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Jailed Spam King Caught Conspiring to Kill Witness
An anonymous reader writes "Spam king Christopher William Smith, aka Rizler, is facing up to life in prison for conspiracy to tamper with a witness and up to 20 years for endeavoring to obstruct justice. The charges are based on an alleged phone call in which he threatened to have a witness or the witness' family killed to prevent them from testifying against him in an upcoming trial on drug and related charges.
Spammers are sociopaths. It seems for a lot of them that their disregard for basic decency also includes a disregard for basic adherence to the law. I bet a lot of them are guilty of actual definite crimes. It's just a matter of finding what they are. But we can find out who a lot of them are.
I'm going to speak up for everyone who doesn't think rape is funny. This kind of humor is really low and suggests that you (and others) think that rape (and sexually-transmitted diseases) is just punishment for something. There are thousands of people in prison who have committed no violence against anyone, stolen nothing, and they are raped. I really expect a higher standard, even if this is Slashdot.
I think that should be the message here. No matter how annoying spam is, it's seldom seen as the type of crime that anybody should really worry about. A lot of people probably don't even see it as a "crime" -- and by people, read legislators. The message from this story is that the kind of people who put together large-scale, organized spam operations are not only a financial burden on society but they are also, sometimes, serious scumbags. Think Al Capone and tax evasion; spam operations should be seen as a red flag for a gray-market mentality, at minimum. Dig a little further and you could find other, more serious criminal operations.
Breakfast served all day!
Oh, how nice. "Not recently". How moral and upstanding!
... torture, really, for moral men to hear. This "not as bad as Hussein" angle is not just that; it's propaganda.
... it's TORTURE. And the only thing that's not stopping it is that there isn't a higher military power to invade the US to enact the necessary regime change.
The backpedaling and endless justifications for American torture practice and methods are just
What the US is doing is not just "humiliation"
Do not confuse the US "humilation of prisoners" with civil treatment by a moral society. Even the rules of war (to which the US professes to be a subscriber) prohibit the things that America now routinely does to prisoners taken in the Middle East. Hypocrisy, hypocrisy, hypocrisy!
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
Being able to laugh at your own misfortune, even along with others, is quite different from laughing at the pain of others when they themselves quite likely don't think it funny. Specifically, different in a sociopathic kind of way. It is sad that this has to be explained.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
Insightful? I dunno, this comment reads to me as "AAAAAGGGGGGGGGHH!!"
You really *can* joke about anything. It's fine if you don't find it funny (obviously), but saying it's shameful and depressing that people joke lightheartedly about a serious issue is always big buzzkill. It's the conversational equivalent of walking up to a group of people and taking a big shit right in front of them. Thanks for the... input. You're leading the thread in exciting new goddamned directions. Cause, you know, this is secretly a thread about the horrors of prison rape, and jokes are the perfect context for inserting unadulterated activism.
I'm not saying people who are against prison rape are extremists or something (given the high rate of incarceration in this country, we should *all* be against prison rape, more out of personal interest than anything else), but busting out with a big ol' conversational turd like that is in worse taste than the original jokes.
I mean, thanks. Prison rape is actually bad. Wow. I'm gonna devote some serious fuckin' thought to that, because it's just such a provocative statement. This is the kind of thing I have to think about on surveys, too. "In your opinion, is getting involuntarily boned in the ass by a violent felon whilst in prison on a drug charge a good thing or a bad thing?" Uhh... Umm... Crap. Let me think about that. I'll get back to you... Right after I read Slashdot!
Jokes, no matter how offensive or distasteful, are *not* an opportunity for you to point out how offensive something is. Jokes are very frequently funny *because* they make us feel awkward or offended. Unless you think that the people making these jokes are secretly *for* prison rape, your comment is totally unwarranted and pretty solidly off-topic.
The twenty year sentence, or any kind of punishment, sort of assumes someone actually reports the rape. It also assumes that the report is taken seriously by the guards rather than ignored. Most victims will not even report it in the first place, especially in prison, where informing on another inmate can get you killed. And many prison administrators routinely ignore and even encourage rape in prisons. The rapist is usually not likely deterred by a theoretical 20-year sentence that he will never have to serve.
Rape isn't funny. Death isn't funny. Murder isn't funny. Theft isn't funny. Nazis aren't funny. Bananas aren't funny. Knocking on doors isn't funny. Marriage isn't funny. Divorce isn't funny. Zombies aren't funny. Religion isn't funny. Sports aren't funny. People walking into bars isn't funny. Chickens crossing roads isn't funny.
JOKES ABOUT THEM ARE. THAT'S WHY THEY'RE CALLED JOKES.
Sorry for the shouting. Clueless people raise my blood pressure.
When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl
You're half right: Nazis aren't funny. Killing Jews isn't funny. Jokes about them can be funny IF (and this is a very big IF) the joke is a means to relieve tension in an absurd and/or awful situation. People need to joke about terrible things to make sense of the world. Gallows humor. Black comedy. I get that. I even like that.
However: jokes about killing Jews are not funny if the point is to take the actual killing of Jews less seriously. Or to turn killing Jews into entertainment.
Likewise, in this case, if the joke was intended to relieve tension on the agreed horor of prison rape, I'd laugh. That wasn't the point. It never is. People really think prison rape is funny. In and of itself. But it's not. Real torment never is. It's also bad for society. It's bad for you.
Clueless people my ass.
Cheers.