Month: January 2008

Reality Stranger Than Conspiracy Theories, Part 2

Neo-Nazi Threatmaker Accused of Working for FBI | Hatewatch:

New Jersey radio host Hal Turner is well known as one of the most vicious neo-Nazis in America, a man who routinely suggests killing his enemies.

Hal TurnerRailing against President Bush, he told his audience last June that “a well-placed bullet can solve a lot of problems.” He has written that “we need to start SHOOTING AND KILLING Mexicans as they cross the border” and argued that killing certain federal judges “may be illegal, but it wouldn’t be wrong.” In 2006, after he published an attack on New Jersey Supreme Court justices that also included several of their home addresses, state police massively beefed up security for the members of the court, checking on one justice’s house more than 200 times.

Hal Turner is one serious extremist. He may also be on the FBI payroll.

On Jan. 1, unidentified hackers electronically confronted Turner in the forum of his website for “The Hal Turner Show.” After a heated exchange, they told Turner that they had successfully hacked into his server and found correspondence with an FBI agent who is apparently Turner’s handler. Then they posted an alleged July 7 E-mail to the agent in which Turner hands over a message from someone who sent in a death threat against Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.). “Once again,” Turner writes to his handler, “my fierce rhetoric has served to flush out a possible crazy.” In what is allegedly a portion of another E-mail, Turner discusses the money he is paid.

On Thursday, as the E-mail exchange was heatedly discussed on a major neo-Nazi website, Turner suddenly announced he was quitting political work. “I hereby separate from the ‘pro-White’ movement,” he said, adding that he was ending his radio show immediately. “I will no longer involve myself in any aspect of it.”

A friend recently quoted Ram Dass to me: “Police create hippies. Hippies create police.” Here police seem to be creating right-wing hate propaganda… which of course creates a need for police.

It would be awesome to find out exactly who was responsible for the brilliant plan of keeping an extremist propagandist on the air, just so that of the people who listened to him and were incited to hate and violence by his rhetoric, the small percentage who contacted him about it could be arrested.

Highway crash spills 20 tons of meat – Latest News – The Grand Rapids Press – MLive.com

Highway crash spills 20 tons of meat – Latest News – The Grand Rapids Press – MLive.com:

HOLLAND — Police shut down eastbound Int. 196 south of town after three semi-trucks collided, spilling 40,000 pounds of meat on the road. The crash occurred around 6:40 a.m. near 60th Street. The highway is closed indefinitely, according to Allegan County Central Dispatch.

Truth Is Stranger Than Conspiracy Theory, or..

…Never Attribute To Malice What Can Adequately Be Explained By The Sheer Weirdness of the World We Live In.

If you’ve been tuning in to the mainstream news you know that a bunch of tiny Iranian ships threatened an American navy destroyer, and we have video/audio of it.

If you’ve been tuning in to slightly less mainstream news, you know that the Iranians deny making the threats and point out that the voice making the threats sounds nothing like the Iranian officer who was speaking at the time, and appears to be clumsily cut in to the audio.

Given the atmosphere of mostly baseless panic about, and aggression towards, Iran that has been encouraged in America in the last couple years, it seemed logical, at least sort of, to think of this as a manufactured “Gulf of Tonkin Incident” intended to justify a war, just like the fake Weapons of Mass Destruction intelligence.

But so clumsy! So obviously fake! There wasn’t even a Colin Powell presentation before the U.N.! Surely they’d do a better job this time around wouldn’t they?…

Via GniobGniob, there are reports coming out that it may have been the maritime radio equivalent of an internet troll. One who’s been doing this for 25 years.

‘Filipino Monkey’ behind threats? – Navy News, opinions, editorials, news from Iraq, photos, reports – Navy Times:

“Based on my experience operating in that part of the world, where theare is a lot of maritime activity, trying to discern [who is speaking on the radio channel] is very hard to do,” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead told Navy Times during a brief telephone interview today.

Indeed, the voice in the audio sounds different from the one belonging to an Iranian officer shown speaking to the cruiser Port Royal over a radio from a small open boat in the video released by Iranian authorities. He is shown in a radio exchange at one point asking the U.S. warship to change from the common bridge-to-bridge channel 16 to another channel, perhaps to speak to the Navy without being interrupted.

Further, there’s none of the background noise in the audio released by the U.S. that would have been picked up by a radio handset in an open boat.

So with Navy officials unsure and the Iranians accusing the U.S. of fabrications, whose voice was it? In recent years, American ships operating in the Middle East have had to contend with a mysterious but profane voice known by the ethnically insulting handle of “Filipino Monkey,” likely more than one person, who listens in on ship-to-ship radio traffic and then jumps on the net shouting insults and jabbering vile epithets.

Navy women — a helicopter pilot hailing a tanker, for example — who are overheard on the radio are said to suffer particularly degrading treatment.

Several Navy ship drivers interviewed by Navy Times are raising the possibility that the Monkey, or an imitator, was indeed featured in that video.

Rick Hoffman, a retired captain who commanded the cruiser Hue City and spent many of his 17 years at sea in the Gulf was subject to the renegade radio talker repeatedly, often without pause during the so-called “Tanker Wars” of the late 1980s.

“For 25 years there’s been this mythical guy out there who, hour after hour, shouts obscenities and threats,” he said. “He could be tied up pierside somewhere or he could be on the bridge of a merchant ship.”

And the Monkey has stamina.

“He used to go all night long. The guy is crazy,” he said. “But who knows how many Filipino Monkeys there are? Could it have been a spurious transmission? Absolutely.”

“We Should Have Bombed It”

I have read recently — I don’t remember where — that a key element in the thinking of an American hawk is that intention is more important than effect — that doing hurtful things with a good intention is virtuous. This is what differentiates us from “terrorists,” the thinking goes — we may kill many more innocent people than they did, but we don’t want to kill any innocent people. It’s all incidental, collateral damage; not our purpose. And that means what we are doing is good. It’s better, the thinking goes, to be killed or maimed by an American with virtuous intent than a Bad Guy with evil intent.

I was reminded of that reading the following story:

President Bush had tears in his eyes during an hour-long tour of Israel‘s Holocaust memorial Friday and told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the U.S. should have bombed Auschwitz to halt the killing, the memorial’s chairman said…

Bush was visibly moved as he toured the site, said Yad Vashem’s chairman, Avner Shalev.

“Twice, I saw tears well up in his eyes,” Shalev said.

At one point, Bush viewed aerial photos of the Auschwitz camp taken during the war by U.S. forces and called Rice over to discuss why the American government had decided against bombing the site, Shalev said.

The Allies had detailed reports about Auschwitz during the war from Polish partisans and escaped prisoners. But they chose not to bomb the camp, the rail lines leading to it, or any of the other Nazi death camps, preferring instead to focus all resources on the broader military effort, a decision that became the subject of intense controversy years later.

Between 1.1 million and 1.5 million people were killed at the camp.

“We should have bombed it,” Bush said, according to Shalev.

Bombing makes everything all better, if you do it because you’re a good person fighting evil.

I mean, seriously, it’s conceivable that bombing a camp could have resulted, in the end, in less suffering in total, assuming the Germans didn’t just build new camps or take to shooting Jews instead of working them to death or gassing them. It’s not utterly irrational. It was considered at the time as a possible strategy.

But I do find it scary that the President’s response to a one of the world’s great horrors is to think “we should have bombed it.”

When all the President’s got is a hammer… he can even look at Auschwitz and see a nail.

Ron Paul’s Past: Yeah, It’s That Bad, But It Won’t Matter

There had been concern about Ron Paul’s ideological past among the more suspicious liberal netnerds for some time. Inbetween terms in Congress, he published a newsletter which mostly circulated amongst violent far-right white supremacist militia types. The only copy of that which had been made available to the public — one of the subscribers had posted it on Usenet years back — was conspicuously racist. But hey, it’s just a usenet posting, and maybe it was a hoax or maybe, as Ron Paul’s own people said, it was not actually written by Paul, but by somebody else who was writing for him at that time. A fluke. Somebody was at the wheel who shouldn’t have been and made Paul look bad in that one instance.

Well it ain’t a fluke. A reporter from the New Republic finally tracked down a large cache of Ron Paul Newsletters, and they were all in that vein. Blatantly racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, supportive of violent uprisings against the government, nostalgic for the Confederacy and agitating for a new secession. Year after year after year. If, as RP still claims, he never saw this stuff and doesn’t agree at all with it, it is strange indeed that for years and years he allowed it to be distributed under his name. Strange indeed.

Will this sink his popularity with libertarian computer nerds?

I don’t believe it will for a minute. If you read the news sites frequented by libertarian computer nerds, you’ll find that a lot of them are quietly bigoted themselves. You know how last year James Watson got drunk and started babbling racist pseudoscience to reporters? They ate that right up. Loved it. The violent stuff? They’re cool with that. They’re cast in the mold of Eric S. Raymond, gun nerd and twitchy threat-maker extraordinaire. The homophobia? I don’t know that they’re specifically homophobic but they’re often rampantly sexist (another matter which affect the selection of articles on their news sites) — they tend to be obsessed with the “discrimination” suffered by straight white males, and resentful of the Political Correctness which makes it impolite to express open bigotry.

In short, I don’t think that this will cost Ron Paul much of his audience at all. I don’t think most of them will find this side of him objectionable. In fact, the only revelation about Ron Paul that has consistently shocked many of them is that he is a creationist, and they’re largely atheists and seethe with contempt for any religious person except Ron Paul, most especially creationists. Racist, anti-Semite, homophobe? Whatever, just keep it quiet. Creationist? Eew, that makes them squeamish! But only a little squeamish.

Tthe evidence dug up by TNR is damning. There is no way he could consistently allow that stuff to be published in his name over a decade or more, whether or not he wrote it himself, unless he approved of it. That is just unbelieveable. Ron Paul has a history of approving of blatant racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and right-wing militia violence. That is undeniable.

Will the Ron Paul nerds care?

No. I predict they will not care one bit. He will remain their hero — and perhaps become a bit more of a hero, for daring to say what you can’t say (except quiety. to your Aryan militia friends).

UPDATE: Michael thinks that my pessimism about libertarian nerds is unwarranted; possibly my opinions have been skewed by hanging around reddit too much, where the worst of the worst rule.  That’s cool.  It’s great when pessimistic predictions turn out to be wrong.