From the Boston Globe:
US Representative Katherine Clark and her husband were watching “Veep” Sunday night, when police lights engulfed her Melrose [Massachusetts] home.
Clark went outside, assuming something was wrong with one of her neighbors. But she said she was alarmed and frightened to see cruisers blocking both ends of her street and “multiple officers, some with long guns, on my front lawn.”
An officer told her they had received a report of an active shooter at her house, where her 13- and 16-year-old boys had just gone to bed.
But of course.
As the Globe notes, Clark is the sponsor of a bill that would make swatting a federal crime. Swatting, of course, is the practice of maliciously making false reports in order to send swarms of police and/or SWAT teams to the home of your target.
It’s not a hypothetical worry: several Gamergate critics have been swatted. And it goes without saying that it’s pretty dangerous to send a small army of heavily armed cops to a home where they think an active shooter is barricaded.
If Clark’s swatters intended to intimidate her, they seem to have failed. The Globe again:
Clark acknowledged that the experience Sunday night was deeply disconcerting.
But asked if she would be less vocal about the issue now, she laughed and said no.
“If that was the intent of calling in this event,” Clark said, “I think they have underestimated my commitment to making sure that we do stop this practice.”
Clark said she had been very sympathetic to people have been the victims of swatting before Sunday night but now fully understands what it’s like.
“It will,” she said, “really cause me to double down.”
Targeting a politician with what is essentially terrorism? Doesn’t seem like a particularly smart choice on the part of whoever was behind this.
H/T — r/GamerGhazi
Eibhear: Hey! Have you checked out our complimentary welcome package?
@Paradoxical
Could you record your laugh and upload it? I want to turn it into a ring tone.
Please, pretty pretty please!
Also noteworthy: The irony of these people calling us Nazis, even as they’re phoning in a fake terror threat at our home address, to some actual stormtrooper types.
But of course, their irony detectors went bust a long time ago, so.
Jamesworkshop
I’d like to hope that if it became a federal crime whatever agency gets control over it would have more power to catch people because it wouldn’t have the issue of local jurisdictions not talking. But I really don’t have enough information.
Tessa
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/02/anti-swatting-us-congresswoman-targeted-in-swatting-attack/
At the moment, it seems only the Melrose police are involved, but it’s super early days.
Can I join in the laughage?
https://youtu.be/KY0uFVdOiyI
Here you go. It’s a bit raw and quiet, but I think it’s okay. Use it for good.
Don’t you get it? Humanity, self-reflection, and empathy are evil, decadent cultural Marxist values no REAL MAN would want to have. Of course, men who do have such values are feminized eunuchs brainwashed into being part of feminist borg.
/sarcasm
I almost vomited typing this shit.
@Three Snakes: And who cares about her two sons unless they can be used as a blugeon against feminists anyways?!
(I find myself sharing your revulsion.)
http://vine.co/v/im0VXLMgQAQ
I really hope the assholes responsible for swatting the congresswoman get caught and made examples of. And that swatting does end up a federal crime.
Also @PI that laugh is the best!
That’s so awesome!
I shall smite all evil and bring peace to this cold uncaring world with the power of laughter.
Thanks Paradoxical, you’re the best.
Zoe Quinn spoke about this recently on Twitter in a way that I hadn’t previously considered i.e. these algorithms actually facilitate harassment of her. If you search Zoe Quinn on anything, you’re going to get far more hits from people spreading lies than you will from Zoe Quinn herself. If you watch a Zoe Quinn video on Youtube, you’re going to have a sidebar FULL of “Zoe Quinn is a slutty slut who sluts for good reviews of her totally not a real game”. I’m sure the same is true of other prominent GG targets.
You’re very welcome. I’m glad you like it.
They really do. Since she and Anita and Brinna Wu have garnered so much hate from these groups, and they’re so obsessive about them and what they do and make all these videos saying what “awful people” they are for whatever reason, it’s going to come up, and I imagine it’s because of the tags and the titles and descriptions.
And I think that people tag their hate videos with the people they’re harassing for that reason, because they KNOW it’ll come up when people look for videos about them on YouTube, and that way they can shove their views on people who aren’t aware of the situation before Zoe, Anita, Brianna, or any other GG targets can defend themselves. They’re literally trying to drown out any other voices with just sheer volume of videos.
The shitty thing is as well, I’ve blocked people like Repzillion and Thunderf00t so I don’t have to see their videos, but YouTube is still recommending their videos to me, even when I just watched the latest Tropes vs. Women in Games just to see what it was about, YouTube thought it was pertinent to reccomend Thunderf00t’s “rebuttal” to it.
Like, no, YouTube, I don’t want to watch that hate filled bullshit.
Tumblr is guilty of the same thing with a lot of Social Justice bloggers. They’ll blog about things like antisemitism and tumblr will reccomend literal neo-nazis to follow because they hit the same key words or use the same tags or something.
Their algorithms are fucked up, and of course, they’d rather not do anything to change them than protect their users. Because that requires them to care about their users.
Apologies for derailing if we’ve moved beyond Dawkins, but I’m just reading “Fountains of Paradise” (again) and this passage has just cropped up.
This reminds me of a day or so ago when I was looking for the full context to the Anita Sarkeesian “Everything is sexist” comments where she was describing herself first becoming a feminist as being annoying, and all I got was the clip with no context or rants about the clip without context.
Oh god, Youtube recommendations are the worst thing. I know Google aren’t stupid, so that leaves either malice or uncaring as the reasons for leaving such a ridiculous algorithm in place.
I’ve just noticed that Facebook is recommending a page to me called “Serious crimes by women that get no mainstream media attention”
I’m hoping it’s because they’re bank robbers who want a getaway driver (if they’re that good at keeping under the radar we could be quids in!)
@Paradoxical Intention:
I shall never read a post of yours the same way again. I am uncertain how to react to this fact.
Those women who get no mainstream media attention, always committing serious crimes.
@Alan You mean like how the mainstream media paid almost no attention to the Jodi Arias case?
OT:
It’s already heavily populated by trolls and people making fun but the #MicrosoftRubioFraud Twitter tag has some legit white supremacist (at least one known to readers here) Trump supporters spinning a conspiracy about how Marco Rubio nearly knocked Trump into 3rd place in the republican caucus in Iowa tonight.
Hilarious.
@P.I.
It seems to me the people who complain about other people wanting an echo-chamber…well, actually want an echo-chamber of their own.
Every single time I or someone I know has been accused of that – it always came from someone who expected us to roll out the red carpet and patronize them. They don’t care that certain venues attract certain people and who may not share the same sensibilities as them, because of their overwhelming sense of entitlement. That, or the naivete to think every venue is a public forum.
As Richard Dawkins shows, along with other hardcore antifeminist atheists, that many white cishet men often mistake disconnection with objectivity. They wrongly assume that, lacking personal experience, they will somehow manage to be less biased than those with that experience…which isn’t how biases work. It could be argued that lacking those experiences makes you more biased – as it downplays negative impact and presumptuously accepts the current status quo as being “how it always was.”
I mean, look at that evo-psych bullshit: it takes completely modern day attitudes and assumes those contemporary sensibilities somehow reflect those in societies from hundreds or thousands of years ago. The reality is obviously that societies then, were they seen first-hand, would come off as completely alien to us. Just because historical fiction recontextualizes many events to make them more comprehensible to those born in the 20th and 21st century doesn’t mean it is an accurate depiction of those times, yet these people like to think people treated politics and religion and ethics the exact same way we do now. It’s so intellectually lazy, it’s embarrassing.
I’d hate to tell all these manly men that, back in the years of the Persian Empire, it was common for men to wear make-up or use perfume. Hell, being as conspiratorially-minded as they are, I bet they’ll say it’s some elaborate obfuscation done by academic feminists and their “beta cucks”…
@U.P.N.
Probably because that’s all they hear. Every conversation I’ve had with one reprehensible Gater or another involves them using completely out-of-context quotes, often from people I don’t even know, who are puzzled as to why I don’t hop on the Bitter Paranoid Woman-Hater bandwagon and claim I’m just being stubborn.
Maybe the reason because I don’t base the entirety on my views on a single sentence from what obviously came from a longer paragraph or article. Doesn’t help their quotes are in the “not even wrong” territory and thus not as inflammatory as they think…
Just as people who accuse you of being closed-minded and refusing to consider other people’s opinions aren’t usually open-minded about considering your opinions.
They see rationality as some kind of state of being as opposed to a process in which one engages consciously. They think they simply are logical. They assume themselves to be impartial which, in turn, makes them complete slaves to their biases. It never occurs to them to question anything that affirms their preconceptions because, in their framework, they wouldn’t be able to believe a thing if it wasn’t rational.
For me it really illustrates the absurdity of the manosphere because the only way any of their “logic” works is if you don’t understand what logic even is.