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
OT but timely
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/02/iowa-caucus-bernie-sanders-can-win-hillary-clinton-beatable
Iowa is too close to call (still)–but Bernie is doing remarkably well against Hillary.
Click through to see Bernie give a short speech earlier this evening.
My brain totally read that last comment in a Jeri Ryan voice.
ETA: Err, Sevenofmine’s last comment, obviously.
: 3c
Well, what do you expect when you legitimately believe you’re right about everything all the time?
These guys literally expect us to drop to our knees the moment they acknowledge our existence. They’ll say they don’t, but then they turn around and get all snippy when that doesn’t happen.
Either that, or they engage in “My Experiences are Universal, and that means if I didn’t see it, it didn’t happen!”.
Talk about your God Complex.
@Paradoxical Intention
The irony is too much. Manosphere assholes of all stripes love to portray themselves as rugged individualists while calling women and feminists drones of the system. When they use pseudoscience their justification reaches absurd levels. Then they depict women as docile, shallow herd animals while men, of course, are profound makers of history.
The irony is that Manosphere assholes themselves behave as a mob. On YouTube their views are supported on volume and numbers and not on reason itself. The same can be said on Reddit. I know YouTubers do not read sources on their own but recieve filtered information from talking heads like Thunderf00t or Sargon. MGTOW and Neo-Nazi members pretty much huddle in a cult, isolating themselves more from the outside world and anyone or any source that disagrees with them. They shove their heads further up their own asses until they never see the light of day again.
That’s what I never get about Manospherians and other white male supremacists. They talk a really big game about how they’re strongest, smartest race but they’re the world’s biggest sissies imaginable. The irony is so huge not even Jonathan Swift could have made this shit up.
😀
This, so much.
Derek Smart, the Elder Deity of assholes, has been filling his blog with blustery talk of legal action against all and sundry. A #GGer commented on one of these posts that “we’re learning about law from [Smart].” Not only is Smart not a law teacher, he’s not even a lawyer; learning law from him would be like learning economics from Davis Aurini or architecture from, well, me.
This is particularly puzzling given that law isn’t exactly the Eleusinian Mysteries; it’s all documented, mostly in the public domain, and can be self-taught by anyone patient enough to spend years doing so. The only explanation I can think of is that the #GGer in question was actively uncomfortable with seeking out information and required it to be spoon-fed to him.
I’m put in mind of shamans: people who make journeys away from the tribe into the terrifying places where spirits dwell, then return with secret knowledge to share with the tribe. This seems to be what the #GGers have reinvented. People like Smart, Aurini, Mason and Benjamin are acting as shamans, insulating their followers from the hideous danger of actual information.
I woke up to fairly decent caucus results this morning. 🙂
Annoying that Sanders didn’t win, but it’s nice to see it was such a close race.
As for the Republicans, I think this might be costly for Trump. I’ve always been of the opinion that he will eventually drop out “for personal reasons”, but of course he would like to drop out while he’s still on top. He’s already tried to twist this defeat into a win, but I’ve seen the reactions on Trump friendly message boards and they’re not happy. The image of Trump as a loser could destroy his campaign, which is entirely built on always winning by not giving a fuck. It’s a shallow movement which could be shattered very easily.
I’ve said since summer that Rubio will eventually be the candidate. I’ll admit that at this point Cruz seems more likely, but I’ll stick with Rubio since he has a decent shot, especially after this relative success, and because it’s cooler to have picked the winner a long time ago. :p
And now I’m soon off to my first therapy session. Hope it goes well!
@dhag85
I’m thrilled that Sanders did so well. He was quite the underdog when he started out. I’ve always thought that he stood a chance–but how much of a chance, I didn’t know. I still feel the same way.
Good luck with the therapy!
Best of luck with therapy, dhag85! It really helped me and I hope it does you too.
About the echo chamber: The fact is, nobody goes around ready to change their mind about anything at any time. All of us have pretty much made up our minds about most things already. And that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re closed-minded about new ideas–it more often means that we’re pretty sure we’ve heard all the ideas already and don’t want to get into the same tedious argument again.
In Iowa, the delegates are awarded proportionately. It’s not winner take all. A virtual tie between Clinton and Sanders really does mean just that.
It also means that both of them will probably still be in the race by the time my state’s caucus roles around. So I’ll actually get to have my say in who the nominee is. Yay!
In UK politics, it looks like we’ll be getting our referendum on whether to stay in the EU sooner rather than later. We now have the results of the renegotiation over our current membership.
Will they be enough to keep us in, or are people pretty disillusioned with the EU anyway that nothing will make a difference? How will the nation decide? Du-du-duhn!
So, a quick check of this reveals that the first two pages of youtube results have her channel showing up 3rd in the results and a total of 1 video from her. There are 1(3?) news pieces and 2 appearances on shows/at festivals.
The other 33 results are from her, and I use the term very loosely, “critics.” *
You have to go to page 4 to find another video from Quinn.
*There is some margin of error given that I don’t recognize all the names and don’t care to watch the videos to find out.
@wwth
Definitely. But doesn’t a “victory” have some symbolic value, too? Even though it’s a virtual tie, I would feel a lot better about Bernie winning by 0.4% than losing by 0.4% (or whatever the difference was).
If it’s any consolation, the media is bound to declare it an unmitigated disaster for Hillary. (They’ve been declaring everything an unmitigated disaster for Hillary since, oh, 1992.)
Iowa probably doesn’t mean a lot in real terms for either Clinton or Sanders but it does to Trump.
A major part of his shtick is that he’s a “winner” and insurmountable. The fact that he didn’t trounce his opponent is much more symbolic for him than any other candidate.
Like all those stories about people perceived as gods immediately being abandoned, after only a trivial wound, when people see they can bleed.
@ ultimateprotagonistnerd
I had the same experience yesterday. I got to talking to my boyfriend, who told me that the word “patriarchy” was a trigger for him, and got him riled up. Trying to get to the bottom of that sentiment, I shortly found out he had been watching *shudder* Thunderf00t videos recently, and had gotten himself into a bit of a nasty rabbit hole.
My bf then cited this “everything is sexist” quote from Anita Sarkeesian without context – just showed me a 7 second clip that was obviously (to me) part of a narrative. It looked/sounded to me that she was recounting a story rather than stating an opinion. I slogged through YT and found the full “How To Be A Feminist” talk by playing a matching game… just looked for the video where Anita’s hair/clothes/mic matched the 7 sec clip.
I think I’ve swayed my bf’s opinion on Thunderf00t by getting him to read some articles and what have you, but I definitely learned some things about his worldview that left me feelin’ a little blue yesterday.
(long time lurker busting out – hi, Mammothers!)
Paradoxical Intention, that laugh is awesome. Just listening to it makes me giggle, and normally I do more of a belly laugh with nose snorts.
Ghost explosion in a school in Karlstad, Sweden. People have heard and felt a big explosion in the building, but there’s no trace of any explosion, no damage, nobody injured. Quite confusing right now.
My view of the results is that the big winner is Rubio on the R side. As for Clinton/Sanders, it’s a mixed bag.
Iowa, demographically speaking, is very favorable territory for both Sanders and Cruz. The democrats tend to be younger, whiter, and more liberal there than in the country at large and the republicans tend to be more evangelical.
Sanders lost by a hair in somewhat favorable territory. He’ll probably go on to win New Hampshire, which is very favorable territory. The problem is after that, when the South starts voting. Sanders has proven he’s a legitimate candidate, for sure, but Clinton’s delegate lead continues to grow.
As for the Republicans, Cruz went all in on Iowa and only came away with a small victory. What will happen in states where he hasn’t devoted so many resources and had such favorable territory?
And, as many people here have noted, Trump’s veneer of invulnerability is starting to crack. Will his followers begin to jump ship now that he’s a “loser”? I think dhag will end up being right about Rubio.
@dhag85:
I’m calling it right now. It’s Hastur.
@Zyvlyn:
Yeah, I’m thinking the same thing. If Rubio can survive, then he’s the natural rallying point for both the anyone-but-Trump and anyone-but-Cruz groups.
Kudos to dhag85 for calling that one early.
Not only should “swatting” in and of itself be a crime, it should be a predicate felony for imputed offenses. So, for instance, if the SWAT team kills someone in the process, the “swatter” should be charged with felony-murder.
Recommender algorithms! Those are fun!
@PI (I think it was you); don’t blame the Googs for the terrible state of the YouTube recommender algorithm. They’ve solved it in a very sophisticated way, using a dynamically assembled decision forest to categorize what a video is about. (That is at least my guess, they of course aren’t sharing those algorithms, and I’m sure it’s a copyrighted algorithm).
Solving it to be able to distinguish between Zoe Quinn’s vlogs and the upended sewage of her detractors is actually a really hard problem. Specifically, you have to solve a slice of the general intelligence problem to do it, and not an easy slice at that – you have to create an understanding of conversational language, and the actual meaning of words within a context. That’s something my research group is working on, and, well – yes, it’s very hard! I wish I could gabble on about what we’re doing to try to tackle it, but I am fairly sure I would be flayed and hung by the toes.
So, yeah it sucks, but there’s not currently a better recommender algorithm out there!
@dhag,
@dhag
Alcohol fumes from the chem lab would be my first guess. Alcohol fume explosions can be all sound and no fury.