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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.
I could be wrong, but his spamming and his current indictment seem unrelated.
From the article:
"Although Smith allegedly built his pharmacy business from spam-related profits, it doesn't appear that Smith actually sent spam to advertise the pharmacy sites. Witnesses told investigators that he bought ads in magazines and had sales reps field calls at the Burnsville, MN offices of Online Payment Solutions."
And from a previous article on him, it would seem that he spammed stuff different from his pharmacy biz.
The latter seems to be the reason he tried silencing a witness, and it was for something that seems to be unrelated to his spamming biz.
I mean really, does this come as a shock to anybody here? What we really should be doing is pointing this out to the mass media and our friends and coworkers. These people don't understand what us email admins are up against.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
So are the editors saying this isn't some legitimate, hard-working businessman just trying to make a buck on the internet? Yeah! Let him rot for all I care.
Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.
Antother one bites the dust, hey hey!
He whom you called four-eyes yesterday, you call Sir tomorrow.
We can only hope his ass is now the recepticle for junk male...
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Having opt-out's slain is frowned upon by the legal system.
I always knew that spamming was a gateway crime. It only leads to something bigger!
There's some underlying psychological trait to a guy who would be a spammer, threaten to kill witnesses, run shady online drug sites. They're all things that worsen society to the benefit of the individual. Somebody who went beyond Psych 101 can probably enlighten us here.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Q:What do you call 1000 email spammers indicted on murder charges?
A: A start.
[Fooz] In a perfect world... spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penisses, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship.
Looks like we are one step closer to this "perfect world" Fooz speaks of!
Killed?! No way! He should go to jail and hopefully, someone (his new husband) will demonstrate (on him) how effective his penis enlargement pills worked.
Death would be the easy way out.
Saturday is April 1. Slashdot will be shut down. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Remember, when you're going to call someone from jail to discuss killing a witness have them steal your attorney's cell phone first...
Now, he's in jail, using the jail's phone to set up witness intimidation and, possibly, murder. Anybody who thinks jail phones aren't monitored is a fool. It just goes to show: spammers are stupid.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Has anyone of you installed blue frog from bluesecurity? It takes the vigilante approach of "flodding the spammer's website". Any reviews?
Sounds like a great product. Previously, you used to have to install some malicious code on a bunch of PCs to conduct a DDOS attack. Now you'll only have to send a bunch of fake spams with the site as a click through. cool!
Not only would he die in prison... but they would keep his rotting corpse behind bars for an additional 20 years "just to be safe."
Indeed.. I already see spam that seems to do exactly this.. usually adverting non existant child porn on the victim's site.
Sounds like he's gonna get smoked!
(or in other words "In Soviet Spamerica, Rizler threatens to smoke YOU!")
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
"These people don't understand what us email admins are up against."
I can see it now, "SMTP, Systems Investigator". Watch him in the next exciting episode where he spends 5 hours pouring over log files and hits on the one woman in his department.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
If you send out a few million emails asking people to kill a witness, one of them will take you up on it.
C1@lis can help! Order now!!
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
WTF is this world coming to? Our children turn evil this quick now?
p g
http://www.spamdailynews.com/uploads/rizler_003.j
I mean good lord. He amassed that kind of wealth that quickly, is now in jail and was threatening to kill another human being.
So sad...I don't feel bad for him, per se...but it makes me sick...
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
...he received an unsolicited add for a hitman and decided to try it out.
One thing I was thinking though, will we get more spam as spammers get more and more time for their crime. Instead of just your grandmas spamming from their computer part time we gonna get sophisticated criminal/spam organizations who will get into this as the chance jail time vs profit increases. Just like drug trafficing. The more time you get for it the more money you can make from it.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Hmm, you have recently been stationed in Iraq?
William Smith
Murcielago - $230,000.00
Houses in Prior Lake and Burnsville - 1 Million dollars
Being a high school dropout spammer stupid enough to use a jail phone to arrange a hit - Priceless!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
They said that hubris was a sin and brought Nemesis to punish.
Oh, the hubris! The hubris!
(snicker)
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.
SPAMAssassin. :)
So this is a reverse Vardin Kushnir by proxy is it?
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!
See if you can scare up the Boondocks episode "A Date with the Health Inspector" and watch at least the first 2 minutes in which the DA has his recurring nightmare about dropping the soap in a prison shower. Mentally substitute spammer for DA. I think you'll like it...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.]
This is as fundamental as free speech. Personally, I'm not amused either.
They're the scourge of the universe.
From TFA:
...and now he's somebody's prettyboy freshmeat bitch in cell block BF.
:)
Christopher William Smith, also known as Chris Johnson, Bruce Jonson, Robert Jonson, Dieter W. Doneit-Schmitz, and Eric Smith, had amassed so much wealth from his pharmacy business that he could afford houses in Prior Lake and Burnsville and keep a fleet of luxury automobiles (2006 Mercedes Benz S65, 2004 Lamborghini Murciélago, 2005 Mercedes Benz C55A, 2001 Ferrari, 2001 BMW M5 Sedan, 2004 Mercedes Maybach, 2005 Jeep Wrangler, 2004 Cadillac DeVille Limousine, 2003 Chevrolet Tahoe, 2001 Hummer H1, etc.) according to court documents.
I would say that there might be something to this Karma thing...
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Some prisoners definitely were tortured to death by U.S. forces in Iraq. From one of Seymour Hersh's pieces: "Two Iraqi faces that do appear in the photographs are those of dead men. There is the battered face of prisoner No. 153399, and the bloodied body of another prisoner, wrapped in cellophane and packed in ice. There is a photograph of an empty room, splattered with blood." So yes, some of it was "honest-to-god death-inducing torture." Prisoners were also tortured to death in Afghanistan. Get your facts straight.
I know this is a bit off the topic of the discussion, but it just pisses me off when people try to whitewash the behavior of the Bush Administration, and offer pathetic excuses like "we didn't torture people as much as Saddam Hussein". Here's a hint: if the only way to put your country's behavior in a positive light is by drawing a comparison to a psychotic, sadistic, murderous dictator, your country is doing something really, really fucked up and wrong.
You seem to have no problem with the violation of the eighth amendment, maybe we should violate his seventh and just skip the whole trial too, shall we?
And what's that "destruction of state property" in Mississippi that was mentioned above earlier? Is that legit? You ass really does belong to da man?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
You are full of shit. Anything can be funny. I will defer to someone who's far better at this than I am, George Carlin:
"Ohhh, some people don't like you to talk like that. Ohh, some people like to shut you up for saying those things. You know that. Lots of people. Lots of groups in this country want to tell you how to talk. Tell you what you can't talk about. Well, sometimes they'll say, well you can talk about something but you can't joke about it. Say you can't joke about something because it's not funny. Comedians run into that shit all the time. Like rape. They'll say, 'you can't joke about rape. Rape's not funny.' I say, 'fuck you, I think it's hilarious. How do you like that?'"
Or, as he put more concisely in the same bit: "I believe you can joke about anything. It all depends on how you construct the joke."
Well... You're maybe on to something here. But I think a "Fruity" group would perhaps be MORE sympathetic. I'd say it's more of some "macho" unsympathetic group than a "fruity" group. :)
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
You know if only 30% of prisoners report being raped during their term, that's really not that high considering the fact that 1 in 6 women are victims of rape or attempted rape nation wide. (Source Source 2). I'm not saying prison rape or any rape is right. I'm just making the point that 30% of prisoners being raped is not a hugely alarming statistic. And the statement by the parent that people suggesting that the problem of prison rape is overrated deserves to be raped is quite ironic. Using the parents logic: If he deserves to be raped for using his right to free speech then certainly prisoners would deserve to be raped for possession of marijuana. No one deserves to be raped. Fact is people make jokes about it. They don't mean to hurt anyone by the jokes. But most humor is at least mildly offensive to SOMEONE. That's where the phrase the butt of the joke comes in. The fact that the butt of prison rape jokes happens to be the butt of the prisoner makes no difference. Lighten up a little.
The 7th only guarantees a jury trial in civil actions. You were thinking of the due process protections of the fifth, sixth, and fourteenth.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
I don't want him raped for practicing free speech. I want him raped for becoming complicit in a national problem by denying it exists and thus participating in a coverup. I do think rape is suitable punishment for rape. Eye for an eye.
But I also wasn't 100% serious. If I had a button that would cause him to be raped, I probably would not push it.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Post Patriot Act, every phone is a jail phone.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Nobody has been tortured to death recently in Iraq.
Note that you didn't qualify this in any way. You didn't say for example "by the US Army". So, I can say you are wrong merely by pointing out the people who have been beheaded.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
...and this sort of thing isn't nearly as commonplace as you seem to imply. Though I was an infantryman in Iraq, my best friend was an interrogator for our battalions S-2 (intelligence) section. Whenever we took prisoners in to S-2, I'd stand in with him during the interrogation; the implied threat of physical violence from me (one of the guys who'd taken the prisoner in the first place, which means he'd already been manhandled, and none too gently, by us) usually enhanced the subjects willingness to talk. The implied threat. I only saw one instance of a prisoner being struck by an American, and that was a piece of shit who had killed three of our men in an IED attack. I'll admit I punched the fucker, too.
If you want to see prisoner abuse, take a look at the Iraqi governments prisoners. They routinely have prisoners who "commit suicide" or were killed "trying to escape". The Iraqi police are particularly bad - I have some pictures of a group of prisoners that were tortured by the IPs. Not interrogated, just tortured. No question asking, just rubber hoses and AK-47s. Compared to a back laid open beatings and AK rounds through the meat of the legs, a few gut punches and a black eye looks pretty damn good. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but the world isn't a black-and-white moral landscape. It's all shades of gray, and sometimes being the lesser of two evils is what makes you the good guy. This "not as bad as Hussein" angle is not just that; it's the plain truth. I envy the apparent strength of your moral convictions, but I pity you for the way you've allowed them to blind you.
Arr! The laws of physics be a harsh mistress!
And this is somehow different from other muslim run countries?
Even our buddies the Saudis do this.
What kind of behavior did people expect when they made him "King"
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." ~The Honorable Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Hell, in some places you'd have to rape a child to get 20 years.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
He should have said he was threatening to f****** kill the witness, and he would have had a job after he got out! With people of his type, too!
...and if it happens to be California, you have to do much worse than that. Worst case senario = Move to UAE.
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to govern any other" -John Ada
I must have imagined this one: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-01-17-pr
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
We exchange the spammer for Abdul Rahman.
Bomb them into the stone-age, I'm fine with that. But for fuck's sake... sending them a spammer? That's just pure sadism.
not the story, but that a slashdot "editor" actually got the possessive of "witness" right.
The extremist hyperbole of the left is really starting to piss me off. Torturers used to saw off heads of dissidents while Saddam Hussein watched, yet it is the US who is accused of torture. Not once in the twenty years did the left get pissed at Saddam's torture, but just one false rumour of flushing a Koran down a toilet and all hell breaks loose. This moral equivalency is sickening. It's extemely common for leftists to say it would have been better if Saddam were still there. That's like arguing Hitler should have remained in power because some some US serviceman beat up a jew during the liberation.
I am not condoning the abusive treatment that occured at Abu Gharib, but it must be kept in proportion. It was abuse, but it was not torture. And the people who did have been punished. But the left keeps pretending that it was a policy ordered by Rumsfeld and signed by Bush, committed with bamboo shoots and rubber hoses, and that it is still occuring daily.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
He did it. He is responsble. End of story.
Yes he did it. Yes he is responsible. I am not excusing anything. All I am doing is explaining how his psyche works. As an adult he has the obligation to curb and control his anti-social tendencies.
Society should never excuse criminal behavior by saying it wasn't the criminal's fault. Society should BEAT the criminal behavior out of him! Since we don't beat criminals anymore, I suppose incarceration is the next best thing.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
But the real crime is that this is sure to give spammers in general a bad name. :(
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.
We are all just people.
The subject is intended to be a joke. Do you really believe that Bush (or his administration) is directly responsible for the torture and murder of Iraqi prisoners (or should I call them terrorists, criminals, "the enemy", etc.)? I could understand the argument that says we wouldn't be there if it weren't for bush, but that is not direct responsibility.
If you were a world leader, how would you deal with another government that seems by all accounts to be developing WMD, refuses UN inspections, and has a history of invading its weaker neighbor countries? Do you just ignore it and hope it goes away? Do you go to the UN (which has been documented to be corrupt)? Please tell me your solution.
The correct answer is an emphatic, "YES!" When the courts martial refused to examine the possibility that Lynndie England was merely following orders, when the Bush administration's highest-ranking lawyer drafts legal briefs on instructions directly from from the President as to why their abuse of prisoners is perfectly legal despite warnings from the Navy's general counsel that the "legal theories granting the president the right to authorize abuse in spite of the Geneva Conventions were unlawful, dangerous and erroneous" -- how the hell could you NOT conclude that
- the Bush administration knew perfectly well what it was doing
- knew that it was illegal
- wanted a legal smokescreen for the time when such activities leaked out
The abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were all carried out under color of authority -- the administration's authority -- which has violated all manner of treaties to which the United States is signatory, not to mention its own Constitution and laws.The question isn't whether Bush and his greasy pals -- Cheney foremost among them -- should be impeached. The question is, how far down does the moral rot go?
Dog is my co-pilot.
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.
Taken from: http://www.lyricsdomain.com/4/donovan/universal_so ldier.html
Universal Soldier
by Donovan
He's five foot-two, and he's six feet-four,
He fights with missiles and with spears.
He's all of thirty-one, and he's only seventeen,
Been a soldier for a thousand years.
He'a a Catholic, a Hindu, an Atheist, a Jain,
A Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew.
And he knows he shouldn't kill,
And he knows he always will,
Kill you for me my friend and me for you.
And he's fighting for Canada,
He's fighting for France,
He's fighting for the USA,
And he's fighting for the Russians,
And he's fighting for Japan,
And he thinks we'll put an end to war this way.
And he's fighting for Democracy,
He's fighting for the Reds,
He says it's for the peace of all.
He's the one who must decide,
Who's to live and who's to die,
And he never sees the writing on the wall.
But without him,
How would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau?
Without him Caesar would have stood alone,
He's the one who gives his body
As a weapon of the war,
And without him all this killing can't go on.
He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame,
His orders come from far away no more,
They come from here and there and you and me,
And brothers can't you see,
This is not the way we put the end to war.
--
Cheers
Stor
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"
An Iraqi whose corpse was photographed with grinning U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib died under CIA interrogation while suspended by his wrists, which had been handcuffed behind his back, according to investigative reports reviewed by The Associated Press.
US Army Segeant Jeffery Frost was one of the people interviewed during the investigation. The AP article reports " As the guards released the shackles and lowered al-Jamadi, blood gushed from his mouth 'as if a faucet had been turned on,' according to the interview summary."
Pulling this slightly on topic, veterans from MP service tend to be the next generation of civilian law enforcement. Today's prison guards in Iraq may be next year's city cops and jailers.
I like Spam Lord, or at least Spam Kingpin.
Be heard || Be herd
Lets see here, in order to be a spam king you need to be accomplished in a few of if not all of the followng...
1) Criminal Fruad. (Think "unsubscribe")
2) FCC rule-breaking
3) Microsoft Exploits
4) Bank scams
5) Obscenity
This in addition to what you mentioned, that a spam business indicates more crimes means it should be taken very seriously. Why has the DoJ been so bent on making examples of hackers, but completely ignored the true scum that are scammers?
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Torturers used to saw off heads of dissidents while Saddam Hussein watched, yet it is the US who is accused of torture. Not once in the twenty years did the left get pissed at Saddam's torture...
Quite false. Any political debate on how Bush did or did not lead us into war on false pretenses inevitably gets the "omg here are quotes from liberals saying how evil Saddam was" list posted.
The reason the US makes the news more is that it is unexpected. That Saddam was a nasty guy was not in dispute - the whole world knew of his abuses, the using of nerve gas on Iraqis, the draining of the southern marshes, the disappearing of countless people. Its not being in dispute led to its not being discussed, just as we don't get a shocked article on how the sun came up yesterday morning.
It's extemely common for leftists to say it would have been better if Saddam were still there.
It may be true. Brutal or not, he did keep Iraq stable with an iron fist. Now we've got a nasty hotspot that could become a nice democracy, a Iran-allied theocracy, or a civil war. One of these things would be great, but the other two could wind up being worse than Saddam in the long run.
No one claims that Saddam would be better than a stable democracy. To pretend the left would prefer Saddam to a stable democracy is to construct a very funny looking straw man.
Gay people aren't funny. But if it weren't for gay comics and comics about gays in the 1970's and 1980's, they wouldn't be anywhere near as accepted in this culture.
Pedophile priests aren't funny. Bit if we didn't have running jokes about the problem, few people would have realized that the problem existed.
Black people aren't funny. But shows like The Jeffersons and Fat Albert did a heck of a lot to realize the dream of the races accepting eachother as part of life.
Humor is when we're allowed to say anything, specifically things that are uncomfortable and which we would otherwise sweep under the rug. But, oddly enough, jokes cannot be used when the problem is known, widespread, and painful. Jokes about normal sexual assaults, for example, are verboten because of the sad fact that everyone knows people who have been sexually assaulted, and the humor properties fade.
But for people who don't have direct connection to the physical abuses in prisons, it can be humorous.
What I'm saying is that humor is a vehicle to inform, and in this case serves your purpose.
The ______ Agenda
"Nazis aren't funny. Killing Jews isn't funny."
Q: Why did Hitler commit suicide?
A: He read his gas bill.
Compared to a back laid open beatings and AK rounds through the meat of the legs, a few gut punches and a black eye looks pretty damn good.
Either we're there as the world's policemen or we're there for a little empire-building. I was thinking it was the former, which makes your abuse far from "pretty damn good", as one can't simultaneously break and uphold the law. Crime by cops isn't better than crime by ordinary criminals; it's worse. But is sounds like you're saying that as unaccountable overlords go, you couldn't ask for a better tyrrany than one run by the US. In which case, what's a little abuse?
Perhaps you can connect the dots on this one. If somebody tried to conquer the US, I'd be out there building IEDs, and I'd bet you would be, too.
Goes to show that spammers are not what they claim to be - harmless mass-mailing advertisers. Maybe they were 10 years ago. Today's spammers are serious criminals, often with links to organized crime.
Good thing the FBI et al finally take them seriously. Let's hope it's not too late. We wouldn't want them to combine their two "talents" and mass-mail death threats...
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Keep in mind that there's a stigma to admitting to it, and the real statistic is likely higher.
Also, when you give blood, one of the criteria is "have you ever been in a US prison?"
That's enough evidence for me right there. The Red Cross doesn't have a political agenda regarding this issue; they just want to keep the blood supply uncontaminated.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Of course, they're probably just giving the illusion of helping... That's politics for ya.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
And I finally got the reference in your name. :)
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
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.
And this, I believe, gives some hint as to why the US hasn't declared war with another territory since around 1943.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Bad things are funny if they happen to someone else and not funny if they happen to me or anyone I care about. That is true for all people; the only difference is who is included in the "anyone I care about" category.
Look at any comedy. All of them are funny because people get hurt - sometimes physically, sometimes emotionally, but they get hurt nonetheless. Or they get into embarrassing situations. Or they experience some other kind of hardship. Or they get otherwise screwed over.
People are sadists, every last one of them. The only difference is how much that tendency - enjoyment from pain of others - is restrained by conscience, pity and sympathy. Since the prevailing attitude in America seems to be that the prison population deserves none of these, prison rape is indeed funny there.
Pitiless people are monsters, because there's nothing stopping them from indulging that side of themselves.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
in the electric chair.
"Hey" they said, passing the farm truck..
[ insert meme here ]
I bet a lot of them are guilty of actual definite crimes.
Just like the Jews, niggers, spicks, chinks, and all the other minorities out there. They're "probably" doing some wrong, aren't they? We'd better enforce the laws a little harder for those groups to keep them in check. (/sarchasm)
I hate spammers as much as anyone but EVERYONE has the right to be presumed innocent until PROVEN guilty. Until that happens, speculation about "other crimes" is just that -- 100% speculation. And it's 100% bullshit.
Well, that and "Do you like movies about gladiators?"
Similar to the upcoming US election results
I totally get that humor can be based on suffering, depending on the context and intent. I laughed in Pulp Fiction when the kid gets his head blown off by accident. But I didn't laugh during Shindler's List. I have a hard time believing you did. There is a difference.
And to be clear: sympathy is not my motivation to dislike prison rape. There are at least three reasons why everyone should be against prison rape:
1. Nearly all criminals are released from prison eventually. If they have been raped they are more dangerous to society.
2. The rapist is experiencing power. Why is anyone in prison allowed the pleasure of feeding their abusive tendancies? See point #1.
3. A society that sanctions human rights violations is fundamentally a less healthy society. Violence anywhere begets violence everywhere. This has been shown over and over again throughout history.
On your tangent: people are not all sadists. How many consciously sadistic acts does the average person undertake per day? Assuming you're living in something that passes for a functioning society, I'd say virtually zero. And you believe this is all simply repression? Even the jerks I know don't seem to take pleasure in hurting, it's just a side effect of their being inconsiderate. In fact, nearly everyone I know takes efforts to avoid causing suffering of others.
Yet we can still laugh at a good Nazi joke. Get used to the complexity of people. Don't get hung up on one point and then paint everything black and white.
Cheers.
You are an idiot.
My Greatest Heist - Muisc partly inspired by the unbeatable Qwantz
You're sorely misinformed. A guy facing the judge before me, a first time felon, got 54 1/2 years (natural life) for his first-ever crime in Mississippi - rape. FIRST CRIME EVER - Life sentence. And it was just rape, he didn't beat her, rob her, steal from her, or kill her. He just screwed her without her consent and got a life sentence. The guy was only 20 years old.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Strawman. I didn't claim that I, or anyone else, laughed during Schindler's List. I did claim, and still do, that the reason why the fundamentally absurd events in Schindler's List aren't considered funny is that they (or something very much like them) really happened, and thus conscience and sympathy intervene and make the thought of laughing at them seem shamefull.
Whether someone is against prison rape or not has nothing to do with whether one finds jokes about it funny. While your points are good, they are irrelevant to the argument I'm making.
Doing something and enjoying it when it happens are not the same. Not all the pedophiles, for example, go around raping kids; quite a lot of them repress their urges because either their conscience tells them it would be wrong to act out on them, or they fear the consequences if they would be caught.
Yes, in the same way that not overeating, not having sex with everyone you happen to be attracted to, and not telling your boss that he's an idiot is repression. People have conflicting urges and goals, and sadism conflicts with most of them, so it gets repressed. Don't think that it isn't there, thought.
Like I said, people have the capacity to restrain their sadism. It is entirely possible to feel conflicting feelings - sadism and pity, for example - at the same time. In most people, conscience overrides sadism most of the time; however, that does not equal to sadism not existing.
Don't get so hung up on shades of gray that you forget that black exists. And I have argued for, not against, people being complex, and tried to show how thinking someone as less human than yourself leads to things like prison rape being considered funny.
Since you mentioned Schindler's List, you may wish to compare the situation to Nazi Germany or the Balkan war, or negro slavery or whatever: as soon as some group is considered sub-human or entirely nonhuman, people are free to act on their sadism with good conscience - which they did, in all the mentioned cases.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
No; being greedy and stupid means you fall for 419 scams. Greedy and indifferent to the welfare of others is more accurate here; or, to oversimplify: Evil.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Nope. Not just as in justice; perhaps effective. I merely hope that any others considering a course of action with widely distributed externalized marginal disutility would consider the risk of disproportionate consquent highly-personal internalized disutility a disinducement, and find the prospect of such risk becoming manifest such nicely ironic. Unfortunately, sociopaths don't consider consequences well.
I also note that the undeserved suffering of one group who have done nothing does not logically imply anything about the suffering of another group who have done something.
No, I am not a nice person; I'm far too pragmatic in my socio-political outlook. It's going to get me killed someday.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
That's not revenge that's simple self protection.
It's cheaper to wearhouse a serious fuckup then to leave them loose fucking up.
If you can't get your shit together with two strikes hanging over you head then you never will.
Your right about giving up on rehabilitation though. Good thing as it simply was'nt working for repeat offenders.
Boot camps are totally different, they are intended to rehabilitate young fuckups.
Personally I'm against prison rape. But for spammers I make an exception. They should all be ass raped by a gizzly bear using hot sauce as lube.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The extremist hyperbole of the left is really starting to piss me off.
The cowardice, ignorance, and downright treason of the right is actually pissing off decent human beings though. You have just demonstrated that you do not fit into that category.
Shitbag appeasers and apologists like yourself who can't string together a 2 paragrah defense of torture without flat out lying and demonstrating their total ignorance of the situation are a stain upon America's honor that won't be wiped away for a century. You're living in a delusional fantasy world, coward.
Look, coward, it was your type of cowardice that said Oh let's just give Hitler Bavaria and he'll go away.
Sorry, Sparky, but people who can actually use their brains *learned* from that situation. When faced with a group who is determined to totally destroy your way of life you need to stand up and be a man, not spout a bunch of idiotic lies to defend the aggressors. That is what you are doing right now.
What a bootlicking lilly livered coward you have *proven* yourself to be with that nonsense you just spouted.
Grow up and grow a pair you piece of shit.
You are exactly the type of person who proves the truth of my sig.
If somebody tried to conquer the US, I'd be out there building IEDs, and I'd bet you would be, too.
No he wouldn't. He'd be licking the boots of the aggressors just like he is now.
They are not.
The Geneva conventions were established to prevent the kind of things that Iraqi insurgents routinely do. (like attacking from within a crowded civilian area, which is a war crime. Flattening the area with the insurgents and civilians in it is not a war crime however.)
To get Geneva convention protection they must fight within the convention.
For example no German was EVER tried for actions taken against actual members of the French underground. They were in some cases tried for actions against run of the mill non-combatent frog civilians.
At least part of the problem is the assinine UN definition of torture. Sleep deprevation is torture? Fucking with their heads is torture? It appears to me that the UN has defined torture down to the point is simply means 'interogation'.
Like the feminists before them and their abuse of the term 'rape' they don't realize they minimize the severity of the act by equating it to things far less heinous.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Strawman. I didn't claim that I, or anyone else, laughed during Schindler's List.
:)
Straw man back atcha. I didn't claim that either. I was just calling attention to the distinction between awful things being funny and awful things not being funny. I assumed in my comment that you did not find Schindler's list funny, which is a pretty safe assumption. I agree that humor is often based on suffering. You didn't explicitly say it, but you implied that the reverse is also true: that suffering is often humor. I would think this is an absurd point of view, but you go on to paint mankind as a bunch of sadists, which again implies this.
conscience and sympathy intervene and make the thought of laughing at them seem shamefull.
And why is sadism considered the base in your worldview and conscience and sympathy the exceptions which intervene? Especially when conscience and sympathy obviously outweigh sadism by a landslide in any observation of average human behavior? Maybe compassion is the base and sadism is the exception? I don't believe that people who don't laugh at Schindler's List refrain out of shame; they don't laugh because they don't find it funny. There's no repression there.
Yes, in the same way that not overeating, not having sex with everyone you happen to be attracted to, and not telling your boss that he's an idiot is repression.
Maybe in your world. I don't do those things because they generally don't yield very good results. And this being the case I generally don't want them at all, at a gut level. The same way I generally don't want anything that I can see as being a net loss for me, even if indirectly.
Don't get so hung up on shades of gray that you forget that black exists.
Understood, I don't. But I also try to avoid seeing the distribution as a flat line or a saddle. Fact is it's a bell curve and the vast majority live in the middle. Extremes are interesting but I don't think it makes sense to focus too much attention on them, which was what I felt you were doing.
as soon as some group is considered sub-human or entirely nonhuman, people are free to act on their sadism with good conscience - which they did, in all the mentioned cases.
A good point. Though I would point out that not all the people involved acted on their sadism. Rather there was always a subset of people who acted on their sadism. These events are horrifying to be sure (the one that always sticks in my mind is Japanese Unit 731). But the huge impact does not outweigh the fact, in my mind, that these events did not receive mass approval, even by those who had no direct suffering. In fact, people on the whole have been gravitating for the past century toward a greater respect for human rights. It happens in fits and starts. And there are huge pockets of time and location where they backslide. But the fact that we are even having this conversation is a testament to the fact that not all people are sadistic at their core, and that compassion can be the foundation of someone's social philosopy.
Back to prison rape: I just feel compelled whenever someone makes a joke about it to pedantically point out that it's actually a real problem. Once awareness has been raised, and prison rape is considered a bad thing by the majority, and prison guards no longer look the other way, I'll shut up and folks can joke away. I may even laugh myself
In any case, agree or disagree, thanks for the well thought out discussion.
Cheers.
But as a group we're better armed and better shots.
So come and get it motherfucker. Stop hiding.
All political power comes from the barrel of a gun. Who's gunfu do you think is stronger?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I didn't say that. It is generally accepted that burning Jews alive is bad. So jokes about it are not an issue. But in the SS in 1942 jokes about burning Jews were most certainly a symptom that the issue was not being taken seriously. And that is analogous to the prison rape jokes today: it is not generally accepted that prisoners getting raped is bad, so the jokes are a symptom that the issue is not taken seriously. This is why I make the point. When it's no longer a serious social problem (one that can be easily resolved) I'll laugh at the jokes myself if they're any good.
Cheers.
> After three significant fuckups the fuckup gets put away .
Again, three arrests for possession of marijuana, and you're up the river without a paddle.
Sorry, I could see the point if it was restricted to violent/sexual offenders; but more often than not, it's used against non-violent offenses such as possession of pot.
That's just bullshit;plain and simple.
So how will removal of those civil liberties in general society make you safer. The abuse of civil liberty is not a tool for securty it is a tool for selective coercion, with your secrets remaining yours only so long as you obey, then add creative editing to your monitored existence and those secrets need not be real as you can't prove otherwise (do you monitor yourself 24/7 to esnure you always maintain a digital alibi). Governments and corporations like to keep their secrets whilst abusing yours, power and profit, the current administration is driven by it and it alone (there's whole lot less dollar profit in a fair, balanced and happy society).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Spammers dehumanize themselves by their actions.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Yeah... and how's that been working out for us?
I probably have 14 counts of whatever he is finally charged with sitting in my inbox this morning...as does the rest of my company/city/county/state/country/continent...what does it really take to get him convicted?
It made us laugh out loud when we were there: English is a funny language.
Humour does not require a zero sum game; just because something is gained from the moment, it does not have to be at the expense of anyone (or anything). Cheap jokes are often digs, but good humour is easy and sweet, and all the richer if it is in the face of horror.
It is the difference between sitcom repartie and wit, and I expect they literally appeal to different parts of the brain: the very old (in evolutionary terms) 'Reptilian' brain (at the top of the brain stem) vs. the relatively modern, abstract, 'thinking cap' (or neo-cortex). While the one deals with instincts such as 'fight or flight', the other deals with complex processing like language and sequencing.
Stuck in the middle is our limbic system, with various areas for processing emotion, 'truth' and so on, adding value to some perceptions and filtering out others.
Really good humour appeals to both instinct and abstract, and puts us in 'two minds' about it - so Itchy and Scratchy can be both funny in their own right, and as a parody or satire within a larger context. They can also be boring, ritualistic, formulaic and depressing. Funny doesn't mean sadism to me: I prefer to be good-humoured...
In summary:
There are 10 types of person: Those who know binary...
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This is just amusing to me. If anyone should be taken down, it should be the spammers. It's so hard for companies to keep this stuff at bay. When you click to junk something, people like my coworkers (I do the antifraud primarily) do work with it to help identify new messeges as smap or not to send to your junk folder or inbox. The rate that this comes in in just incredible. And the tricks they use to keep a program from spotting it as spam? The worst may be an e-mail that is entirely a clickable image. You might be surprsed at what people fall for, the rate of catches. It's mindboggling.
It's a girl!
Don't flame peope if you can't be funny, and don't give advice if you can't be smart.
I think therefore I am, but you just fuck off and die, shit-kicker.
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