Right now, an annoying racist brat is trying to leave abusive comments on PooterGeek—my favourite so far: “niggers stink of shit”. Well, this nigger’s shit hot with UNIX.
If you’re reading this, mate, I already know what school you attend and the name of your head of year. She is going to ring me back when she gets out of her next class. Welcome to the Internet, where your every step to exclusion is logged.
UPDATE: The kid responsible has been identified, has spent the morning in tears apparently. He’s not going to be expelled or suspended, but is going home from school with his dad today. He has been given a talking-to and is going to write me a letter of apology. That’s the end of it as far as I’m concerned, so I have removed the link to his school’s Website from this post.
71 Comments
You can almost smell the fear!
Whooh! Go gettum, Damian! Sounds like that school may not have an *operating* safe internet use policy– though there may well be one sitting in a cupboard somewhere…..
She has indeed just called me back and I was very impressed with her response, and by a non-IT teacher who knows what an IP address is. I’ve just emailed my records to her. And, from what she told me about her school’s audit trail and disciplinary policy, my new friend is looking forward to a thorough bollocking.
Given that this is a racially motivated attack, he’s likely to have the police banging on his door before sundown.
Don’t get mad: get even.
Good lad Damian.
Hang on, have you just got rid of one of the few teenagers who actually visits political blogs? For shame!
Good work, that man… Nothing teaches the little buggers like a bit of swift justice.
Trying to spam up a blog called “PooterGeek” and get away with it? Truly this kid is a genius of Einsteinian proportion.
Suddenly the world makes just that little bit more sense. One spotty little oik got his comeuppance. Hurrah! Just a million more to go.
Good work.
Hahahahahaha! Fucking classic!
Nicely done, sir…
DK
Wonderful!
You bastard. He could have missed a perfectly good class on racial tolerance thanks to your interference. Now he´ll never learn.
Priceless… I usually delete my hate mail but if it means I can name and shame them I can filter it all to your mailbox
It goes without saying that the remarks which your correspondent made were disgraceful. But behaving so vengefully towards a schoolboy who’s merely exercising his right to free speech is utterly unconscionable. The continuation of liberal civilisation depends on evryone recognising that the right to be offensive is one of our most fundamental liberties.
PooterGeek, my friend: Stop congratulating yourself on infringing other people’s rights. You’re a bit of a moral cretin.
Yeah, lone voice, but it is very funny…
DK
Lone Voice, you ignorant slut. No one has the right to hurt other people for their own amusement. Nobody has the right to be gratuitously rude. We practice courtesy and manners to keep an already dicey situation from going completely nuts. Monkeys share lice, we share gossip.
No right is ever absolute. There are always constraints on our behavior, because without those constraints this would be a much darker place.
Lone voice: do you remember the famous Star Trek episode where that robot is on an increasingly insane mission to destroy all imperfection in the universe until Kirk convinces him that he too is imperfect and so must destroy himself? That’s what you remind me of.
Racial epithets, threats: both speech. Publishing angry responses to racial epithets and/or threats: speech. Phoning a school to express anger re: epithets and/or threats: hey, that’s speech too. If the kid didn’t know that speech can be dangerous well he knows it now. And all through the magic of free speech.
note: if this is yet another example of me not picking up on that [I'm making curly quotes with my fingers] British irony, then scratch everything above.
Don’t tell me, JeremyBrown: the Gestapo arrive to complain about anti-Nazi remarks – and that’s just speech too, huh?
Well, well: “infringing other people’s rights..”
Let me guess – you are one of those people who believe that ‘rights’ come without the accompanying ‘responsibility’, hmmm?
There is no “right to free speech” on some-one else’s blog.
I’ve just had this extraordinary vision of one of JuliaM’s previous lives. It’s Moscow, circa 1937. There’s a certain chill in the air. Comrade Julia has just been appointed to a plum position on Pravda. Her first article begins thus: “The right to live in the USSR carries with it the responsibility to speak respectfully of Comrade Stalin at all times…”
Meanwhile, Keith has a point. PooterGeek has a right to decide what appears on his blog. But there’s all the difference in the world between deleting offensive remarks and going to extraordinary lengths to bully some wretched adolescent.
That anonymous lone voice for free speech isn’t actually your childish interlocutor come back in a new guise, is it?
Lol! “..bully some wretched adolescent”. Yeah, man, don’t get all, like, HARSH on the dude, ok? Peace….
No, I doubt it – too many words & complicated stuff like grammar to be the charmless little individual who wrote the original quoted post.
You don’t have to go back as far as the 30s, “lone voice”. Come with me to a summer day the 70s. I’m standing quietly on Wilnecote Junior School playground. Three of the school’s young students have been watching television the night before and learned of an exciting political movement, one that was very popular in the Midlands during that period.
They decide to share their knowledge with me, by marching in formation towards me chanting at gradually increasing volume the mantra “National Front! National Front!”
Eventually I shout out “Leave me alone!” loud enough for Mr Chamberlain, a Phys. Ed. teacher, to hear from a prefab backing on the playground. He runs outside, takes the boys surrounding me to his office, and thumps their backsides with an old tennis shoe.
Nazis like me and my schoolteacher friends just never stop stamping on the natural urge of the young to express themselves. Just wait till I’m even older: the inevitable endpoint of my ideology of hate will be for me to order them to herd little Jewish children into gas chambers.
PooterGeek, old comrade. For heaven’s sake try and observe some fundamental distinctions. The infant fascists who picked on you in the 1970s were engaged in a straightforward act of intimidation, not merely expressing some rather unpleasant opinions. The heroic Mr Chamberlain was absolutely right to discipline them, though your evident relish for corporal punishment somewhat undermines your carefully cultivated liberal image. The infant fascist who posted messages to your blog was simply sounding off – nothing more and nothing less. By all means delete his messages. But be aware of one thing. If people like you continue to do dirt on his right to free speech, he’ll soon conclude that there’s a conspiracy against him and his kind and his commitment to racist ideology will only be intensified. And then the trouble will really begin.
“For heaven’s sake try and observe some fundamental distinctions.”
Ah, yes. Reporting racist abuse = the activities of the USSR censors in quashing political dissent.
Those kind of fundamental distinctions..?
In what sense does “niggers stink of shit” constitute an “opinion”?
Are you suggesting that is what he literally believed??
Damian, that’s both extremely cool (that you got the little bugger) and extremely scary (that it seems like there is zero anonymity on the internet). I’m curious: what can you find out about where and who I am? I’ll e-mail you with my true identity once you’ve said which types of info you’ve been able to find out (you already know me vial e-mail, and the e-mail address I’m posting with isn’t real, as part of the test) so you can tell me your findings! It would be great to know how exposed one is these days… Thanks in advance!
The kid has every right to say that niggers stink of shit. But he is also expected to obey school rules. If the rules say that he can’t make racist comments in school, then he’s still free to do it when he gets home. Also, the school has a contract with an ISP. An ISP’s customer has the right to say whatever they like, but the ISP has the right to ask that they not do so when using their service to access the Web. Anyone not happy with such conditions doesn’t have to sign the ISP’s contract in the first place.
None of this is in any way related to freedom of speech. If you still don’t understand, try shouting “Fuck off!” repeatedly at your grandmother.
Hello, TestCommenter
Trade secrets is trade secrets. I prefer that my enemies live in fear of my vast and unspecified powers. Let’s just say that Google Maps has made it so much easier to train an orbiting death ray than it ever used to be.
P.S. I love what you’re wearing today.
Um. It’s Damian’s website: he doesn’t have to have anything on it which he doesn’t like, any more than I have to put up with someone spraying “Niggers smell of shit” on my car or my house.
Does he have the right to get the boy into trouble with his school? In my view, yes, because kids don’t have the same rights as adults. They aren’t allowed to drive or have sex or vote or lots of other things, and that is right. And if they express disgusting views, adults are allowed to stop them from doing that and call them on it.
It’s tough being a child, but it’s also temporary.
Righteous work comrade. Cyber-discipline, the New Wave in school discipline. You’ll need to tell me how it works. Can it be used to distribute death-rays to adolescants in white tracksuits?
Squander: None of this is in any way related to freedom of speech. If you still don’t understand, try shouting “Fuck off!” repeatedly at your grandmother.
Squander has hit it exactly. And if your grandmother then disinherits you does that mean she’s violating your right to free speech? Or does it just mean you’ve finally convinced her that you’re a little twerp and she’d rather leave her money to the local animal shelter?
Lonely Justice Guy: “Don’t tell me, JeremyBrown: the Gestapo arrive to complain about anti-Nazi remarks – and that’s just speech too, huh? “
If I were a student and someone complained to my school that I made anti-Nazi remarks on their blog and then the school principal sent the Gestapo to interrogate me? I’d ask my parents to help me transfer to a different school.
It’s not as if Damian is really an omnipotent wizard (sorry Damian, someone had to break it to you) and the poor infant’s school had no choice but to do Damian’s bidding.
If some crackpot blogger complained to a school that one of their students left comments that were offensively future-oriented, then any rational school official — after enjoying a good laugh — would warn the blogger against harrassing their students for exercising their right to free speech.
The kid wasn’t even suspended. All he had to do was (gasp!) apologize. I think he’ll survive. If all that stands between this kid and a future as a hardened Nazi is the indulgent silence of those whom he verbally abuses, then I think the kid needs some intervention (like, I don’t know, his guardians being aware of his behavior.)
…oh, yes, I meant to provide this link re: complaints of “future orientation.” The point being that a school can wrongly enforce hilariously false standards of civility, but that does not mean that students shouldn’t have to answer for actual racist remarks made with clear intent to intimidate. Actually, the fact that PC has ‘dumbed down’ racism makes it all the more important to educate kids as to how to recognize the real thing.
This will have to be my last post, so I’ll make four brief comments before bowing out of this stimulating debate.
(1) Having wrongly accused of me of failing to recognise that rights and responsibilities are two sides of the same coin, JuliaM goes on to accuse me of equating PooterGeek’s minor act of cyber-vigilantism with Stalinist state terror. Unless she’s even more impercipient than she seems, she must surely realise that I’ve done nothing of the sort. What I was actually doing was illustrating the way in which an excessive emphasis on responsibilities has often been used to deny people their legitimate liberties. I offer Julia a friendly piece of advice. The next time she’s thinking of contributing to a debate, she should think the issues through carefully rather than reaching for the first available cliche.
(2) Dirigible implies that my commitment to free speech is so mindlessly uncompromising that I would happily tolerate acts of gross personal defamation. This is absolutely untrue. If an individual has grossly defamatory remarks made about him, he has every right to seek their suppression – though even here he would often be wise to avoid resorting to the courts. The point about PooterGeek’s errant schoolboy was that his remarks eschewed personal accusation in favour of general-purpose abuse. The best specific against this sort of thing is hearty contempt, not a phonecall to the Thought Police.
(3) TestComment raises an important point when he draws our attention to the lack of anonymity on the net. So far the net has functioned as a peerless vehicle of free speech, but its capacity to do so is wholly dependent upon people being able to protect their anonymity if they want to. As soon as large numbers of people are tracked down by self-appointed internet censors, they will begin to think twice about expressing their opinions and online debate will be greatly impoverished as a result. The choice before us is a clear one. Either we honour the internet’s extraordinary contribution to democratic debate, or we acquiesce in online censorship until the people’s voices falls dumb.
(4) I greatly admire that way that Alan Kellogg tells us that “no one has the right to be gratuitously rude” while simultaneously calling me an “ignorant slut”. I trust that he will soon be seeking treatment for what is obviously a serious case of Attention Deficit Disorder.
Let me end on a conciliatory note. I think PooterGeek’s blog is extremely interesting and I greatly respect his detestation of racism. I simply ask him to consider the possibility that his methods of combating it might actually make the problem worse.
And now, dear comrades – exit, stage left.
To call someone who enters a debate by accusing his host of being a “moral cretin” an “ignorant slut” might be rude, but not gratuitously so. A pack of Ritalin is on its way to your home address, Mr speech.
The student’s freedom of speech has not been curtailed. He is quite free to rant and rave his racist nonsense if he so wishes. Equally, people like Damian are quite free to defend themselves against libel and slander through legal means.
Those who labour under the frankly asinine notion that slander is somehow protected as a part of free speech, and that the freedom to slander should over rule other’s freedom to be free of slander, need to spend a little less time talking Chomsky with their coffee-shop comrades and read some real philosophy.
I fully support freedom of informed opinion, but freedom of speech has turned into nothing but a fascist soundbite for BNP supporters with a victim-complex.
‘Niggers smell of shit’ just doesn’t quite make my definition of informed opinion.
“…he’ll soon conclude that there’s a conspiracy against him and his kind and his commitment to racist ideology will only be intensified. And then the trouble will really begin.”
There are a number of juggernauts that can be driven through that argument Loner. I’d just withdraw it if I were you.
“What I was actually doing was illustrating the way in which an excessive emphasis on responsibilities has often been used to deny people their legitimate liberties.”
Yes, those responsibilities – they really are a bitch, aren’t they? If you want to post racist abuse on a website without being held to account, that is…..
“I offer Julia a friendly piece of advice.”
Ooh, thanks! This’ll be good…..
“The next time she’s thinking of contributing to a debate, she should think the issues through carefully rather than reaching for the first available cliche.”
Ah, that was worth it. From the person who drew up the image of me sitting in the offices of Pravda stamping out free speech….
“And now, dear comrades – exit, stage left.”
Pursued by a bear..? Or just smarting at being so thoroughly taken to task by everyone here for the vacuity of your argument?
I think it’s interesting that those who are so righteous in their conviction of your wrongdoing are never quite righteous enough to leave any trace of themselves or method of response.
Love voice, perhaps if you were to point us to some website you maintain, or email address for you (I’m guessing (perhaps wrongly) that the address he left was not valid) your points might be more palatable.
Alas, you are yet another in a long line of “trolls” who have plenty to say without really standing behind that which you say.
If there is one thing I hate it is commentors competing with each other to be the best apple polisher for the blog owner.
Yes the young man was a nasty toad, who does deserve a moral slapping. Yes the owner of the blog should be able to delete the comments and complain and get redress (as he has).
But the practice of tracking down and publishing IP addresses from commentors is chilling, and I’ve seen the practice spreading.
It’s more the pleased gloating about it that annoys me. One doesn’t need to be a *NIX guru to track an IP. Track the IP back through a dozen anonymous proxies and I’d be impressed. But frankly this is kid’s stuff.
I’m sorry that your blog got nasty posts on Damian. I think people should be able to say what they want (i.e. the post where you quoted a man that said the majority of East Asian women are so beautiful that they make Julia Roberts look like Lyle Lovett – that made my Japanese American mum really laugh, BTW). But remember ‘lone voice for free speech’ that this is Damian’s blog and his URL, which I presume he owns. It is no more acceptable writing derogatory stuff aimed at him and his readers on his blog than on his house or across his car (if he has one).
Anyone with an ordinary Windows box and a Sitemeter tracker could have done most of what I did. And grepping through Webserver logfiles is trivial for a modestly experienced UNIX user. The rest was, as usual with these things, down to social engineering and a basic understanding of how people set networks up in schools. So yes, you probably do have a bigger penis than I do, Andrew.
> the practice of tracking down and publishing IP addresses from commentors is chilling
Chilling? Oo.
We know now that it was a student at the school. What if it had been the janitor or a teacher? *
I think PooterGeek’s entirely justified in investigating and identifying the individual. He’s learned something very important about the internet for a start, and his family and school have learned something important about him.
* conspiracy theory; it was the Head of Year herself and the thing with the kid is just a cover story.
Harry’s Place wouldn’t allow this sort of thing. Rascists deserve anonymity over there apparently.
Well done.
Fucking well done.
Maybe it was and, in a Scooby-Dooian reverse, thanks to those pesky kids he got away with it.
Wow. One kid writes something controversial and you guys really go after him. The mob bays for blood, demands a public outing, or at least the knowledge of his whereabouts or IP address. The ad hominem attacks flow with genuine bile accompanied by accusations of trolling, ignorance and stupidity.
Poor old Lone Voice.
Hi Benji. I was wondering when you’d fetch up.
I’ve let you post this one just for amusement. It’s so gloriously stupid. I’ll be deleting any other false identities you adopt today.
I thought the other one was benji personally, the insults which he tries to take back or disavows, the claims which weren’t really claims after all when people try to question them, and the sheer vacuum where there should be an argument of some kind are textbook examples of Mackian discourse.
Speaking of trolling with ignorance and stupidity…
‘he’ll soon conclude that there’s a conspiracy against him and his kind ‘
If there isn’t, I’d like to start one.
Well done on tracking that child down, bet he was not expecting that.
A more cynical person than me might wonder if “lone voice” was trying to clumsily prod PooterGeek into responding with a post of spluttering pomposity in order to win a game of Pompous Post Poker.
No, i am not Benji, whoever he is, nor am i Lone Voice in another guise, merely someone who disagrees with your heavy handed approach. How old is this schoolboy? 11?, 12?, assuming that this is a secondary schoolboy we are talking about not a primary schoolboy.
His comment is stupid and unpleasant but that hardly makes him the first schoolboy to make dumbass remarks. I used to think i was a Leninist-Stalinist when i was fourteen. Luckily no-one reported me to my school headmaster for supporting the views of people responsible for the deaths of millions.
Ignore him, ridicule him, laugh at him, be rude about him. Just don’t take his IP address and report him to teacher.
If he were in my class I’d want to know. I doubt he confined his free speech to the internet and toe-rags like that have to be dealt with.
( In the teaching profession, toe-rag is a term of affectionate exasperation.)
Having checked your IP address properly now
, I have to admit you probably aren’t. Sorry about that.
But, like Benji, you’re still comprehensively wrong.
Not only do I not have to justify my actions to you or anyone else, I really can’t be bothered.
pommygranate: “One kid writes something controversial…”
Yeah, all he did was express an opinion (with whose central premise many of us find that we have little basis upon which to honestly say we agree, though none of us, we must admit, has had the integrity to offer one iota of support for our side in this controversy).
There’s no reason to get personal or to taint the discourse by injecting a tone of judgement or hostility. Why, what if this tiny human soul were to feel loathe to share his opinions in future on account of the abuse that was his only recompense for the fragile gift of trust given us by this yearning, questioning infant mind? He, innocent of the depths of human experience into which he has wandered, reaches out a trembling hand, seeking nothing more than our guidance and, because we happen to find fault with the empiricism of his piquant hypothesis, can think of no better way to conduct ourselves than to be arch and accusatory, to pay him not with wisdom but with vile contumely.
O, Sweet Judas…what…have…we…wrought?
The continuation of liberal civilisation depends on evryone recognising that the right to be offensive is one of our most fundamental liberties.
Liberal civilisation as we have come to understand it from our own history also depends on people understanding that there is a context in which people should exercise their liberty.
I assume since it were possible to identify the school the boy went to, this meant that he was accessing this site through school equipment. Are we being asked to take seriously the idea that a commitment to free-speech necessitates the use of resources that are intended to assist teaching and learning should be used to deposit racist absuse on people’s blogs?
Well done! A few weeks ago, while overtaking a school bus, some cretin threw something out the window and bounced it off my windshield. Then they did it again. The windshield wasn’t broken and no harm was done.
I reported it to the school board and asked for the video tapes. Did I interfere with his right of free expresion? Or bully him?
One day they are throwing things out a school bus window, the next day they are dropping cinder blocks off a interstate overpass and killing people.
Why? Because they don’t realize it is wrong! No one ever chatised them. No one caught them or cared when they were young.
Dirigible implies that my commitment to free speech is so mindlessly uncompromising that I would happily tolerate acts of gross personal defamation.
Well that’s easier for you to respond to than actually taking my point that freedom of speech does not require that you devote your own time and resources to assist abuse directed at you that would not otherwise see the light of day. Well done.
If freedom of speech covers posting to a blog comments page, it covers phone calls to teachers as well. We then get to the substantive content of the speech. You are making excuses for hate speech but not for critique of hate speech. Why is that?
“The continuation of liberal civilisation depends on evryone recognising that the right to be offensive is one of our most fundamental liberties.”
Ummm….. has anyone on this thread ever attempted to deny that?
PooterGeek has not infringed his right of free speech in any way whatsoever. Free Speech acts for all. The boy has the right to make his offensive remarks, and PooterGeek has the right to say “This boy must be fairly loathsome and others ought to know that this is what he said”. The difference is that PooterGeek will be able to back up his assertion if challenged.
It would be insane to suggest that free speech means the right to say anything you like without being held to account for what you say.
Indeed, this is a rather important lesson for our young scrote to learn…
Well, it’s likely this kid was too preoccupied with surfing the web when he should’ve been paying attention in his lesson. But perhaps now that the magic of IT has exposed him, the kid will take more of an interest in his studies and who knows?—he might become a computing genius . Okay, okay, maybe not but wouldn’t that be a beautiful end to this episode?
Note to PG: if this story makes it into Hollywood, you probably won’t get a mention; you’ll only be referred to as the “‘blog guy”. It’s unfair, I know, but hey—that’s show business.
Just as well the kid didn’t write something REALLY offensive, like UNIX IS SHITE. In my experience, for the average UNIX geek, NOTHING compares to criticism of his horrible OS.
I was a terrible little racist when I was a kid (as were most of my friends and my parents) until someone had the good sense (and courage) to confront me about it and shame me into changing my mind.
Pootergeek has done this kid a service, he has shamed his ignorant pig headedness.
One Lone Voice. There is a difference between free speech, and going to someones house and deficating on the kitchen table. This is what that young man did. I have a rule in my rules for commenting on my blog and I’ll repeat it here for your benefit.
Good on ya, I would have done the exact same thing!
Bwahahahahahahahahaha!
Urban 75 used to print the IP addresses and Email’s of those who left troll posts. Along with grovelling pleas for forgiveness from the perpetrators as they suffered a hail of flame mail.
Way to go pootergeek!
for all those who opposed pootergeek’s action… Honestly what harm was done? He was just sent home for a day. that’s it. no serious punishment.
why take such a small punishment to an epic level?
Kids need punishment to keep them in their place, I’d never oppose the idea, because I was punished often for doing idiotic things once I was a kid.
I honestly can’t say much because this is my first year of ever having internet, or even a modern operating system above DOS for that matter.
but please take into consideration that a punishment is a small price to pay to teach a child/teen their place in this world.
Way to go pootergeek!
for all those who opposed pootergeek’s action… Honestly what harm was done? He was just sent home for a day. that’s it. no serious punishment.
why take such a small punishment to an epic level?
Kids need punishment to keep them in their place, I’d never oppose the idea, because I was punished often for doing idiotic things once I was a kid.
I honestly can’t say much because this is my first year of ever having internet, or even a modern operating system above DOS for that matter.
but please take into consideration that a punishment is a small price to pay to teach a child/teen their place in this world.
(just look at the time. It took forever to read all of those posts XD)
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