Rumproast attic

Ever since Rumproast freaked out and put their forum offline, there has been some speculation about what kind of illegal and/or unethical behavior is going on behind the curtain. But why do they even bother with the secret decoder ring routine, if they’re just going to let their most narrow and conservative male supremacists out of the attic? I’m talking about Humboldtblue, the same Humboldtblue who back in March of last year told us:

I smoke and the weed I smoke is f*cking awesome,…I for one, voted for a Democrat, because, as Kevin pointed out, a Democrat is the best chance to get legalization through…..

So what is Humboldtblue up to this time? Well, first he invokes the same-old, same-old raaacist theme the Rumpsters use to characterize anyone they don’t like.  But chances are, you won’t find the people he’s mad at using the kind of polarizing language — hate speech, really — that he uses:

Here’s where you know if you’re going to find common ground with them—just ask yourself the question, do I hate n*ggers in charge? When you can answer that question you’ll know which side of the debate you are on.

But wait, wasn’t that the same Humboldtblue who just last year was telling everyone how women should be denied equal opportunities so he could stare at their butts?  Oh, dear, yes, that Humboldtblue:

I just don’t think I’m cut out for the whole “women are equal and deserve our respect” thing.

Tsk, tsk.  And it seems that Rumproast  still cherishes his presence.  Why am I not surprised?

Maybe someone should put it to Rumproast like this:

Here’s where you know if you’re going to find common ground with them—just ask yourself the question, do I hate b*tches in charge? When you can answer that question you’ll know which side of the debate you are on.

…and then explain to me why these guys can’t seem to find common ground with progressives who like women.

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*edited for ethnic slurs, profanity, hate speech, etc., etc., as usual

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Rumproast Behind Closed Doors-death to Lieberman

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“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest (Thomas Becket) ?–King Henry II.

“Let us away, knights; this fellow will arise no more.”–King Henry’s knights.

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Rumproast’s infamous forum, the Rumper Room, may have disappeared, but thanks to technology like the Wayback Machine and Google Cache, nothing on the internet ever really disappears.   On a recent Cannonfire thread, Rumproast regular “Strangeappar8us” even hinted that it was just temporarily offline, not gone.

So why have they locked the doors?  What is going on in there that they don’t want the public to see? Using my Google-fu, I have discovered that Rumproast’s  latest targets are Sen. Joe Lieberman and Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa.  Here’s their latest attempt at witty repartee (image clickable) :

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“The fact that Ms. Coakley shares two things with me–a vagina and a vote for Hillary does not mean she is a proper representative.”

Color me confused.  Aren’t those the only two things that matter about a person?
Comment by sean on 01/20/10 at 09:30 PM

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Maybe we should take a page from the Tom Coburn playbook * and start praying for certain senators from states with Democratic governors to kick off really soon.

I’ll start the list—Chuck Grassley of Iowa.

(Note to lurkers: I’m kidding. Maybe.)

Comment by Oblomova on 01/20/10 at 09:39 PM

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Oh hey, can we curb-stomp** Lieberman now? Since the super majority thingie has gone bye-bye, we might as well. Sure would turn my frown upside down.

Comment by Betty Cracker on 01/20/10 at 10:22 PM

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Oh hey, can we curb-stomp Lieberman now?
Please God yes.  I have no idea what he cares about, but I hope someone figures it out (Goldman?  BCBS?), so we can tear it apart while he watches from his AEtna sinecure.

Seriously, though, Lieberman represents the new American dream—“I’ve got mine, bitches”—and there’s not much we can do but get our own and hope that he gets some hideous cancer.

Comment by sean on 01/20/10 at 10:55 PM

*Tom Coburn playbook : “‘What the American people ought to pray is that somebody can’t make the vote tonight,’ he said. ‘That’s what they ought to pray.’ It was difficult to escape the conclusion that Coburn was referring to the 92-year-old, wheelchair-bound Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) who has been in and out of hospitals and lay at home ailing.”

** Curb stomp. Urban dictionary: “Placing someones mouth on a curb, then repeatedly stomping and/or kicking the back of the person’s head, hard enough to detatch their jaws. Most people die from this experience, due to head, neck, or vertabrae injuries.”

Rumproast reprise

Just when I was starting to enjoy my little blogging vacation, I have gotten sucked back into the ugly vortex that is the political blogosphere. This time it is about a subject near and dear to my heart: internet anonymity. Everything worth saying about the subject has already been said here, at the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Anonymous communications have an important place in our political and social discourse. The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that the right to anonymous free speech is protected by the First Amendment. A much-cited 1995 Supreme Court ruling in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission reads:

Protections for anonymous speech are vital to democratic discourse. Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical, minority views . . . Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society.

The reason the subject of internet anonymity has come up now, is that a blog called Hillbuzz (I made some comments about them here in December) is claiming their anonymity has been compromised by Obama supporters at a website called Rumproast.  In turn the Obama supporters claim they are being harassed, but oddly enough, at the same time, they have freaked out and closed down their main forum. The main subject of discussion involves the identity of Rumproast blogger JohnD, who started a website called “stupidpumas” on WordPress, and later at stupidpumas.com and pumafail.com, and whether he has published real names and photos of anonymous persons.

At one point, “JohnD” invited me to “dialog” and brought all the Rumpsters along.   I have since removed all the Rumproast threads and aired out my blog, but the four letter words I had to put in my filter are still there. After the “dialog”, they also stalked me for ages at various blogs, discussing comments I had posted on non-political blogs at length on their forum and linking to a photograph they said was of me. One of them impersonated me at Pandagon; the Pandagon admin deleted the account of my stalker, but would not provide me with the IP of the person who did it.

I am not happy about the Rumproast visit to my clean and quiet blog.

While I don’t publish either real names or IP’s, I do link bloggers with their sock puppets. Here are the names JohnD has used on this website, commenting:

• as “theWatcher”: Rumproast Leftovers
• as “JohnD”: Rumproast Wonkette Lurker Thread
• as “johnd12009” and “JohnD”: Rumproast Flame War (just kidding)
• as “theWatcher”: Rumproast: the Eightfold Path

and on his own blog:

• as “johnd” and “obotinchief”: Hanging it up (on this thread you also see johnd consumed in flames at the same time as TheBigotBasher rises from the ashes like a Phoenix, with nearly identical links given to stupidpumas.com and pumafail.com respectively.)
• and the thread about outing economics professor Dakinikat.

UPDATE: Part of Rumproast proprietor Kevin’s narrative is that the excesses of the misogynist bullies that take refuge at his blog are outliers, not condoned or encouraged by him in any way. He lays out this position on his Hillbuzz FAQ post where he states, “…but I deleted the comment the minute I saw it and basically told TheBigotBasher to bugger off. I do not support, nor have I ever supported, the outing of people who blog or comment under aliases, regardless of what I personally think about them.”

Riiiiggghht.

Going back to “The Dialog” let’s take a look at another Rumproast regular, “Strangeappar8tus”, who has control of enough editing keys at the Rumproast to author his own posts. “Strange”, as he is nicknamed:

• wrote the full name of a private citizen, a troubled individual, in this comment.
• And in this thread, he uses the name Robert Ching and pretends he has never seen my blog before: (“I found this site through Stumble, quite by accident.”)

For anyone with enough morbid curiosity, the other posts here where “Strange” commented are

• (Eightfold Path)
• (Leftovers)
• (Flame War-just kidding)
• (Wonkette lurker thread)

For diehard Rumproast sniffers I have also resurrected, hopefully for a very short time, some posts I wrote some time ago on a private, non-unsearchable test blog when it became clear members of Rumproast were stalking and impersonating me and posting photographs they said were of me. For those with the time to search defunct blogs with the Wayback Machine, some of the posts contain old links and screenshots of now-disappeared forum discussions.  I have also restored the Rumproast members’ all time search favorite, Farewell Strangelove, my tribute to the Strangeappar8us courtship which I found both so touching and so repugnant. We still have Paris, eh, Strange?

So is the current bru-ha-ha just about one rogue blogger, or is Rumproast an astroturf machine that regurgitates predigested talking points while spying on and trying to disrupt progressive non-misogynist bloggers?  Is the Rumproasters’ real goal to  “cut away from the herd” in their “neutralize and release” program, or was that just talk?   Has Rumproast achieved “plausible deniability”?  I sort of hope the Hillbuzz people can get to the bottom of it.

ANOTHER UPDATE:

It just occurred to me, when PumaPAC founder Murphy did a radio broadcast on the line with Jennihillary, the Rumproast regulars showed up en masse to comment on the radio stations blog.  Some of the comments were pretty over the top.    And unlike their Rumper Room forum, Rumproast doesn’t have the capability to scrub these blogs…yet.

Interview between Jenniforhillary and Darragh Murphy of Puma PAC on KPFT November 13,  2008:

• transcript
• audio with blog comments
• a second comment thread

RumpRoast loses Hubcap

Tears rolled down my cheeks this morning as I read the obit of the Rumproast cat, Hubcap. The photogenic Hubcap had captured my imagination as a small fighter who in spite of her size, met life’s challenges with dignity, determination, and extended claws. Her character showed in her face, and even though I’m not an artist, I tried to capture her timeless spirit in a reworking of totalitarian art in the Shepard Fairey style.  Her owner Kevin seems to be one of the most laid back and least toxic of the rumproasters; perhaps it was the influence of this remarkable animal. Ah, well, Hubcap is with Ceiling Cat now.

One blogging community uses a single period by itself in obituary threads as shorthand for a moment of silence.

For Hubcap:
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Hubcap has a posse

Hupcap the Fighter: Small. Brave. Puma-hearted.

Rumproast: the Eightfold Path

This afternoon as I was pondering the eightfold path of Rumproast, I was having a hard time getting up to eight. Then one of the Rumpsters claimed (incorrectly) I had called him an Obot and ran off in a snit. Suddenly I realized I now had all eight parts of the spiritual journey of the Rumpster. Here it is:

1. When in doubt, shout “epic fail”.

2. Pretend to read. It makes you look erudite. Post the name of a book you are reading in the sidebar, something like say, Nixonland by Rick Perlstein, but never change it. No one will notice.

3. Collect grievances. If you can’t find any, make them up. When you complain about something on your grievance list, don’t use specific quotations or link to anything. You don’t want anyone to find out that you made the whole thing up.

4. Post pictures of cute little animals. Include some videos of pets doing tricks with balloons.

5. Swear. If you are posting on a blog with a child-friendly rating, swear anyhow. The F-word is preferred, but talking about genital mutilation works as a standing joke. If you use the genital mutilation one, you have to pretend someone else on a different blog said it. See #3.

6. Ridicule other people. Especially fat people, people with unusual chromosomes, and children who have been sexually assaulted. Also women who have been abused or killed by their husbands and boyfriends. Then maybe the jerks you are so afraid might turn around and ridicule YOU will forget to do it as you egg them on to ridicule someone ELSE. (For some real doozies, see some of the comments Rumproasters left over at KPFT.) When people question you about why you were making fun of them, say you know they were having icky thoughts and they deserved it. Make and wear the special inverse tinfoil hat that amplifies other people’s thoughts so you know what they are thinking.

7. Don’t think of anything new of your own. Find a blog or two with creative writers and post long stretches of conversation from their forums. You can probably even create a whole new blog with them as the theme. You might call it something like stupidpumas.wordpress.com.

8. If you can’t think of a good argument against someone, claim they insulted you and go off in a snit.

Rumpster or Obot?

How do you tell Obots from the denizens of Rumproast? The question occurred to me this afternoon as a Rumpster snarked at me that I had called him/her an Obot. Not true. Or is the Obot part of it true? I have always thought of Rumpsters and Obots as distinct critters, but now that it has been brought to my attention, there could very well be a bit of overlap. Here then is the story of how I discovered the  Obots and the eightfold path of Rumproast.

I first became aware of the bots reading straight news. It’s no secret that my first love is the Middle East. I subscribe to several international type feeds as well as the major U.S news feeds, as a feedreader lets you scan a lot of headlines quickly without trying to google all the websites. If you read just one news source, you won’t find out the truth–you have to read several.

And what I found in scanning the national news stories was literally armies of very obnoxious people posting hate comments at the end of the straight news pieces. The same comments over and over on one news service after another. I was appalled at their hatred towards women and the vulgarness with which they approached sexuality. It was clearly organized. At the same time I discovered a few individuals trying to hold back the tide of misogyny who signed their names with Puma. They had all discovered the Obots individually, but they blogged together collectively at PumaPAC.org. They were the only ones actually trying to do something about the iron-my-shirt kind of ugliness and hatred directed against any and all women in the public sphere regardless of their political affiliation.

Who knows what direction this blog might have taken if I hadn’t seen the Obots.  I might have reread Biden’s plan for dividing Iraq and commented on it.  I might have had time to write about some amazing detail about the Palestinian state I came across in a book about something else.  I might have spent more time polishing my Arabic.  But instead someone named Geeklove left a message asking me to post a video about women.  I did.  Since then I have gotten pulled further and further away from my personal goals.  Here it is again.  Hillary ‘s voice talking about the contributions of women all over the world in her China speech against a backdrop  photo montage of the way women in public service  are treated–by Obots.

Will I ever get back to blogging about the things I love?  Or will I be forever stuck at first base, back at election 2008, defending the right of women–ordinary women like myself and extraordinary women like Hillary — to have lives and to be treated with basic human dignity.