That toddler who found the gun in his mother’s handbag at Walmart and killed her with it – how often do accidents of that kind happen?

No one knows, David Graham at the Atlantic tells us.

There aren’t reliable statistics on gun incidents involving kids.

Because…it doesn’t matter? We forgot? There’s no money in the budget for that? We’re going to do it next year?

…it’s unclear how often children accidentally shoot people. The Washington Post looked into the question earlier in 2014, after a 9-year-old at a shooting range in Arizona lost control of an Uzi and killed her instructor. Mark Berman found that no agency could give him a clear answer on the matter. While there are often media reports about such deaths, there’s no comprehensive database. One can track the number of victims of accidental shootings younger than 18 with some confidence, but it’s tougher to track them by who’s pulling the trigger.

Maybe that’s because what’s the point of collecting the data if you can’t do anything about the problem?

Research for more than a decade has found that accidental shooting deaths are consistently undercounted.

The upshot of all this is that it’s hard to learn any policy lessons from Rutledge’s death—in addition to the impossibility of making sense of it on any emotional level.

But what’s the point of learning policy lessons if you’re not allowed to put what you learn into practice?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

But don’t forget, online harassment is no big deal.

Casey Parks at OregonLive reports:

A prank call sent a large number of Portland police officers to a Southwest Portland home late Friday night.

Central Precinct officers responded to a home in the 11200 block of Southwest Capitol Highway around midnight after receiving reports that an armed man was holding residents hostage inside.

As officers were developing a plan to contact residents, they learned that the call was probably a hoax.

They later confirmed that everyone inside the home was safe.

A Twitter user who goes by Grace Lynn says the hoax, called a “swatting,” was intended for her. A forum on the website 8chan described the plan to “swat” her.

8chan?? That nice harmless outlet for discussions of ethics & gaming and similar controversial issues? Surely 8chan wouldn’t do a thing like that.

Police Sgt. Pete Simpson confirmed the bureau did receive a phone call suggesting the original call was a prank.

“The whole swatting term came from people calling to get a SWAT team to go out on a call,” Simpson said. “But that’s not how we operate. Patrol officers are going to go assess a scene based on what they see. We don’t roll out a SWAT team just because someone calls 911. We need more than a phone call.”

…

“You’re taking away resources that might be needed for someone who has a real emergency,” Simpson said.

Unless it’s GamerGate or people who hate “SJWs” – if they’re the ones doing it then no harm will befall anyone as a result, because god is Just.

Simpson said the bureau has encountered one or two other “swatting” attempts but that such prank calls won’t be successful here.

“It’s not going to result in the prank playing out the way the prankster wanted it to,” Simpson said. “But it does create significant risk to the public and significant risk to officers responding. And the prankster can face state and federal charges.”

Improper Use of an Emergency Reporting System is a crime in Oregon, and investigators say they will work to identity the caller and make an arrest.

Anyone with information about this incident is asked to email it to CrimeTips@portlandoregon.gov.

But but but…online harassment is no big deal. Everybody says so.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Now that Dave has drawn my attention to that Salon article saying please stop spelling “God” as “god” I feel like telling the author, Richard Eskow, my reason for disliking the automatic “God” as opposed to “god.”

Please, please, stop writing “god” in lowercase form.

I get it. You don’t believe in a supreme being. That’s fine with me. What anybody believes or doesn’t believe is their call. You may believe that the world would be a better place without organized religion. Having seen organized religion in action, I’m inclined to say you may be right. You may believe that even private, reflective, personal religion is harmful, although I don’t see that myself.

Notice he didn’t say “You don’t believe in The Supreme Being.”

The reason he didn’t do that is the same as the reason I spell “God” “god” when it’s not too confusing. (I don’t always do it, because sometimes it is confusing.)

I understand why some atheists might want to write “god” instead of “God.” If you believe that the word describes a human phenomenon rather than a genuine and existent deity, it might seem appropriate to use the lowercase form. But it’s not.  If you are referring to the singular and all-powerful deity of monotheistic tradition, you are using a proper name. That means the capital “G” is a must.

No. Here’s why: the thing being named is too various and flexible and differently-described by different people or in different contexts to have a proper name. Giving it a proper name conveys an air of reality and familiarity that “god” should not have. Every sighting of a “God” gives another little layer of acceptance of the actuality of the putative person named, even to people who on a conscious level don’t believe in it. It’s merely a custom, and it’s one we’re allowed to break.

To be sure, there will continue to be many opportunities to use the word in lowercase form. The phrase “belief in gods” is punctuated correctly. So is “belief in a monotheistic god.” But the phrase “belief in god” is not correct, no matter what you do or don’t believe.

You’ve said it a thousand times, and I get it: You don’t believe in capital-G God any more than I believe in Tinkerbell. That doesn’t change anything. (See what I did there? I don’t believe in an entity named “Tinkerbell.” But since it is the proper name of a, yes, fictional character, I capitalized it.)

Ah yes, but “Tinkerbell” is a fictional character, and recognized as such. So are Hamlet and Lear and Emma Woodhouse and Thea Kronborg, but “God” is not – because of lacking the recognized as such part. Talking about god as God makes it more concrete and matter-of-fact and normalized; we shouldn’t do that.

The true nature of creation may be in dispute, but the proper usage in this case is not. Webster’s Dictionary tells us that a “god” is “a spirit or being that has great knowledge, strength, power, etc.” while “God” is “the perfect and all-powerful spirit or being … worshipped by Christians, Jews, and Muslims …”

One is a noun. The other is a name. If it weren’t a name, it would be necessary to use a different sentence construction, as in: “They forced the sergeant to swear to the god,” or, “Is the god good?”

Indeed, and that would be better. It would be better because it would make it clearer what everyone was talking about.

And by the way we know what the dictionary meaning is. We know it’s not standard to call it “god.” That’s the point.

The atheist/religionist debate concerns nothing less than the fundamental nature of the cosmos. It involves issues like the fundamental ground of being, life after death, the soul, and the origin of all existence. If anybody wants to argue those things, be my guest. But now we’re talking about grammar.  When you don’t capitalize a proper name like God’s, you’re violating a fundamental principle of grammar.

Don’t.be.silly. One, we’re allowed to violate putative fundamental principles of grammar; two, we’re all the more allowed when we do it for a reason; three, it’s not even a fundamental principle of grammar anyway; four, it’s not a proper name like other proper names because it can refer to anything and everything, and definitely not only the Webster’s definition; five, e.e. cummings; six, bell hooks; seven, don’t be silly.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

This pendantic hypocrite is correct about grammar rules, but totally wrong about capitalizing the word god when we are talking about his god in particular, and about how we should all just acknowledge that Christians are always right. And completely wrong about why I write “god” in lower case. I will tell you why:

His god already has a name. It’s YHWH, or Yahweh or Jehovah. That is a proper name, and I generally capitalize proper names. I don’t usually capitalize my own name, but that is a page out of e.e. cummings, and another story. So, if smartass wants his deity capitalized, I have no objection if he uses that particular god’s proper name.

However, I do object that one particular religion gets to claim the generic term “god” as the actual name of their particular god. It’s like my proclaiming that, from now on, everybody is to refer to the tree in my front yard as “Tree” with a capital T. No, not the Alder (that phony!), the Pear. And nobody ever anywhere is allowed to talk about Tree unless they capitalize it all proper-like. Disrespectful, don’t ya know? And Alpha Centauri? From now on, that one is known as “Star”, so kiss my ass.*

The other reason I don’t capitalize the word god, unless it is at the beginning of a sentence, is because, to quote a certain pendantic hypocrite, it “shows dumb disrespect” to every other religion. There are currently some 4000+ active gods, and countless dormant ones from throughout human history, and they are all diminished by only the Christian god owning that capital letter. Nope. Nobody but Christians can refer to their god as “God”. Sorry about that. Sure, I respect your religion, but screw your puny god, because mine is the true god.

So, my point isn’t that I don’t understand grammar, or that I use “god” to take the piss out of Christians, I do it because I am inclusive, and respect all religions equally. With all the respect they deserve.

Thus endeth the lesson.

*I realize that the Tree and Star analogies fail at a certain point, because trees and stars are real.

David Richards

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Boko Haram has taken over a whole town and a military base in Borno. That’s bad.

The BBC reports:

Boko Haram has seized a town and key multinational military base in north-eastern Nigeria, officials and eyewitnesses say.

A senator in Borno state said troops had abandoned the base in the town of Baga after it was attacked on Saturday.

Residents of Baga, who fled by boat to neighbouring Chad, said many people had been killed and the town set ablaze.

Baga, scene of a Nigerian army massacre in 2013, was the last town in the Borno North area under government control.

So a part of Nigeria is now in the hands of Boko Haram. That’s bad.

Maina Maaji Lawan, senator for Borno North, told BBC World Service civilians had run “helter skelter” – “some into the forest, some into the desert”.

Communications with the town were cut off and exact information about casualty numbers could not be confirmed, he said.

“We are very dispirited,” the senator added.

The military simply ran away, he said. The people there find this hugely frustrating, as well they might.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Great – the New York cops are still flirting with fascism by making a great show of their opposition to civilian control of the police department. Apparently they want cops to answer only to other cops, and for everyone else to simply obey the armed police force.

Hundreds of police officers have turned their backs on the mayor of New York at the funeral of the second of two officers shot dead last month.

Wenjian Liu, a son of Chinese migrants, was killed with his partner Rafael Ramos on 20 December by a gunman with a grievance against the police.

Speakers lined up to pay tribute at the service in a Brooklyn funeral home.

In the street outside, hundreds turned their backs to a video screen when Mayor Bill de Blasio spoke.

Police departments can’t be autonomous in a democracy. People who are issued deadly weapons as part of their job simply can’t be somehow independent of civilian law and oversight and administration. They have to be accountable, and they have to follow the rules. It’s not negotiable. Pay is negotiable, hours are negotiable, benefits and tenure and promotion are negotiable, but autonomy from the civilian government is not.

No police coup in New York City thank you.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

More on that ship full of refugees abandoned in the Mediterranean the other day – specifically, the cheerful news that the traffickers made 3 million bucks on the deal.

Police in Italy believe traffickers made some $3m (£1.9m; €2.5m) from 359 illegal migrants found abandoned on a cargo ship in the Mediterranean.

The Ezadeen was towed into the Italian port of Corigliano Calabro after being found by coast guards on Friday.

Most of those aboard appear to be Syrians, in the second such case involving a freighter this week.

You know – people fleeing for their lives from a deadly war and a murderous government.

The police chief of Cosenza province, Luigi Liguori, said each migrant had paid between $4,000 and $8,000 to board the ship.

Officers say the smugglers wore hoods and locked the migrants in the ship’s hold before apparently abandoning ship on a lifeboat.

Locked them in the hold??! Fuuuuuuuuck.

The smugglers’ new tactic appears to be simple and effective: point a cargo ship towards Italy and let the coastguard pick it up, the BBC’s James Reynolds reports from Corigliano Calabro.

Illegal migration to the EU has been fuelled by the civil war in Syria, which has driven people to seek asylum in Europe, along with economic migrants.

Last year it is estimated that nearly 3,500 refugees died trying to cross the Mediterranean while another 200,000 were rescued.

And lots of traffickers made lots of money.

Source: the BBC.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

As you may have seen, it has emerged that Avicenna has been plagiarizing extensively on his blog, so we had to cut him loose from FTB.

He posted what he calls an apology after the plagiarism emerged and before we cut him loose. I wouldn’t call it an apology myself. It’s not actually apologetic, and it is quite self-aggrandizing and self-absorbed and self-serving. That’s…not how to apologize.

He doesn’t mention anything about the harm done to the rest of us, or gratitude for taking him on to begin with. That’s not how to apologize either.

So, altogether, not a very shining moment.

On a happier note, we have new people coming aboard soon.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

And just in case you feel like watching the whole damn thing – here’s the 45 minute version.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVWn89vGJys

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I went to A Play! last night, and Tuesday night. It’s a two-part play about the presidency of LBJ, All the Way With LBJ and The Great Society. It was pretty damn good. He was an interesting guy but his interestingness was overshadowed by at one end the (much exaggerated) “charisma” of the Kennedys and at the other end the misbegotten war in Vietnam.

Accidental president. Brilliant politician. Flawed man. It’s 1963 and an assassin’s bullet catapults Lyndon Baines Johnson into the presidency. A Shakespearean figure of towering ambition and appetite, the charismatic, conflicted Texan hurls himself into Civil Rights legislation, throwing the country into turmoil. But in faraway Vietnam, a troublesome conflict looms. The Huffington Post calls Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert Schenkkan’s dramatization of LBJ’s first year in office “a vivid profile of one of the most complicated men to occupy the presidency.”

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihb2KURGuio

Here’s the last 5 minutes of Johnson’s March 1965 address to Congress urging passage of the Voting Rights Bill, also known as the We shall overcome speech.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNjlwwf2K9g

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Speaking of Lego and girls…

Last May, some Girl Scouts met with Obama to talk about a bridge.

Five girl scouts from Jenks met President Barack Obama to present their plan for a flood-proof bridge at the White House Science Fair.

The girls, 6-year-old Avery Dodson and 8-year-olds Natalie Hurley, Miriam Schaffer, Claire Winton and Lucy Claire Sharp of Girl Scout Troop 2612 built a model for the bridge based on the recent damaging floods in Estes Park, Colo. The girls are the only Girl Scouts in the nation at the fair.

The flood-proof bridge model the girls designed mechanizes the bridge with motors and gears in the correct ratios.

A computer program developed by the girls would cause the bridge to retract when flood conditions set in through a motion sensor in the river bed.

The fair was in June. It was in the news last week.

Ignoring his own stern warning to not “put stuff on your head if you’re president,” Obama donned a tiara while posing for a photo with Girl Scout Troop 2612, of Tulsa, Oklahoma. White House photographer Pete Souza shared the photo for the first time on Wednesday.

“Still editing 2014 Year in Photos. I may include this one even though it’s a posed photo,” Souza said on Instagram. “This is from the annual White House Science Fair. The kids from Girl Scout Troop 2612 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, convinced the President to wear a tiara with them for their group photo. The girls had exhibited a Lego flood proof bridge project.”

The White House Science Fair took place in June, and focused on girls and women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields who are inspiring the next generation of scientists.

Emphasis mine.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally part of a comment by Golgafrinchan Captain on They were essentially without any relevant experience.

When I was growing up, my parents had a friend who had been a Nazi is WW2. It wasn’t something he really talked about but, through the years, I gathered some details from him and some more from his children. They thought they were the good guys, doing what needed to be done to protect themselves and the world from an imminent threat. It scares the crap out of me that our brains can make that kind of rationalization, but they can.

He was captured quite early and kept in a Canadian POW camp. The moment he realized how horribly wrong he had been is when he got to the POW camp and was actually treated well. The enemy he thought he was fighting would never show compassion to captives. That’s what’s so horrible about things like the US torture program; it confirms the beliefs of “the enemy”.

When Bush Jr.’s Iraq war started, it really messed with my head. Many of the things I heard coming out of the States reminded me of the things that had convinced my parents’ friend that they were on the side of good in WW2. Note: this is not to say that the US’s current actions are anywhere near as horrible as some of the things done by the Nazi’s, but it’s walking the same path. Also, plenty of comments by US citizens were/are just as horrible (“nuke all the sand-n***ers”, “savages who don’t deserve to live”, etc.). To be fair, Canada also has it’s share of such assholes but I think they are tolerated much less.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment by Ilyris on Just children.

30 years ago Lego had a space range. I always played with my brother’s Lego, and eventually my parents started buying me Lego too. One of the changes seems to be the faces. The Lego faces of my spacemen were very neutral, just 2 dots and a gently smiling mouth. I hear that they are getting angrier, and the characters are more geared toward conflict. I don’t understand why they can’t leave them neutral and if the child wants to play cops and robbers or whatever they can use their imagination. That seems to have really disappeared, the toys that you build your own dreams with.

From the article: “Research conducted for the company found that children, especially boys, enjoyed playing out conflicts between characters.”

So they’ve pushed their range toward boys deliberately, and then decided they need something fluffy to market to girls, both perpetuating gender stereotypes and also encouraging boys to engage in conflict.

And you know, apparently tricycles do need to be gendered. We went looking for one for a 2 year old a couple of weeks ago; the choices were pink and covered in princesses, or blue and covered in trucks and masculine wording. How about a plain green one?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The NY Times reports that Cosby and his team have been attacking his accusers for decades – so he not only assaulted women, he also did what he could to damage them afterwards.

That too is a familiar pattern. Bill Clinton did it, Woody Allen did it, Michael Shermer did it. It’s interesting how conscienceless you have to be to do that – to harm someone and then when she tries to report the harm, try to damage her so badly that she will stop trying to report the harm.

In 2005, when Tamara Green told the “Today” show and The Philadelphia Inquirer that Bill Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted her in the early 1970s, one of Mr. Cosby’s lawyers publicly branded the allegations “absolutely false,” while his aides approached another newspaper with “damaging information” about her, according to court documents.

Nice guy.

As accusations of sexual assault continue to mount against Mr. Cosby — more than two dozen women have gone public, the latest last Monday — the question arises as to why these stories never sparked a widespread outcry before. While many of the women say they never filed police complaints or went public because they feared damaging their reputations or careers, the aggressive legal and media strategy mounted by Mr. Cosby and his team may also have played a significant role.

Nice, nice, nice guy.

An examination of how the team has dealt with scandals over the past two decades and into this fall reveals an organized and expensive effort that involved quashing accusations as they emerged while raising questions about the accusers’ character and motives, both publicly and surreptitiously. And the team has never been shy about blasting the news media for engaging in a feeding frenzy even as the team made deals or slipped the news organizations information that would cast Mr. Cosby’s accusers in a negative light.

But there can be a downside.

But casting doubt on or aiming vitriol at the accusers can have consequences.

In 2005, when Mr. Cosby’s team denied Tamara Green’s accusations that he had drugged and sexually assaulted her in Los Angeles in the early 1970s, she did not pursue legal action. But this month she was ready to fight back. Mr. Cosby’s team had greeted her renewed claim of sexual assault by saying it was “a 10-year discredited accusation that proved to be nothing at the time, and is still nothing.” On Dec. 10, Ms. Green filed a defamation suit against Mr. Cosby, saying the denials basically branded her a liar.

“I want it put to a jury,” Ms. Green said earlier this month. “I want it ended, finally. I want my name restored.”

But but but Bill Cosby is such a nice guy.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A story posted publicly by A Mighty Girl on Facebook:

CNN reports.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: FTB

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Back in the day

Jan 2nd, 2015 11:03 am | By Ophelia Benson

At Gregory in Seattle’s suggestion I did a Google images search on “LEGO ad 1970s” and sure enough…compared to the present they look like a lost utopia.

Note the caution – when it’s a girl and boy together, the girl is smaller and younger than the boy. It wouldn’t do to have a dominant little girl, even though there are in fact some families in which there is a girl (or even more than one) who is older than her brother.

But all the same. Utopia, I tells ya.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: FTB

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“I am not sure why you feel the need to protect him”

Jan 2nd, 2015 10:08 am | By Ophelia Benson

I guess I should adjust my opinion of Judd Apatow. I had thought of him as one of the pillars of Bro-world, whose citizens generally seem oblivious to the existence of women as anything other than platforms for genitalia. But that doesn’t seem to cohere well with his attitude to Bill Cosby.

If you’ve followed director Judd Apatow’s Twitter musings for the last several weeks, his views on the rape allegations against Bill Cosby won’t come as a huge surprise.

But over the weekend, Apatow went on a lengthy anti-Cosby rampage. He slammed Cosby’s “cold” defenders for siding with the comedian. He compared Cosby’s lack of conviction in a court of law to Hitler dying without being convicted of murder. And he labeled Cosby “a rapist” and “a monster.”

“I wish he wasn’t a rapist too. I am not sure why you feel the need to protect him,” Apatow told one Cosby defender.

“I always wonder why some people try so hard to not believe women who have been assaulted. What is the root of that?” he tweeted at another.

The usual – the failure to understand that women are human beings just as men are.

Asked by one follower why he had an “obsession” with Cosby, Apatow quipped: “I guess it’s because guys who rape a lot aren’t cool.”

Cosby has never been convicted of any of the allegations against him, but the recent allegations threaten to permanently tarnish the reputation of one of America’s most beloved and powerful comedians.

Not all the rapey priests and bishops have been convicted, either, but the hundreds of allegations threaten to tarnish the reputation of the Catholic church forever.

Apatow’s outspokenness is rare among entertainment industry figures, who have remained largely silent on the allegations that have swirled around Cosby for years but havereached a fever pitch over the last several months.

Save for a few of Cosby’s celebrity defenders like comedian Whoopi Goldberg and singer Jill Scott, the response in show business has been non-existent. Hollywood, it appears, prefers to stay out of the fray.

“Almost nobody here will acknowledge that Bill Cosby has been accused of rape x30,” he said earlier this month.

Well, I guess I do have to adjust my opinion.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: FTB

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Have a pleasant trip, thank you for sailing with us

Jan 2nd, 2015 9:33 am | By Ophelia Benson

Here’s an exciting new way to treat people badly – offer them passage on a ship and then once the ship is well out into the sea…leave. What the hell, you have better things to do, right?

Italian authorities have taken control of a ship with 450 migrants, thought to be Syrian, that was abandoned by its crew off Italy’s coast.

The Italian coastguard said it was now being towed to an Italian port after a rescue team managed to board.

The Ezadeen, sailing under the flag of Sierra Leone, lost power in rough seas overnight off the south-east of Italy.

A total of 796 migrants were rescued from another ship found abandoned without any crew earlier in the week.

It’s the hot new trend.

The alarm was raised in a distress call from one of the migrants using the maritime radio on board, who told the Italian coastguard: “We’re without crew, we’re heading toward the Italian coast and we have no-one to steer.”

The Ezadeen was built nearly 50 years ago and is a livestock carrier. It appears to be registered to a Lebanese company and has come under the control of human traffickers.

That is, the traffickers borrowed it, and once it was in open waters, they returned it to its owners and went away to borrow another ship.

Analysis: Jonathan Josephs, BBC News

The Ezadeen is the latest uncrewed ship full of would-be migrants to be left to drift to its fate in the Mediterranean Sea.

People-traffickers appear to be behind the phenomenon and one source with close knowledge of the rescue operations is concerned that it “seems to be something of a new trend”.

Money for old rope. Borrow or rent a ship, stuff it with people, pocket the cash, nip back to shore in a speedboat.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: FTB

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Just children

Jan 1st, 2015 6:01 pm | By Ophelia Benson

A great comic on the whole “let’s make a special pink fluffy version of this toy for girls” approach to toy-making and -marketing. Maritsa Patrinos is the artist.

“Why do girls need their own Legos?”

“We wanted Legos to appeal to girls more.”

Why not just make them appeal to children? Just children?

There’s no need to sell tricycle for girls and tricycles for boys. There’s no need to sell baseball bats or wagons or toy cars or stuffed animals or train sets or dolls or in fact anything for girls or for boys. There’s no need for all this shepherding and herding and nudging. Leave us alone. Let us play with whatever we want to play with, and keep your ideas about what’s “gender appropriate” to yourself.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: FTB

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Dossiers on trolls

Jan 1st, 2015 5:04 pm | By Ophelia Benson

Sweden has a tv journalist who confronts internet trolls, Robert Aschberg.

The goal of Troll Hunter is not to rid the Internet of every troll. “The agenda is to raise hell about all the hate on the Net,” he says. “To start a discussion.” Back at the Troll Hunter office, a whiteboard organized Aschberg’s agenda. Dossiers on other trolls were tacked up in two rows: a pair of teens who anonymously slander their high school classmates on Instagram, a politician who runs a racist website, a male law student who stole the identity of a young woman to entice another man into an online relationship. In a sign of the issue’s resonance in Sweden, a pithy neologism has been coined to encompass all these forms of online nastiness: näthat (“Net hate”). Troll Hunter, which has become a minor hit for its brash tackling of näthat, is currently filming its second season.

It is generally no longer acceptable in public life to hurl slurs at women or minorities, to rally around the idea that some humans are inherently worth less than others, or to terrorize vulnerable people. But old-school hate is having a sort of renaissance online, and in the countries thought to be furthest beyond it.

The anonymity provided by the Internet fosters communities where people can feed on each other’s hate without consequence. They can easily form into mobs and terrify victims. Individual trolls can hide behind dozens of screen names to multiply their effect. And attempts to curb online hate must always contend with the long-standing ideals that imagine the Internet’s main purpose as offering unfettered space for free speech and marginalized ideas. The struggle against hate online is so urgent and difficult that the law professor Danielle Citron, in her new book Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, calls the Internet “the next battleground for civil rights.”

And Sweden is not immune.

Sweden’s Internet also has a disturbing underbelly. It burst into view with the so-called “Instagram riot” of 2012, when hundreds of angry teenagers descended on a Gothenburg high school, calling for the head of a girl who spread sexual slander about fellow students on Instagram. The more banal everyday harassment faced by women on the Internet was documented in a much-discussed 2013 TV special called Men Who Net Hate Women, a play on the Swedish title of the first book of Stieg Larsson’s blockbuster Millennium trilogy.

Internet hatred is a problem anywhere a significant part of life is lived online. But the problem is sharpened by Sweden’s cultural and legal commitment to free expression, according to Mårten Schultz, a law professor at Stockholm University and a regular guest on Troll Hunter, where he discusses the legal issues surrounding each case. Swedes tend to approach näthat as the unpleasant but unavoidable side effect of having the liberty to say what you wish. Proposed legislation to combat online harassment is met with strong resistance from free speech and Internet rights activists.

What’s Freeze Peach in Swedish?

Some researchers collected a ton of data from the comments section of the right-wing online publication Avpixlat.

Starting with this data, members meticulously identified many of Avpixlat’s most prolific commenters and then turned the names over to Expressen, one of Sweden’s two major tabloids. In December 2013, Expressen revealed in a series of front-page stories that dozens of prominent Swedes had posted racist, sexist, and otherwise hateful comments under pseudonyms on Avpixlat, including a number of politicians and officials from the ascendant far-right Sweden Democrats. It was one of the biggest scoops of the year. The Sweden Democrats, which have their roots in Sweden’s neo-Nazi movement, have long attempted to distance themselves from their racist past, adopting a more respectable rhetoric of protecting “Swedish culture.” But here were their members and supporters casting doubt on the Holocaust and calling Muslim immigrants “locusts.” A number of politicians and officials were forced to resign. Expressen released a short documentary of its reporters acting as troll hunters, knocking on doors and confronting Avpixlat commenters with their own words.

People should own their own words.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: FTB

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