Nick Farr's 30c3 Jake Appelbaum story of abuse and harassment

Actually it was trying to fight back against Pando that taught me a great deal about trying to cut water with a sword, tbh. You can find me in that stream. You won't find me working on arguing particulars until I have a contract around rules, in general. Mobs don't have rules.

One sane person using logic can't win, ever.

When there is a venue with a contract, whether that can be negotiated outside a state system, or comes with it, we can talk about this like a community. Until such time, this is torches and pitchforks, and bad precedent for our future, which is what we are for, what we are about, and what the accusers claim they are trying to preserve.

We all want that. Even the accusers have to acknowledge that Jake has contributed significant independent work to that. So in respect for not destroying the overall reputation of hacktivism in the outside world -- where we have accomplished things like:

Snowden convincing people that Comey is full of shit supporting people in Congress in the US like Leahy and Wyden Shutting down Free Harbor for it's eventual renegotiation Various leaks and their support many many direct actions many many civil disobediences many many cons and sharing information much public education through mainstream and less mainstream media and all the things that people count that I'm not enumerating because everyone has other goggles on their tin hats, this is just the first few slides on mine because I'm old and straight right?

but this stuff is morphing the world, not just our culture, and this reaches the US and EU and all over, out into tech press and MSM and everywhere else.

It is not about a bunch of play parties and cliques and hacker cons and thons and house parties and who knows who and whatnot and people being aspie and sensitive and whatever and whispering campaigns and whatever and consent culture and rape culture and all these things.

It's about that, and it's about a bunch of smiling gray faces who love to see us fight and destroy ourselves over this shit, as non-authoritarian cultures always do, like ulcers eating our own flesh. Because no matter what Jake did and didn't do, this mechanism is vigilante and abusive. It can not stand.

It is designed to prolong the chaos and damage. What is the end you have in sight? Where does the recursion end? When someone takes a hit out on him on some skanky dark net site?

This is what Hoover did to MLK in the 60s. And MLK fucked up; he was human. He was not faithful to his wife. He screamed and swore at this planning group in the SCLC.

Gandhi was a freaking monster in a lot of ways. He beat his wife. He was probably exactly a sociopath, within modern diagnostic bounds. Mahatma. Later, he sent troops to support Britain in WWII. he was not a pacifist in any absolute sense. He was HUMAN.

Mandela was in jail for years. Why? Because the Boers would not listen to the ANC when they were nonviolent -- the Boers felt they didn't have to. So Mandela took a deep sad breath, and they bombed a train which had civilians including families with women and children and civilian men, and the Boers howled for his blood! And Mandela came forward and said, "Put me in jail and don't look for the others, and I will come peacefully, and the ANC will return to nonviolence -- but understand, this is in our blood, we are Zulu, still." And the Boer listened. And this is why they always called him a murderer, Mandela. This man of peace.

This stuff is not easy. There are no saints. If you wait for saints to take up social change, you will live in hell forever.

So stop it. You are creating a world where no one will ever dare to move out of their front door and take up a life of activism, because they can not know if Jake is a sociopath, or a person who is being framed.

And unless we create some way to clarify that, you people are playing right into the hands of history that no one will come into this path. It's hard enough. It is FUCKING HARD ENOUGH to get people to take up peace and no money and justice and risk.

And you add our own FUD, on top of the FUD that gets rained down on us.

Find me a court, a contract, an actual way to resolve this, or use the state.

Fuck this noise.

  a spooky name relating to a literary figure who 
  killed himself

Ha! Oh man, talk about a stay-puft marshmallow moment.

The name was supposed to be borrowed from an absolutely harmless carmel candy. Something that could do no wrong, but I had to truncate it into something that would fit into HN's 15 character namespace.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Stay puft? You just commented to say you don't care, you addressed nothing, and if that's the only thing you respond to, that also is another signal. No good deed, right.

That's the only thing I responded to, because it shows me that you are looking for things where they don't exist, and deciding that you found them anyway.

I've rarely seen other people attribute malice to my actions at times when I know I'm being anything but, but when it does happen, the person is lashing out at any stranger.

Pretty much means the person I'm dealing with is isolating themselves, and it won't be possible to do anything right for them, regardless of any objective, rational information one might try to present.

In the 1984 movie, Ghostbusters, one of the main characters, Ray Parker (played by Dan Aykroyd), accidentally selects a childhood memory of a marshmallow mascot for the "stay-puft" marshmallow company. He imagines, in his own mind that this was a representation of harmlessness, only to find it transformed into something horrible, and used against him.

> but when it does happen, the person is lashing out at any stranger.

I responded to a comment and to a "personal account". Zilch replies, downvotes instead. I moan about that, I get your non-replies. So yeah, excuse me for lashing out at a throwaway who doesn't care about something I care about, and feels the need to tell me that.

> Pretty much means the person I'm dealing with is isolating themselves,

Awww, I'm so hurt. From whom though? From people I'm criticizing who can't deal with that honestly? From a throwaway? From "peers" who don't bat an eye to join a mob, all with their own plausible deniability? I never joined, you could not pay me enough to not want to distance myself from that kind of stuff. So you're exactly right, int he meaning of the word, I am isolating myself, putting on an ABC suit, say "whoa wtf is this, are you people crazy? well, I spoke my piece, the rest is on you."

> In the 1984 movie, Ghostbusters, one of the main characters, Ray Parker (played by Dan Aykroyd), accidentally selects a childhood memory of a marshmallow mascot for the "stay-puft" marshmallow company. He imagines, in his own mind that this was a representation of harmlessness, only to find it transformed into something horrible, and used against him.

That explains that then, thanks, but I don't find it so terribly monstrous to "lash out" at something needlessly during adressing everything else in a comment, too. That's just a bonus you can ignore, instead of fixate on.

> it shows me that you are looking for things where they don't exist, and deciding that you found them anyway.

Right, and you're telling yourself that being slightly annoyed by getting essentially mocked with a non-reply, and to then make ONE demonstrably false guess, that this somehow can be applied to everything else, and of course retroactively, too?

You're simply demonstrating the "type of character" kind of stuff I'm denouncing. Read Arendt, that's exactly how totalitarianism "thinks". Jake's a "rapist, sociopath, plagiarist", the victims are "victims", I'm someone who "is looking for things where they don't exist", and you're someone who is being "anything but malicious". Nothing of substance at all. The punishment "proves" the "guilt" for the thoughtcrimes, the type-of-person-crimes, as well as bestowing the appropriate immunity from criticism to others, and the sentences are nilly-willy and the hands of the executioners free of all guilt.

Instead of me asking some valid and uncomfortable questions, which don't get good responses because nobody HAS a good answer, it's now my fault, obviously because mentioning that I got no responses, and noticing that you then respond with nothing but "I personally don't care, that's how it is, if you can't take the heat get out of the kitchen [which you'd never say about some of these stories about a creeper even in cases where he stopped when asked to, then tried again, am I correct?]", and getting something about your throwaway handle wrong, which is the only thing you respond to -- all that somehow means I'm "looking for things that aren't there" and "isolating myself" and ladiblah. It's not you avoiding things and blaming that on me, nah. It's not you who prefers to talk about people rather than facts, and then looks kind of bad even when talking about people, in your mind.

Anyone who has ever been mobbed or dealt with a narcissist will find that kind of strategy very, very familiar. You saying you're not malicious is just you saying things. But this string of comments, in content, for those paying attention, is what it is.