Fuck rape culture (including small towns and football)

GUYZE YOU IS MAKIN ME CRAZYPANTS READ THE GODDAMN THREAD

I defended someone who had been slightly misrepresented -- to her own admission, no less -- and went on to say that comparisons between the two are just plain invalid and it's an empty argument either way, as made evident by the fact that we're still fucking talking in circles about nothing.

Also http://www.stopbigred.com/

That link 404's for me :/ ?

This is kinda my other issue with Anonymous, and it's similar to what happened with Occupy Wall Street and the responses I've heard from others. They get their press, but they end up mostly preaching to the choir and have no clue what they're ultimately trying to accomplish, much less how to communicate it to Joe Average Soccer Mom America. The whole "we are from the Internet" schtick has the potential to just turn off the people who need to hear the message most before they even let themselves process it, especially with the abysmal civic perceptions and short attention spans of the average American.

Still working for me *shrug*

I agree. But hell at least it's something. If it was up to me these little shits would be ripped apart by an angry mob but I'll take what I can get.

Anonymous needs PR handlers. I imagine in my secret little drug-addled world that they would all wear bunny masks and carry briefcases shaped like giant easter eggs. Then I would write a steamy adventure-romance novel about Guy Fawkes and the Easter Bunny and their enduring saga of passion and crime.

I'm a little under the influence. I'm sorry.

Oddly, using the built-in-web-page proxy at Hidemyass.com gets the page loading just fine. Hmmm.

Works for me, too, riding clean through my ISP. Probably routing problems somewhere.

Same for me. I have Century Link. You?

404s for me on WOW; on my office connection with Comcast, loads fine.

Yeah that's the thing with collectives of grassroots volunteers that are doing something about an issue that I wax eloquent about on the internet. They won't do what I tell them! And if they did, surely they'd accomplish something like helping to get small town stories in the national media or (like OWS) getting an issue like income inequality that was wholly ignored prior into the national discourse. I bet the only thing keeping either of them from persuading mainstream America is the absence of my carefully honed collection of buzzwords and punditry.

No, what I want is for all citizen action to be replaced with coordinated astroturfing run by people who know what they are doing and what's best for us. If you're not manipulating people into supporting your position or at least hating your opponents, you aren't trying! Look at me, I've identified a demographic as "People I Am Broadly Contemptuous Of But Nevertheless Understand Intimately In Terms Of Effective Persuasion". I know what I'm doing!

There are serious, legitimate questions to ask of vigilante actions, any time they occur and even when they occur in a situation where institutions were clearly failing to do their jobs. Separate, but related, are questions of internet culture and how that connects with mainstream culture, and to what extent it's the responsibility of the former to do anything but wait for the latter to become less dominated by people who can't google things they want to have opinions about when it's so much easier just to sneer from a distance based on tribal affiliations.

Maybe you're right. Maybe I don't live in a country full of people who get all of their information from contextually vacant TV sound bites and inaccurate Facebook chain forwards (which is a wholly separate entity from "Internet culture", mind).

You're actually pretty spot on about manipulation. Americans have to be manipulated into finding out facts for themselves. We don't take being preached to well unless we're already in camp. We don't have much of a coherent civic culture. We cull most of our data from advertiser-dominated media that skews the news away from responsible journalism and towards The Casey Anthony Channel, when we're not off generating strong opinions based on the bullshit our Uncle Joe told us. Hell, we can't even maintain any sort of non-profit, ad-free media in this country without people pitching a fit. Our information culture is pretty damned unique in the West, and it infects both the left and the right.

Occupy made a small bit of headway in making people feel like income inequality was A Bad Thing We Should Not Tolerate. But they offered no end game and no understanding as to how we got there and why it keeps happening and what we need to do to stop it, and they frequently came off to even the most well-meaning and potentially sympathetic folks in the rest of the country like a bunch of buffoon hippies and Internet nerds. I don't watch Jon Stewart, but I remember my ex pointing out to me that he had very similar views on OWS:

Oh lord don't turn this into a you americans thread.

Orcon, in New Zealand.

No, a Kiwi in our midst? Start sneering at American football so we can all get defensive about the outsiders criticizing our culture and tradition!


LK laid it pretty bare -- increased attention to and intimate knowledge made public of an instance of a rape cover up is pretty much a win. They aren't tarring and feathering the offenders, they are increasing awareness of something that is all too frequently glossed over or swept under the rug.

To be clear, the downsides to vigilante justice are still there even if the outcomes seem just from a distance. As a precedent, it's awful in terms of what it means for the presumption of innocence and for due process, just as a start. Unlike with involuntary transparency around governments and institutions (which also comes with caveats), you have a much stickier situation long term when individual alleged criminals are the focus of the disclosures.

I just find the concern trolling about what OWS, Anonymous, etc "should" be doing according to a halfassed evaluation of who they are and what they are trying to do obnoxious every time it comes up. They are very different things, and one Anon effort to another is a radically different creature apart from some signature gestures and methods that unite them. The only thing that really ties them all together is that people with only a passing interest in them as a novelty have instant expertise in how they should do business.

I got lost somewhere amid the "don'ts". Or maybe I didn't not.

Platitude, platitude, platitude...AHA! Delicious incendiary-seeming equivalence. Your profile is almost complete.

The United States went from having a deficit-oriented conversation where all of the ground to give was in the direction of cutting "entitlements" in the name of austerity, to a position where our moderate conservative president could keep radical conservatives in the other party from driving the country off a cliff. A real cliff, one made of the looting and gutting of American wealth in the name of short term profits, not the silly recurring one that lawmakers keep gussying up in the name of no-issue politics. Taxation adjustments, however modest, were not on the table before OWS scared Democrats briefly by being shapeless and outside of their coalition. Same with student loan reform and in general with standing for government infrastructure that's outside of what you can scare old people into rallying around.
In terms of the Obama presidency, OWS gave him back a mandate after he spent all of his working with the intransigent GOP to try to pass moderate, conservative healthcare reform. That's kind of a big deal. Everything coulda shoulda woulda been better if x happened, but that doesn't mean you get to rewrite the history of our national discourse by handwaving away what actually did happen.

Well, get back to me when you have critiques that aren't sourced secondhand to someone you don't watch. Jon Stewart's a good guy, but sometimes he leads with what he thinks is funny and then fits facts to it afterwards. OWS was his ritual sacrifice from atop his cynicism to the gods of "holy shit the right in America has been nuts forever and I need some juice in the other direction".

Rugby is like totes manly and padding makes American football for girlymen. Also what's with baseball lol.

The OWS comparison is apt, as it met with the same criticisms: "Either protest in exactly the way I take to be optimal and about exactly the things I take to be Real Issues or don't do it at all." Which is a deeply unimpressive way of doing nothing about very important issues, thereby reinforcing the status quo, and having the gall to claim that this is the mature and reasoned position to take.

You're treating vigilante justice as an "unfortunate side-effect" and not the intended purpose that it is.

It's the unifying gestures and methods that bother me so damn much and make them not so radically different. Anonymous's unifying MO is instigation, media whoring, and show parading that relies on rallying a slim demographic behind a cause while having zero accountability. They're not activists. Activists work in a directed, cogent fashion to educate the public and influence and speak directly with legislators in a way that is taken seriously by said public and legislators because they're not prone to having people muddle their message on their behalf by wearing ridiculous masks and talking about cats. I appreciate anyone trying to take a different approach to activism. This isn't it.

You did. Not. N't. That was all me, I blame the raging headache I've had all day.

I couldn't think of a more clever way to dismiss shit I don't know how to respond to, and if you think it's an attempt at fiery rhetoric to suggest that Americans on all sides of the political spectrum aren't prone to the same knee-jerk reactionary bullshit, I don't know what to tell you. The whole "I hate these things because it is socialism and I'm not sure what that is but it's bad" faux ideology makes me just as ill as anyone with a brain, but to say it's a uniquely Republitarian mechanic is horribly short-sighted. And the intersection in America between media and the public is at the crux of why groups like Anonymous have the danger of becoming incredibly counter-productive, especially once people start doing illegal shit in their name because of that lack of accountability.

What did happen, exactly? There's no such thing as a "mandate" in American politics, especially while we still have a divided Congress and a party that is still too scared of its own shadow to rock the boat and call out the opposition. The GOP may be trying to reposition itself a bit, but they're certainly not running scared. American conservatives didn't change their caustic perspective overnight, they just learned to adjust their rhetoric.

Then go play it sometime, tough guy. Report back on your findings through the series of tubes you'll have to blow through to communicate. That is the stupidest argument made in sports. The problem with American football is that is too brutal, and pads and helmets enable it, not prevent it.

Sorry, you lost me at... well, frankly, every single statement in this post.

Anonymous doesn't have a unifying MO. They span people quietly supporting Tor in China and Iran and running proxy internet-via-phone systems during Arab Spring to clueless idiots trying to point LOIC at ISPs. If anything, all that unifies the segment of Anonymous that takes actions (rather than just speaking) is the certainty that shit be fucked up yo, but that can be fixed.

Fundamentally, your assertions are of the "Examples to the contrary disprove the thesis" nature, so:

Anonymous didn't media-whore when they supplied internet to uncountable (literally, it would be impossible to get a count, by design) numbers of Egyptians, except inasmuch as they wanted to do so to recruit likeminded people to do it on a larger scale. They didn't media whore when they LOIC/social engineered (not going to provide details because I don't know them, which I'm kind of grateful for, other than in very broad strokes) their way into a database of exploits that included a zero day exploit, which was provided anonymously (heh) to a Microsoft engineer along with a recommended patch.

I award your post a 3/10 on the Aaron Sofaer Scale and request that you rewrite it in such a way that it's not trivially wrong.

I was responding to Shake's post with what was intended to be a parody of the sort of sneering he mentioned. It was supposed to come straight after, but LK got in first. I do not, in fact, give two shits about which sport is 'tougher'.

And not one bit of that means anything when taking in the public face of Anonymous. If you want to argue that the ends justify the means, we can happily agree to disagree. The fact is that that their very nature makes them completely unaccountable for anything done in their name, and it's a dangerous counterpoint to whatever virtues their cause may bring.

Did we miss the part where the founder and public face of Wikileaks was vilified as a misogynist and a bit of a self-righteous twit and Wikileaks pretty much disappeared from the public discussion? Even the ongoing Manning case only got tangential coverage in the US.

The very nature of the movement is what makes it effective at what it does, and utterly incompatible with a coordinated message greater than "the Internet is pretty choice!" and "let's do some stuff!".

Also, wikileaks, what has that got to do with anything? You need to spend some time on 4chan to learn a little more about what you have so many opinions on.

Yes, you are starting to get the point.

I seriously have no idea what you're talking about. You made a series of statements which were falsifiable. I provided evidence that they were false. Now you're... talking about wikileaks? Forgive my apparent denseness, but I don't get your point.

It has everything to do with it. The minute a visible and vocal sector of a movement goes off the rails, the whole movement often collapses in the public's eye. Anonymous is begging for this to happen. I'm not being a conspiracy-mongering fatalist here, I'm pointing out that there are very serious flaws in the way they address their advocacy.

And that's the other problem -- most people don't read 4chan. 4chan is an insular community that the media doesn't even begin to know how to describe and break down to the public. The whole notion of a shadowy pseudo-decentralized figure with origins that are cryptic to most common folks is romantic and all, but it's a rife platform for abuse.


Am I the only person bothered by the fact that Knightsec released a zip file of the school's webmaster's email (attachments and all), declared that it contained several nude photographs, and subsequently stated that "We strongly urge local law enforcement to look into this email as possible child porn could be present."? Yeah, it's totally cool to both make unsubstantiated claims that the webmaster is possibly a child pornographer, and then distribute the potential child pornography. Are you kidding me?

I'm not gonna push this anymore; I'm not trying to be a righteous rationalist and shit on this thread just because I have issues with Anonymous and you good folks are staunchly defending them. But I really wish people would take a second look at their questionable methodology before championing them so vigorously. I completely agree with everything that Anonymous as an entity stands for on the surface. But the actions of many people associated with the movement frequently give me pause to question their motives.

GOOD DAY SIR <3

If I may I believe what Mister Gnu is saying is that by being so unorthodox it's easy for people to focus on the weirdness instead of the message. In the same way coverage of Occupy Wallstreet gatherings focused on the few individuals that wore Star Wars costumes, called for the abolishment of all debt, or pooped on police cars instead of the many that had a legitimate point.
Wikileaks had/has some pretty important stuff that the world should be focusing on sucj as-holy shit the founder of Wikileaks hates woman and has shown his penis around!!!
Anonymous, for as much good as they could do, are too disorganized and too fond of memes to get anything real done. If something real happens it's easy to just focus on the one member, real or not, who draws Scooby Doo slash fiction and emails it to newspaper editors. The headline the next day is not "Anonymous source reveals horror" but "Internet based terrorist group draws Scooby Wang"

Seems better than doing nothing. If you don't like their methods, do it better, or work towards a system that marginalizes the cause they support (e.g., in this case by getting people to enforce the laws against athletes in small towns).

A claim that Anonymous's actions are not optimal is perfectly valid, and I might even agree with you on it. It's very different to say that their actions do not qualify as advocacy at all, which I think is spurious and at odds with your further posts in the thread.

Not that you're wrong about the likely response, but this is true of every protest movement ever. Suffragettes: jumped-up libertines in need of a beating. Black civil rights activists: dangerously militant thugs wanting to take over. Vietnam war protesters: drugged up communist sympathisers not appropriately ashamed of their sexualities.

This stuff writes itself and you can't win by trying to avoid it. I think maintaining a consistently strong message (not quite the same as a strong consistent message, though that can be important too) is the most vital. If people can match a ramshackle appearance with a ramshackle message you have no hope of being successful. But a powerful core message that keep going, especially when backed up by evidence, can be effective quite apart from the how the movement is perceived.

Like I said, if the argument is that the ends justify the means, then we'll have to let it rest there. But the whole "do it better" argument is a kinda thin defense to me for overlooking the indefensible.

And, yes, I've looked at the webmaster's emails; I never seriously thought there was any danger of kiddie porn (and it wasn't, just private phone self-pics of some poor floozie who is now all over the Internet). There was certainly no merit in releasing the webmaster's email in the first place when its contents were completely unrelated to the circumstances, much less the ridiculous child porn accusations obviously intended to fan the flames. But were they true, I'm sure it would look great for Anonymous if some ambitious federal prosecutor decided to go on a tear about bringing someone up on charges of interstate child pornography.

Look, I did my share of unscrupulous things in my youth behind beige boxes and hacked VAX accounts. I don't have a lot of issues with hacktivism when it's done in a measured and conscientious way that still allows the legal gears of justice to keep turning. The problem is that it often doesn't seem to work out that way, and all we're left with are unfocused witchhunts and inadmissible evidence, and I just don't have much faith in the mob to play judge and jury.

No, the argument is not "the ends justify the means", the argument is that every single assertion in the post I took exception to is wrong. Yes, there are things done by Anonymous that aren't ethical. The same applies for every single goddamn movement in the history of the world, and it's profoundly disingenuous to assert that Anonymous uniquely should be evaluated by some cherry-picked elements rather than by the whole.

If you have a problem with my pedantic disagreement with the argument you made then maybe you should make a different argument; you're not going to get me arguing about whether some individual act of members identifying as Anonymous is ethical or not, because it is, among other things, essentially irrelevant to whether the means in the general case of Anonymous are ethical and whether the consequentialist result of what they're doing in the general case is ethically/morally positive.

Gnu, no one will argue that Anonymous has the flaws you suggest (at least, I won't), we just don't think that you get the point that Anonymous is able to do what it can do (good/bad/cats) because it isn't centralized, because it has no plan, because it is entirely driven by whomever has a catchy idea on a particular day.

You can't have all the things that are good about Anon without all the things that are inefficient or a weakness.

Not hardly. This isn't just about the civil rights of a disenfranchised party or railing against an unjust war. Anonymous has taken it upon themselves to be the superheroes of any random cause they collectively see as unjust, and that kind of pervasive Merry Men mentality gets really murky really quickly. Where's the working precedent there? And, hell, even the Black Panthers made a point to keep its members following the letter of the law, at least until they passed the Mumford act. The minute someone fucks up and the word "cyberterrorist" gets permanently attached to Anonymous in the media, the fit is gonna hit the shan and their unorthodox organizational structure is only gonna leave horrible impressions and make it damn near impossible to distance themselves from the fray. "We are Anonymous. But some of us aren't. We think. But we can't tell you who is anyway." Not helpful.

That's the point, though; people won't give a damn about "individual members of Anonymous". The minute the public puts a name to it in a negative light, it's either as a static collective or a flawed decentralized ideology. I think the core issue is that you have a lot more faith in the public and media than I do, but that's another thread about my own disheartening experiences in the world of public policy.

I think the better argument you can make is whether any potential public backlash really matters to Anonymous in the grand scheme of things. I certainly doubt it would halt the core of the movement and its immediate, most fervent supporters. But it would certainly discourage folks from wanting to attach themselves to it, with or without masks -- and that kind of free association is sorta at the core of what they do when it comes to keeping themselves visible and valid -- not to mention the raised eyebrows of law enforcement.

Having said all that, I'm not hoping to be right here. I hope they do good. We could use it.

Anon has never really followed the law, the roots of the whole thing come from people who have spent majority of their time finding ways to break things. That they can then find others to support what they found, and make a cry for someone to -do something- is what is happening. They could just break into things and sit on the info, or ignore it , or even sell it.

And there are cases before what we collectively can point at and say THAT IS ANON, that they did just that. The selling, the sitting .. the breaking.
Somewhere along the line the amount of things they were finding changed the nature of those doing the acts. Robin hoods developed, so did even worse villains to rob and plunder.

It is all Anon, because they don't really exist. They never did. Most are doing this under some other guise , or getting others to be them. It is both incredibly effective and absolutely worthless.
I think the only thing Anon does regularly is make everyone else talk about something, the rest is a process from that point.

This is an ends-justify-the-means argument. You're arguing that it's correct to uniquely evaluate Anonymous by the cherry-picked elements, while it's not correct to do so for other movements or organizations. I'm arguing that one should evaluate means independently from ends; that one should use a consistent method of evaluating means regardless of the purported ends of an organization, if you don't believe that the ends justify the means.

The issue at hand is that you made assertions about Anonymous which simply aren't true, I argued about it, and it went on from there. You're making two different arguments here, added onto the original one. The three arguments essentially seem, to me, to be as follows:

1 - A set of assertions about Anonymous which I consider inaccurate at best, and which you have not revisited.
2a - An assertion that Anonymous should be uniquely evaluated by the worst elements of what Anonymous does
2b - This somehow does not qualify as an ends-justify-the-means argument, despite explicitly invoking means testing for figuring out who gets to not get judged on their worst elements (civil rights, etc)
3 - That the free-for-all hacktivism that Anonymous represents is a net negative to their cause.

In the end, I don't think I agree with 1, 2a, or 2b, and I'm unswayed by 3, because in the absence of the ability to make confident predictions, I lean towards supporting a person's ethical responsibility to either act or not act as that person feels appropriate.

I wasn't the one trying to push that argument, but fair enough. Comparisons between different activist groups concerning whatever imagined ratio of bad stuff to good stuff we want to attach to them is completely off point as far as I'm concerned. My point was only that the organizational methods and anonymity of its active sponsors make Anonymous unique to others in that respect, and harder to discern if certain elements are truly running counter to the cause, neutering any ability to separate them from the public's cognition of what Anonymous is about. People can argue over whether, say, the ANC were terrorists or revolutionaries, but the fact is they ultimately had shared accountability for their actions. The very nature of Anonymous makes that accountability impossible, and that's their whole point, and that's what unsettles me. It would perhaps be more excusable if we lived in a police state in America, but we don't, regardless of what eventual miscarriages of justice come along.

You still haven't told me what I have asserted about Anonymous that was untrue, although I've been sick and a little addled and may have missed it in the melee. Neither of us have said anything, as far as I'm aware, that is patently false. I thought we were just arguing over ideology and its net effects; I'm happy to retract, and I'll just assume here that I was in the wrong for purposes of bringing my end of this argument to a close. Even though we're in Santorum, I'm still not willing to run this into the ground any further and lose net respect with someone who I otherwise fundamentally agree with 99% of the time. (It totally has nothing to do with the fact that this one thread is killing my otherwise decent likes ratio.)

I still don't get 1, we're not gonna agree on our perceptions of 2a, I never intended to invoke 2b, and 3 is pretty much the same as 2a as far as I'm concerned. As far as ethical responsibility to act as they feel appropriate, you're far more optimistic than I and God bless you for it.

And yes, I apologize that many of my arguments got lost in the message and I was much less coherent than my usual rambling self. I've spent all day nursing a raging headache and projectile vomiting, it hasn't been fun, and I should have just put the whole thing on pause.

Anon's bizarre methods did seem to serve them well when they protested Scientology churches. Scientology is notorious for rabidly attacking anyone who dares speak of them negatively, and Anon's retarded style of protest was so confusing to them, they didn't know how to respond.

Beyond that it's mostly an ad hoc Improv Now performance for internet autism patients, and obviously there is Anonymous (the internet hackers) and Anon (the meme-adorned Guy Fawkes-masked protesting horde), which are likely to be two entirely different entities.

This I have to give to anyone. Their methods are a perfect antidote to CoS's stalking/harassment/smear campaigns.