When I wrote this post advocating for a non-partisan approach to defending thuggishly threatened speech, I was happy when people started to link to it, because I believe its message sincerely and forcefully.

I was happy, that is, until I noticed that a large number of the links were coming from scrapers — sites that simply copy an entire post verbatim, with or without attribution.

Take conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' site InfoWars, which scraped my post wholesale, though it at least preserved original links and attributed it with a link. That's clearly not fair use. I tried writing InfoWars Editor Kurt Nimmo, politely requesting that they transform the post into a reasonably limited quotation and a link, so as to respect both my intellectual property rights and good blogging etiquette. I never got a response. Perhaps that's understandable. Folks at InfoWars are busy. Day by day, they are the tip of the spear, seeking the irrefutable proof that Lizard People faked the "Moon Landing" to create the illusion of a genuine space program, whilst actually preventing humanity from encountering That Which We Are Not Meant To Know. This month they are very busy fact-checking this so-called private space mission, which is actually being filmed on a sound stage in Burbank. If you look carefully you'll see a number of the participants were washouts from second-string reality shows. And InfoWars is this close to a blockbuster story about how local craft services people have been delivering a suspicious amount of live bugs to the soundstage. So they're busy — too busy to create original content, too busy to refrain from thievery, too busy to respond to emails.

I considered sending them a DMCA notice, but I may hold off just a bit. My wife has informed me that I have reached my quarterly quota of unbalanced people I may antagonize. She's concerned that I might get snatched off the street and stuffed into some sort of Patriot's Terrarium or something.

I also got scraped by a blogger named Chris Roubis, whose blog falls into the general classificaion of "sites with advertisements about how fluoridation threatens babies" or "sites with post categories involving the terms 'UFO' and 'Chemtrails.'" As much as I like attention, this seemed like something of a disappointing comedown, venue-wise. InfoWars is heavily trafficked, and has higher-class advertisements advocating use of colloidal silver, not posts about babies, who after all are not independently productive members of society. [Interesting Fact: Lizard People, who are naturally green, are genetically incapable of turning blue, whatever disguise or glamour they are wearing. Therefore widespread use of colloidal silver is an excellent method of identifying Lizard People. This is also why it is imperative that someone fund a live-action Smurfs movie.] Anyway, I left a comment at Chris Roubis' site, but a week later it's still in moderation. He's busy too, I'm sure. So is Radio Justin, who also scraped me shamelessly. I tried listening to Radio Justin to see if he's hold a symposium explaining his principled reasons for ripping off my content and not answering my complaint about it, but after a while a got sort of depressed by the weepy Donna Summer tributes and tuned out.

Anyway, I guess I should be happy. Silence and stonewalling, ultimately, are preferable to enraged, vaguely threatening, and semi-literate justifications, which is what I got the last time I complained about a scraper. Counting blessings!

George Tierney, Jr. of Greenville, South Carolina, who finds himself abruptly infamous for sending crass tweets to Sandra Fluke and then making legal threats to people who wrote about him, raises a series of questions in my addled mind.

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Yesterday in this post I mentioned a response I recently sent to a cease-and-desist letter generated in the course of a controversy about whether a particular seller was eligible to sell goods on the web site Etsy.

I've since spoken to the attorney to whom I wrote. We had a very civilized discussion, though we disagree on some fundamentals (including but not limited to the substance of his email).

He related to me that he is the husband of the young woman at the heart of the controversy, and the father to their two-year-old daughter. He said that since the controversy went viral, they have received a flood of abuse, both by email and in various internet postings. He said that the abuse included threats of physical harm against his wife. He said that people went as far as to post his daughter's school, its address, and a video of it. Though he complained about some of the factual claims made about the business in question, these threats and comments were his chief concern in his discussion with me.

For purposes of this post, I am taking him at his word.

I stand by what I wrote in my response to the cease-and-desist letter. Nobody who reads this site is likely to doubt my commitment to freedom of expression. But allow me to be blunt: if you are the sort of person who thinks it is funny to react to this sort of situation by making threats, or targeting somebody's kid, or engaging in harassment that crosses the line into illegal behavior, you are not a friend of free speech, and you are not my friend. You're an enemy.

The internet is full of assholes. I strongly disagree with this attorney's argument, which seems to be — in part — that people who write vehemently about controversial issues on the internet are morally or legally responsible for what assholes do when they read it. That's not the law. But that doesn't change the fact that people who make threats, and target the family members (especially children) of folks embroiled in controversy, and engage in direct harassment of them (as opposed to writing about the situation and stating their views), are vile, and we should call them out.

So. If you are someone who reacts to these controversies by sending threatening emails to the participants, or writes comments about how violence should be done to them, or posts their kids' schools, you are my enemy. I will call you out. You liked that response I sent to the cease-and-desist letter? You might not like the tone as much when it's naming and shaming you. You like it when I conduct lengthy and detailed investigations of fraud? You won't like it if I use those same techniques to track down people who make threats, and hand them over to the victims, or to law enforcement.

You want to argue? Fine. You want to criticize? Fine. You want to ridicule? Fine. But when you threaten, and if you cross the line into unlawful harassment, and if you target families of controversial figures, you're hurting the cause you think you're fighting for. You're also making it easier for law enforcement, and legislatures, and courts to justify censorship. You're a problem. And if you become my problem, I'm going to use my First Amendment rights to make you pay. You won't enjoy it.

My client in this matter engaged in clearly protected expression and said absolutely nothing that could rationally be taken as encouraging threats, violence, or unlawful harassment. If this attorney sues, I will fight him on every front without quarter and with all of the allies I can muster. But let's be clear: if you are someone who has been making threats against these people, then you are a substantial contributing factor to my client's stressful situation this week. That makes me angry.

Please don't make me angry.

Daring state legislators to have me arrested is beginning to feel suspiciously like work.

Last week, you may recall, I sent the Connecticut Joint Committee on the Judiciary a rude post that would probably constitute a crime under the ridiculously overbroad cyberbullying bill they passed. Now a reliable source informs me that bill died in committee. Swell.

But do I get some down time to get some sleep and recover from this miserable chest cold and watch Lena Headey slap Jack Gleeson over and over again? No I do not.

Because fuck you, Arizona.

So tired.

Okay. Here we go. Cowboy up, Ken.

Dear Members of the Arizona State Legislature,

By this post, it is my specific intent to use this digital device — a computer — to annoy and offend you.

I do so because you have passed Arizona H.B. 2549, which provides in relevant part as follows:

It is unlawful for any person, with intent to terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass, annoy or offend, to use a telephone ANY ELECTRONIC OR DIGITAL DEVICE and use any obscene, lewd or profane language or suggest any lewd or lascivious act, or threaten to inflict physical harm to the person or property of any person.

OK. I certainly don't intend to convey any physical threat. And I can't terrify or intimidate you, even with the prospect of revealing you for a pack of morons who ought to be voted out of office — after all, you're in Arizona, where prolonged lawlessness, venality and idiocy seem to be sure paths to electoral victory.

I certainly do mean to annoy and offend you, though. You've been swept up in the moronic and thoughtless anti-bullying craze and consequently passed a bill that is ridiculous on its face, a bill that criminalizes annoying and offending people on the internet. That's like criminalizing driving on the road. By so clearly violating the First Amendment, you've violated your oaths of office. You should be ashamed of yourselves. What kind of example are you setting for the children of Arizona by ignoring the law to pass fashionable rubbish? It is no excuse that you are merely modifying an archaic law to apply it to the internet — you're still enacting patently unconstitutional legislation.

and use any obscene, lewd or profane language or suggest any lewd or lascivious act

Oh, yeah. Also, snort my taint, go to Hell, and go fuck yourselves.

There. I'm a criminal in Arizona. Send some of your cops to collect me. I know it may be temporarily confusing for them, as I'm not brown, but perhaps they can manage.

Come get me.

Cheers,

Ken

Numerous tipsters and friends pointed out the New York Post story about how the New York City Department of Education had banned words like "dinosaur" and "birthday" and "Halloween" from tests. I was quite ready to unload on the Department — in fact, I was discussing a contest to see who could use all of the words in one test question — when I was struck with a sudden and overpowering sense of skepticism, and ground to a halt.

Sometimes these stories are based on snippets of truth taken out of context, or misreported. Am I, I asked myself (not aloud, because that's pretentious), being taken in by a story that plays into my predisposition to see the education bureaucracy as witlessly politically correct?

So, though it pained me, I tried to find the original source for the story. None of the news reports or blog posts about it posted the Department of Education document allegedly containing the dinosaur's-birthday ban. From a reference in one of the stories I figured that the language came from the Department's notice seeking bids from test providers — an RFP, to those who bid on government contracts — and located it here. But the Department's site doesn't let you access the RFPs unless you have a vendor account. Fortunately there's a Popehat reader who has one. I think he does work for the Department carting off dead bodies or catering mixed drinks to the rubber room or something; I didn't ask. Thanks to this intrepid reader, I had it — the Appendix to RFP #R0911, the Periodic Assessment Program. A delay followed, as I spent much of the weekend coughing up muppet-colored gunk. But then I read it.

And yes, contrary to my concerns, it's just about as bad as was reported.

The Appendix shows a list of topics for test questions "that would probably cause a selection to be deemed unacceptable by the New York City Department of Education." The Department explains:

In general, a topic might be unacceptable for any of the following reasons:
The topic could evoke unpleasant emotions in the students that might hamper their ability to take the remainder of the test in the optimal frame of mind.
The topic is controversial among the adult population and might not be acceptable in a state-mandated testing situation.
The topic has been ―done to death‖ in standardized tests or textbooks and is thus overly familiar and/or boring to students.
The topic will appear biased against (or toward) some group of people.

Now, it might be perfectly reasonable for the Department to avoid tests with obscene content, or content celebrating criminal activity, like the pimping-or-crack-dealing math test that the occasional "creative" teacher devises. But the Department's list of disfavored subjects is incomprehensibly broad and, in many instances, stubbornly irrational. Here it is, with the occasional comment from me:

Abuse
Alcohol (beer and liquor), tobacco, or drugs (No questions about Prohibition? No questions about colonial tobacco trade?)
Birthdays (no "Ronnie got six presents on her birthday. She gave four away.")
Bodily functions (Presumably they mean no traditionally private bodily functions. Otherwise this is going to be a very abstract test.)
Cancer (and other diseases) (Nothing about Jonas Salk. Gotcha.)
Catastrophes/disasters (tsunamis and hurricanes)
Children dealing with serious issues (Not even children dealing with a fundamentally broken educational system run by twits?)
Computers in the home (acceptable in a school or public library setting) (Really? Because — kids would feel deprived? Really?)
Creatures from outer space
Dancing (ballet is acceptable) (What. The. FUCK.)
Death and disease (So — just avoid discussing any war, then.)
Dinosaurs and prehistoric times
Divorce
Geological history
Evolution
Expensive gifts, vacations, and prizes
Gambling
Halloween
Holidays
Homes with swimming pools
In-depth discussions of sports that require prior knowledge
Junk food
Loss of employment
Movies
Nuclear weapons
Parapsychology
Politics
Pornography
Poverty
Rap music
Religion
Religious holidays
Rock-and-Roll music
Running away
Sex
Slavery
Terrorism
Vermin (rats and roaches)
Violence
War and bloodshed
Weapons (guns, knives, etc.)
Witchcraft, sorcery, etc.

But that's not all. Now that the Department has gotten a topic/word list out of its system, it's time to move on to more amorphous concepts:

Avoid anything that may be interpreted as:
Anthropomorphism (attribution of human characteristics to inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena) (Anthropomorphism is allowed in retellings of fables.)
Biased towards or against any particular form or system of government (So. Democracy? Meh. Take it or leave it.)
Dangerous for children (alone at home, swimming without adult supervision, etc.) (No children-overcoming-adversity stories.)
Demeaning to any group (Not counting, presumably, demeaning to the children taking the resulting insipid tests)
Disrespectful to authority or authority figures (no questioning authority! No American Revolution stuff, please.)
Highly controversial (Meaning, whatever the Department wants it to mean)
Middle-class amenities that may be unfamiliar to some children (Decently written tests administered in decent schools, for instance)
Regionalism
Smug, moralistic, preachy (That invades the province of the Department's administrators)
Stereotyping of any group
Stridently feminist or chauvinistic
Avoid using trade names.

In short: I'm glad that I took the time to locate and read the source document. It makes the story worse, not better. \

New Yorkers' tax dollars went to drafting this list — to sitting in rooms and coming up with lists of concepts and topics that might possibly upset someone somewhere, and thus must be avoided in the modern Wiffle School.

Tell me: do you think the time spend devising this list, and devising compliant bids, and policing bids for compliance, contributed anything positive or useful to the education of children?

Late Friday night I posted my analysis of Crystal Cox's vengeful and freakish assault on Marc Randazza. I discussed how her "oh look I registered a domain in your name, I need money, do you need reputation services" closely resembled a seemingly extortionate email she sent to a previous target of her wrath. I also pointed out the main thing you need to know to evaluate what Crystal Cox is: when she gets mad at you, she'll buy a domain in the name of your three-year-old child as part of an attack on you.

In that post, I argued that the best private response to the sort of gibbering evil Crystal Cox offers is more speech, not litigation. Marc Randazza — whose own three-year-old daughter is a target here — is taking the more-speech road. It works. For example, today David Carr at the New York Times posted a piece about Cox and her behavior, revealing that after his critical piece about her last year she launched a domain attacking him.

Some evidence suggests that this weekend Cox bought up a bunch of new domains. No doubt she'll launch new vile attacks on her growing number of critics. I registered domains in the names of my children, but who knows, maybe she found variations on my name, or my business, or my children's names that I did not anticipate (or could not reasonably afford to buy). That's what she is. That's what she does. Treat her accordingly.

Edited to add: looks like Forbes gets her, too. Note that she also started sites attacking the Forbes reporter based on his prior article on her.

Here's the most important thing you need to know about blogger and "investigative journalist" Crystal Cox: when she got angry at First Amendment attorney Marc Randazza, she didn't just register the domains marcrandazza.com and fuckmarcrandazza.com and marcrandazzasucks.com in order to attack him. She registered jenniferrandazza.com and nataliarandazza.com — the names of Randazza's wife and three-year-old daughter.

That's Crystal Cox in a nutshell — an appropriate receptacle.

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"Liberty," said Learned Hand, "lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it."

Learned Hand was quite right — if people don't support basic legal norms like freedom of expression and due process of law, no legal systems will be sufficient to enforce those norms. They will wither. But how is the appetite for liberty born in our hearts? Some choose to believe that it is an inherent aspiration of humanity. I don't think that history, ancient or recent, supports that. Rather, I think that liberty is a cultural value, carefully cultivated by example and education. Good American citizenship is characterized by fidelity to shared taught values, and a willingness to support them and teach them to others.

Like any value, liberty can also be suppressed. People — especially young people — can be taught to scorn it.

Right now, the Shawano School District is Wisconsin is teaching students to scorn free expression. The Shawano School District, through its leaders, is teaching bad American citizenship.

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Listen to me: no sensible and well-ordered society can recognize a right to be free from offense. It's unprincipled and mercurial, a celebration of the rule of subjective reaction over the rule of law. It's an open invitation to censorship-by-heckler's-veto. It chills satire, parody, sharp retorts, hard truths, and uncomfortable revelations. George Bernard Shaw says "all great truths begin as blasphemies" — so where is the room for exploration of truth in a society that lets every entitled group define its own blasphemies and demand that everyone avoid uttering them? Going to courts complaining of fee-fees is no basis for a system of government.

Why the mini-rant? It's because today, courtesy of Ophelia Benson, I learned of a loathsome example of the assertion that we all have the right not to be offended, and an illustration of how it can be used as a weapon of suppression. The Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society (ASHS) at University College London has a Facebook page, and on that page they posted a picture as part of an invitation to a party:

And you know what happened next:

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That was the title of an email I received an hour ago. OK, I added the exclamation point — the email was titled only "Felony Arrest."

Other criminal defense attorneys — indeed, perhaps most attorneys — know what comes next. Was it from a client, or potential client, alerting me to crisis requiring my assistance? No. No, it was not. It was an unsolicited email from a legal marketeer I had never heard of before — from a fairly well know referral service — who wanted me to "discuss a relationship" in which I would pay for access to his firm's list of potential clients. Here, with certain deliberate omissions and alterations, is how it went:

Ken,

I do not believe that our two firms have met.

I'd like to discuss a relationship regarding the rights to our criminal law matters in the San Diego area.

Take a look at some of our current pre-screened (for financial capability) client matters in that protected territory.

To access our database:

• go to our site, societyforcornholingunsuspectingchildren.com;

• click on attorney log-in;

• your user name is rube2012;

• your password, is sucker2012;

• all lower case

• note that the password and user name are different

• click on the "all" cases line near the top of the home page;

• expires on January 4

Of course, I do ask that you not yet contact any of the clients.

Let me know whether it looks like a potential fit.

Cordially,

Mr. Feculent Q. Pus-Crust
Society For Cornholing Unsuspecting Children
[Los Angeles address and numbers]

My new pal Feculent is right about one thing — our firms have not met. That's because my firm is a law firm, and his firm is lodged, like a partially absorbed suppository, in the legal referral industry.

A few notes:

1. As is common with solicitations form the legal referral industry, the email title is intended to deceive. They do they same thing when they call — they tell the receptionist "I'm calling with a referral of a case" or "I need to talk about a criminal case."

2. My firm does, in fact, do work throughout California. However, most of our work is in the greater Los Angeles area. Our San Diego work is a few percentage points of our practice. Trying to pitch San Diego strongly suggest that dear Feculent is working off of some sort of automated lead generator. [Note: Feculent writes an enraged email back stating that he writes each pitch by hand and does not use any automated lead generator.]

3. Note that the misleading headline and the lack of a prominent opt-out provision puts the email squarely in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act.

4. I cannot imagine doing business with someone who seeks to initiate a business relationship based on deception. Even if I thought that using a legal referral service is palatable (which I do not) or made business sense (which I do not), I would never in a million years turn to a firm like the S.F.C.U.S., which approached me with a deceitful heart and a dishonest pitch.

5. I didn't use the password to look at their "pre-screened (for financial capability)" client matters. But the mere existence of a list of such things being put on the internet and emailed to potential customers is bizarre. I assume — I hope — that the list doesn't disclose actual names. Even if it does not, what type of criminal case has (a) a client pre-screened for financial ability and (b) such a leisurely pace that it can be summarized on a web site and used for marketing purposes to attract potential lawyers to represent the client, as opposed to, I don't know, immediately connecting the criminal defendant with a lawyer to protect his or her rights?

I feel the way I do when I get body-part-enlargement spam and fortune-in-gold-in-Nigeria pitches: what sort of morons respond to this? Isn't the model, in some ways, inherently self-repudiating? Isn't any lawyer who would respond to such a pitch inherently unsuitable to represent any criminal defendant?

The Bloggess is simply hilarious. That's why I'm a fanboi.

But because she's simply hilarious, she gets huge traffic. And because she gets huge traffic, she gets huge amounts of blogspam — press release spam, let-us-advertise spam, etc. We get a little here, but nothing like that.

Part of what makes the Bloggess hilarious and awesome is that she has a lot of fun with them, as I've pointed out before.

But spammers and other forms of marketeers are, as a rule, an entitled bunch. They don't like it when people make fun of them.

That's how marketeers from a firm that is supposed to be in the business of media relations and marketing called the Bloggess a "fucking bitch" and told her, in effect, that she should be grateful to be spammed by them.

The outfit in question is called Brandlink Communications LLC. Their Twitter account describes them thusly:

BrandLink Communications. Builds brands with ROI strategies Leverages its relationships with media, influencers and talent to ensure a clients messag

The kids these days — they're in such a hurry.

Anyway, Brandlink sent the Bloggess an unsolicited PR pitch, hoping that somebody might blog about a Kardashian wearing panty hose, which they view as newsworthy. From the email:

“The Kardashian’s once again show they are right on trend, and this is on (sic) Mommy’s are all going to want to follow.”

Global illiteracy is also a trend that is widely followed, though I do not believe that it is a paying client of Brandlink Communications per se.

Anyway, the Bloggess sent her standard whimsical reply: a picture of Wil Wheaton collating paper. It means "thanks for the thing I didn't ask for; here's something you didn't ask for, albeit almost certainly a far cooler thing.

Some marketeers laugh this off, or engage in amusing banter with the Bloggess. Not this one. "Erica" of Branklink sent a snippy email threatening the Bloggess with the ULTIMATE MARKETEER SANCTION: they would stop sending the Bloggess things she didn't ask for and didn't want:

We’ll make note of this email in moving forward and remember if we have any advertising opportunities with any of our clients not to go through you.

How will the Bloggess know whether or not the Kardashians are wearing hose now?

But that wasn't all. "Jose" — would that be VP Media Director Jose Martinez? — sent a "reply all" calling the Bloggess a "fucking bitch." I haven't been to media relations school, but I'm pretty sure they don't recommend that. Perhaps the "reply all" was an accident — but it strikes me as just the sort of deliberate-accidental move you might make if you are a passive-aggressive douche who spams people about Kardashians for a living.

The Bloggess responded with an unusually serious email about how she fights PR spam. "Jose" replied. "Jose's" reply is why I am writing about this — not because of the "fucking bitch" reply-all, which could be Jose having a bad day. "Jose's" reply shows him swollen with typical marketeer/spammer entitlement, including the following:

I get it and I was out of line by saying that however you put way too much effort into your approach. A simple "I don't cover this, no thanks" or "Please remove" would suffice. To go out of your way to be snarky and rude is a little inappropriate. Again, I should've been less harsh – but I also feel like your email was rude and unprofessional as well. We will do a better job to research who we are pitching but maybe you should be flattered that you are even viewed relevant enough to be pitched at all instead of alienated PR firms and PR people – who are actually the livelihood of any journalists business.

Jose is freakishly entitled: he thinks people should be grateful to get his spam, and that people should, out of courtesy, simply politely decline or ask to be removed from the mailing list. Jose sees himself as participant in a polite conversation, not as the equivalent of a stranger deluging you with unwelcome, over-capitalized and oddly spelled screeds telling you how you can make your dick bigger. Jose is wrong. Jose is a classic loser in high-tech form: someone who makes his money sending insipid spam emails about uninteresting things done by vapid people to masses of people, 99.9% of whom don't care and the other .1% of which only care because they are stupid.

Jose's attitude is typical of his ilk. Remember when we made fun of SEO spammer Jamie Spottz, and he showed up in the commends to tell us we should be grateful like his other clients? Remember Spara Townson, the the marketeer who thinks that the comments to other people's blogs are fair game for her shitty little advertisements? Remember serial spammer Bradley Johnson, who inspired a different marketeer to show up and call us assholes for not just deleting comment spam meekly and moving on? Spammers and other marketeers are entitled. I suspect they feel so entitled because they secretly know what they do is so loathsome. They don't just feel entitled, under the First Amendment, to spam you — they feel entitled to be free of criticism and ridicule for doing it.

But they are not. People like this aren't entitled to such polite deference. They aren't entitled to the expectation that you will simply delete the email or unsubscribe, that you will refrain from telling them what you think of them if it amuses you. They are unwelcome intruders, annoying ten thousand people to get one sale. Fuck 'em. Keep up the good work, Bloggess.

Also, on a pure marketing level — if you were the manager for a celebrity, or an event, or a product brand, and were shopping for a public relations and marketing firm, wouldn't you want to know that this is what the people at Brandlink Communications think is good marketing?

Edited to add: On Twitter, Jose is saying that he was "defending" Wil Wheaton. That's his story. That's his crisis management. He gets paid to do that.

Edited again to add: Consider this post by a PR blogger to demonstrate that not all PR people support spamming — though from the comments to that post, you can see that other PR people still think that there's something wrong with calling spammers out. In a similar vein, consider Scott's encounters with PR entitlement syndrome here and here.

Also, Brandlink's Facebook page now says this:

Earlier in the evening I wrote an email to the Bloggess. She was the wronged party and it is up to her to decide if she wants to post the contents of my email. An apology was included, as were my thoughts on profanity and spamming. A mistake was made, but we will respect the privacy of those involved and deal with it, and the consequences, internally. I have chosen not to remove or block the posts. I do ask that you refrain from obscenities as it wasn't right today, and it isn't necessary now. I hope you will continue to follow us and that we will have the opportunity to earn the respect of those of you who were introduced to us through this situation. Sincerely, Carol Bell- Partner

That's somewhat better. Though "mistake was made" made me guffaw.

Fear not, America: in a world where so many wish you ill, the Transportation Security Administration is still vigilant against your greatest foe: Americans who have survived cancer.

Via Letters to my Country and Amy Alkon (who, you might recall, had her own recent run-in with the TSA), I encountered this rage-inducing story by Lori Dorn:

Yesterday I went through the imaging scanner at JFK Terminal 4 for my Virgin America flight to San Francisco. Evidently they found something, because after the scan, I was asked to step aside to have my breast area examined. I explained to the agent that I was a breast cancer patient and had a bilateral mastectomy in April and had tissue expanders put in to make way for reconstruction at a later date.

I told her that I was not comfortable with having my breasts touched and that I had a card in my wallet that explains the type of expanders, serial numbers and my doctor’s information (pictured) and asked to retrieve it. This request was denied. Instead, she called over a female supervisor who told me the exam had to take place. I was again told that I could not retrieve the card and needed to submit to a physical exam in order to be cleared. She then said, “And if we don’t clear you, you don’t fly” loud enough for other passengers to hear. And they did. And they stared at the bald woman being yelled at by a TSA Supervisor.

I'm sure the TSA will explain why it was necessary to grope a cancer patient in public, just as soon as their official blogger finishes bragging about how the TSA's explosive detection technology helps them interdict smuggled fish.

This is, by far, not the first time we've heard that the TSA acts in an inhuman fashion to people with illnesses and disabilities. We've seen wanton treatment of people with urostomy and colostomy bags, the sick torment of the mentally disabled, and the demands that cancer survivors remove prosthetic breasts. Throughout, for the most part, the media remains the TSA's compliant fluffers. So, though what happened to Lori Dorn is sick and infuriating, it is not new.

One of the questions I've been asking here is why do we let this happen? But there's another apt question: these TSA agents are human beings, of a sort, so why do they act this way? Is there something about recruiting on pizza boxes that attracts a statistically unlikely cluster of sociopaths?

I think the answer is an old one and a simple one, congruent with one of the main themes seen on this blog: power corrupts. If you confer upon a man or woman the power to inflict tyrannies and indignities upon his or her fellow citizens, he or she will slowly grow to hate those fellow citizens, feel justified in mistreating them, and increasingly inflict the indignities with aggression and contempt.

Stanford University has offered two very apt studies, one old and one new. First, there's Philip Zimbardo's chilling and classic prison experiment, which illustrated how ordinary college students — people who on a more typical day would be thinking about weed and sex and avoiding work, people who were probably more countercultural than authoritarian — were transformed by being given even temporary power over others as mock prison guards. And now, more recently, a joint study by Stanford, USC, and Northwestern shows how petty power corrupts:

In a new study, researchers at USC, Stanford Graduate School of Business, and the Kellogg School of Management have found that individuals in roles that possess power but lack status have a tendency to engage in activities that demean others. According to the study, "The Destructive Nature of Power Without Status," the combination of some authority and little perceived status can be a toxic combination.

The research, forthcoming in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, is "based on the notions that (a) low status is threatening and aversive, and (b) power frees people to act on their internal states and feelings."

(Thanks to Greg Lukianoff for the pointer to that study.)

This study could have been written explicitly about the TSA. TSA agents are poorly paid, work in nasty conditions, and have little status. Yet they have, within their petty fiefdoms, tremendous power to humiliate and demean. And God, do they ever use it.

The fact that this is a recognized psychological phenomenon explains, but does not excuse, any more than it excuses police abuse and bureaucratic indifference. Nor does it excuse the leaders of the TSA and the Department of Homeland security, who have decreed a feckless facade of security theater that is calculated to lead to this result, all in the name of promoting unquestioning compliance.

What are you going to do? Are you going to retell these stories on social media and forums and blogs? Are you going to make it clear, when asked, that you don't accept the security state's excuses at face value? Are you going to write your representatives?

Are you going to stand up? Or is it really no big deal that a petty authority groped and humiliated a cancer survivor in public, purportedly for your safety?

Blogger JJ seems to think so. [Edited to add: JJ has now sent the original post down the memory-hole and posted a much shorter and less emo post. Fortunately I have some quotes below]

See, though JJ assures us that he is not a "law-suit [sic] kind of guy", he believes he has a strong case against overpriced-coffee-and-muffin-behemoth-and-hipster-hangout Starbucks:

Do I want to file a law-suit against the company for discrimination and emotional distress? Absolutely not, although I know I would have a case for that.

My God, my God. What did Starbucks do? Did they refuse to serve him because of his race? Did they scream obscenities at him because of his religion, thus humiliating him? Did they disclose his ludicrously convoluted coffee order to the world for everybody's amusement?

Nope. They asked him to order more product, or move on, after he sat and worked for three hours. [Edit: again, note that he has now changed the post.]

This morning, like yesterday morning and many other mornings, I woke up and felt that need to be around people. I arrived at Starbucks at approximately 9:30 am. Like many other mornings, I stood in line, ordered my toasted bagel with cream cheese along with a grande, bold coffee in a venti cup. My total came in at just under $5. After I received my order in a very timely manner, I found an open seat, began eating and continued my work from earlier that morning. After playing a bit of musical chairs, I finally ended up on a cushioned bench near an electrical outlet. As always, I was minding my business and being productive. At about 12:00 pm (less than 3 hours after my arrival), a man in a button down approached me and politely asked, “What brings you into Starbucks today?”. I glanced up from the work I was doing and replied, “Just here to get some work done”. Here is where the story takes a sharp left. I was expecting his next sentence to be something along the lines of ”How has your experience been in our store today?” or “Would you mind filling out a feedback form?”. My prediction was off…WAY off. He stated, “Okay well we like to reserve our seating for those who are enjoying our beverages”. Go ahead and let that simmer. Being completely caught off-guard, I looked at the store employee who was cowering behind him and I said, “I had breakfast and coffee this morning”. He reiterated, “Yes, but we would like to reserve our seating for those who are enjoying one of our beverages. Would you like another beverage?”. I replied, “No, I’m not quite ready for another one yet”. He, again, repeated his previous 2 statements. At this point, he’s literally standing over me waiting for me to either say “Okay I would like something else” or “No thanks, I’ll leave”

Read the whole thing, to get more flavor.

JJ thinks that he has been discriminated against, in a way that gives him a cause of action against Starbucks. It's not clear what JJ means by "discrimination", which normally requires an invidious distinction — JJ implies, without saying, that Starbucks might have it out for laptop users. So far as I know, pertinent discrimination laws do not identify laptop-users as a traditionally despised class. JJ also thinks that Starbucks has inflicted emotional harm against him in a way that gives him a cause of action against Starbucks — even if this man-child with his lap-top is not in favor of law-suits and therefore will not file one at the court-house. JJ may or may not know that the tort of infliction of emotional distress generally requires extreme and outrageous conduct beyond the bounds of decent society, though somehow I suspect if he knows that it would not be a deterrent. JJ thinks that Starbucks has an obligation to let people buy $5 worth of product and then use their space as an office or hangout for more than three hours, and an obligation not to embarrass anyone who takes advantage of this obligation.

JJ deserves congratulations for not filing suit. People who have profoundly disordered senses of entitlement often do. JJ is taking the approach that Americans ought to take — writing about his discontents and, one hopes, voting with his feet and going to some other coffee shop that will cheerfully serve as a substitute for his mother's basement.

But in JJ's yawp is the seed of everything that is weak and soft and pampered and needy about us — the feeling that everyone else ought to be in the business of coddling us.

JJ might not sue Starbucks. But as he wanders through life with this set of expectations, chances seem high that he will sue somebody, sometime, for not indulging him. If he files pro se, I hope that he somehow comes up with a better grasp of the law than he has right now. If not, maybe we can recommend a lawyer.

Via.

By the way, if this is performance art or satire by JJ, then bra-fucking-vo.

A person I have mentioned in this "Anatomy of a Scam" series claims that her family is being harassed as a result of it. She claims increased car traffic near her house, and believes that this traffic represents harassment. She reports harassing phone calls, including someone posing as a police officer, whose number came back to a computer shop in Laguna.

Frankly, I'm not inclined to believe anything this person says without hard proof, in light of what I've seen in the course of the investigation. I specifically doubt this claim.

But if it happened, such harassment is absolutely unacceptable to me. I said that already, and I meant it. If you make harassing calls or drive-bys or any other form of harassing contact, you are part of the problem. You are my foe, and a foe of the detection, investigation, and exposure of fraud. Don't do it. The proper remedy for fraud like that exposed in this series is reports to the authorities, and publicity designed to expose and deter it.

I will cooperate with any law enforcement inquiries into any actual harassment. I am not legally obligated to do so, or even to post this notice. But I will. Ask yourself: based on this series, what is Ken likely to do to me if I use the information in his posts to behave badly?

I'm asking this person for the number of the computer store that was allegedly the source of the harassing call. If I get it, I will investigate accordingly. Both telephone harassment and posing as law enforcement are crimes in California. Conduct yourselves accordingly.

As we've discussed many times before, our friends in Canada have a government with very strong opinions about what opinions are "acceptable" — meaning what opinions may be uttered without prosecution, fines, cease-and-desist orders, and reeducation. It's not to American tastes to create vast bureaucracies with the power to regulate and punish speech based on vague guidelines, but Canada is a sovereign nation, and can do what it wants.

Pity poor Professor Cameron Johnston at York University. He was just trying to make this fundamentally Canadian concept clear to the students in the class he was teaching by giving examples of unacceptable opinions. Really, reminding them that some opinions are unacceptable was, in the Canadian context, an act of great patriotism, akin to starting an American lecture with the Pledge of Allegiance and possibly a barbecue. In the course of being so very Canadian, Prof. Johnston mentioned that the sentiment "all Jews should be sterilized" was "unacceptable."

Regrettably, Professor Johnston doesn't get it.

See, it doesn't matter that he uttered the words in a context — the context of identifying the sort of opinions that are unacceptable to Canada. He still uttered them.

By uttering the words, Prof. Johnston committed speechcrime. That's a strict liability crime; intent is irrelevant. Moreover, in thinking that he could utter a series of offensive words by putting them into a specific disapproving and pedagogical context, Prof. Johnston committed a hate crime against the Moron-Canadian community, which is too stupid to grasp context, and the Entitled-Canadian community, which believes that it is un-Canadian to require them to pay close enough attention to follow context. Prof. Johnston knew or should have known that his class of 450 people would include members of the Moron-Canadian and Entitled-Canadian community.

And indeed it did — in the form of Sarah Grunfeld, a member of the Moron-Insipid-Entitled-Canadian community. Sarah Grunfeld was outraged to hear, sort of, that her professor thought that all Jews should be sterilized, and started quite a stir, complaining to York University officials and various community members. Tumult and inquisition ensued. The Canadian media acted in an appallingly un-Canadian manner, focusing on the so-called "context" of Professor Johnson's words and the utterly irrelevant detail that he was Jewish. Grunfeld, raised by her actions into a position of leadership in the Entitled-, Insipid-, and Moron-Canadian communities, did her best to set them back on the path of right thinking:

Grunfeld said Tuesday she may have misunderstood the context and intent of Johnston’s remarks, but that fact is insignificant.

“The words, ‘Jews should be sterilized’ still came out of his mouth, so regardless of the context I still think that’s pretty serious.”

Grunfeld also expressed skepticism that Johnston was in fact Jewish.

Asked directly by a reporter whether she believes Johnston is lying, she was unclear.

“Whether he is or is not, no one will know,” she said. “. . . Maybe he thought because he is Jewish he can talk smack about other Jews.”

Grunfeld demonstrates that with proper accommodation, Moron-Canadian students are able to learn the most important lessons that modern universities offer, such as the lesson that there is no objective reality. Is the person-object-construct we call "Professor Johnston" Jewish? What a childish question, reflecting a retrograde, linear belief system. Whatever "Professor Johnson" or other social constructs like "The Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs" might say, whether the "Johnston" person-object is "Jewish" depends on the shifting perceptions of people like Grunfeld and on advanced scholarship by deep thinkers.

Shockingly, some Jews in Canada are contributing to the continuing wordcrime, failing to cherish Canadian values:

In response, Sheldon Goodman, the GTA Co-Chair of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs issued the following statement:

“Upon hearing of this incident, we immediately contacted York University as well as Professor Johnston directly. While York is currently looking into the matter, it appears that a very unfortunate misunderstanding has taken place. We believe Professor Johnston’s use of an abhorrent statement was intended to demonstrate that some opinions are simply not legitimate. This point was, without ill intentions, taken out of context and circulated in the Jewish community.

“Professor Johnston, himself a member of the Jewish community, may regret his wording but should not see his reputation tarnished. This event is an appropriate reminder that great caution must be exercised before concluding a statement or action is anti-Semitic.”

Sheldon "Goodman" doesn't get it. He's focused on "context." He's using "logic" and "inquiry." He might as well come right out and label Sarah Grunfeld and all the members of her dull-witted inattentive community as second-class citizens. Fortunately there are other Jewish-Canadians who are better assimilated into Canadian values. B'nai Brith of Canada, which has a record of supporting Canadian values about speech, is fully supporting the Moron-Canadian community by running Sarah Grunfeld's statement in full. In that statement, she speaks out bravely against all the bigots who wrongfully demanded her to absorb hate-concepts like context, comprehension, and caution:

I stand by my initial concern brought to the University’s attention immediately after the incident that when Professor Cameron Johnston made the abhorrent statement in his class that all Jews should be sterilized, he failed to qualify the statement clearly as an unacceptable opinion held by others. His delivery of this statement, made in a class of 450 impressionable students, was offensive to me and to others in the room.

I have since been grossly misquoted and ridiculed by the media, and attempts have been made to assign blame to me with the false claim that I simply “misheard” or “half heard” what was said. Meanwhile, the professor has not been called to account in any way for his “miscommunication”.

But Sarah's not done. Showing great insight far beyond her years and apparent natural abilities, she identifies what the real crime is here: that people — people like her — will be deterred from making careless, stupid accusations of racism if those accusations are actually subjected to scrutiny, and if the accusers are burdened with hateful responsibility for paying attention to what's going on around them:

It has been a very painful experience for me to see how the university has closed ranks and reneged on its assurances to me. I understand that there may have been a miscommunication, but any miscommunication was on the part of the professor, not me. The media has been complicit in allowing a false interpretation of my actions to be circulated widely, which can only have a chilling effect on the ability of students to have any kind of a voice on campus.

Well said. There ought to be a government inquiry — perhaps by Jennifer Lynch — into whether universities and the media are chilling stupid people from being stupid.

Meanwhile, if Sarah Grunfeld feels that Canada is a cold and barren place that refuses to celebrate her differences, she should consider coming here to America. Sure, we don't have Human Rights Councils like Canada. But there are signs that our universities and their administrators are coming around to Sarah's way of "thinking," and doing what they can to protect the moron community. At Brandeis University, Professor Donald Hindley uttered the word "wetback" in the course of criticizing people who use it; the 50-year teaching veteran was found guilty of racial harassment and forced to admit an ideology-monitor to his class. At Widener University School of Law, administrators are defying a hearing panel that cleared professor Lawrence Connell, and insisting that he be punished for using the term "black folks" in class and using the name of an administrator in an exam hypothetical.

And surely I need not offer you links to establish that modern America is, in fact, very welcoming to morons.

Come on down, Sarah. You've got lots of friends here.