Laughing at Obama is a good start to ridding ourselves of the PC stranglehold on speech that every minority has a right not to be offended that the Left has been shoving down our throats.
Believing that this actually happened obliges you to believe a large number of not-very-believable things, starting with a department store selling lions and finishing with some sociopaths naming a child “Ace Berg”. The Daily Mail appears to buy it, which means … well, nothing. But Mr. Ace Berg and his good friend Mr. John Rendall say it happened, and his even better friends Mr. C. Monster and Mr. Ty Dell-Wave have kept any doubts they may harbor to themselves, so, fuck it, I’ll believe them. Even if it isn’t true, it should be.
… is satire. It’s a joke, and it’s very funny. Kevin Drum is a fine blogger and surely a wonderful person in many ways, but one is advised to file his comedy advice alongside Dom Deluise’s miracle 6-week washboard abs diet. The problem with putting a big Surgeon General’s warning label on this satire reading NO!! NOT REALLY!!! BUT JOHN MCCAIN THINKS SO!!!! is that doing so would make it not a satire; or, if it were a satire, a satire of humorless liberals. (And would presumably fail for the same reason that this satire allegedly fails - many liberals appear to sincerely believe this is a good and necessary correction.) I further suggest that “A Modest Proposal” would not actually be improved by putting the whole thing in the blood-drenched mouth of a Tory industrialist named “Dasterdly McBabyeater von Evil” and/or renaming it “An Absurdly Broad Caricature of Aspects of Contemporary Society which The Author, In Truth, Deplores”. True, the idiots being satirized won’t “get” the joke - that’s the joke’s value to those who do. I may be a horrible elitist, but I don’t think jokes are improved by pitching them to people with no sense of humor.
Senate bows to Bush, approves surveillance bill
By PAMELA HESS
WASHINGTON (AP) — Bowing to President Bush’s demands, the Senate sent the White House a bill Wednesday overhauling bitterly disputed rules on secret government eavesdropping and shielding telecommunications companies from lawsuits complaining they helped the U.S. spy on Americans.
We can identify two general methods of online ratfucking: propaganda and sabotage. Propaganda is promoting anti-Republican bullshit to a general audience; the model would be Swift Boat Veterans for Truth; the methods would include mass emailing and posting to large, unmoderated general interest message boards. Sabotage is undermining and/or co-opting pro-Republican organizations or communities; the model would be Cointelpro; the methods are legion. Sabotage is the more interesting method, its techniques mirroring those of movement-building:
To Facilitate The Movement
To Inhibit The Movement
Facilitate capacity for corporate action
Inhibit capacity for corporate action
Make it possible for energies of movement to go toward pursuit of broader social change goals, as well as maintenance needs
Direct energies of movement of defensive maintenance needs and away from pursuit of broader social goals
Create favorable public image; develop and support ideology
Create unfavorable public image and counter-ideology
Give information to movement
Gather information on movement
Facilitate supply of money and facilities
Inhibit supply of money and facilities
Facilitate freedom of movement, expression, and action; offer legal immunity
Inhibit freedom of movement, expression, and action; create myth and fact of surveillance and repression; apply legal sanctions
Build and sustain morale
Damage morale
Recruit supporters
Derecruitment
Build leaders
Destroy or displace leaders
Encourage internal solidarity
Encourage internal conflict
Encourage external coalitions with potential allies and neutral relations (or conflict only insofar as it is functional) with potential opponents
Encourage external conflict with potential allies and opponents
Facilicate particular actions
Inhibit or sabotage particular actions
A few operational pointers:
1. Proper hygiene is very important. Use clean email/blogger/newsgroup accounts and online identities. IP address masking or spoofing is probably overkill for most applications, but it’s simple enough. Also: there’s this thing called Google you might want to be aware of. Don’t post any details about ratfucking, because that shit will leave an world-readable, endlessly searchable, multiply-archived stain for a very, very long time. IM and email, plz.
2. He who lies best lies least. Changing your name constitutes adopting a fictional persona, and it’s probably best to leave it at that, without needless embellishments. Get to know your targets, how far you can push them and in what direction, and remember that an effective agent provocateur has a delicate touch and doesn’t draw attention. Don’t be the first to accuse others of having hidden agendas and you won’t be the next accused. You are entering a world where the paranoid style has always been en vogue.
3. Bring a friend. A) having someone to run plays with makes you that much more effective, and B) even thinking about doing this shit alone makes me feel like I’m losing my mind. Make a game out of it “I bet I can get them to swallow more shit than you (by some metric)” and joke about it later. What you are going is halfway between Donnie Brasco and an internet predator, and that’s a mighty creepy neighborhood. Don’t get lost.
4. Is your conscience bothering you? This is probably because you need to fortify your diet with Vitamin S:
It’s way cooler than huffing paint, and a little bit now could mean a lot less over the next 4 years. Bottoms up.
Ed Burns, Vietnam vet and co-creator of HBO’s Generation Kill, interviewed in Salon:
How did working on this series affect your perspective on the war?
It didn’t. I still hate it. It just makes it more of a tragedy to know that we sent these guys into combat in the wrong war, on a make-up war. We wasted such talent on a lie. I know from Vietnam, when these guys are injured — guys who are really injured, the guy who steps on a mine or gets hit with an IED [improvised explosive device] — you know, he wants to believe that he gave it for the right cause. And you know, as time wears on, it’ll become more evident, just like it was in Vietnam, that it wasn’t the right cause. Yet that doesn’t bring his foot back or his arms back.
The best trained, best equipped army in the history of the world and you thought it was just your fucking toy to play around with, you incompetent half-wits? That these astonishing people were your little bauble? May you be drowned in the shit of history, post-haste. May your every contribution to this world be denied by all right-thinking people everywhere, forever. Happy fucking fourth of July.
