Thursday, August 01, 2013

SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO PLAY THE ODDS.

Michele Catalano was once upon a time a stalwart warblogger (the precursors to rightbloggers), sworn to the War on Whatchamacallit and denouncing those of us who weren't as keen on it as traitors. Sample:
I get more and more discouraged, more upset at the tone the AWC [anti-war crowd] has taken. I will not this time apologize for calling them traitors. I will not back down from those words. When you support an insurgency against your country's soldiers, when you declare that you are in bed in with the enemy, then you are a traitor. And you should be treated as such. I wish that every vet who has returned home from Iraq would see those signs and act upon them.
And there's plenty more where that came from.

Flash forward to 2013, and here's Catalano's new thing: The goddamn Gummint is after her because quinoa!
Most of it was innocent enough. I had researched pressure cookers. My husband was looking for a backpack. And maybe in another time those two things together would have seemed innocuous, but we are in “these times” now...
NSA is the new MSM! What Catalano described as "six agents from the joint terrorism task force" paid her husband a call: "three black SUVs in front of our house; two at the curb in front and one pulled up behind my husband’s Jeep in the driveway, as if to block him from leaving. Six gentleman in casual clothes emerged from the vehicles and spread out as they walked toward the house..." Panic in Suffolk County! "All I know is if I’m going to buy a pressure cooker in the near future, I’m not doing it online. I’m scared. And not of the right things."

She even got this tale of woe in the Guardian. The usual suspects cried havoc: "A woman on Long Island says that her family was visited by authorities yesterday because of their Internet search history!" flashed National Review; "Yes, the federal government knows what you search for on Google," hand-wrung Reason.

But I knew her work, and waited.

Eventually, from TechCrunch:
Catalano asserts that the visit was likely prompted by her husband searching for the term “backpacks” in close conjunction with her searching for the term “pressure cookers” and her son reading the news. Or something. 
Turns out the visit was prompted by the searches, but not in the way most speculation asserted – by a law enforcement-initiated, NSA-enabled dragnet of the couple’s web history. It turns out either Catalano or her husband were conducting these searches from a work computer. And that employer, “a Bay Shore based computer company,” called the police on their former employee...
Actually TechCrunch is being kind (or something) -- the Suffolk County Police bulletin they worked from described his search terms as "pressure cooker bombs" and "backpacks." Now, I don't approve employers flipping out over stuff like that, even if their subject is married to an obvious nutcake like Catalano. But it's a far cry from the Federales doing a Google-enabled home-invasion, and it's a bit rich to hear such accusations coming from someone who once wrote, "It makes me angry to see how many people react with glee when something goes wrong with Homeland Security. These people who are wishing and hoping for Bush to fail are, in essence, wishing and hoping for another terrorist attack. Sick."

This would be a useful thing to remember the next time you hear wingnuts working their new "libertarian populism" schtick and denouncing the national security state that 10 years ago they all huddled against for electoral warmth. Or whenever you read anything by Andrew Sullivan.

In other words: If you know they're full of shit, when you squeeze 'em don't expect rosewater.

UPDATE. I should point out that many of the outlets that credulously carried the story have since updated to reveal the con, except people like Mollie Hemingway, for obvious reasons. Oh, and Catalano updated too:
The piece I wrote was the story as we knew it with the information we were told. None of it was fabricated. If you know me, you know I would never do that.
I was tempted to ask, how many times does that work? But then I realized there'll always be a whole lot of people who never catch on.

UPDATE 2. At the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger talks about "Obama's Creeping Authoritarianism." Please see above.

UPDATE 3. Commenter Donald G. points out that Catalano eventually came out against the war -- and so she did, in March of 2013. Here's a bit of her day-late-and-dollar-short:
There were others out there like me. I talked to them at work. I talked to them in the school parking lot while we waited for our kids. I talked to them over email or instant message, people from across the country who had that twinge of regret. What we all had in common was this: we felt used. We felt taken advantage of. We felt manipulated. And we were admitting we were wrong.
So let history record that starting in 2003 America went to war on Michele Catalano's self-esteem. Key bonus line:
Not that I would have voted for Kerry.
Maybe she can start a support group with Andrew Sullivan.

UPDATE 4. Ain't it the truth: "This story would have had entirely different vectors and volume of skree," says commenter mortimer, "had she written, 'My husband, Hakim, who was Googling "pressure cooker bombs"...' I miss Annie Jacobsen."

79 comments:

  1. Fred over at Slacktivist likes to tell the parable of Bad Jackie. Bad Jackie hears that something horrible has happened. Then a friend points out, no that's just an urban legend, it never really happened.

    If a sane person hears that, no, the next door neighbor did not actually rape 27 babies, they would be happy and relieved. Bad Jackie gets angry and insists even more that it really truly happened. Indeed, it is central to my point.



    How many Bad Jackies should we expect to see in the next week or two responding to this "story"?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mike McCarthy11:34 PM

    Well if the retraction hadn't come so fast the story would have gotten play on Fox soon. Then there would be millions of Bad Jackies forever.

    ReplyDelete
  3. DocAmazing11:56 PM

    It takes a very special brand of chutzpah to complain about the security state one demanded come into being. That she managed to trigger a visit from the heat by doing stupid things on her boss' computers is merely typical wingnut dipshittery.

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  4. Caroline Abbott12:02 AM

    Catalano wrote, "They mentioned that they do this about 100 times a week. And that 99 of those visits turn out to be nothing."
    Does she mean that the six man/three vehicle team conducted those searches? Twenty per day (assuming a five-day work week)? Or that there are other teams in the area sharing the duties? That would be an impressive resource allocation.

    Really, the story reminds me of things my kids told me when they were five years old and wanted to puff the importance of their experiences.

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  5. JennOfArk12:10 AM

    Indeed.
    It's the digital equivalent of "Hey Cletus, check this out!"

    ReplyDelete
  6. Jay B.12:21 AM

    Total information awareness is exactly like the conservative movement except for three words.

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  7. FlipYrWhig12:43 AM

    Before you pin this on wingnut credulity, note too that this story ricocheted around Kos and the Kos-curious all day too.

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  8. Yeah, and the partial retraction hasn't made much difference to some people I know. They don't want to be bothered with little details like the difference between the feds wiretapping everything and a business owner calling the local cop shop; bringing up such things makes one a crypto-authoritarian party pooper. There's an attitude of "Well, even if it doesn't directly illustrate my point, it's in the same ballpark and it really makes you think, doesn't it?" But to me that's like saying "Sure, it turns out that the burglars came in through my front door which I always leave open, rather than through my garage, but the point is there are thieves about— so I'd better throw a couple more locks on my garage."

    The only place I've seen that approached this in a not entirely embarrassing way from the start was The Atlantic, which actually did some fucking reporting to follow up with the various cops, etc., rather than just taking every word of Catalano's piece as gospel. But look how even someone as smart as Digby summed up their ongoing reporting: "The reporter got a massive runaround from the FBI and the dozens of
    police agencies involved in the Joint Terrorism Task Force about this,
    none of them copping to how this happened."
    Digby, what the hell? There's nothing in there about dozens of agencies. There was an early quote from the FBI, saying it was Nassau County and Suffolk County cops. The FBI said "it wasn't us," and the Nassau cops said "it wasn't us." So if you take a couple seconds to think through that "massive runaround," you might conclude that it was... the Suffolk cops. Which it was.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Boy, it's just one long circle of crying wolf, punching hippies, drunken logic, sneering, and butthurt with this crowd.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Slacktivist is a great blog, and that one's a classic.

    ReplyDelete
  11. whetstone3:11 AM

    All I know is no fuzz has ever tracked me down for searching for "crock pot."

    ReplyDelete
  12. Donald G3:40 AM

    While you hammer Catalano for her highly vocal support for the war during the Bush administration, as of last March, she how appears to castigate herself as six kinds of a fool for her support for that war and her acts of hippie punching. See: https://medium.com/something-like-falling/f05a8010fac0

    Pull quote from her piece:


    "All those protesters I made fun of? All those hippies with their 'No blood for oil” placards I laughed at?They were right.

    They were right.

    Blood for oil.'

    ReplyDelete
  13. hominhtrang4:15 AM

    I never bet because when I bet I always fail.

    kiem tien tren mang truc tuyen online

    ReplyDelete
  14. Jon Hendry4:47 AM

    "Now, I don't approve employers flipping out over stuff like that, even if their subject is married to an obvious nutcake like Catalano."


    I'll cut the employer some slack if it's something they found on a recently-departed employee's work computer. There are too many cases where ex-employees get violent.


    (So long as there isn't a full-on SWAT team raid as a result, with people terrorized and dogs shot.)

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  15. montag26:25 AM

    Y'know, I'm thinking back to that series of people early in the last decade who were turned in by fearful neighbors for, gasp, having a "bad" poster of Bush or an unflattering piece of art of Bush as war criminal (thus proving that art does not imitate life), whereupon the entire warblogger crowd wanted them to suffer something from incarceration to summary execution. There was no indignation over an intrusive surveillance state then.


    Of course, the two primary lessons in this business were lost on them that, a) it doesn't make a fucking bit of difference which party the President belongs to when he's ordered the spies to go full bull-goose loony on you and, b) the improper response is a two-minute hate, and the proper response is, "fuck, that could be me."


    Having not learned the first lesson (since they believe that all this was magically put into motion by the Kenyan Muslim Communist Usurper), they were therefore not inclined to remember the second.



    Lost in all this, too, is the concept that corporations today (well, those that aren't banks, anyway) are more risk-averse than agoraphobics and that corporations are not democratic institutions serving the interests of free inquiry and individual rights, despite what saintly qualities rabid free-marketeers ascribe to them.



    The lesson to be learned from the McCarthy years was not that McCarthy was right because there turned out to be a few Soviet spies in the government, it was that McCarthy turned a few into a few hundred, and given time, would have turned a few hundred into a few thousand, or a few million, that his alcohol-pickled brain saw enemies everywhere, that paranoia, whether individual or institutional, leads to a disintegration of discrimination.


    Now, a curious thing--most sane people who'd been paying attention could understand this and see all this coming twelve years ago, but the Michele Catalanos out there did not, and treated those who did as if they were dangerously unpatriotic. And now that she's gotten the treatment, she's surprised and indignant.


    Sorry, but I find that mordantly hilarious.

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  16. Marcia Kazmierczak6:40 AM

    Glad to see Fred getting a mention. He's a fine thinker and writer.

    ReplyDelete
  17. coozledad7:21 AM

    It's really going to get nasty after someone packs some c-4 into a big rubber dick. Half the freshman Republicans will be in their back yards trying to burn their hard drives.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Pope Zebbidie XIII8:06 AM

    She's still convinced precisely where she is is the correct spot (the triangulated centrist weaselling zone). No matter how disastrously wrong she was and how much her judgement has proven faulty, she will continue to obstinately misread the world.

    ReplyDelete
  19. There also exists a crowd that used to be against the USA PATRIOT Act, but is now certain that Manning and Snowden are traitors.
    ~

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  20. Derelict8:12 AM

    Conservatives really and truly love the deeply authoritarian state in all its forms--at least until they discover that they, too, have to live under that authoritarianism.

    ReplyDelete
  21. redoubt8:18 AM

    Oh, cosign. (What did she think would happen?) The Enabling Act USA Patriot Act is a toolbox. The tool might be gone, but the toolbox remains, and the toolbox will be used by this President, and the next, and the next, until and unless Congress repeals it. (Which won't happen; more tools.)

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  22. Glenn Beckeestan8:22 AM

    The Million Bad Jackies March is scheduled for the National Mall next month.

    ReplyDelete
  23. Jaime Oria8:59 AM

    The (Pandora's) toolbox remains, indeed. Another example is the armed drone so many across the political spectrum fret over. After the cruise missile strike against bin Laden's training camps - launched in response to the embassy bombings in Africa - missed killing him by IIRC less than an hour, folks in the Pentagon wondered if a Predator could be armed in some way (they'd already been used for surveillance in the Balkans). The idea was to close the gap between searching for someone like bin Laden, spotting him, then launching an attack.



    So the first Hellfire missile was hung on a drone back when Clinton was still president. And there's no way a military technology like that, once proven, stays strictly a one-off. Check out the book THE WAY OF THE KNIFE by Mark Mazzetti.

    ReplyDelete
  24. glennisw9:05 AM

    None of it was fabricated. If you know me, you know I would never do that.


    Hahhahahahahha!

    ReplyDelete
  25. Dr. Hunky Jimpjorps9:09 AM

    Well, it's at least consistent, isn't it? Those kind of people are for change within the system, and they see people like Manning and Snowden as throwing a branch in the spokes.

    ReplyDelete
  26. Leeds man9:19 AM

    "I’m scared. And not of the right things."


    Half the battle is knowing you have to be scared of something.

    ReplyDelete
  27. John E Williams9:36 AM

    A few months ago in these here comments I brought up Michele's Great Recant, and I took a bit of heat from some of the gang for castigating her -- after all, as Donald G. points out, she DID say she was wrong, and can't we just cut her some slack? But now perhaps I'm the one who should get some o' that sweet slack. Michele Catalano wasn't used or manipulated by anybody for anything for one second, unless you count herself. Back then, there was never a single word of doubt in any of her blog posts, not a scintilla of dissent, not a crumb of self-examination. And again and again she castigated anyone who disagreed with her, literally claiming 9/11 as a personal tragedy and denying grief over it to anyone who wasn't 100% on board with George Bush. She fantasized about The Troops returning home and taking care of the protestors. She never apologized for any of it and has to exhibit even the slightest understanding or regret for taking that particular stand, but sure has done a great job of making herself the tragic victim hero. "Manipulated and used." Fuck you.

    Michele is an idiot, but she's not stupid. She saw dollar signs and fame the minute the cops showed up on her doorstep.

    ReplyDelete
  28. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard9:54 AM

    A million things went through my husband’s head. None of which were right bullets.


    Fixed to reflect that even terror suspects are the recipients of white privilege.

    ReplyDelete
  29. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard9:58 AM

    Well, just because the wingnuts created this world, doesn't mean that they should have to live in it. That kind of thing is for those people.

    ReplyDelete
  30. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard10:13 AM

    "Out of my hot. lubed ass!"

    ReplyDelete
  31. DocAmazing10:14 AM

    As of last March.


    Unimpressed.

    ReplyDelete
  32. Mr. Wonderful10:15 AM

    "...but just because we were wrong doesn't mean that those who disagreed with us at the time--i.e., the ones who were right--were right. We were right to be wrong, and they were wrong to be right, which means, really, that we're still right, and they're still wrong. Actually we're MORE right, because we have the courage to admit we were wrong. They're cowards, because they're unwilling to change, even if they were right which, when think about it, they weren't. Is that my Depakote? I thought it was supposed to be pink."

    ReplyDelete
  33. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard10:15 AM

    "Fear is the mind killer."

    ReplyDelete
  34. DocAmazing10:18 AM

    I'm unimpressed by people who will make excuses for a police state, as long as the cops are unionized.

    ReplyDelete
  35. No, I wouldn't say that.


    It's not a matter of "change within the system", it's merely a matter of what President is in charge of the system.


    How would a secret spying system that is now bipartisan get changed, without the actions of people like Manning and Snowden? We would know almost nothing about it. We certainly wouldn't be talking about it.
    ~

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  36. Shorter: "I was wrong, but hippies were wrongerer *and* I would still vote for *exactly* the same people that gave us the war, the police state, the drones, and the blood, lots of the blood". Nice work if you can get it.

    ReplyDelete
  37. No, don't you understand, the War on Terror isn't supposed to inconvenience white people! The moment it does, it transforms from a just and noble fight for America's freedom to the worst kind of big-government tyranny.

    ReplyDelete
  38. Let's just hope more than ten people show up, or it'll just be embarrassing.

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  39. His brilliance combined with an unflagging compassion makes him one of my favorite bloggers.

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  40. Mr. Wonderful10:30 AM

    OT, but someone on Wonkette made the brilliant observation that "Garance Franke-Ruta" surely must have stolen her name from a character in Dune.

    ReplyDelete
  41. If they conduct 100 searches a week and only 1 turns out to have been justified, that's exactly in line with the conservative policy which she consistently voted for: "If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response." So said Dick Cheney.

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  42. It is through will alone she sets her mind in motion.

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  43. I laughed out loud (well, almost) at that sentence. "I'm supposed to be scared of brown people and Muslims, not my own government!"

    ReplyDelete
  44. mortimer10:47 AM

    This story would have had entirely different vectors and volume of skree had she written, "My husband, Hakim, who was Googling 'pressure cooker bombs'..."

    I miss Annie Jacobsen.

    (BTW -- From what I can tell, there ain't a whole lot of updatin' or retractions going on out there. The NY Daily News still has the original, and some of the usual winger suspects are sticking with it... A couple had added "conservative blogger" to the reasons for gummint harassment.)

    ReplyDelete
  45. sharculese11:23 AM

    I believe the great contemporary philosopher Muntz had some appropriate words for this situation.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7Tm0SQT7N4

    ReplyDelete
  46. Mooser12:13 PM

    "If they conduct 100 searches a week and only 1 turns out to have been justified"
    Justified? They must mean the ones where the person, after searching, actually bought a pressure cooker or a backpack.

    ReplyDelete
  47. tigrismus1:20 PM

    They might track you down if you searched for "crock pot bomb," though maybe only to laugh.

    ReplyDelete
  48. sharculese1:21 PM

    Read this at first as 'crotch pot bomb' which is probably not a problem use should try to solve using google.

    ReplyDelete
  49. witlesschum1:38 PM

    Catalano was also a virulently anti-teacher's union government employee in her warblogging days. Good taste in music, though. I remember reading A Small Victory for the music and skipping over the stupid crap.

    Despite her being an asshole and hanging on her own petard, (if ladies have a petard?) it's still a shame when shit like this goes down. Illinois Nazis, Ben Franklin quotes, etc.

    Annie Jacobsen reminds me that conservatives are not evil geniuses. When you're nodding you're head to "Oh, totally. Let's invade an essentially random Middle Eastern country when we're allegedly trying to convince people not to listen to the man with the long beard who says we're out to kill all Muslims," you'll believe anything and do. Her tale of Syrian musicians was total assery and anyone who took it seriously was ridiculous.

    Happily, there is an upside to the continued existence of easily-gulled terror junkies. This guy is making a good living bilking them out of speakers' fees.

    http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/16/1132652/--Ex-Terrorist-Kamal-Saleem-Cons-the-Conservatives#

    ReplyDelete
  50. sharculese2:29 PM

    (if ladies have a petard?)


    History facts!: A petard was a Renaissance-era siege weapon, basically a little bomb you used to bust holes in fortifications. It was set manually, and then you had to basically run away from the blast as fast as you could. Now of course, it wasn't the most reliable technology, and if it detonated too soon the blast pattern meant the dude was tossed into the air, literally 'hoisted by his own petard.'

    ReplyDelete
  51. catclub3:51 PM

    crotch rocket. Explosive manhood. Flesh cannon.

    ReplyDelete
  52. Gromet4:25 PM

    Do these people ever find it exhausting, having no foresight and getting angry about things that didn't actually happen?


    Related: Anyone else ever have a conversation with anyone who is stoutly for war -- Vietnam, Iraq, any war -- because even though they're kind of actually against the war, it's inconceivable to oppose the government and its noble deciders? While at the same time they're busy staking out anti-government positions on taxes, the safety net, and civil rights, and decrying 90% of elected officials as lying, amoral cretins in the pocket of Wall Street?


    I've had these conversations. One actually ended with the person endorsing a return to the barter system. Sure, you pay the hospital for your MRI with all the farm animals you don't have. I'll be over here in Real 2013, using evidence and sense to make decisions. Oh and also I'll be checking the Facebook pages of friends who are patrolling dusty shit towns in the world's crappiest demi-nations, courtesy of the war you thought was a great idea last time you chatted with someone while waiting for your kids in a school parking lot. Ugh.

    ReplyDelete
  53. Mooser5:04 PM

    "It is through will alone she sets her mind in motion."
    That's amazing! I need several cups of coffee before I can think at all.

    ReplyDelete
  54. Mooser5:08 PM

    "Flesh cannon."
    I've heard them called "murdercycles" but "flesh cannon" is new to me (when it gets through to me) and I like it. It fills my eyes with that double vision, if you get my drift.

    ReplyDelete
  55. Ruviana5:21 PM

    Friend of Sue Lowden, eh?

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  56. Michelle's last sentence of her original hysterics, "I'm scared. And not of the right things." explain's her delusional life perfectly, I would say. And to think that she had a 'twinge of regret' (as pointed out by Donald G. in UPDATE 3 & here https://medium.com/something-like-falling/f05a8010fac0) about the Iraq debacle that is to somehow excuse equating the AWC with traitors a decade earlier is just another of her 'not the right things'. What a fucking coward!

    ReplyDelete
  57. Broken link is fixed here.
    https://medium.com/something-like-falling/f05a8010fac0

    ReplyDelete
  58. I was reading the Guardian's update on this story when this sentence stopped me cold:

    -- The computer company's police report prompted a visit to Catalano's home
    by "six gentleman in casual clothes" who "all had guns in their
    waistbands", as she described the agents. --

    "Guns in their waistbands"? Seriously?

    She's saying trained law enforcement dudes were carrying their guns in their waistbands?

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  59. dybevick2:35 PM

    No one has picked up on how this is eleventy dimensional public-private entrapment. One does not even have to finish typing "pressure" into a google search box before they helpfully suggest "pressure cooker bomb". A few pixels off with your mouse or a bad keystroke order and there you are.

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  60. realinterrobang3:57 PM

    I want to refuse to testify in front of the HUAC with this comment, and join it on the blacklist.

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  61. The Rancid Honeytrap8:26 PM

    You guys need to get your story straight. You can't on one hand insist that there's nothing to see here where the security state is concerned and on the other gloat about a right winger getting caught in the net she helped create.

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  62. calling all toasters8:49 PM

    "OT" has no meaning whatsoever around here.

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  63. The Rancid Honeytrap9:07 PM

    So you're conceding that's what we're living under. Cool. Because I thought we were all supposed to point and laugh at the paranoid 'nutcake'.

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  64. Bill Jones10:37 PM

    So 2 million dead = " that twinge of regret"

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  65. Bill Jones10:40 PM

    Hamlet, act III, scene 4, lines 206 and 207: "For 'tis sport to have the engineer/ Hoist with his own petard"

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  66. availablealias10:54 PM

    Happy to see all the commenters here accepting the security state. I guess it doesn't feel so bad when you can snark at the victims.

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  67. As Roy's already documented, Catano loves it herself when it's not going after white people.


    Bet you probably think that "Tex" Sensenbrenner's being totally sincere when he sez that Section 215 of his PATRIOT Act doesn't allow for all this, when it not only does, but he's fought every single effort to weaken it.

    ReplyDelete
  68. DocAmazing12:44 PM

    Actually, it was her husband's employer who tipped off the cops--did you read the article? So our advocate of "see something, say something" falls victim to the snitch culture she helped to flourish.


    But thanks for playing!

    ReplyDelete
  69. DocAmazing12:49 PM

    Actually most of the commenters here have gone on record opposing the security state; many of them have done and continue to do material things to bring it to heel.


    However, if you actually read the post and the article that spawned it, you'll note that it wasn't the Feds in any form that tipped off the cops about Catalano's husband's Google activity: it was the owner of the computers, hubby's boss. Thus, Catalano finds herself a victim not of the security state, but snitch culture. "See something, say something" claims another victim, and it couldn't have happened to a more deserving gal.

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  70. Mooser12:53 PM

    "Happy to see all the commenters here accepting the security state. I guess it doesn't feel so bad when you can snark at the victims."
    Accept it? No! See, we're just saying that to fool the NSA. Why should we arouse suspicion?

    ReplyDelete
  71. The Rancid Honeytrap3:02 PM

    Did you read my comment, dumbass? There's more to a surveillance state than the NSA's data mining. You and your idiotic comrades are alternately giggling over there being nothing nefarious here and and gloating about a right-winger getting caught in the net.


    How tiresome you stupid, unprincipled little shits are.

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  72. Halloween_Jack8:09 AM

    Obama's Chicago goons, dontcha know--thugs 4 lyfe!

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  73. Halloween_Jack9:46 AM

    Perzactly. As Roy pointed out, she still insists that she wouldn't have voted for Kerry--why is that? She's a big fan of Alito and Roberts, regardless? (I'm sort of glad that Kerry didn't take the blame for the economy tanking, but Citizens United and its repercussions will be with us for a long-ass time.)

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  74. Halloween_Jack9:49 AM

    Now call me a bagger or a libertard or something equally witty you predictable, robotic, tribalist shitheads.


    I might consider it if I wasn't about 100% certain that you wrote this with a diamond-cutter boner.

    ReplyDelete
  75. DocAmazing10:49 AM

    Let's try again.



    Can't speak for anybody else here; I've put in plenty of miles opposing the security state, both in word and deed. I'm not even a Democrat, so skip the I'm-to-the-left-of-you bit; most of the political work I've done has been alongside Wobs, anarchists, and straight-up Reds (all of whom reliably work harder than Dems, but that's another story). By all means, oppose the security state, but (and here's the kicker) know what the fuck you're talking abut so that you don't discredit your own argument. Catalano screamed for a heightened security state, and has been caught in the net she demanded come into being. Those initially commenting on her police encounter chalked it up to NSA-style web fishing. It wasn't; it was old-time snitching. If you're going to use Catalano's story to warn people of anything, use it to warn them of the right things so that their energy won't be wasted on the wrong targets and so that those signing on to Catalano's fight don't become obvious dupes, making those fighting the security state look like UFO enthusiasts.


    In other words, don't squander revolutionary praxis on staged fights set up by the oppressor.


    In other other words, find out what the fuck you're talking about before you pen dipshit screeds. You may want to marginalize yourself; that's your right, and you're doing a bang-up job. Others among us actually plan to have some political effect, and don't wish to be marginalized along with you.

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  76. Halloween_Jack12:07 PM

    You may want to marginalize yourself; that's your right, and you're doing a bang-up job.


    I believe that he's probably "marginalizing himself" right now, as he does several times a day, preferring the overhand stroke.

    ReplyDelete
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