream news by journalists who should know better.

That's why when I see a video like this coming from CNN today, I wonder where CNN was 15 years ago, when they thought this was merely funny. This shouting Nazi slogans and spewing anti-women and anti-gay slogans and memes wasn't really "srius" -- it was just meta. So meta that it wasn't real. 

I felt that as with human rights work, the best thing to do in these cases was to investigate and document the actions, abuse report them and get other victims to AR them, and then ignore them. Logging off when they descend on you is the best way to break their attention. But I also think -- unlike others who mouth the slogan "don't feed the trolls" -- that documenting and publicizing to keep the record is valuable just as with human rights violations or acts of terrorism. Because that prevents them from lying about what they do.

Steubenville

That's really important because they do lie strenuously about what they do -- just as with Steubenville, Anonymous claimed they were there to champion the rights of a victim of rape by football team members. In reality, they prevented a just prosecution, ended up outing the victim's name, and ruined the lives of people like the coach or town officials with false accusations. I and a few other bloggers  tried to point out that the denizens of 4chan in Anonymous, who spent time on horribly misogynist forums trading dreadful pictures, were hardly the folks to be championing rape victims' rights. (Yes, Lee Stranahan in that era of 2013 while at Breitbart did a good job on this story, although nowadays his conspiracy shtick is a horror and he even works for Sputnik). Yes, people love to tell you how random Anonymous is -- and then how precisely different Anonymous is from 4chan or lulsec or whatever. Unimpressed -- too many virtual and real experiences where I see they are the same people.

I saw instantly this was about disrupting the justice system -- just because. And the real effects just weren't acknowledged. As Frank Bruzzese, an assistant prosecutor for Jefferson County, Ohio who assisted in the early stage of the investigation, said:

“The internet lynch mob did damage to their own stated goal of helping the victim by putting her in an international spotlight that only served to humiliate her. Anonymous claimed to want justice but their threats had the opposite effect; by calling for the scalps of eyewitnesses and other completely innocent people, the result was a hampered prosecution where people were afraid to testify and where the judge was forced to grant three witnesses immunity.”

It was a scam -- taking a popular issue that got many people angry and running with it to produce chaos and disruption far beyond the supposed original cause of the girl. Twitter amplified and metastasized this insanity beyond belief. (Steubenville was an early example of how these online terrorists seized on the rampant interest and sensitivity about "bullying" to accuse anyone who criticized them of "being a bully".) Ultimately, one of the Anonymous actors around Steubenville was caught and jailed for two years for hacking and exposing private information (and later violated the terms of his release) - but as you can see from the Rolling Stone coverage of the story, he is still portrayed as a tragically-misunderstood hero who "got more time than the rapists". Yes, arguably the rapists should get "more time" and nothing exonerates them. But why is it ok to hack and crash web sites, hack into the coach's phone, or the web-master's site and accuse him of child molestation falsely and ruin his life? For the hacker, the entire town of Steubenville was guilty of creating football glory culture that lead to the drunken parties and the abuse of the young girl? But that's not justice. Threatening involved eyewitnesses so that they have to be granted immunity is not justice. Using Internet incitement to parachute in mobs of goons in masks from all over to a small town isn't "justice". At one point the Anonymous hacker (his real name was Deric Lostutter) tweeted, " “Hey I’m running your whole town from the comfort of my toilet,” he tweeted, “How’s that feel?”

Would you want that to be the way justice is always run in America? Well, then.

P.S. William Rhinaman, the IT director for the Steubenville schools, was sentenced for tampering with and destroying evidence in the case, so it's not as if this small town justice system, consumed with f0otball culture or no, is incapable of prosecuting those guilty of obstructing justice in a rape case, even in the face of outrage from his colleagues. They do not need hackers to help them do this.

It's nearly impossible to get across how wrong Anonymous and its spin-offs were throughout Steubenville because neither social media or mass media covered their real actions or thought about their implications, and if you were the slightest bit critical of their Bolshevik methods, you were seen as excusing rapists and bro culture.

Feminists praised Anonymous and still do to this day over Steubenville, although that is terribly misguided. Fake concern for the girl was only the hook for mayhem extremist attention-seeking -- and they bought into it and helped perpetuate it. I suffered some of the worst abuse of my life -- with Anonymous making one of those eerie videos on YouTube against me, and deluging me with hate posts on Twitter, some of which I noticed were coming from Russians (and this was in 2012, long before the presence of disruptive Russians in the 2016 elections was acknowledged). These were either live people or bots, as I saw the Russian mistakes they made in their English or actual words in Cyrillic. So a key reason I didn't get involved in GamerGate is that I really wore myself out trying to explain a nuanced point of view that both supported the victim and condemned the small-town football culture that enabled it but also objected to justice being served this way by Anonymous.

This is why the DNC hack felt like old hat to me -- remember the enormous hatred and skepticism that anyone who believed Russia was involved suffered in the early days? This came mainly from hackers who supported Snowden. With Steubenville, I had goons calling my mother-in-law and sending pizzas that weren't paid for and all the rest. Months and months of it -- yet I had no feminists standing up for me because they were too busy applauding what they thought were these wonderful crusading hackers saving a young girl terribly harmed by the football players for life (although several of them were sentenced to jail for a year and lost college opportunities). 

Steubenville keeps spawning tragedy - when justice is disrupted and vigilantism takes its place to the applause of feminists, it only causes feelings of unjustice to build and spawns more tragedy, which is arguably rooted in the historical injustice of racism long before the Internet. 

Women's organizations and the burgeoning use of social media could have fought the injustice of a football team rape fairly -- anonymous men in masks who caused mayhem and harm to numerous people in their supposed zeal to advocate for the victim were actually not needed and got in the way.

When I tried to explain even long before Steubenville that these Anonymous and 4chan griefers were "like" terrorists, I was ridiculed even by the journalist who interviewed me for a cover story in Wired about this phenomenon 11 years ago. I remember this journalist told me to get a much bigger and baggier blouse on -- I went and found a maternity smock, although my children were in grade school already. He then photographed many pictures with my son who happened to be there, but then snapped one where I was in the kitchen, with my back to the camera, as if I wanted to be anonymous. (Ridiculous, since I had agreed to give an interview with my own name.) This creep even photographed me looking through the chain of my locked door. He made all these photos with a kind of distractive patter so I didn't realize at first that I was merely being set up to look stupid -- like some middle-aged soccer mom online who was afraid of kids who said bad words. In the end, only the picture of me in a huge blouse with my back to the camera was used -- and that picture became a meme literally served up to me millions of times in hate posts, particle attacks, and griefer objects of every kind. I would log on to find giant versions of it; people would poke it in my face on a sign at meetings.

I was supposed to laugh this off, of course. But they would also text me photos of my real-life doorway, they called me at home and played the Soviet national anthem, they hounded me with social media posts that they could see me with an umbrella in the rain on an actual street where I lived when it was raining. (They picked up the Soviet theme because of my Russian work and because I compared them to Bolsheviks.)

Believe me, I know the difference between virtual characters online using terrorist-like methods, and the real terrorists who massacred my neighbours on 9/11, or the Bolsheviks who  tortured my children's grandfather and uncle to death in the Gulag. I don't need help on this, truly.

I said "like" because the dynamics are the same, the culture of nihilism is the same; the "end justifies the means" is the same; the defiance of the rule of law is the same; the glorification of violence and meaningless are the same. And so on. I wrote reams on this because I thought it had to be studied. I thought it would spread beyond the game and virtual world realms. I saw Second Life as a kind of incubator or petri dish of this awful phenomenon. And I worried about what would happen when it spread and go off-line.

And it did.

The Culture of Silicon Valley Geekdom

I don't mean that it spread from Second Life, which was an exoticism with perhaps only a million sign-ups and a 100,000 concurrency and returning users in its heyday. But some of the best tech minds in the Valley came through SL (many of them can now be found at Facebook or Google or Tor or any number of other geek berths) because the problem of streaming virtuality, compression, intellectual property, governance -- these were all available to work on and study -- and still are -- in this unique setting. The devs and their favoured friends tolerated and even coddled the griefers because they were only somewhat more extreme versions of themselves. When people talk of the awful culture of GamerGate or more broadly of gamers who turn violent, they seldom contemplate the culture of the devs - which is the same culture that produced social media and all its woes. So the patterns there are like what you can see elsewhere -- with precursors to many phenomena we saw later, such as the WikiLeaks and Snowden hacks, the issues of customer privacy, how to balance hate speech prosecution with allowing freedom of expression, and so on.

And whether people want to hear it or not, that culture comes from the people who make tech and engineered their culture into the tech, who first scorned copyright and browbeat those who wanted to protect it, then scorned privacy by tolerating doxing and careless maintenance and only claimed to be "doing something" when Congress and law-enforcement came calling, and who scorned the virtual violence of griefing or crashing servers or deluging users with bots and wrung their hands over 8chan saying they couldn't act because of Section 230 or the First Amendment.

I suppose the series Silicon Valley, which I've been watching (I rarely watch movies and don't have a TV) is helpful in conveying some of the violent, nihilist, misogynist, hateful culture of the bros and the VCs who fund them, committing fraud and felony along the way.

Online Goes Offline

I was very struck by a human rights training I once went to by a colleague from ADL who described how a certain percentage of the anti-Semites online go offline into real life and commit vandalism and even assaults of Jews. (Note to various insane Wikipedia editors and offshoots and the shady companies who put "real" background files on line: I have never worked for ADL -- I only attended one of their trainings while working at the International League for Human Rights, and I never worked as an IT specialist, although I often did network troubleshooting in our small office because we couldn't afford expensive IT help).

So it was no surprise to me at all that 4chan devolved into 8chan and some of these people actually committed mass shootings. Does that mean that everybody who steals content or hacks somebody's account or crashes their server "is" a terrorist or mass murderer? That mass shooters "start with" illegal music downloads and anonymous sexist harassment and graduate to terrorism? Of course not. But some of them do. And the cultural milieu is there, and causes a range of worrisome damages that stem from the same ideology of nihilism and extremist tech anarchy.

And here we all are. And that's why I don't want to be afraid to study violent games as a cause of this culture; or the tolerance for hate speech and violence on social media; or to demand that platforms lose their Section 230 safe haven as part of the complicated path to curbing this hateful culture. Curbing it, providing alternatives to it -- that's the best that can be done, as it is too late to stop it. It is in all tech; it is in the culture of all technologists, whether they manifest the extreme variants of it or not. This needs more critical study -- and not by griefer professors or feminist authors who defend the female devs of GamerGate but praise Anonymous in Steubenville -- it needs more than the lawyers for Facebook or the lobbyists for Google deciding what is permissible or not about it.

You see, people are still seeing the phenomenon of mass shootings as "white supremacism" or Nazism only, and blaming Trump (who does deserve blame in my view, especially for the massacre of the Jews in the Pittsburgh synagogue over the issue of refugees). But I believe this is wider and deeper and threatens us all because it is about technologists who made themselves like machines to get computers to work, and then make all of us machines to a small or larger extent. As the saying goes, the fear of the future isn't so much that robots will become humans and take over, but that humans will become robots and take over.

Human Solidarity

The best way of combating the violent culture of anarchic nihilism is human solidarity. Believing someone when they say they are wronged and standing by them, instead of telling them that they take themselves too seriously or should "get a life". (But also respecting that a victim's story is not always enough evidence to deny a confirmation or sentence a suspect; facts and corroboration are needed). The women in GamerGate sure had to "get a life" -- hiding in fear of serious death threats and having to completely alter their routines, living spaces, and even jobs. So many people in minority and transgender communities in particular have suffered terribly from these extremists. The Internet should remain free and not be ceded to these goons. They are the new totalitarians.

I can't say it enough although I don't have an audience to hear this -- GamerGate or 8chan or similar cultural manifestations you can find in Anonymous or groups like the Proud Boys are not just about white supremacy or misogyny or anti-gay harassment although those are very terrible and the most obvious manifestations of their being. They are against civil society under the rule of law, which means they hurt all of us. This isn't to dilute the very salient features of this awful phenomena related to very real fascism and Nazism that 10 years ago we were told was "meta". They are Nazis and it's more than fine to focus on this.

But if you think that if they're just white supremacists and you're white or straight and it doesn't concern you, you're wrong. Because they are against all of the humanness of humanity and the cure -- human solidarity and caring -- gives you a real idea of that terrible disease. They will come for you, and not only because you're in the target groups or you stand up for the target groups but because you're not a member of their posse. How to break up and stop the posses before they engulf us is the challenge of the Internet which is now thoroughly embedded in real life.

 

 

 

Moral Panic Over Moral Panic

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

This article/video by Clair Wardle in the New York Times seemed to me like something not to be praised.

She thinks that panic about deepfakes -- videos that distort real people or events through technology to misleadingly sway opinion -- is more of a threat to democracy than the deepfakes themselves because it spreads doubt and disbelief in general.

David Kaye, UN Rapporteur on Freedom of Speech praised it on Twitter and linked to it, but now I can't find his tweet. It doesn't matter. Why do I have problems with the "anti-moral-panic" of this piece?

Three reasons:

1. It's not clear there really is a moral panic  -- and that even if technology to create fakes is being "democraticized," technology to detect fakes is also being developed and will be used by platforms when content is uploaded.
2. The claim just doesn't hold up that panic about highly-realistic fake videos is worse than the fake videos because it undermines democracy by instilling doubt in institutions. That doubt has long existed and grows without fake videos.
3. The Pentagon is working on this -- which means it's not in the realm of Twitter vapours or mass media-generated panic but something more serious -- beyond moral panic.

The "moral panic" most notable lately seems to be about the slowed-down Nancy Pelosi video, and it's because of the very controversy of Nancy Pelosi herself, where some Democrats desperately hang on to her because they think she is the only one who can manage the floor of Congress, keep Democrats together, and get deals. And others oppose her either because they're to the left of her program (the "Squad") or because they simply think she's been in the job too long. I'm not a supporter of AOC, but I don't see what's wrong with pointing out that Pelosi at 79 is too old for this job -- and I say that at age 63. She can't last forever, so it's time for a new leader. If the Democratic hold on things is that fragile that it depends on an old lady -- even a very tough and experienced old lady -- it's in more trouble than we thought.

I don't see people making the obvious point about this video -- that the satire succeeds because it's quite close to the truth. Nancy's speech is ALREADY slurred even if she is stone, cold sober because a) apparently she has dentures; b) she has one of those lock-jawed accents and rapid speech where she doesn't finish sentences and isn't always distinct. Look at videos from years ago (2012)

So when you go to watch the "doctored" video, especially the real one right after the fake one, you see how in fact her speech has grown more indistinct over the years, due to age, or dentures or lockjaw (people even joke about her dentures in the comments on the videos) and you wonder what the big deal is -- the satire is telling a truth of sorts. And how has this really changed the story of Pelosi and the controversy around her, i.e. that some want her to go and some think the world will end without her? It hasn't, it has only become another skirmish in the same battle.

But despite the obvious truths here -- that a slightly-slowed-down video could work as satire because it was very close to the real Nancy, and that it played on the misgivings that cause the divide in the Democratic Party -- no one would mention it. It could not be articulated by a pious Ian Bogost in his thumb-sucking piece about media and truth for the Atlantic. Nancy sounds slurred anyway, fake or no. Facebook can say it has no policy to ensure things are true before allowing them to be published because it's not a publisher -- but imagine if your description of your fabulous life on FB had to be subjected to the truth test?! Of course it can't have a truth test. What is truth? 

Bogost writes:

When Facebook says it’s not a news company, it doesn’t just mean that it doesn’t want to fall under the legal and moral responsibilities of a news publisher. It also means that it doesn’t care about journalism in the way that newsmakers (and hopefully citizens) do, and that it doesn’t carry out its activities with the same goals in mind. And yet rather than understanding and responding to those truths, public discourse instead beats its head against a wall trying to persuade Facebook that it “can’t do” what it’s been doing with impunity. It would be much simpler and more productive to take the company at its word, since reforming it into a responsible actor concerned first with its responsibility to truth or citizenship is likely impossible.

Well, no. And journalism isn't that fabulous thing, either, given the way Covington was covered and many other subjects. The cure is to remove the safe haven of Section 230. Facebook doesn't have to like or do "real" journalism. But it is a publisher, the way tabloids are publishers and should have responsibility for the content on its platform. Bogost sidesteps this issue so I don't know what he believes about Section 230, but it is likely he wouldn't want to change it, given the Silicon Valley culture he has long resided in.

I disagree with David Kaye about a number of things (like his support of Snowden in his UN report as a "whistleblower" (he is a felon who fled to Russia) or his idea that Trump is the "worst" disinformer, when Putin is far worse), but he posed the right question here (although notice he doesn't answer it). It may not be politically correct, flying in the face of Pelosi supporters' outrage, but the reality is, Facebook shouldn't remove this video, because it's satire of a public figure, and that is allowed under the First Amendment.

homework assignment: draft the rule that prohibits doctored pelosi video but protects satire, political speech, dissent, humor etc. not so easy is it? https://t.co/zaA7kQf83i

— David Kaye (@davidakaye) May 25, 2019

I don't know if his praise of the NYT video is about the tendency of all such commentators to act as if the masses panic but the talking heads know better.

I personally don't think fake videos will undermine faith in democracy and its institutions as the author says -- for one, it already is undermined, but undermined notably on Twitter, which doesn't represent even the Democratic Party, let alone all of America, as multiple studies have shown.  After all, we had democracy before the age of TV and radio and the Internet. To be sure, media has impacted democracy in good and bad ways, but I think we will find that if fake videos are used more extensively, to the point where they affect elections,  reporters will get more savvy about getting real interviews face-to-face instead of looking up Twitter accounts and web sites and cutting and pasting. And that will be a good thing.

And even before the Internet gave legs to deepfakes, there was negative advertising on TV -- I'm thinking of those fake claims that Mitt Romney caused a fired worker's wife to die of cancer because Bain Capital, where he was an investor, had taken over the plant, then later laid off workers so that they loss their health insurance. Snopes didn't take this on, but Factcheck did, and has a very extensive entry explaining that the claim is misleading and a matter of debate. The plant Bain took over might have closed anyway. The man's wife died five years after the closing, and for one of those years she did have her own job's insurance. There are a lot of "whatifs" in this story -- too many to pin the blame on Romney certainly, and even Bain. American steel companies can't compete in a worldwide market. That's the underlying truth to the whole story. Leftists have a visceral hate of this sort of leveraged buyout but it doesn't always fail and it's not clear what alternatives they can offer to save a plant. 

This anti-Romney video isn't called a "deepfake" but it is misleading. You don't need to have neural networks learning algorithms to re-make faces on a video to create a misleading video that can be argued as true, depending on the set of premises you start with -- hatred or appreciation of capitalism; belief that plants can be saved by Bain-style buyouts or not; even belief that people will go to the doctors if they have insurance -- after all, their insurance might not have been enough to deal with cancer anyway.

You know what I'm worried more about? Neural networks being taught by geeks to do things automatically. There's a scene in one of the episodes on "Silicon Valley" where Richard, the CEO of the start-up Pied Piper, bursts into a focus group where ordinary people are criticizing his app to explain that in fact it's very cool and neural networks are being trained to do things with people's content. One woman named Bernice expresses concern about what is being done with her uploaded content by the company running the app. One man then says worriedly, "Terminator" -- the neural networks will become so smart they will take over and destroy humans (the Singularity cult idea). Richard dissuades them and continues to insist on its coolness. Of course, those neural networks can only learn what they are being taught - garbage in, garbage out.  And they only "keep learning" on their own -- and doing -- if coders don't stop them. Shouldn't we be more worried about ethics-free coders manipulating neural networks  and not conceiving of breaks on their "learning" -- without any input from ordinary people in a democracy? 

Even so, while one set of geeks are doing something undermining democracy, according to this Times essayist, another set are undoing it for mundane business reasons. Facebook doesn't want to be regulated. So some engineers are working on detecting such deepfakes at the stage they are uploaded to a platform.

Wardle suggests that platforms "think hard" about this (huh?) and "reduce prominence" to videos like the Pelosi slur or "give context". Facebook did that, but others didn't.  But wait a minute. If Facebook does that much with content, aren't they editors? If they label things or start providing context on their own which inevitably will be politicized, aren't they media?

I'm all for Section 230 to be revised so that platforms no longer are exonerated from responsibility for user content. I want them to have this responsibility, whether it is for letting shooter's videos stay up or the morgue photos made by the despicable pro-Kremlin Graham Phillips of the children killed in the mortar attack of their soccer field in the Donbass (which and others tried to get removed -- and failed -- although ultimately other things Graham did caused his account to get moved).

There's a moral panic about Section 230 being removed from the libertarians and leftists, in the belief that this is the Internet's First Amendment. Baloney. Private companies do not  have to -- and don't currently -- maintain First-Amendment level freedoms on their platforms. Therefore they cannot "lose" their First Amendment. They have terms of service and rules which they already enforce -- but badly. So let them  have the responsibility that goes with that, and use some of their billions on hiring staff to deal with customer content and complaints.

Everyone remembers the panic spread by Orson Welle's War of the Worlds radio show in 1938. The potential for someone to use YouTube and Twitter or Facebook for some modern version of this -- say a fake Trump declaring war on North Korea or something like that -- is there and not all reporters these days seem to have the cold-call and foot-pad skills to go into reality and find out what is happening (as they did ultimately but not before they Internet got their first -- when nuclear war seemed to be launched in Hawaii). So the moral is to start now to do more reality. There's plenty out there waiting to be covered in person and on foot.

I Don't Think Robot Pets Can Replace Real Pets

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Sam Byford/The Verge

So I read in this shopper Manhattan Express that Lorraine Cortes-Vazquez, commissioner of the New York City Department for the Agining in the de Blasio administration, former AARP executive wants to "battle social isolation" which she feels is a problem for 1.6 million older adults in NYC. She has a point -- for example in my large housing complex of some 4,000 people, a woman died alone in her apartment and no one knew for days. Some seniors revived a senior group to have socials and outings to try to combat this. (The problem is that the outings often involve at least $30 in expenses and climbing stairs or walking some distances, which puts it out of reach for some).

So the solution the commissioner thinks will tackle this problem is not just a visiting program with real, live people - such as my church has and which the city itself has with something she launched called ThriveNYC Friendly Visiting Program. There are some senior centers but if they are anything like the one in my neighbourhood, they consist of a TV and outdated paperbacks and bad coffee. The private sector is better at this, especially with public funding, as some Jewish organizations have done for seniors in Brighton Beach, giving Soviet emigres like my mother-in-law the time of their lives -- companionship in their native language, meals, gifts, musical performances, poetry and book readings, art classes -- even ballroom dancing, which our babushka does at the age of 93 and says it keeps her alive.

But what Ms. Cortes-Vazquez is touting in this piece is a robotic dog given to a senior, aged 64, suffering from an immune disease. That sounds like me. There are some days I can't go out, I get opportunistic infections from a rare disease whereby the immune system attacks your own mucous membranes causing pain and suffering. Really, the medicines with their side effects are worse than the disease. 

This woman likely has a much worse disease because I think with gloves and plastic garbage bags, you could minimize the remote risk of toxoplasmosis from cleaning out a pet's litter box (which may have been the argument in favour of the robo-dog).

"The dog has sensors, responds to touch, barks and nuzzles and provides comfort," says the commissioner.

Well, the price tag for these dogs, if it is like the Sony dogs (and the picture doesn't look like one) is $2,899.

The picture is from Ageless Innovation which also makes these automatic pets. Their version is only $99, for example like this orange tabby.

One old lady in the video says, "They make you feel you're not alone. They make you feel soothed." It's the purring sound that does it. 

Obviously, this $2,899 Sony robo-dog does a lot more, although he doesn't look cuddly at all without fur and without strange robot eyes. But he can pick up a bone or fetch a ball or recognize people or respond to petting in different ways because he's just more sophisticated -- hence the price tag.

It would be good before spending city funds on all this if anybody got the idea to have the $2,899 version to see what people really respond to. Maybe they don't need a thing like this to fetch as much as they need it to purr and cuddle.

I do have to wonder, given the city's over-population of pets (I hear about the stray cat population from my daughter, who helps out a friend who is a "street veterinarian"), why we have to spend anything more than fees to spay and vaccinate the pets. 

What a real animal gives you is something that robots try to learn with algorithms and "machine learning" but can't replicate -- randomness but also familiarity. A real pet has a favourite toy or food that I should think a robot wouldn't develop. It also does random things. Sometimes it sits and stares out the window; sometime it chases around the house. I suppose you could program a robot cat to have a wild run through the house every night at 8:30 like real cats do. Would it be the same? The robots obviously are still clunky, they freeze up, they can't align themselves with that bone as the video shows.

 

Of course, there is the one great down side of real animals -- they get sick and die. But this is part of the natural life cycle and maybe it makes you appreciate them more . (I had to put down my children's cats last year when at 18 years of age, they both got very ill.)

At this point, I'd rather have a real cat. The advantage they are pushing with robots is that they require no feeding, clean-up or vet bills. But the feeding and bonding routine is part of the attraction of real cats.

I have artificially-intelligent breedable cats in Second Life, an online virtual world (not a game, because it's an open-ended platform and you can put anything in it). The cats come with pre-programmed chat they say, like "Let's go for a walk" or "How did you get so big?" or "Did you know I like fish and milk?" You can program them to say other things. But that's just it. Then they are no longer random. They may move randomly, but the repetitive chat gets to you. The only thing random is the names of the new kittens, which are often odd, and a surprise, and to which some ascribe superstitious meaning (and it can get eerie!). You can change the names. But that's just it -- the randomness isn't there.

Here actual two KittyCats brand cats are being held in Second Life to help them to breed.

Here two of the cats -- a special birthday brand for the 16th anniversary of Second Life itself -- have gotten sick and "gone under the blanket" because the owner forgot to feed them or didn't "set to group" (a way to feed multiple cats with different owners). They stay in that condition for 7 days -- then go and eat more food to make up for lost time.

To be sure, the creator of these cats, Callie Kline, has programmed a lot of fun things into them -- they bat butterflies, they have fake fights with each other, they sleep on little pillows, they race around and you can pick them up and even ride the Megapuss giant version.

Still, they are nothing like real pets! You feel guilty deleting them, but they get expensive as they require a few dollars food every month -- or you can "permapet" them for about $5 to stop feeding them but keep them still moving and responding as pets.

I'm looking forward to the time when I can get a real kitty again.

How to Clean Up Your Monster E-mail Box - With Especially One Great Trick

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulu. 

Do you have a completely wild, untamed e-mail box like me? I had 250,000+ emails going back at least until 2009. When I clicked on the "unread," I saw that half of the e-mails were unread.

I know some people who just abandon an e-mail box like this and start a new one. And I've done that, too, because Yahoo e-mail is so unreliable. I've kept it not only out of habit but because I like the interface better than Google, and since this address has been on all my business cards and translator sites and such, I need to keep it. I forget to go to gmail for entire days at a time. 

I have no idea if it is the sheer mass of emails that makes the account perform poorly -- loading slowly or not at all with multiple error messages; not delivering emails directly sent from frequent contacts; repeatedly putting into spam things marked as "not spam"; losing attachments. It's pretty awful, and Google's mail is seemingly better, but not error-free, either (and then there's those hugely annoying threads which geeks love but which make it impossible to tell if you have a new e-mail).

In any event, it can't hurt to clean an email box, and surely it can be done, but there's a huge hobble: they do not make it easy for you, because you can't compartmentalize the search to only the inbox. So when you file a lot of email into other folders, they keep showing up in search as if they need to be filed again.

So here's my trick -- but keep your wits about you.

SORT E-MAILS INTO TRASH

First, empty the trash bin to prevent confusion. Second, search on one email contact or news list you want to sort, and trash it. This is slow because it starts with a batch of 25, then only gets you batches of 50, but put in a little time every day, or do it while you are on conference calls or watching a movie or something.

Once you have the desired email to segregate all in trash, you can now move it all. Why put it in trash? Because trash IS segregated and does NOT show up in search. So while you are searching, you don't keep seeing the same already-filed stuff. You could even go through this process with multiple contacts. It makes it SO MUCH EASIER.

Now that you have all the email in trash -- being careful not to select DELETE and ignore the "do you really..." warnings! -- you can now move it into the desired file folder. Now, Yahoo shows its muscle. It actually can move 100 at a time (not just 25 or 50) when it is moved out of trash. Funny, that.

I don't know why they make it so hard. The "archive" function is stupid because it merely puts it all somewhere else, but not filed. It's pretty useless. Subject or Name files are what you need, so make them.

UNSUBSCRIBE FROM UNREAD LISTS

Now, select UNREAD and look at the unread and decide on entire listservers especially that you need to unsubscribe from. You don't read them. Here is the proof. Bite the bullet and delete them. You can always go and browse the site in question if you really need it, or use Google with search terms.

GET RID OF FUND-RAISERS

The politicians of all stripes are particularly useless. I sign up for them left to right, but with few exceptions, like Stand Up, the conservative alternatives, they don't have hard news in them. They are just fund-raising pitches, constantly. Bernie Sanders is especially pathetic and awful, asking you to "chip in" a dollar all the time. I get Daily Kos and Daily Signal (left and right) which are generally free of the fund-raising, although Daily Kos is also pathetic, constantly telling you how many journalists have been fired as if they aren't bloggers, but journalists, and need you to fund them. I don't. They do fine. I don't care for their ideology nor Daily Signal's for that matter, but I read everything to get some breadth.

MAKE FILTERS

Another thing to do is to set up filters to make some news lists or even people go into folders so you don't have them in the inbox. That may make you feel guilty because you never read them, but at least they are there to read. I did this with Google news terms I have set up like "Snowden". I recently got rid of a lot of those Google news searches because they delivery daily so you are never going to read them.

BTW, perhaps like other people, even though I made filters, they didn't seem to work, and that's because I failed to fill them out completely.  Go to "Settings" on the right, then "More" (they don't make this easy!), then fill out every box -- not just "to" and "from" and "body" etc. Then make sure to specify the folder it goes into.

Doing all this, I found a few very important overlooked e-mails -- so it was worth it -- and I got rid of about 100,000 emails. The "put in trash" method is especially useful and fast. I'm now trying to file as I go, and deleting more. If something is in last week's email and you didn't read it, especially not real, live email from real people, but just lists, delete it.

I now have 160,000 I think still to go, but I did succeed in cleaning out completely a smaller email I have and it's a great thing.

E-mail has not evolved. It is incredibly hard to port (the mbx files can't be opened except by that email program often); it's hard to sort; it's hard to manage. The "innovations" Google has brought like template answers (which many people, including me, hate) or the sorts into "promotion" or "social" aren't really what it's about. That creepy program Google launched some years ago and then removed which enabled you to rewrite or delete e-mails from other people in real-time threads just isn't workable.

It would be better if e-mail were on the desk top in a graphical form you could push around. Like the files on the Second Life interface, for example (and I think most online games or worlds). So you push in front what you want and push to the side what you don't need at that moment. You can also open two inventories so you can see the file folders better to file into. Ideally, you could use your own graphics, like a fire to show what is really important, or a treasure chest for gems, etc.

This won't be coming likely in my lifetime, but meanwhile, perhaps you, too, can benefit from these tips.

Who's the 'We' Who Will 'Fix' This 'Horror'? On the Unreality of Online America

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Once again, I'm going to answer Raph Koster with a blog post rather than a post on Facebook, not only because of length, but because I've always found that the worst possible haters on earth are friends of friends.

Raph wrote:

On the one hand, if we allow networks to spread falsehoods or hatred without consequence, we create alternative realities that drown out facts with emotion. In this view, free speech falls prey to vulnerabilities from scale that were never anticipated, creating propagandistic universes that destroy society. The only solution is authority employing moderation techniques.

On the other hand, any authority that is handed power over moderation techniques in order to restrict speech that is damaging to the public fabric can inevitably become corrupted -- either in a pure government propaganda way, or even in more subtle ways, resulting in the creation of a different propagandistic universe. Therefore we need completely free speech so that suppression of opinions can never happen.

These feel like cases of choosing to hand over our thinking either to the moneyed or the government. Money wins in complete freedom; government wins in moderated scenarios.

If we want freedom, then we probably can't permit accumulation of money to provide the loudest voice. And if we want moderation, we have to design it in a way that doesn't permit those in authority to shape our opinions to reinforce their power.

Why do I mention this? Because of this horrifying story: 

Nothing on this page is real: How lies become truth in online America:

Who's the "we" here, Raph? Let's start with that. Your friends and you in Silicon Valley? You didn't mean Congress, right? You meant perhaps platform providers? Or government? What kind of government? Who is to deliver this pious suppression of free speech for the greater good, no doubt delivered as a coded thing to run mainly automatically with key words? Will we get to elect them?

I read this article through twice to try to see where the "horror" was. Why? It's absolutely normal and is absolutely understandable as the environment that geeks from Silicon Valley created. That Internet environment spawned the Christopher Blairs of the world, cynical trolls with no or dead-end jobs and substandard homes who can make a living by the ad system created to provide just enough democratic access to lure people into thinking it's good.
Such people naturally prey on older women like Shirley Chapian who but for just a few missing connections -- children and grandchildren? a church? a volunteer group? a bar? -- might have stayed closer to their original path of Europe and NOW. But the Internet is the same thing that killed those social connections even if it pretends to save some of them. Where's the horror? It's normal, natural and expected.

The place to rein in cynical geeks is in civic and corporate culture, not by suppression of the First Amendment but changing the nature of how the platform responsibility is viewed. This began with the disrespect of private property (copyright) that ended with disrespect of privacy -- and a hypocritical belief that encryption can't be used for the former but can for the latter, even to the point of keeping the FBI from accessing a terrorist's phone. It means an end to safe harbour. It means in the marketplace of services, Google decides that people with youtubes spawning falsity and hate can't have ads -- but lets them at least copy their uploaded videos before killing them off. Let another provider serve them if they want the possible legal liability, as non-moderation usually leads to extremism fairly quickly -- incitement of imminent action, not just general hatred; child pornography; assassination for hire. You know, like the Silk Road on Tor -- with Jacob Appelbaum. Like that.

What is the solution? Better housing? More church-going? More malls so that you don't have to drive 50 miles to them? Why even reach for moderation and the suppression of the First Amendment when it's about housing or jobs? Or at least, Ocasio-Cortez thinks it is and perhaps she's at least partly right. But where are the jobs? Did the robots take them? Or are they at Amazon? And why is that so terrible?

Shirly Chapian is absolutely right -- if she had kids, she should yank them from school -- because this is the result -- people like Christopher Blair, not fighters for ISIS. Schools only cater to the Internet and tech instead of challenging it.

I really don't understand your pieties, Raph. One thing I know for sure: the people who created this situation can hardly be the ones allowed to moderate with systems they code and rule, given what they think shouldn't be "alternative reality." Because the people who will delete idiocies about sharia law in America may well block any criticism of Islam for violation of the rights of women. They are not to be trusted with this ban hammer.

We "probably can't" allow the freedom of capitalism, i.e. freedom of the press belongs to him who owns one? Why? Who says? The gnomes of the Internet? We're to have Soviet-like uravnilovka (forced leveling)? By whom? So Amazon builds a success building from the Internet created by all your friends and neighbours, and everyone orders online from them, then we are to block them from opening new hubs in our cities? Why? Couldn't we have civic, religious and political institutions under the First Amendment instead? Oh, are those harder to do so you're rather have something coded and run by 20-somethings? But those harder things are required to make it possible for people to sort their way through the minefields created by the trolls and their innocent victims. Not "moderation" except for banning of speech that incites imminent violence.

Yes, it's a lot more hard work in real-time in organic life to make decent people. Ask your mom.

 

PS

Then this further interesting exchange:

Dorian Ouer I have always said that the only thing worse than a stolid, lazy, dysfunctional government bureaucracy with monopoly levels of authority, is a ruthless, for profit, private company with monopoly levels of authority.

 

Raph Koster Dorian Ouer at least we can build rights structures into governments. They can fail but people do cling to them fiercely. Can’t really do rights with private industry except via regulation.

 

 

Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick We already have a "rights structure" built into government, Raph, it's called "separation of powers" and involves Congress, the Supreme Court, the Constitution, you know, that sort of thing. That you think there is some better coded thing that can be built instead of this is the real horror. Apparently you also don't fathom that the private industry you seem to loathe is a result of rights and that's a good thing, you wouldn't even be having this conversation without the private corporation Facebook, which all its faults.

 

Raph Koster Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick I really think you misread what I wrote. I know perfectly well we have a rights structure built into our governmental system. I also know it’s only as good as the government guaranteeing the rights is. 

The concerns I listed in the post are that free speech is losing out to money and it is damaging us all; and we can’t moderate because it would infringe rights and be vulnerable to governments that go bad. The whole Constitution is carefully architected to prevent issues with government going bad. 

I don’t loathe private industry. I loathe specific private industries *brainwashing people.*

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Manage

 

Like

 · Reply · 45m

Raph Koster Further: I was specifically describing two opposing viewpoints both of which are failing us — not advocating for either one of the two.

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Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick Raph Koster But you said "we" -- as if there is this smart committee of people who will chart a path between these supposed extremes, even as you lean toward disdain for the free market and capitalism. Otherwise, you wouldn't write this, Raph: "If we w…See More

Dorian Ouer I am genuinely baffled how you can be agreeing with him yet so strongly convinced that you're not.

 

 

 

Catherine Ann Fitzpatrick Raph Koster Free speech isn't losing out to money, Raph, except in your worldview -- which is only that, your worldview. You believe, most likely, as many of your cohorts do, that Facebook's demand to know the funding of Freedom from Facebook is anti-semitic. You might have the patience to read a careful explanation as to why that isn't the case. https://www.tabletmag.com/.../the-truth-about-george-soros Which I can only endorse having worked for Soros or received Soros grants for most of my adult life.

And you might want to ask who the hell is Freedom from Facebook, anyway? Who are those guys? Moveon? Or who? Mitch Kapor? They don't tell you any names, there's no board, even the registration is cloaked. You have to dig around and find the hedge fund guy. But he's not the end of the story.

And good Lord, Raph, there are specific private industries "brainwashing" people?! Which ones? Facebook? Are you serious? If the lady sending out things about Sharia law went to church instead of doing that, you'd call her brainwashed, and if she volunteered for anything but Planned Parenthood, you might well call her brainwashed, too. Nobody can win in your world.

Manage

TABLETMAG.COM

 

The Truth About George Soros - Tablet Magazine

 

 

 

Vote NO on 'Civic Engagement' Proposition on NYC Ballot - It's Stealth Socialism

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

If you live in New York City, be sure to turn your ballot over tomorrow and vote on three propositions. I recommend NO (Campaign finance limits), NO "Civic Engagement" Commission), YES (Term limits for community boards).

I particularly urge you to vote NO on Proposition 2, the so-called "Civic Engagement" proposition -- it's stealth socialism at its worst.

By using the term "Civic Engagement," the stealth socialists hope that people will simply think, 'Oh, that sounds nice, more involvement from the public, I'll vote for that". It's why I loathe stealth socialism -- they can never stand up and call themselves what they are, and stand for what they actually think, but they have to smuggle in their agenda in part, in order to ram it through in full later.

This particular proposition promotes another seemingly-innocuous concept called "Participatory Budgeting". It's also designed to lull the unsuspecting into thinking, "Oh, more involvement of people in spending public money." But again, that's crap.

Let me suggest there is a way you ALREADY have to "get involved" in spending public tax money. It's called DEMOCRACY and ELECTIONS. You elect people you trust who campaign on principles that you support and delegate them to spend funds because that is what modern liberal democracies do. They have delegation and division of labor, they don't pretend that you can mass-decide anything by "everybody" just "clicking". This is populism at its worst, and both extreme left and right love the concept -- because under the guise of "the public," small groups of determined cadres can take over.

What you get when you push through such methods is what I call "the tyranny of who shows up." Remember the student council in high school? Did you ever bother to follow what they were doing? Did you try to get elected? Or give up because you weren't one of the cool kids? That's how you lose your freedom.

"Participatory Budgeting" is a staple of every socialist party and group in the US and has long been a cult of these groups they have been trying to push through -- and now they're succeeding (it will likely pass due to lack of involvement and stupidity). Google it and you'll see. Yes, I understand what socialism means, no, I don't suffer from a false definition of it, and no, I don't suffer from "propaganda" and "fake news". Do you? Have you visited socialist countries of various types and lived in them, as I have? Did you go to the Socialist Scholars' Conferences in the 1980s, like me -- and Obama?

The "participators" are the "tyrants who show up" and even if any of us do, they show up already from cadres organizations with hidden agendas that we can find difficult to suppose -- especially if they wave the cards of "civility" or "the need to be positive" to suppress criticism.

Who wouldn't want to be involved in spending public money -- especially as a socialist? It's not your organization's, and you didn't vote for or support the people actually elected to do this because you're in a tiny, sectarian minority. You want to have, say, "Public Bikes" or "Bike Paths." This isn't something good just for its own sake, but smashes corporations and is good for dismantling capitalism. That New York already is overrun with Citibikes that aren't even used in many corners (ask me if you want documentation) and actually cost way more than their supporters let on doesn't matter. That bike paths already slow traffic and take away parking spots for people who use cars even if they are poor (or taxis) doesn't matter. That clean, safe public bathrooms would be a better call for spending this million is something that hipster socialists won't get -- they have the disposable income to spend on buying a slice of pecan pie in a diner to go to the bathroom -- unlike some of us, with two kids in a public park or on a fixed income. Socialists are often good at spending other people's money in fact because they have more of their own than others, as I've found.

"Participatory Budgeting" might be benign if it involved only advice, recommendations, and not actual spending of money. But it involves actual spending -- that's why they show up. It's often discretionary funds or open-ended pots of money that can get spent without too much attention. The socialists imagine they are stopping "corporate greed" or "political graft" or whatever by spending YOUR money. But that's insane, as New York City politics are very transparent and very criticized and very contested by the media of all types. But something like this falls below the radar.

I've found that if you try to criticize "Participatory Budgeting" or even just ask some pointed questions about its methods and means and full agenda, you are silenced, banned, muted, harassed on social media. That's how you know it's a socialist cult.

If you don't believe or don't understand anything I am telling you now, think of this: what do you know of "Participatory Budgeting"? Did you ever hear of it? Did you ever read a single article on it? *Is* there a single article that is balanced and critical about it, or can you only find pieces by its ardent supporters by Googling? Are even "critical" articles only advice on how to ram the concept through better in the face of skeptics, painting critics as supporters of corrupt oligarchs?

At the very least, then vote NO until you and others in the public can become more educated about what this REALLY means.

I don't have the capacity due to my personal circumstances to go and "participate" with these "participatory budgeters" to call them to account and flush them out for what they are -- although years of reading and debating about this have convinced me. Yes, it would be good to go to the actual meetings. But do you have that capacity? Does anybody? This is how you lose democracy -- by thinking that elected representatives are corrupt or stupid (the view of many Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley [NYC] hipsters) and that such "organized" little groups can "run it better". But they are ideological stealth raiders. Beth Novak, the socialist who got in the Obama White House tech office with these sorts of ideas, tried (and fortunately failed) to destroy the Patent Office with a form of this "community involvement."

Whenever I see the word "community" in NYC, I've learned to take a second look, because the cult "Working Families" or others may be involved. Democracy means all of us. Socialism means some of us as the "advance guard." Don't confuse it. Sooner or later in my experience, socialists suppress freedom of speech and freedom of association to keep themselves in power. That's why I oppose them.

If you don't want to hear it from me, hear it from The New York Times, which while leftist, isn't socialist in the main, and from Gale Brewer, a liberal, leftist politician whom I have supported on a number of issues who in fact questions the hard-left socialist mayor on this issue:

“The mayor already has control over the Department of City Planning; why should his appointees help select the community boards’ technical advisers for land-use decisions, too?” Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer argued in an op-ed in The Villager.

Indeed. What Brewer has ferreted out is that if DeBlasio has the power to pick these "community-involved" types who want to "participate," he will pick his friends, the socialists, and they will grab land decisions away from developers they think are "corrupt" and "oligarchic," regardless of the facts -- which even a leftist like Brewer, who is no corporate tool, questions. 

The New York Times uses that argumentation as well: 

The measure would create a commission, largely controlled by the mayor, whose exact powers would be unclear. It would add yet another layer of bureaucracy without good cause. And in taking up participatory budgeting, such a commission could tread on the authority of the City Council, which now oversees that process. In a city with ample mayoral influence already, it is best that the powers afforded to the Council — most notably land-use and budget oversight — be carefully guarded.

Some of the initiatives the commission would be tasked with overseeing are worthy, such as expanding translation services at poll sites. But it would be wiser to implement them through legislation in the City Council or existing city agencies instead. That would preserve the powers of the Council and prevent the addition of unnecessary bureaucracy, better serving New Yorkers.

 

The New York Times is at least enough of an institution itself to understand you don't dismantle a democratic institution like the City Council and its authorities lightly, handing them over to latte-drinking hipsters in bike-clipped pants and geometric haircuts who believe "we need to dismantle capitalism" -- except, of course, Google or Ben and Jerry's.

Brewer says term limits will "kill our first line of defense" against developers. But I don't agree with her on this point regarding the third proposition, where I recommend voting YES. The community boards are a total racket in New York City, with hard-core pols getting entrenched in ways that are unstoppable. Term limits helps break up those mafias and that's a good thing. Development is not all evil. Community boards opposed things like the Hi Line on the West Side which in fact have turned out to be wonderful. 

Regarding "campaign finance," I advocate NO for lowering limits to $2000 in the socialistic belief that there will now be "a thousand schools of thought contending" with smaller contributions, "like Sanders" (a misunderstanding even of the socialist Sanders campaign -- these things are never decided by Mom and Pop sending in $5, but by socialist corporate hegemons like Ben and Jerry's).  Brewer and the New York Times support that argumentation that "more small contributions" will be encouraged. This is baffling, because small contributions of $100 are made regardless of whether limits are $2000 or $5100, and that's not the way to encourage them -- it is disconnected.

On the Accusations of James Roche, MD, Yale Room Mate of Brett Kavanaugh, Supreme Court Justice

Facebook removed this post as "spam" -- I don't know whether it was merely because of its length (they could just give that simple answer, and so, so that's not it) or because it challenges their own received wisdom on Kavanaugh, who knows. So it goes here.

To summarize: this is a debate about due process and institutions such as Congress and the Supreme Court and nomination hearings, between two people who did not vote for Trump -- I voted for Hillary and I don't know who Raph voted for. We both have the same values but line up different pieces of evidence to support them, and these are at odds. My argument is basically that if you insist on these standards for "evidence" from Kavanaugh's treatment at the hands of the Democrats and liberal media, they could come for you next.

Raph cites as his chief piece of evidence in this round the accusation from James Roche, who is described as a doctor and room mate of Kavanaugh's at Yale. From just a few minutes of digging, however, you can find out that he is not a practicing physician but CEO of a multi-million dollar Silicon Valley company who made his millions from a company that sold customer responses to big corporations like Wal-Mart, and by his own admission, only socialized with Kavanaugh a few days, despite being his room mate.

So I go to work on him, using the same methods of association and circumstantial evidence that he -- and Raph -- want applied to Kavanaugh. In the end I ask if Raph, himself a denizen of Silicon Valley, could like Roche to be summoned to a Congressional hearing on customer data privacy on the Internet using the same standards that the Democrats think should have been used -- and were in part used -- on Kavanaugh.

Raph Koster: From that very Vox article: "But Kavanaugh swore to the Senate Judiciary Committee that not only was it impossible that he attended a party with Ford in which he blacked out from drinking, he’s never been that drunk in his life. “I’ve never blacked out,” he told the committee. He answered “no” to a series of questions from guest prosecutor Rachel Mitchell about whether he’d ever, for example, been told about something he did while drunk that he hadn’t remembered or woken up without knowing how he got there. (Mitchell quickly sidelined soon afterward.) And when asked by Senator Amy Klobuchar if he’d ever drank so much that he’d been unable to remember things, he retorted, “I don’t know. Have you?” (Kavanaugh apologized to Klobuchar later in the hearing.)

This is at odds with the accounts of some contemporaries — particularly some of Kavanaugh’s Yale classmates. James Roche, Kavanaugh’s freshman roommate, told the New Yorker that he remembers Kavanaugh “frequently drinking excessively and becoming incoherently drunk.” Another college classmate, who’s now a doctor, told the Washington Post that “there’s no medical way I can say that he was blacked out. ... But it’s not credible for him to say that he has had no memory lapses in the nights that he drank to excess.”"

> "Being president of the Keg Club isn't proof of being black-out drunk; being black-out drunk isn't proof of rape."

Ah, but I didn't claim it was proof of rape. You're arguing against something more extreme than what I am saying.

> "No, I don't conclude that a plausible outcome is that Kavanaugh would undo Roe v. Wade after he has stated that it is settled law"

Again, that's specifically NOT something I said. I said that the plausible outcome was his voting in favor of restrictions on clinics based on states' rights. We just had a lengthy discussion about whether that was a real issue. But that's all I said.

> "Yet this subject makes you return again and again, with vim and vigor. Unlike some of my friends, you've had children, not abortions. So what drives you? What imaginary loss of the institutionalization of the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, before you were even born (! -- I was born in 1956) causes this energy? I marched against the Vietnam war when I was 14 and against the war in Iraq holding my small daughter's hand. Did you march against anything when you were 14 or ever? What causes your vehemence on this subject?"

I am not sure what subject you are referencing. I wasn't discussing anything related to abortion when I first showed up in this thread. Abortion didn't even come up until yesterday.

The kinds of things I marched against and wrote letters for and whatnot when I was young were against apartheid, for political prisoners of conscience, mostly with Amnesty International. I think I attended an anti-Iraq War thing as well during college.

The topic that I started with, and I think I have continued to return to throughout, was "we need to maintain due process." My initial post was "Of course, the answer to that would be to do a proper investigation, which didn’t happen. I suspect it *still* wouldn’t have found enough facts to prove anything but then at least we’d know that both presumption of innocence and due process had been upheld as principles. When presumption of innocence is used to dismiss even the need for an investigation, or to limit it unduly, we are left without confidence in the process."

In other words, the motive for my posting was fear for our institutions. That's what worries me these days. What I see is partisans actively destroying institutions, partisans letting members of their party -- their leaders -- get away with things that are corrupt or undemocratic because they are more invested in winning than the orderly functioning of the country.

It so happens that right now, most of those happen to be GOP, but that's because Trump himself is signally uninterested in democratic norms and because the GOP happens to be the party in power.

I don't think that concern over corruption should be a partisan issue. In fact, I would have hoped that conservatives would be prompt to the defense of basic principles. But I tend to get a lot of "Obama did it too!" when I talk about it.

My big gripe with Kavanaugh was the process. Literally, that. Oh, I don't like his politics in a bunch of ways, but I didn't like Gorsuch's much either and I didn't post anything at all about him. That's because the Gorsuch process went smoothly.

You say, “What I see is partisans actively destroying institutions, partisans letting members of their party -- their leaders -- get away with things that are corrupt or undemocratic because they are more invested in winning than the orderly functioning of the country.

But that’s exactly what happened when Democratic activists, many among the left wing of the party with indeed financial backing and already-existing press adulation, set out to sink Kavanaugh because they couldn’t come up with arguments proving that in fact he’d be against abortion rights. So I share your concerns, but with just the opposite set of facts that you think are merely good civic activities.

So no, Raph, the testimony you cite is not "at odds" with the statements of Kavanaugh. You don't like Kavanaugh -- he's Republican, he may be a secret abortion rights remover in your view, or maybe because he's a preppie, or even an Irish Catholic, and you know how they drink! So you're predisposed to *think* it's at odds. It is not.

There are four possibilities: 1) Ford has mixed up the identity of her assailant; 2) Kavanaugh was black-out drunk and doesn't remember it;  3) Kavanaugh wasn't black-out drunk but doesn't remember it anyway; 4) Kavanaugh was either black-out drunk or wasn't, but knows it did happen and is lying. It's this fourth option that many Democrats such as yourself think is true -- but you have no evidence whatsoever of this; no corroboration of Ford's story from anyone. So what you're trying to do is turn one of these *other* stories about his drinking into a corroboration -- to see if you can "catch him in a lie" or "corroborate her story" and not even to back up Ford – which you claim you aren’t doing – but only to indicate “his character” isn’t suitable for a justice. That’s what’s so sneaky about it. You know perfectly well that if there was no allegation from Ford at the height of the #MeToo movement, and the stories were only about his high school or college drinking with no sexual connotation, we would never have heard them. Absent a sexual abuse angle, these stories would only say more about the accusers than the accused and they wouldn’t risk them.

Kavanaugh’s statements under oath aren’t “at odds” -- the 4th option is the only one you're considering whereas any of the others could ALSO be true and be consistent with the friends' memories. For one obvious point, you can be "stumbling drunk" or "incoherent" but NOT "black-out drunk," which means not passing out, but not remembering what you did while drunk. These friends could remember that Kavanaugh was "stumbling drunk" -- which may or may not be true -- but a) that wouldn't mean he was black-out drunk b) and even so, it wouldn't mean that he's an assailant. It's your refusal to understand all the possibilities with these hysterical hypotheticals that is so troubling. You seem to think that if a friend remembers him as "stumbling drunk", THEREFORE he is a) blacking out b) has committed a rape attempt [which you claim not to be assessing, but it is implied]. But neither a) or b) follows definitely -- it's ONLY SPECULATION. "Becoming incoherently drunk" is way more common than "blacking out" -- and committing assault is even less rare than blacking out. They aren't welded couplets.

Kavanaugh's retort to Klobuchar is rude, but understandable, given the hostile situation in which he was placed. It's not relevant whether she was ever blackout drunk, but then what did she expect as an answer? The very definition of "black-out drunk" is that you don't remember. So if the answer is "yes," it would go with a situation where "everybody else" told him he was blackout drunk, not that he "remembered that he was blackout drunk". And again, if he admitted such a thing, it would only strengthen the innuendo of hostile Democrats, not constitute proof of assault.

Having the guest prosecutor there was a gambit designed to avoid the optics of mean white old Republicans questioning a delicate Democrat victim of sexual assault, but it's odd, given that we've been told a million times that this is not a criminal investigation but a "job interview". How many job interviews have guest prosecutors?

This college classmate was not called as a medical witness, nor was any medical witness called in this non-criminal trial (just as Ford was not called as a scientific expert on memory, and no one was). So it's only his opinion. He admits that "there is no medical way I can say he was blacked out". That's good, because it would be malpractice for him to make a diagnosis over the Internet over something that was alleged to have happened 36 years ago with a person he admits he saw infrequently. That's helpful for you to realize, since you cite him, that there is no lock-step way in which you can claim that "incoherence=black-out". But for him to then say "it's not credible for him to say that he has no memory lapses" is merely his opinion -- and one that his previous statement said to avoid legal/professional problems undermines. Yes, it is credible. Because he may have drank to excess -- which he admits -- yet not blacked out. And certainly not committed rape.

>Ah, but I didn't claim it was proof of rape. You're arguing against something more extreme than what I am saying.

In a climate where the whole purpose of drilling down on his drinking was to link it to an assault, this is pretty disingenuous. So what you're saying is that you want to gather all these "witnesses" about his "black-outs" but merely for "character" purposes, not to prove rape. Except, they aren't character witnesses given that these events happened in high school and college. If you think people should be denied a political position based on what they did in high school or college, say so. I don't, because there is no evidence of any serious crime. And more to the point, they aren't a) any circumstantial evidence of a rape attempt b) not relevant to examining his character now, as he has been a judge for the last 30 years and not to our knowledge had any episodes of drunk driving, or bad behavior while drunk, or even any anecdotal tales of his drinking to excess now. So that's why I'm not for admitting it as "evidence" in this "job interview" as it does not describe his 30 years as a judge -- which is what matters -- and the background of his private life as an adult while serving as clerks or judges -- which is what is relevant now.

James Roche, Kavanaugh’s freshman roommate, is complaining that "the FBI never contacted him." And? The FBI doesn't contact all your room mates from college or anywhere, and even in the extended background check granted, it's quite reasonable to assume that if such room mate has already told what he knows to the Washington Post, there isn't much to get there. (Again, there's this assumption that the FBI works magic).

James Roche said in his statement, "Brett and I did not socialize beyond the first few days of freshman year" a fact you can glean only if you click through to read his actual statement. Why is someone who didn't socialize "beyond a few days" and only occasionally spoke to his room mate at night (it's like the room mate in "I am Charlotte Simmons") a credible witness?

Making a claim that someone "lied under oath" as Roches does about Kavanaugh is a very serious matter. I'll bet if he were a lawyer, he would risk doing that. Roche also said he believed Kavanaugh's other accuser, Ramirez, who was a "good friend" of his by his own admission. But her story is pretty flimsy, even by the standards of the liberal press. And evidently while at these same Yale parties, Roche himself was never "black-out" drunk and of course has a pristine memory, right?

But I don't believe that a doctor speculating on the meaning of someone's drinking -- after his own caveats -- is anything that can be used against Kavanaugh. Furthermore, I’m happy to use the same association on Roche as he used on Kavanaugh. Roche is " CEO of Helix Re, a San Mateo-based software company spun out of the Google X project." It's also described as providing “advanced technology solutions” for real estate owners, operators and tenants." Likely he is a Democrat, and could be a contributor to Democrats. The same kind of hysterical speculation could be started about him as he has indulged in about Kavanaugh.

Crunchbase has more that explains that like all Internet millionaires, these brothers got their start scraping data (and likely that is still the core function of that "advanced technology" for selling real estate).

"Jamie and Matthew Roche are the Co-CEOs of BO.LT. Over 15 years, the two brothers have created three successful startups. Their most recent company, Offermatica, defined the category of online testing and targeting and is now the Adobe Test and Target platform, which serves billions of impressions per week.

Prior to Offermatica, the two advised and built solutions for many of the most powerful companies in the world including Wal*Mart, Intuit, Intel, CNET, Nike and many others. James and Matthew have spent their careers focused on removing the barriers that separate marketers from their audience."

I raise this to explain that I can only be profoundly cynical about James Roche. No, his tech career is not relevant to a rape charge about a Supreme Court nominee but neither are his memories of 30 plus years vintage relevant. But his status as a tech millionaire may be relevant to his character. He's a rich, Yale-educated, successful start-up seller (he got $65 million for selling his company which "helps companies analyze their customers' online behavior to boost revenue", i.e. for personal data scraping operations -- who naturally has his own press spokesman -- and who evidently wants to influence politics from Silicon Valley -- as you do. Let's not pretend he's a mere concerned country doctor. Let's not pretend he's an innocent actor in general -- he's the kind of liberal who can get away selling to Wal-Mart despite all the hatred it generates on the left because no one will bother to look. He's the kind of data-scraper like Obama who first scraped all our data from Facebook to win the elections, then privatized his Organizing for America to a non-profit group where now the data is not accessible, who did this long before Cambridge Analytica, and will never have the scrutiny they did.

Shall I keep going? I raise the details of his biography to illustrate that two can play at this game -- he dredges up details of Kavanaugh's biography that may or may not be true from more than 30 years ago and which have no bearing on his activity as a judge, i.e. he cites no court decisions or legal theory or action. Meanwhile he himself from all indications has had 30 years of scraping data for profit. Which is the more despicable human being, if you want to get into biographical details?

He says in his statement that he has "no political agenda" and he merely thinks Ramirez, his friend, has a right to be heard. Can we probe some more on what it means for him to be the friend of Ramirez, given her self-reporting – and does he still socialize with her today? I simply don't believe him -- chances are strong that he votes Democrat, gives to candidates, hates Trump, is pro-abortion and all the rest, and this all came together in his sense of "civic duty" which is really a form of vanity. What was especially precious is his refusal to provide any more information -- "that's all I'm comfortable sharing" and refusal to grant any press interviews. That lets me know it's bullshit. You may feel that he could give confidential information in an FBI interview and that it's the fault of Congress or the White House for not allowing the FBI free range as long as they wish, but he can comfortably hide behind that forever -- which is why I think it's bullshit.

Ramirez is a woman who by her own admission was drunk to the point of having only a patchy memory of this incident in which she claimed Kavanaugh exposed himself after a dildo game. Why is that credible? It would never be coming from a Democrat against a Republican.

>Again, that's specifically NOT something I said. I said that the plausible outcome was his voting in favor of restrictions on clinics based on states' rights.

But you don't have evidence of that, either. A Supreme Court justice isn't going to determine a state's restrictions; a state would. It's a red herring. Because quite frankly, states *do* have right to determine matters of health, welfare, and education, not to mention other rights, and thank God for it, that's what makes America not-Russia. If Missouri or Kentucky wants to place restrictions on abortion, they have the democratic majority to do so, and if you want an abortion in the third-trimester, because you can't manage to get it together to have one before that, then you will have to cross a state line.

>When presumption of innocence is used to dismiss even the need for an investigation, or to limit it unduly, we are left without confidence in the process.

But presumption of innocence is just that. It's supposed to give way to the speculation of a Silicon Valley doctor who makes charges about something 34 years ago about a man he didn't socialize beyond a few days? It's supposed to give way to a woman drunk and on the floor at a dildo game who admits her memory is patchy? It's supposed to give way even to a person like Ford who appears credible but who can't remember the time, or the place, or the manner in her story? Why? Presumption of innocence is just that. You might counter that for all we know, Roche never violated customer privacy in any of his start-ups; we don't know that he did, only that it is likely given the nature of his companies and what they offered. Then you can concede that Kavanaugh never had a black-out.

You are imagining you are championing due process in this debate but what you are championing is hearsay, innuendo, cultural beliefs, and at best circumstantial evidence that doesn't prove anything. I think due process has to be about at the very least, journalistic facts, if not "beyond a reasonable doubt" which isn't the standard for a nomination hearing. Raph, would you like the standards that you think should apply to Kavanaugh be used in a Congressional hearing about customer privacy on the Internet to which Roche is subpoenaed?

Judging from all the Democratic activists email I get calling for "revenge" and spreading cartoons of the Supreme Court of Kavanaugh in a funny frat cap and all the rest, and judging from the kind of powerful individuals who have indeed lined up and do indeed have the cash for running these campaigns as Kavanaugh complained, and as I know from having worked at Soros or received grants from Soros from most of my adult life, if they really think perjury has been committed and a great wrong has occurred, they will chase down every story, find every fact, launch every lawsuit for incompetence, get every ABA ruling, do everything possible they can to discredit Kavanaugh. Watch them. It didn't work on Clinton (when it was the GOP versus Clinton) or on Thomas (when the Democrats warred on him as they did on Bork). Good luck!

Will Bill Cosby Ever Be Seen as Funny Again?

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

As everybody knows, the famous comedian Bill Cosby is now looking at millions of dollars in fines and possibly years in jail due to his outrageous and criminal treatment of women -- drugging them without their knowledge or consent and raping them.

So the short answer is: no.

If at first some people might have been inclined to think that women coming forward with stories 30 years after the fact are just after a celebrity's money, today -- and not only with #MeToo in general but the testimonies around Cosby's case in particular -- that's impossible to claim now. 

Now that there is a conviction even after a mistrial. That LA Times link will show you that even as Cosby racked up success after success throughout his career of decades, he was still insecure enough -- evil enough? -- to have to drug and rape women when he could have likely got them without force.

Read the timeline, and none of Cosby's achievements will ever seem the same to you.

So the question is: are Bill Cosby's routines or sit-coms still funny? He even had a comedy routine based on the hypothetical story of using "Spanish Fly" to seduce women. And many of the women in the lawsuits are white women -- is that the issue? Reading that time-line will make you sick and it should likely make it not possible for you to ever find Cosby funny again.

Cosby was liked by many for his critique of the dysfunctionality of some blacks that whites didn't feel they could properly say themselves. There was his famous speech dubbed "the Pound Cake speech"  in which he said blacks should stop blaming discrimination for their problems and look at poor parenting:

"These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake! Then we all run out and are outraged, 'The cops shouldn't have shot him.' What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else. And I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said if you get caught with it you're going to embarrass your mother. Not you're going to get your butt kicked. No. You're going to embarrass your mother. You're going to embarrass your family."

 

But a young black comedian wasn't buying any of this, as you can see from the LA Times timeline:

Hannibal Buress, during a stand-up performance in Philadelphia that goes viral, renews the allegations against Cosby in a sketch about what he saw as Cosby's hypocritical crusade against hip-hop culture and the unraveling of the black family. Cosby had made a speech at the NAACP's commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education segregation case. “Bill Cosby has the ... smuggest old black man public persona that I hate," Buress says. "He gets on TV: 'Pull your pants up, black people, I was on TV in the '80s. I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom.' Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby, so turn the crazy down a couple notches. ... I guess I want to just at least make it weird for you to watch 'Cosby Show' reruns.” Within weeks, both Netflix and NBC had scrapped projects with Cosby, stand-up performances were canceled around the country, and TV Land pulled "The Cosby Show" from its lineup.

This speech certainly backfired on him later.

I remember very distinctly when Cosby's second record, "I Started Out as a Child" came out in 1964. I was 8 and my brother was 6. We must have listened to this record a hundred times and we thought it was hilarious. It was a time when there was no Internet of course, our television was very limited in our house, but radio and records could always be played. Comedy records were very popular at the time. We had the routines memorized down pat, and I can still remember Cosby's jokes even today. "Stop on a dime, give ya nine cents change."

For some reason, when I think of listening to these albums, I picture a dark room and my brother in a crib. But it must have been some other record because at age 6, even being sickly as a young child as an RH baby, and even with my parents not getting us new beds until we moved out of our house in Niagara Falls, he wouldn't have likely been in a crib at that age. 

In any event, I can still picture a darkened room with the two of us listening to the routine about the "Giant" -- Cosby's father, coming home drunk and going to bed. He wasn't a rowdy drunk, but a sentimental drunk. He came home and stumbled around and hummed a tune. I can still remember my little brother imitating him perfectly, drawling "Hello, my dear..." and then the CHINK of the father's pants falling on the floor, and the little kids (in Cosby's routine) saying "The giant...has change!" We didn't have a father like this, but a grandfather like this. And we didn't have to steal his change because he gave us a quarter for "Sunday candy" -- but only after church.

Cosby's low-key narrational style is called "observational humour."

I always thought these earlier albums were a lot funnier than any of the sit-coms he was in -- which I didn't watch, finding them contrived, like a lot of sit-coms.

I don't think at that age and time (1964) we had any black friends or even knew any black people. That's how it was in the 1960s. So that's why Bill Cosby's record seemed more about "urban" or "poor" or "childhood" than "black," perhaps. We lived in a working-class neighborhood in Niagara Falls and my father worked at a big plant as an engineer. Then when we moved south but still in upstate New York, we started out in a shack on a farm while we looked for something better and my father worked at another chemical plant.  My main memory of that time, other than the huge sandbox we got to play in which was actually part of the chicken set-up, was having German Measles and being very, very sick, being kept in the dark, along with my brother, who was sick as well, and losing some hearing in one ear. 

Likely the first black children I met was in Girl Scout camp around that time, and I remember one girl got into a fight with me seemingly for no reason and scratched me.  I remember the counselors said to me that the girl was underprivileged and I simply had to be sympathetic. That was the form the lessons of desegregation came in. We didn't meet any blacks or have any black guests at our house until later in the 1960s when we moved closer to the bigger city of Rochester, where my mother taught in the inner city, something that she felt she should do (leaving a private Catholic school where our tuition was free) after the riots in Rochester in those years.

Maybe that lack of association affected how we saw that early album of Cosby's -- not as being about "blackness" but about being poor -- and certainly we weren't as poor as he and his family must have been. Even so, his routine on shoes, and how there weren't sneakers, but shoes with rubber soles, and how the shoes were repaired and made to last was something we were familiar with. We had Buster Brown shoes -- "I'm Buster Brown, look for me in your shoe!" and people went to shoe repair shops more then. Keds, with their special decoder rings, were something we got when we moved from Niagara Falls to what was actually a much more poor town in those years, Penn Yan. We moved a lot in those years for my father's different jobs and I remember each time we were told that we would get something when we moved, to make us less sad and distressed about yet another wrench -- toys, sneakers, a colour TV, even, and even a dog (before that we only had a stray cat we adopted).

Actually, it seems Bill Cosby had something to do with making sneakers popular, but I don't remember this. Rubber was rationed during World War II and into the 1950s so sneakers were not mass produced, until TV made them popular with figures like James Dean:

Sneakers became footnotes in the history of the Civil Rights movement. In 1965, I Spy was the first weekly TV drama to feature a black actor—Bill Cosby—in a lead role. His character, a fun-loving CIA agent going undercover as a tennis coach, habitually wore white Adidas sneakers, easily identifiable by their prominent trio of stripes. This updated gumshoe alluded to the “sneaky” origins of sneakers, while also serving as shorthand for new-school cool

 

A lot has changed in the 54 years since then -- and now there's this awful case. And I have to say, the routine isn't funny any more, at least for me, and I can't bring myself to listen to it although I suppose it still survives in the form of a sound track to a fond childhood memory. Now I think I'd be mining it for clues to Cosby's later criminal behavior (or maybe it had even started then).

I did listen to some of this, which is Cosby's reflections on that album, which he wrote while attending Temple University, which went into the Hall of Fame. Apparently it's still there.

I suppose there might be an argument to be made about art like Wagner's music and Hitler, which is still being speculated.

This is difference, however, as there are numerous testimonies and a sentence from a court of law for Cosby -- not to mention the condemnation in the court of public opinion in the press. So now this legacy of art only becomes something to be mined to explain why the man became a criminal despite all his scolding of black criminals.

Had none of this ever happened -- or never come to light or been prosecuted -- it might be that someone might say of Cosby's legacy with those early albums that they were an introduction for whites at that time that enabled them to see blacks as more familiar and normal, like themselves, and not through the prism of stereotypes and the news of urban riots.  But now that's gone forever and will be forever challenged. 

 

 

 

 

The Incredible Story of the NYPD's Defeat of a Terrorist Group -- But Could They Do This Today?

A screen capture from a video posted to YouTube by Revolution Muslim showing Younus Abdullah Muhammad (aka Jesse Morton) preaching on 43rd and Broadway in New York City on May 1, 2010.

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

Here's the remarkable story of how the New York Police Department defeated a radical Islamist group responsible for terrorism: NYPD vs. Revolution Muslim: The Inside Story of the Defeat of a Local Radicalization Hub.

The story is in the Combating Terrorism Center's publication at West Point. 

Abstract: Between 2006 and 2012, two men working on opposite sides of the struggle between global jihadis and the United States faced off in New York City. One was the founder of Revolution Muslim, a group which proselytized—online and on New York streets—on behalf of al-Qa`ida. The other led efforts to track the terrorist threat facing the city. Here, they tell the inside story of the rise of Revolution Muslim and how the NYPD, by using undercover officers and other methods, put the most dangerous homegrown jihadi support group to emerge on U.S. soil since 9/11 out of business. As the Islamic State adjusts to its loss of territory, this case study provides lessons for current and future counterterrorism investigations. 

It's really worth reading in full. There's an interesting part about how specially-trained agents -- who are trained in isolation from the NYPD so they can't be traced to it -- infiltrated the terrorist group. There's reference to the careful compliance with the Handschu agreement from 1971 which is about trial of violent political groups, with the precedent set by the Black Panthers' case. The Black Panthers are indeed violent in ideology and deed, but due process is due process.

It seems the NYPD accomplished a very important mission here, putting a terrorist group out of business and trying the mastermind Younus Abdullah Muhammad, even extraditing him from Morocco. That might not have been possible if he had been located in a more strict Islamist state with more animosity to the US, although the article doesn't mention that.

The question for me is whether this important work could be done NOW, now that there was just a settlement in the class-action suit against the NYPD for their surveillance of mosques and radical Muslims in New York and New Jersey.

The lawsuit appeared merited in some ways because it involved activity like this, as the New Yorker explained:

The police also paid attention to Muslim student groups, the lawsuit said, infiltrating several in New York City, with one detective attending a whitewater-rafting trip organized by members of the Muslim Student Association at the City College of New York, and reporting what they talked about and how many times they prayed. One man, who said that he had been paid up to $1,500 a month to work as a police informant, declared in a sworn statement that he had provided the police with phone numbers from a sign-up sheet listing people who attended Islamic instruction classes, and had been told to spy on a lecture at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, even though the police did not believe the Muslim student group there was doing anything wrong. The man, Shamiur Rahman, also said that he was told to use a strategy called “create and capture."

“I was to pretend to be a devout Muslim and start an inflammatory conversation about jihad or terrorism and then capture the response to send to the NYPD,” he said in a legal filing, later adding: “I never saw anyone I spied on do anything illegal, not even littering.”

So that wasn't like the activity described in the West Point article:

The disruption and destruction of the Revolution Muslim terror network was of critical importance. Through its violent ideology and prowess in radicalization and recruitment in the West, the network was connected to almost 20 American and British terrorists, with plots that included a September 2011 attempt to fly a remote-controlled plane strapped with explosives into the Pentagon, a March 2010 plot to kill a Swedish cartoonistﾊwho satirized the Prophet Muhammad by Colleen LaRose (aka Jihad Jane), the May 2010 stabbing of a British member of Parliament, a Christmas bomb plot in 2010 against the London Stock Exchange, the January 2009 targeting of the Chabad-Lubuvitch headquarters in Brooklyn, death threats against the creators of South Park in April 2010, and a November 2011 lone-actor bomb plot in New York City.⁴ One member of the Revolution Muslim network was killed in a drone strike in Yemen, where he had joined al-Qa`ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Several attempted to leave the United States to fight for al-Qa`ida Core and al-Shabaab between 2007 and 2011, and some joined the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria during 2013 and 2014.⁵ All in all, there were at least 15 plots, arrests, or kinetic military actions related to members of the Revolution Muslim network worldwide.⁶

 

I guess the wisdom is to know the difference, but how much observation of the seemingly more benign activity is required, at what level, with what signals and justifications, to stay within not only Handschu but the terms of this latest lawsuit?

I just don't know.

When you see the complexities and the long-term nature of this effort, it's hard to know how the NYPD or any police department can wend their way through this:

The NYPD Intelligence Division’s effort to disrupt, dismantle, and destroy the Revolution Muslim network and radicalization hub was multi-faceted and required a sustained effort over more than six years. It is useful to examine this effort by breaking it down into five different phases: 1) Identification phase—detecting the threat/network; 2) Investigation and Penetration phase—beginning the investigation; 3) Intelligence Collection and Analysis phase—understanding the threat; 4) Crushing the Network phase—arresting and prosecuting; and 5) Loose Ends phase—pursuing members on the periphery of the network who later activated. At a time when some believe the Islamic State appears to be morphing into a virtual caliphate, it is the authors’ hope that this analysis provides lessons for future counterterrorism efforts. 

And yet that's what they and other law-enforcement bodies have to do to protect civilians so that their human rights are saved, too.