2021

I am reading Gone With the Wind and it is amazing how it touches on so many of these subjects, sometimes in quite a lot of depth.

2022

Well, to me, I feel true cultural libertarianism accepts that there are problems, and that those problems do have to be accounted form in some fashion, just as true libertarians accept that the free market cannot solve every problem. In general, true libertarians want solutions, and they are openminded enough to understand that sometimes you have to go outside individualism for it.

Vulgar cultural libertarians (Gamergate is an example of this in my eyes) are much like Vulgar fiscal libertarians (current GOP mainstream economic plans)- in that they fail to realize that bootstraps aren’t always the solution.

2023

I don’t think there’s any reason for a casual smear of libertarians here. On paper, identity politics seem compatible with liberty and individualism. In practice, they’re often at odds, perhaps because so many libertarians are white males that are tired of being shouted at, and so many identity politics groups are weak statists that want to use top-down control to improve (so far as they can see) their own lot.

But if you think about it, racism and sexism and all our favorite -isms are simply ascribing certain characteristics to individuals before you even meet them. It’s anti-individual. And to be fair, many actions by identity politics groups are government (force) neutral. They’re using social pressure – which we’re all free to engage in – to increase empathy and encourage others toward self-reflection. Heck, there’s ultimately no reason to care what they do to university administrations, since those are arbitrary structures that can be avoided or mitigated more easily than, say, state and federal laws.

Whatever you goofballs see on your goddamn social media feeds full of idiots is another matter. You’re on your own there.

2024

I don’t think there’s really very many libertarians out there anyway.

2025

I really think that’s the best approach. How we got here is important, at some level, but in some ways it’s also irrelevant. The trick is to fix the issue.

2026

No libertarians in a foxhole, eh?

2027

Certainly not the strawman type who embrace libertarianism as a set of rules rather than a set of guiding principles.

But it’s harder to irrationally demonize liberty and pretend it’s a vice.

2028

There are a lot more people who claim to be libertarian than are actually people who know what that means when they say it.

2029

I didn’t really mean it as a snark or attack on libertarians, There just aren’t enough of them to be politically effective. Instead they are just exploited by the culture warriors on the right.

2030

Heh, I was throwing in the closing dig at libertarianism because I’d strayed too far to the right in the rest of my post for comfort.

And because I enjoy throwing elbows in P&R.

(And because it’s true.)

2031

It’s okay, we all get a little right-curious sometimes.

Target this one for increased monitoring.

2032

‘The terror of swatting: how the law is tracking down high-tech prank callers’:

The first 911 call came at 4.30pm. The caller told dispatchers that a man, woman, and boy had been shot and another child was being held hostage. Police responded in force, sending more than half a dozen cruisers and emergency vehicles to a sprawling house in the affluent Atlanta suburb of Johns Creek.

But when they arrived there were no signs of a shooting; inside, police found a nanny with two small children. When the mother returned from shopping she found her home surrounded by emergency vehicles. The father, who had been on a plane, landed at Atlanta’s international airport to see his house on TV, with news reports declaring that his wife and children had been shot.

They were victims of a swatting attack, a malicious form of hoax where special weapons and tactics (Swat) teams are called to a victim’s home under false pretenses, with potentially deadly results.

Just more than a week later, on 25 January 2014, someone launched a second swatting attack on the same home. This time the Johns Creek police were prepared: they responded with two cruisers to make sure everything was OK.

DS Ben Finley was assigned to the case and was told to do whatever it took to find the people who did this. It would take him on a circuitous voyage that lasted nearly a year and involved dozens of local law enforcement agencies, the FBI, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

It’s a case that demonstrates just how difficult it is to track down and prosecute online harassers, thanks in part to the ease with which malicious individuals can operate anonymously on the internet, and a legal system that is still playing catchup to 21st century technology.

“When I started out I had never worked one of these cases and had no idea what to do,” says Finley, an amiable man with a buttery Georgia drawl. “I called anyone I thought might know anything about these types of investigations. I would just take each piece of the puzzle and see where it led me. I was baptized by fire.”

Finley started by tracing the numbers the swatters used to call the Johns Creek emergency hotline. Because calling 911 only connects to local emergency services, swatters in distant locations call non-emergency lines and ask to be transferred. To mask their true locations, they use voiceover-IP (VoIP) numbers that appear to be in the same area code as their intended victims.

In late January 2014, Finley issued subpoenas to a half dozen major VoIP providers, obtaining the numbers the swatters had called, logs detailing when each call had been made, and the email addresses and websites swatters used when signing up for VoIP services. Over the next few weeks, Finley scanned the list of numbers looking for those characteristic of public police lines – such as 877-ASK-LAPD – and talked to the dispatchers in each city.

Tracking them down was a hell of a task
Ben Finley

Sure enough, they had received emergency calls on the dates and times in question. Finley then went to the victims of the swatting attacks, some of whom were already working with local law enforcement, and obtained their details. Over the next year he filled a conference room at the Johns Creek station with boxes of police reports, victim affidavits, and audio recordings.

“A lot of the IP addresses that were generated through the subpoena and court order process were from virtual private networks and proxy sites all over the world,” Finley says. “Tracking them down was a hell of a task.”

At first, Finley says, he was looking for a single perpetrator. But the paths he followed kept diverging – the first call pointed toward a person in New York, the second indicated a swatter in Canada. As it turns out, the second attack was a copycat of the first, which had received broad media attention.

Finley caught a break when he traced the calls from swatter No 1 to a cloud services firm in New York, to whom the swatter had given his real name and address. When Finley contacted local police, he discovered this individual had been linked to similar crimes in the past.

He was a 16-year-old active in online gaming circles, where swatting is a common malicious prank. Finley doesn’t know why swatter No 1 targeted that family in Georgia, but he believes it was a mistake – the location was the former address of another teenager who was a highly visible gamer on YouTube. The Fulton County district attorney agreed to transfer prosecution of the case to the swatter’s local jurisdiction, where it is still pending.

Finley used an email address associated with one Skype account to uncover a personal website for the second swatter, whose online handle was Obnoxious. Using that email, he found a page on the text-sharing website Pastebin where one of Obnoxious’s enemies had revealed his name and address. According to that page, Obnoxious was a minor living in Coquitlam, British Columbia. When Finley called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in Vancouver, they knew exactly whom Finley was talking about – the youth was already on probation for similar crimes.

With the help of the FBI, Finley pored over the mountains of evidence, eventually connecting Obnoxious to more than 40 incidents. (He was also the subject of a New York Times magazine profile, The Serial Swatter, in November 2015.)

“This kid was unbelievable,” Finley says. “He was calling everyone and everything – schools, businesses, private residences, law enforcement, the FBI’s weapons of mass destruction hotline, even Disneyland. Nothing was sacred to him.”

In November 2014, the RCMP asked Finley to send him evidence for the strongest 10 cases he had built against Obnoxious so they could obtain a search warrant for his home.

Then Obnoxious decided to take his act public. On 1 December 2014, he live-streamed swatting two homes in Ohio on YouTube, boasting about it first on Twitter. The parents of one previous swatting victim saw it and called Finley, who then notified the RCMP. Four days later, the 17-year-old was arrested. In May 2015 he pleaded guilty to 23 counts of extortion, public mischief, and criminal harassment; he was later sentenced to 16 months in youth custody and was due to be released in April 2016.

That is, imho, a very light sentence for all the work it took to track him down! Still atleast they can track these guys down, so that is good to know.

2033

This is turning out to be somewhat of a pivotal article, you can see a tangible left/right split among libertarian/free speech activists over the rise of alt-right (or at least being able to define it)

You Can’t Whitewash The Alt-Right’s Bigotry

2034

Gotta love those double-edged swords.

2035

Ben Finley is my new favorite hero.

2036

The apocalypse fizzles.

In other news, the University of Minnesota says students should “expect to encounter ideas that unsettle them”. Furthermore, “University officials, like government officials, cannot assume the authority to pick and choose who may speak or how much they may speak based on the perception that some speakers have “too much” or “too little” power in public debate.”

The University of Chicago says “it is not the proper role of the university to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable or even deeply offensive.”

And Princeton and University of Missouri nod and basically approve a copypasta of Chicago.

TL;DR: Nothing to see here, move along.

2037

Missouri really set the bar…By the fact that their enrollment, academic contributions and athletic contributions has nosedived. They have had major budget cuts across the board and a hiring freeze b/c their freshmen class is down by more than a fifth. The school is in a real financial crunch.

And when the University has to institute a wage/salary/hiring freeze and budget cuts as a result of the protests, you have a different reaction than fall of 2015.

Missouri is pretty desperate to get back $$$ and students. I’d guess other schools, particuarly those w/o 10 digit endowments are going to have less tolerance given the MO financial debacle.

2038

The sad part is in talking to someone who was a student at Missouri the demonstrators were a small group who represented very few people on campus. The subject of the original demonstration really had nothing to do with the later group. They were a group who would have disappeared without the media there to make them something they weren’t.

I have seen a list of their current “demands” and they are ridiculous.

2039

Meanwhile, the “safety” and “abuse” tools the regressives have engineered into social media are being used to close down Arab atheist and moderate Muslim pages because Islamists and Muslim governments have learned that if you scream “I’m offended” then Western socmedia companies roll over and comply, as they’ve been trained to do so in order to keep the Western white middle class in their safe space bubbles.

We have Yazidis fleeing Germany as they are being integrated with the Sunni Muslim immigrants, and no one is concerned about their safety because of cultural relativism has ensured that the Yazidi oppressors are seen as “refugee victims” and have also learnt to scream racist at anyone that calls them out on continuing their sectarian wars in Germany, so the Yazidi choose to go back to Iraq.

and no one is removing immigrant child brides from their adult husbands, because again, cultural relativism, and again, fear of being accused of being a racist.

and no one is doing anything about forced marriages.

When this is called out, the progressives answer in the only way they can, attack the moderates and ex-Muslims as, house muslims, traitors and collaborators, their ire at our refusal to fit in their stereotype of the violent barbarian clear to see.

and the concept of free speech continues to be reviled and attacked.

and ive even held back on talking about the refusal to recognise Jews as an oppressed identity, the application of white privilege to the Jewish race, and the pedestalling of the Muslim identity thats lead to open anti-Semitism from the “progressives” throughout Europe and is currently tearing the Labour party apart.

but yeah, let’s carry on pretending its a handful of inconsequential students.

2040

So much of this is about herd behaviors fostered by social media. It’s hard to get my head around all the outrage.