Pardon me, President Obama?

Ultimately, I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress. And I'd just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is, the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint — that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law. Well, this is a good example. And I’m pretty confident that this Court will recognize that and not take that step.

Pardon me, Mr. President, but kindly think this thing through before you talk, or shut the fuck up. This is incoherent. You don't agree with conservatives about "judicial activism." Even conservatives don't agree with the conservatives about "judicial activism." You're supposed to be on the side the supports a strong judiciary evaluating the constitutionality of laws, whether they are popular or not. Granted, your side has completely abandoned the concept of judicial review of the scope of the government's power to do things, as opposed to whether government actions violate enumerated or unenumerated rights. But Mr. President, this can't be your argument. You are not arguing on the internet. "This is a bad argument, and generally I don't agree with it, but because they use it, I will use it too, that's only fair," is not a position for a leader of any sort, let alone the leader of a party or of the "free world."

Ahem.

Pardon me, Judge Jerry Smith?

Smith: Does the Department of Justice recognize that federal courts have the authority in appropriate circumstances to strike federal statutes because of one or more constitutional infirmities?

Kaersvang: Yes, your honor. Of course, there would need to be a severability analysis, but yes.

Smith: I’m referring to statements by the president in the past few days to the effect…that it is somehow inappropriate for what he termed “unelected” judges to strike acts of Congress that have enjoyed — he was referring, of course, to Obamacare — what he termed broad consensus in majorities in both houses of Congress.

. . . .

I would like to have from you by noon on Thursday… a letter stating what is the position of the attorney general and the Department of Justice, in regard to the recent statements by the president, stating specifically and in detail in reference to those statements what the authority is of the federal courts in this regard in terms of judicial review. That letter needs to be at least three pages single spaced, no less, and it needs to be specific. It needs to make specific reference to the president’s statements and again to the position of the attorney general and the Department of Justice.

Look, Your Honor, I know that I've judicial bloviation is often more about generic judicial self-indulgence than it is about the specific matter bloviated about. But this was unjudicial, unprofessional, and an embarrassment to the rule of law. You took an off-the-cuff comment at a press conference by the President and turned it into a homework assignment for a lawyer at oral argument in a fit of political pique. You've been on the bench since the Reagan administration, Your Honor, and if you're going to tell me you've never heard a Republican administration gripe about judicial activism, or that you've heard it but never bothered to give the Reagan or Bush I or Bush II Department of Justice an assignment on judicial review, I'm going to tell you that you're a partisan hack.

Gentlemen. Please. Mind the dignity of your offices, if you would.

First of all, remember what I said before: the most important thing you need to know about "blogger" and "investigative journalist" Crystal Cox is that she is the sort of person who will retaliate against a critic by registering a domain in the name of the critic's three-year-old daughter as part of a campaign against him.

But there's something else you should know, too: Crystal Cox is not a sincere supporter of free speech. Crystal Cox is not a defender of the First Amendment. Crystal Cox supports free speech for Crystal Cox, but for her own critics, Crystal Cox is a vigorous (if mostly incoherent) advocate for broad and unprincipled censorship.

This should not surprise us. As I mentioned before, free speech cases often involve defending vile speech by repugnant people. Nearly as often, those repugnant people are no respecters of the rights of anyone else. Do you think the Nazis who marched at Skokie, if they had their way, would uphold the free speech rights of the religious and ethnic minorities who protested them? Do you imagine that Fred Phelps' church, given its choice, would permit the blasphemous and idolatrous freedoms it rails against?

No. We extend constitutional rights to people who, given the opportunity, would not extend the same rights to us. That's how we roll.

Crystal Cox is no different. Eugene Volokh and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are appealing the judgment against her to vindicate (through however flawed a vessel) important free speech issues. But just because Crystal Cox wants free speech for herself, that doesn't mean she supports it for others. In fact, she consistently takes the stance that criticism of her is unlawful and will be met with lawsuits and complaints to state and federal authorities.

Take, for instance, her cross-complaint in the Oregon defamation suit against her. She sued a vast array of people, including all the attorneys in the law firm representing the plaintiff suing her, as well as miscellaneous government entities:

For Complalint against Counter Defendants David Aman, Esq Personally and Professionally, Tonkon Torp Law Firm and all partners, associates and of counsel in their professional and individual capacities, Obsidian Finance LLC and any/all affiliates, Kevin Padrick Esq. officially, professionally and personally, David Brown Esq. professionally and personally, Ewan Rose Esq. officially, professionally and personally, Patrick Flaherty Esq., Bend Oregon District Attorney Office officially, professionally and personally capacities, Deschutes County, Stephanie DeYoung, CPA StudebakerDeYoung CPA PC -Stephanie Studebaker LLP , Mark Neuman, Lane Lyons, Brian Stevens, Tim Larkin, Summit Accomodators Inc. and any and all affiliates, Sean Boushie, Lincoln County Montana District Attorney Bernie Cassidy, P. Stephen Lamont, CEO of iViewit Technologies Inc, Robin Clute Personally and Professionally, and John and Jane Does.

In her Cross-complaint, Crystal Cox asserts that all of these people have engaged in a conspiracy to harass and defame her — by suing her for defamation. Crystal Cox can say whatever she wants about you, but if you say "Crystal Cox defamed me," well, that's illegal:

Plaintif has harmed my Oregon Real Estate Brokerage License by filing a frivolous lawsuit and defaming me among potential real estate clients as I am a licensed real estate broker in the state of oregon.

Writing scores of deranged sites blasting strangers through oddly capitalized screeds is fine when Crystal Cox does it, but if anyone puts up a site that criticizes her, that's a "hate blog" and it's actionable:

Counter Defendant Bernie Cassidy aided and abetted Counter Defendant Sean Boushie to continue on hate blogs, and hate groups, and in conspiracy against counter plaintiff.

Registering domain names incorporating the names of enemies and accusing them of crimes is swell when Crystal Cox does it, but if you try to convince others that she's evil, well, that's actionable too:

Stephen Lamont defamed me in sending emails to all iViewit shareholders to join a hate group against me. This group was and is ran by Sean Boushie of Montana, who claims to this day to be working with David Aman of Tonkon Torp and Kevin Padrick of Obisidian Finance to harm my and financially ruin me.

This pattern repeated in Crystal Cox's motion to exclude a witness. (This witness, a hapless fellow who apparently earned Cox's ire by writing a letter to the editor she didn't like, obtained a restraining order against her; she accused him of a raft of offenses and tried to get a restraining order against him, but was rejected by the court.) Once again, the motion shows Crystal's freakishly narcissistic view of free expression: Crystal Cox can accuse everyone she wants of anything she likes and say any terrible thing about them, but if someone criticizes her in vivid terms, that's "extreme hate, harassment and intimidation" justifying excluding them as a witness.

Finally, consider Crystal Cox's response to the recent attention to her behavior by blogs including this one, not to mention stories at Forbes and the New York Times. Writers, including me, have presented Crystal Cox's own words, her own domain registrations, her own emails, and her own court documents, asked readers to evaluate them, and asserted that they show that Crystal Cox is an evil person who has engaged in what appears to be a campaign of extortion. Crystal Cox crows about her own supposed right to attack strangers on the internet without evidence or reason (or diction, or grammar, or a grasp of reality.) Does she extend that same right to her critics? Of course not. Here's how she plans to respond to her critics:

And now Kashmir Hill of Forbes, David Carr of the New York Times, Marc Randazza, Kenneth P. White of Popehat.com, Tracy Coenen, Randazza Legal Group, have launched a campaign to set up a Blogger for Extortion when I was not accused of Extortion in an Criminal Complaint, nor was I on trial for extortion and now this Lynch Mob has put me under Extreme Duress and ALL will be named in my Federal Hate Crime Filing, Criminal Complaint, Judicial Complaint, FBI Complaint, Attorney General Complaint, Bar Complaint and Department of Justice Complaint.

Crystal Cox is no free speech defender. Crystal Cox is no First Amendment advocate. Crystal Cox is merely that familiar, universally scorned and loathed figure of the playground — the bully who can dish it out, but can't take it.

Every time you think of her, remember: Crystal Cox is someone who will register a domain in the name of the three-year-old daughter of her critic as part of a campaign against him.

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.

Yes, yesterday's post about how Senator Lieberman was introducing a bill to undermine Section 230 was an April Fool's joke cunningly crafted by Eric Turkewitz. It was the third Turkewitz jape in which we have participated.

For the record, though I was supposed to be poised to delete "hey this is a joke" comments until midnight on the 1st, I was feeling too lousy to pay attention and Nyquilled myself into oblivion; yet only one person called "prank." Maybe the rest of you were playing along. A rough review of comments at the various places where this popped up led to similar results. This might be about how credible the prank was, how skillfully Turkewitz planned it (the sleeper blog was genius), or about how we think now.

As usual, though the surface message was part of the joke — Senator Lieberman really is a scary cheerleader for government censorship — there's also the meta-joke, which is about how we receive and evaluate and trust information in the modern age, and about how news propagates. Conduct yourselves accordingly, as they say.

I don't have much time or energy at all to write about this — fighting a bad chest cold — but it looks as if Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-ouchebag Censor) — is seeking to strike a another serious blow against free speech on the internet.

At issue is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which says that hosts — everyone from Google to Facebook to humble little Popehat — is only liable for the content they create, not for the content that others (for instance, thread and forum commenters) put on the internet. It's not an exaggeration to say that this protection is the legal backbone of the modern internet — without it, no site could afford to allow anonymous users or commenters, topics of discussion would be strictly limited by liability-adverse legal teams, and the internet would be a less robust, interesting, and free place.

Apparently Lieberman is about to offer a bill eliminating it.

I wish I could be surprised, but I'm not. Liberman has been making ominous noises about sites hosting material he doesn't like. He's backed not only by people who are foes of free speech on ideological grounds, but those who are foes on economic grounds. And, as we frequently document here, the idea "all you sites have to clean up and police your guests, or get sued" fits perfectly into the insipid nanny-state think-of-the-children "anti-bullying" nonsense so popular now.

Too sick right now to write further. It might be time for another SOPA/PIPA protest. This one is huge.

Please see April 2 update.

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.

Continue Reading »

Dear Members of the Joint Committee on Judiciary of the General Assembly of the State of Connecticut:

My specific intent in writing this post is to annoy and alarm you.

I am posting this communication to you because of the traits and characteristics that I perceive in each of you, and which I firmly believe you possess. I specifically refer to your venality, your sub-normal intelligence, your poor hygiene, your regrettable oafishness, your indifference to your oath of office under your state's constitution ["You do solemnly swear (or affirm, as the case may be) that you will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Connecticut, so long as you continue a citizen thereof; and that you will faithfully discharge, according to law, the duties of the office of...........to the best of your abilities. So help you God."], and your civil, legal, and constitutional illiteracy. It's not clear to me whether these personal traits and characteristics are the result of poor upbringing, bad pruning on the sad Charlie-Brown-Christmas tree that is your genetic lineage, or the quality identified by philosophers and various Omen sequels as Pure Evil. At any rate, your traits and characteristics inspire me to write about you, and are the subject of my discussion, and I spit upon them like so, ptui.

You have no reason to be in physical fear of me, a blogger on the other side of the country. I am not violent and do not believe in visiting violence upon people like you just because you are oathbreaking censorious twunts. Moral and legal issues aside, there are simply too many of you — including other state legislators like you around the country — and it would be exhausting. I prefer to stay on my couch.

However, it is my sincere hope that by writing to you I will achieve the following:

1. That my message will have a substantial and detrimental effect on your mental health, in that I will help you to realize what an embarrassment to the very notion of responsible self-governance you are, and that you have clawed and bit and scrambled and fought to become dim, petty tyrants; and

2. That my message will have the effect of substantially interfering with your participation in, and ability to benefit from, (a) the academic performance of those of you admirably engaged in remedial math or English classes, (b) with the employment in the Assembly of each of you, and (c) with other community activities or responsibilities (giving speeches, opening strip malls, asking your LAs to write your pro-traditional-marriage speeches while you meet your catamites at the Ramada Inn, collecting your Teamster bribes, etc.). I hope that my message will have that effect because it will show you, and your constituents, that you are worthy of only contempt.

3. Most especially, I hope that this message has the impact of causing you substantial embarrassment and humiliation within the professional community, including the legislative community, the legal community, the political community, the business community, the community of functional illiterates who speechify about education, the community of people who work "liberty" and "freedom" into every speech whilst they find new ways to regulate ever aspect of human existence, and the community of people typically viewed by the general public as slightly more palatable than child molesters but definitely less palatable than car thieves, wife beaters, or lawyers.

Why, you ask?

Well, it's because of Connecticut Senate Bill 456. As the Student Press Law Center reports, you — the members of the Connecticut Joint Committee on Judiciary — have referred Bill No. 456, which expands Connecticut's harassment laws in a stupendously ridiculous and unconstitutional way. How stupendous and unconstitutional? Well, so stupendous and unconstitutional that this blog post could be a crime in Connecticut if the rest of the droolers in your General Assembly approve this turd. Under the current version, it would be a crime to do the following:

(a) A person commits electronic harassment when such person, with intent to harass, annoy or alarm another person, transmits, posts, displays or disseminates, by or through an electronic communication device, radio, computer, Internet web site or similar means, to any person, a communication, image or information, which is based on the actual or perceived traits or characteristics of that person, which:
(1) Places that person in reasonable fear of harm to his or her person or property;
(2) Has a substantial and detrimental effect on that person's physical or mental health;
(3) Has the effect of substantially interfering with that person's academic performance, employment or other community activities or
responsibilities;
(4) Has the effect of substantially interfering with that person's ability to participate in or benefit from any academic, professional or community-based services, activities or privileges; or
(5) Has the effect of causing substantial embarrassment or humiliation to that person within an academic or professional community.

The statute helpfully provides that the crime is committed where the communication is sent or where it is received, apparently meaning that you might assert that I have committed a crime in Connecticut by this post even though I write it in California.

You've joined the moronic headlong rush towards "cyberbullying" legislation that tramples of our heritage of free expression in exchange for a few local news headlines. You've drafted a bill that is stupendously overbroad and chilling of all sorts of protected expression. Frankly, it is not even a credible gesture towards complying with the United States or Connecticut Constitutions. If your lawyers wrote it for you, you need to stop hiring lawyers from gas-station bathrooms and the alleys behind methadone clinics. If you had even a minimal grasp of the power you wield — or if you cared — you would recognize that this statute purports to criminalize all sorts of criticism, argument, and satire based not on any objectively threatening nature, but on the whiny subjective butthurt of the disagreed-with. I'm guessing you'd say you're thinking of the children. But our children are not helped by teaching them to be bad citizens, by teaching them they should look to government for redress when people hurt their feelings, or by steadily weakening their Constitutional heritage in the name of fashionable concerns.

In summary: you are ignorant censorious tools. If your Joint Committee on the Judiciary passes this bill along in anything close to this form, its members should consider this post directed to them all. If the entire General Assembly approves it, it is directed to them as well. If the Governor signs it, he's on the list as well. I will republish the post when the law becomes effective.

Perhaps some of you, members of the Joint Committee on Judiciary, spoke up about this bill. However, so far as I can tell, there's no record of it, and your state does not see fit to attribute the bill to any particular member. At any rate, if your reaction to this bill was anything but immediate denunciation, consider this directed at you as well.

In closing, snort my taint,

Ken

Edited 3/30: Or, sure, you could discuss this in a polite manner like First Amendment demigod Eugene Volokh. I mean, if that's your thing. He's a busy professor, he probably doesn't have time to be extradited to Connecticut.

If you're on a deadline, and you need to produce written content, the internet makes it ridiculously fast and easy to rip other writers off.

But people who live by the sword also die by it. Once someone suspects plagiarism, the internet makes it easy to search for other people who used your words first. It also makes it easy to spot-check your other work to see if any of it appears lifted from prior sources without attribution. Finally, once plagiarism is detected, the internet — full, as it is, of both successful and frustrated writers — makes word of the misconduct spread like wildfire.

This week's example: the Movie Junkies.

John Scalzi — who hates plagiarism the way you hate Hitler and the way I hate reality TV — writes the Alpha post, noting that MaryAnn Johanson's review of a film — appropriately enough, "Shame" — was plagiarized at MovieJunkies. As Scalzi notes in an update, MovieJunkies has now edited that review, leaving an incoherent mess that still has elements of the plagiarized work. A screenshot is here, and the sentence fragments, run-on sentences, and other errors are in the original:

A powerful plunge into the mania of sex addiction. The feelings of isolation and all-consuming need so piercingly in “Shame”. Brandon (Michael Fassbender) is a New Yorker who shuns intimacy with women but feeds his desires with a compulsive addiction to sex. His troubled sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) moves into his apartment stirring memories of their shared painful past and Brandon’s insular life spirals out of control. Sissy is her brother’s polar opposite, and she proceeds to invade his carefully cultivated privacy.

Shame offers something different than I have ever seen on screen in a main stream movie. For the first a main stream audience can see a man with extreme vulnerability. Fassbender is exceptional is expressing is misery and utter weakness in the fight against his obsession and addiction. Most movies that are available to the mass audiences protect the male image and ego. Even male nudity is treated much more tabu than female nudity.

The only issue I had with the direction was that some shots were held for too long where I got a little bored numerous times throughout the movie.

Movie Junkie Rating: GOOD BUZZ Note: GREAT HIGH for Fassbender’s performance!

Now comes the part where other writers — and their fans — start looking for other instances of plagiarism. Scalzi's commenters are off to a good start and have found some strong candidates for plagiarism. Mike McGranaghan of Aisleseat indicates he has screencaps of six reviews plagiarized from him, and is tracking down plagiarism of other writers. Things are swiftly becoming very grim for MovieJunkies. The plagiarism is looking serial and pervasive rather than isolated.

Using the comment form on the MovieJunkies web site, I asked for a comment, indicating that I write about various forms of internet misbehavior and wondered if they had a comment about allegations they had plagiarized multiple articles. Here's the response I got — which I feel comfortable sharing because I made it clear I was writing to get a comment for a blog post:

Hello Ken,

I cannot apologize enough.

It seems some of my views that I passed onto to one of my staff to post on the site have used other sources that should not have been included. I should have looked more carefully and we do so in the future. I apologize for this error. We have removed the requests that have been sent to us.

Please let me know if you see anything else and I will gladly remove it immediately.

Thank you very much.
Sincerely,
Michele Schalin

I find this incoherent and unconvincing. To the extent one can parse the main sentence, it's very difficult to believe. Is she saying that she voiced views that happened to incorporate the exact language of other writers' work, and her staff wrote it verbatim? Or that she referred to other writers' work, and they copied it verbatim? It's impenetrable, particularly for someone who supposedly writes professionally. Moreover, it's not believable. The hasty and incompetent editing of challenged posts — which as of now lack any apology or acknowledgement — suggests a guilty conscience, not an innocent error. The number of posts at issue, discussed above, also makes any innocent excuse hard to accept.

The people who run Movie Junkies are poised on a knife's edge. If they handle this situation correctly, with a convincing display to the extent that critics are mistaken, or (more likely) with abject apologies and acceptances of responsibility, the site might survive, even after this goes viral. If they take a dishonest, self-righteous, or evasive approach, they are done: curb-stomped by the internet they used as a source for stolen text. Just ask Judith Griggs

(If memory serves I learned of Griggs from Scalzi, too. Don't plagiarize around Scalzi. Just . . don't.)

Edited to add: another plagiarism victim.

Edited to add: Mike McGranaghan tells his story, and notes that the Movie Junkies site and Facebook page are down.

Edited to add: Eric Snyder talks about how the site plagiarized him, and about his correspondence with Michele Schalin.

I don't recall exactly when I concluded that Spike Lee is an asshole, but I think it was around the time he told Esquire “I give interracial couples a look. Daggers. They get uncomfortable when they see me on the street.” I've long viewed hostility to interracial couples a reliable tell for self-involved douchebaggery, and now that I have a multiracial family my impression is only confirmed. Nobody wants some fashion-victim goateed dwarf glaring balefully at them during a romantic stroll. It's liable to make you anxious about whether you set the DVR right for Game of Thrones.

So: color me utterly unsurprised that Spike Lee is acting like an unprincipled asshat in relation to George Zimmerman's shooting of Trayvon Martin. I haven't written about that shooting yet; even though the undisputed facts trouble me. Right now the case seems to be a hot mess of unsourced rumors, punditry by Nancy Grace aspirants, racism, and this-fact-favors-my-side-so-it-must-be-true wankery. I advocate a thorough and responsible investigation followed by due process of law — a rare luxury, but good to have when you can get it.

So how does the shooting provide Spike with an opportunity to be like himself? Well, as the Smoking Gun documents, a Los Angeles man named Marcus Davonne Higgins found what he thought was George Zimmerman's address and began publishing it with exhortations to "REACH OUT & TOUCH HIM." He eventually tweeted the address with a request that EVERYBODY REPOST THIS. Spike Lee obligingly reposted the address, and substantially contributed to the tweet going viral.

Among the problems with this was that Marcus Davonne Higgins is dumb and/or a shitty researcher. He got the wrong Zimmerman family, and the wrong address. The Zimmermans who live at the address that Higgins and Lee tweeted are in their 70s; the wife is a lunch lady at a school. After getting hate mail and being pestered by dumb reporters, they left for a hotel. They assert that they attempted to reach out to Marcus Davonne Higgins, and received the response "Black power all day. No justice, no peace." This seemingly self-justifying response is odd. I've certainly litigated against people who are shitty researchers and frankly a little slow, and some of them seem proud of it, but I've never observed them to be disproportionately members of any ethic group.

But the issue is not merely that Marcus Davonne Higgins is a reckless idiot who tweeted the wrong address, or that Spike Lee is a gullible creep who retweeted it to a vast following. The issue is that both were highlighting the home address of a person accused of a crime with the rather clear intent to incite violence against that person or, at least, put them in fear. Exhortations to mob violence are the marks of thugs who are part of the American tradition of lynch mobs, not the American struggle towards justice. By urging angry followers to REACH OUT AND TOUCH Zimmerman at his home address, Higgins and Lee were urging violence, and risking not only Zimmerman's life, but the lives of his family, the lives of neighbors, the lives of law enforcement, and the lives of — as it turned out — the utterly unrelated people who lived in the house that the moron Higgins identified. That was the work of thugs. It deserves our open scorn.

As far as I can tell, neither Spike Lee nor Marcus Davonne Higgins has apologized — not for scaring the hell out of a lunch lady who shared the name of someone they hated, and certainly not for their mob-justice tactic of publishing a home address to angry followers. I doubt they will. If Spike Lee says anything, I suspect it will be something along the lines of "it's typical in racist America that the media is talking about this instead of about violence against African-Americans." The media might, indeed, not focus enough on violence against African-Americans — what with pretty white girls being so prone to getting lost — but that's really not the point, and if Spike Lee said words to that effect, it would be a contemptible dodge.

It's very rare that reporting a story legitimately requires emphasizing the subject's home address. Occasionally it's hard to tell a story without talking about public resources or documents that might lead a reader to a home address; in those cases, caution is warranted. But I submit that it is never anything but vile to publish a subject's home address and exhort followers to go harass them — not when the subject has a political position you don't like, and not even when the subject has been accused of a terrible crime. That's why I called out the asshole Mike Troxel (who, like Marcus Davonne Higgins, was a shitty researcher who published the wrong address, leading to harassment of the wrong party), and that's why the targeting of Michele Malkin was wrong.

Publishing twitter accounts, Facebook accounts, email accounts, and other methods of communication that can be cut off? That's fine. But publishing a home address and sneeringly pointing it out to followers and inviting them to "have a chat," or words to that effect? That's a threat. Threats are for thugs. Don't be a thug. Don't be like Spike Lee and Marcus Davonne Higgins.

Edited to add: Thanks to Bret for a link to this doubling-down tweet by Higgins:

I might be wrong, but I think "THEY" probably means "the Jews," or something.

Edit 2: Thanks to commenter Phil for pointing out that Higgins is now tweeting apologies for tweeting the wrong address — though not for tweeting an address in the first place. Scumbag.

Be a shame if somethin' happened to it.

I don't tend to rail against political correctness too much any more. I did when I was living in two of the bellies of the beast in college and law school. But now, I tend to see PC as a self-defeating, feckless thing to be mocked, best addressed with the more-speech remedy. When political correctness is at the root of some actual official act of censorship, I firmly support calling it out — the results are often gratifying. But too often I think that (1) "political correctness" is just another way to say "boo hoo, I can't act like an ass without being called an ass, and it's chilling my speech," and (2) too few people call out politically correct idiocy on both sides.

But now and then, a story of insipid political correctness comes along and grabs my attention. Today's sample comes from the FIRE's Peter Bonilla, who pointed out an embarrassing incident at Cornell. In short, in response to a poster announcing a performance by Margaret Cho, a shadowy student group calling itself "Scorpions X" defaced posters across campus. They didn't do so because Margaret Cho is profoundly annoying. They didn't do so because, as a group with a name culled from the B-plot of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episode, they felt incapable of resisting their destiny to engage in minor and ineffectual villainy. No, they did so because the poster had the wrong font.

The font used was Chop Suey, which, according to Scorpions X, has a history of Asian-American stereotyping. In their email, Scorpions X demanded that ALANA “discontinue use of these posters [and] quarter cards immediately and also remove current postings.”

The African Latino Asian Native American Students Programming Board — which, despite encompassing more traditionally disfavored interest groups than Scorpions X, still apparently felt intimidated by them — issued an excruciating apology in which they pointed out that Margaret Cho's people had approved the poster. Oh, THAT'S a denouncing.

But one day later, Scorpions X responded to ALANA’s email, saying that their apology letter was not acceptable and did not adequately address the situation at hand. They said that ALANA was not justified in bringing Cho to campus if her management accepted a poster using a font that, according to Scorpions X, reveals a “one-size-fits-all Asian stereotype.”

And, in a sort of preschool-level version of "death to anyone who says we are violent!", they added:

They added that members of Cornell community have unfairly accused Scorpions X of being “militant, confrontational and angry” for speaking out on racial issues.

Oh, dear.

Look, there's genuine racism against Asian-Americans in this country. It pisses me off, and not just because I'm trying to raise three Asian-American kids. I'm all for naming and shaming racist douches.

But defacing posters that make you mad is a tactic for censorious dipshits, a tactic that resembles its stupid, ugly cousin, stealing or destroying newspapers with articles you don't like. Combining censorious thuggery with adolescent levels of self-seriousness and entitlement, as Scorpions X has done, is hideously counter-productive. Believing that there is only one way to view expression that you don't like, and lashing out at splitters, is embarrassing. I don't think there's a stereotype that Asians are self-parodying, easily butthurt, hostile to dissent, and more than slightly unbalanced, but if there were such stereotypes, Scorpions X would have just dramatically reinforced them. Over a font, a font approved by the artist it depicted.

That's an example of the sort of political correctness that might move me to comment, because it's censorious and regrettable.

Ideal clients and ideal political opponents share an important quality: they'll shut up if you tell them to.

James O'Keefe and Nadia Naffe are not ideal clients, and political blogger Patterico is not an ideal political opponent.

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When I heard about this story from Walter Olson and Amy Alkon:

A 34-year-old Ann Arbor man was sent to the hospital with a head injury after another man punched him on Saturday during a literary argument, according to police.

. . . I immediately thought of one of my favorite satirical poems, by Wendy Cope:

Poem Composed in Santa Barbara

The poets talk. They talk a lot.
They talk of T. S. Eliot.
One is anti. One is pro.
How hard they think! How much they know!
They're happy. A cicada sings.
We women talk of other things.

It's a good thing that there are people, otherwise there'd be nobody to laugh at.