RedSand

Was watching the Chelsea vs Hull build up on NBCSN here in San Diego. Arlo White & Graeme Le Saux talking about team sheets, tactics, Mourinho and the like..... Then Arlo proceeds to tell us that the stadium announcer at Stamford Bridge has just said..... (Im paraphrasing here) "Welcome to Stamford Bridge and we look forward to introducing our new manager a lot more than our previous manger." Followed by girlish chuckles from Le Saux Class..... If the announcer did say that, (and why would Arlo White make up such a quote on Live TV) that club is rotten to the core. How petty, crass and classless is that? Nevermind that you won a major trophy w/ that previous manger. Why would you say something like that? Why not just stop at "We are looking forward to introducing our new manager." Even w/ the return of The King, I can't imagine George saying something similar about Roy Hodgson. I was stunned..... I still am stunned that such a public announcement was made. We all say things in private, but to be that tasteless in public? Fuck me what a bunch of cunts!

[YOUTUBE]FGoaXZwFlJ4[/YOUTUBE]

As a non local, I found this an interesting read. England's two nations: Divided kingdom | The Economist The diverging politics of the Labour north and Conservative south make England look ever more like two nations. Reuniting them will be hard Apr 20th 2013 | Heswall, Liverpool, Sheffield and Southampton |From the print edition IN 1951 Winston Churchill launched the Conservative Party’s general-election campaign in Liverpool. The crowd went wild. “I’m not conceited,” he later told his doctor, “but they wanted to touch me.” The Tories went on to win a majority of votes in the city. Today such a result is unimaginable. In the 2010 general election the Conservative Party won just 19,533 votes in Liverpool. Labour won 116,285. The Conservatives lost in all of the city’s five constituencies, and in 71% of those in the north-west as a whole. The party fared even worse in the north-east, where it won only 7% of the seats. Over the years the Conservative Party has been expelled from most of the north of England (and almost all of Scotland). Labour has been virtually driven from the south. Margaret Thatcher once told a newspaper interviewer that economic change has the potential to alter “the heart and the soul” of a people; the double-edged sword of Thatcherism changed the hearts and souls of north and south in strikingly different ways, and with long lasting effects. The differences between them now go beyond economic circumstance—their cultural and political identities are ever more distinct. This represents a daunting but inescapable political challenge. On ordinary electoral maps the north-south divide is not as plain as it might be. Rural British constituencies are both big and nearly always represented by a Conservative or a Liberal Democrat. Thus swathes of the country will appear blue and yellow come what may. And Northern Ireland is represented by parties not seen elsewhere. If you look just at the mainland, though, and equalise the size of the constituencies, the binary reality becomes obvious (see map). Save for a belt of Tory hills and dales across North Yorkshire and the Lake District, the north is red—as are, barring nationalists, Wales and Scotland. The south is deep blue, strikingly so in the surrounds of London (it gets more Liberal Democrat to the west). Only in London and the Midlands do the parties seem to be in real competition. Isolated elements Of the 158 seats that make up the three northern English regions, only 43 are Conservative: 86% of the party’s seats are elsewhere in the country. Of the 197 seats in the three southern regions outside London, Labour now holds a mere ten. In the 2010 election Conservatives won 31% of the vote in the north and 47% in the south; Labour won 17% of the vote in the south but 38% in the north. Combining one of the most centralised systems of government with one of the starkest regional splits in party support makes England an oddity. Italy’s geographic division is deeper, economically; but right and left both have strongholds in the rich north and the poor south. Electoral maps of France and Australia are kaleidoscopes of shifting colours. America’s division between Democratic coasts and a Republican middle is relatively new—until 1988 the West coast was a Republican bastion. And unlike the peoples of Belgium, Spain and Germany, all of whom enjoy a federal structure, England’s halves must rub along in just one Parliament. The rift goes back a long way. In 1900 John Hobson, an economist, described a southern “Consumers England” of leisurely suburbs and a northern “Producers England” of mills and mines. The north was Liberal territory: Conservatives were as weak there then as they are today. Later, as women and working-class men won the vote, the rise of the Labour Party and class affiliation overwhelmed older, regional patterns. Between the 1920s and 1960s the electoral map was more uniform than before or since. The return of the split reflects the diverging economic experiences of the two halves of the country. Beginning in the 1960s changing industrial fortunes drove a wedge between the manufacturing-oriented north and the services-heavy south. In the 1980s wealth generated by London’s booming financial-services industry turned neighbouring regions a deeper shade of blue. Mrs Thatcher’s monetarist reforms were accompanied by high unemployment, particularly in northern cities. She defeated the National Union of Mineworkers, accelerating the industry’s decline—many former mining towns in Yorkshire and Lancashire struggle to attract new jobs to this day. The privatisation of the steel industry had a similar effect in places like Teesside. In Wales and Scotland Conservatism was widely viewed not just as malign but as a foreign imposition. “Scousers have long memories,” says Tony Caldeira, who ran as Tory candidate for mayor of Liverpool. A doggedly upbeat bunch—and, tellingly, a young one—Conservative activists in the city report that Lady Thatcher’s legacy is hurled across doorsteps with a “barrage of hatred”. And some of the forces behind fission have strengthened since the 1980s. Under the 1997-2010 Labour government the economy grew more slowly in the north—and, partly as a result, the state accounted, directly and indirectly, for a larger share of jobs created there. Public-sector workers are more likely to vote Labour, regardless of their social class, and constitute a larger proportion of the workforce in the north. When Labour increased public spending in the north it strengthened its position there. When the Conservative-led coalition began to cut public-sector jobs they strengthened Labour’s position there, too. (The same may yet prove true of cuts in benefits, which are a larger part of incomes in the region.) Tory grumbling about Labour’s “client state” has something to it. At every election, the Liverpool offices of Unite, a trade union with some 250,000 public-sector members, become the engine room of the local Labour campaign. The possibility of the government “localising” public-sector pay, which would mean lower pay for teachers, doctors and policemen in the north, haunts those Conservatives vying for their votes. Swimming in the same direction These policies may explain why the regional difference seems still to be widening. Poll figures from Ipsos MORI show that five years ago the Conservatives led Labour all over the country, but by 13 points more in the south than the north. In 2012 the gulf between northern and southern voting intentions was 21 points (see chart 1). The results of the council elections to be held on May 2nd should reflect this. Colin Rallings, a psephologist, predicts on the basis of YouGov polling that the Labour Party will win control of two or three councils, all in the Midlands or the north. But the preference northern voters show for Labour is not merely a reaction to who pays their salaries, or just a matter of the size of those salaries. In the south people in the middle of the national income spectrum favour the Conservatives; in the north, they lean strongly towards Labour. Indeed well-off people in the north are more likely to vote Labour than the poor are in the south (see chart 2). Even in a place like the Wirral, a peninsula of golf courses and big houses west of Liverpool, the council and most of the parliamentary seats are Labour. Jeff Green, a Tory councillor, says lots of voters are well-paid public-sector workers who have moved out of the city to enjoy the well-heeled suburban life. They tend to retain their collectivist loyalties, he sighs. Policy Exchange, a think-tank, has found that even controlling for factors such as education level, housing tenure, benefit receipts, local unemployment rates and age, the political divide remains in evidence. Thus the north looks hard for the Tories to crack. Judged just by number of constituencies, Labour’s position in the south looks even worse. Consider Southampton, a port city poorer and smaller than Liverpool in the middle of the south coast. Its industrial glories, like Liverpool’s, are long gone. Parts of the city reek of decline: inky waterways lined with derelict warehouses run up against rows of boarded-up shops. Yet John Denham, the Labour MP for Southampton Itchen, very nearly lost his seat to the Conservatives at the last election. Until recently, Tories dominated the city council. Just as the Wirral, despite its well-to-do-ness, displays the pro-Labour tendencies of the wider north, so down-in-the-dumps Southampton reflects the politics of the south. Whatever their wealth, people there are more likely to consider themselves middle-class, and more likely to vote Conservative. There are 84 constituencies in the south-east outside London; Mr Denham’s is just one of four held by Labour. The average majority in all four is less than 3,000. This part of the country, historically less dependent on heavy industry, has higher levels of private-sector employment, particularly in Britain’s successful service and knowledge industries. Mr Denham points to a factory along the coast where almost the entire workforce is university-educated. “They make satellites,” he adds by way of explanation. Mr Denham accepts the south broadly lacks the Labour tradition of the north. But that does not mean that it has as deep a cultural aversion to Labour as the north currently does to Tories. Southerners can be quite happy to vote Labour when they like what it offers—or at least many were in 1997, when Tony Blair came to power. Alastair Campbell, Mr Blair’s spin doctor, recalls the party’s astonishment at the results: “seats were falling that we would never have imagined standing a hope in hell of winning.” The greatest swing was in the south-east and eastern regions, where Labour won 44 constituencies, including such leafy, middle-class suburbs as St Albans (now comfortably Tory once more). That result owed much to “Southern Discomfort”, a pamphlet produced by the Fabian Society, a think-tank, after Labour’s defeat in the 1992 election. It argued that the party had to engage more actively with aspirant, middle-class southern voters. Policy Network, another think-tank, recently published an updated version. One of its authors, Patrick Diamond, reckons that Labour’s challenge in the south is different today: “Insecurity has replaced aspiration as the dominant concern of wavering Labour voters.” Voters in the south feel caught between stagnant wages and rising living costs; if they think Labour can do something about that, they may vote for it. The purpose of understanding The regional divide seems likely to widen, and not just because many public-sector cuts are still to come. Recent by-elections suggest that the decline in Liberal Democrat support will accentuate the gap by widening the Conservative lead in most southern seats and (to a greater extent) the Labour lead in the north. By forging a budget-cutting coalition with the Tories, the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, has damaged his party’s prospects in post-industrial northern towns. In the 2010 election the Liberal Democrats got 16% of the vote in one such seat, Rotherham. In a 2012 by-election they got just 2% of the vote there. The UK Independence Party, which won 6% of the vote in 2010, came second with 22%, thus showing that its voters are not, as widely thought, exclusively found in the south. A right-wing party without the baggage of a Thatcherite past may complicate things further for northern Tories. And in various practical ways the regional split is self-reinforcing. Previous successes mean the parties have their ground troops—activists, councillors and constituency MPs—in the wrong places. In 2010, for example, there were about as many Labour members in the five Manchester seats as in the 18 constituencies that make up Essex. The Conservatives have not one councillor in Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle or Sheffield. But some way to surmount the problem has to be found if either party is to get a respectable absolute majority. Though they will fight hard over seats in London and the Midlands—regions which have some of the post-industrial pallor of the urban north and some of the private-sector fizzle of the wider south—neither party thinks gains in those regions alone can win it an absolute majority. The best way for a party to get into the other’s heartland may be to target the changing patterns of work that have perpetuated the split. Mr Green talks of breaking Labour’s grasp on Wirral politics by replacing monolithic provision of social services with a less statist political economy of “mutuals, co-operatives and co-production.” Other Conservatives point approvingly to the government’s moves to curb trade-union power. Labour, in turn, identifies a need to adapt to a larger private-sector workforce. Rowenna Davis, a broadcaster and Labour councillor (who has written for The Economist), points to the party’s moves to encourage companies to pay employees a “living wage” higher than the basic minimum wage. Such strategies may bear fruit in the long-term. Looking to the 2015 election, the tactics are simpler: show up. The Conservatives have hosted a cabinet meeting in Leeds and included a number of northern seats—Wirral South and Berwick-upon-Tweed, for example—on their list of targets worth serious resources. David Skelton, who will run a pro-Conservative campaign group focused on the north, cites the attention that Michael Heseltine lavished on Liverpool when in Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet as an example for the party today. The former deputy prime minister still has “demigod” status in the city, according to local Tories. Mr Denham (a close ally of Ed Miliband, the Labour leader) has prepared a detailed report on improving the party’s standing in the south. His practical prescriptions have much in common with those voiced by Conservative activists in the north. Northern Conservatives and southern Labourites agree that their parties must repudiate the labels “Tory south” and “Labour north”. Both groups want their party leaders to talk more about their region: Mr Denham urges shadow cabinet members to cite Southampton, Reading, or Exeter in their speeches; Mr Caldeira praises the justice secretary, Chris Grayling, for name-checking Liverpool in his. The talk needs to be accurate, though. Chloe Smith, the Tory MP for Norwich North, was widely mocked for describing Sunderland in the north-east as “near” Bolton, 200km (125 miles) away in the north-west. Pamela Hall, the 2010 Conservative candidate in Liverpool West Derby, admits to some head-in-hands moments when bow-tie-wearing southerners in her party betray their ignorance of the north: “it’s an absolute disaster for us.” Fellow Tories, she reckons, should shelve in-house obsessions such as the EU, talk more about jobs and living standards and put up more northern and working-class candidates. Another good idea is to concentrate on voters with shorter political memories. Few older Liverpudlians will ever back the Conservatives, local activists admit. Ryan Shorthouse, a young Conservative commentator, reckons the party can escape the decades-long shadow of the “Thatcher effect” among his generation of northern voters by focusing relentlessly on public-sector reform. Showing the party’s commitment to effective, universal services, he says, can help exorcise its ghosts. Some worthwhile investments take time to pay off. Labour members in Southampton recently campaigned at every farmers’ market in Hampshire. In terms of immediate electoral benefit this is something of a long shot. But it may have gone some way to securing what Mr Denham sees as the key long-term goal: reassuring voters that “people like you vote Labour.” The temptation to defer investments in opponents’ strongholds is great. But, argue the long-termists, such investments need to be made. The party which first smears its colours all over the map will be in a position to reknit England’s heart and soul on its own terms.

Whoever came up with that quaresmasammy tag...... Fuckin' Genius.... I was in tears....

There are doubts about that: Amanda Todd suicide: Did Anonymous dox the wrong guy?

I heard about this at work today, and have been left stunned........... Bullied Teen Amanda Todd's Death Under Investigation - ABC News Suicide of Amanda Todd - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia I have not linked to her video on YouTube.... I couldn't bring myself to watch it.... Teenager Documents Bullying and Abuse Before Her Death Canadian authorities are investigating the circumstances surrounding the death of 15-year-old Amanda Todd, who made a heartbreaking video chronicling years of bullying in school and online, previous suicide attempts and humiliation that lasted up until her death. Authorities have opened a probe into her death and "anyone that had contact with her" before she died, police said. Todd posted the video called "My story: Struggling, bullying, suicide, self harm" on Sept. 7 and was found dead in her home town of Port Coquitlam, British Columbia on Oct. 10. Since her death, the video has been viewed more than 3 million times. In the video, Todd described using webcam chats to meet and talk to new people online as a seventh grade student, including a man who pressured her to flash her chest. One year later, she did and the man took a photo of her chest. Todd said that the man put the photo online and sent it to everyone she knew. Even after moving towns and schools multiple times, the man continued to follow her online and use her photo, she said. The photo and the bullying online and in school drove her to depression, drugs, alcohol, cutting and a suicide attempt with bleach. "I can never get that photo back," she wrote. "It's out there forever." ABC News Amanda Todd, 15, of Port Coquitlam, British... View Full Size Oklahoma Teen Shoots Himself at Junior High School Watch Video Teen Kills Herself After Being Bullied: Family Watch Video Bullying Suspected in N.Y. Teen's Suicide Watch Video Authorities would not comment specifically on whether they are searching for the man Amanda claimed was cyber-bullying her, but Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sgt. Peter Thiessen said, "We're following up on a wide variety of tips and information, without getting into detail." When asked if criminal charges could result from the investigation, Thiessen told ABCNews.com, "That would be dependent on the quality of the evidence we might get." Anonymous, an online hacking and activist group, posted the name and address of a British Columbia man in his 30's who they claim pressured Todd for the nude photo. Contact information for the man was not immediately available. The RCMP did not respond to requests for comment today regarding the Anonymous post. Authorities have not officially called the death a suicide, but Cpl. Jamie Chung of the Coquitlam Royal Canadian Mounted Police said in a statement, "At this time it has been determined that the teen's death was not suspicious in nature and that foul play was not a factor." The nearly nine-minute, black and white video showed Todd silently telling her story through a series of white cards with black marker writing on them. She can only be seen from her nose down for most of the video, occasionally moving around so that her face is visible. "Hello, I've decided to tell you about my never ending story," the video begins. She described the events leading up to the photo of her chest and how she felt after the photo was posted online. "I then got really sick and got anxiety, major depression and panic disorders," she wrote. "I then moved and got into drugs and alcohol." She described being called names, eating lunch alone and resorting to cutting herself. She also told the story of an incident where she made a "huge mistake" and "hooked up" with a boy at her school who had a girlfriend, but who she believed really liked her. A week later, she said she received a text message telling her to get out of school and then a group of students, led by the boy's girlfriend, surrounded her at school and said, "Look around, nobody likes you." "A guy then yelled, 'Just punch her already,' so [the girlfriend] did," Todd wrote. "She threw me to the ground and punched me several times. Kids filmed it. I was all alone and left on the ground." Todd said she "wanted to die so bad" when her dad found her in a ditch. She drank bleach when she went home and had to be rushed to the hospital to have her stomach pumped, she said. "After I got home, all I saw was on Facebook--'She deserved it. Did you wash the mud out of your hair? I hope she's dead,'" she wrote. Todd moved to another school in another city, but said the torture followed her through Facebook. Students posted photos of ditches and suggested she try another bleach. "Every day, I think, why am I still here?" she asked towards the end of the video. "I'm stuck. What's left of me now? Nothing stops. I have nobody. I need someone. My name is Amanda Todd." Authorities were called to a residence in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, just before 6 p.m. on Oct. 10 to investigate the sudden death of the tormented teenager. Oklahoma Teen Shoots Himself at Junior High School Watch Video Teen Kills Herself After Being Bullied: Family Watch Video Bullying Suspected in N.Y. Teen's Suicide Watch Video Todd said in her video that she did not want to press charges against the girl who beat her up because she wanted to move on when she moved to another city and school. Cheryl Quinton, spokeswoman for the Coquitlam School District, told ABCNews.com, "The family was wanting to pass along that several supports were in place for their daughter on the school, home and community levels. There was a lot of intervention and a lot of support. I know that is the message that they want to convey." Quinton didn't get into specifics of the timeline, but emphasized that Todd's parents wanted people to know that "there was a lot of support for this student." Todd was in the tenth grade at the Coquitlam Alternate Basic Education School when she died. School officials would not release the name of her previous school. Quinton said the death has been "very devastating" to the small school where resources are being provided to students in regards to suicide prevention and bullying. "We typically, as a school district, don't talk about such deaths but with the family's endorsement we did choose to do so because it is important to point out the dangers associated with social media and cyber-bullying," Quinton said.

Some revealing articles about someone trying to hide behind their InterSpaz hardman persona...... Unmasking Reddit's Violentacrez, The Biggest Troll on the Web Reddit user Violentacrez fired from job after Gawker expose | The statement behind r/politics' Gawker ban: An announcement about Gawker links in /r/politics : politics Their hypocrisy is astounding.... the comments are worth a read too... Why Reddit Politics ban on Gawker will stay, by a moderator | Technology | guardian.co.uk Reddit wants free speech – as long as it agrees with the speaker | James Ball | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrez, The Biggest Troll on the Web Adrian Chen Last Wednesday afternoon I called Michael Brutsch. He was at the office of the Texas financial services company where he works as a programmer and he was having a bad day. I had just told him, on Gchat, that I had uncovered his identity as the notorious internet troll Violentacrez (pronounced Violent-Acres). "It's amazing how much you can sweat in a 60 degree office," he said with a nervous laugh. Judging from his internet footprint, Brutsch, 49, has a lot to sweat over. If you are capable of being offended, Brutsch has almost certainly done something that would offend you, then did his best to rub your face in it. His speciality is distributing images of scantily-clad underage girls, but as Violentacrez he also issued an unending fountain of racism, porn, gore, misogyny, incest, and exotic abominations yet unnamed, all on the sprawling online community Reddit. At the time I called Brutsch, his latest project was moderating a new section of Reddit where users posted covert photos they had taken of women in public, usually close-ups of their asses or breasts, for a voyeuristic sexual thrill. It was called "Creepshots." Now Brutsch was the one feeling exposed and it didn't suit him very well. But Michael Brutsch is more than a monster. Online, Violentacrez has been one of Reddit's most reviled characters but also one of its most beloved users. The self-described "creepy uncle of Reddit" has played a little-known but crucial role in Reddit's development into the online juggernaut it is today. In real life, Brutsch is a military father and cat-lover. He lives with his wife in the Dallas suburb of Arlington, Texas. There are many sides to Violentacrez, and now that I had Michael Brutsch on the phone I hoped to find out where the troll ended and the real person began. *** I first became aware of Violentacrez last year, when controversy erupted over a section, called "Jailbait," that Violentacrez had created on Reddit dedicated to sexualized images of underaged girls. (Brutsch adapted the name from "Violent Acres," a popular anonymous blogger he was fond of in the mid-2000s.) Reddit, for the uninitiated, is essentially a social news site; with a free username, anyone can submit and vote on content and can do so anonymously. And anyone can start a forum on Reddit dedicated to their interests, known as a subreddit. Today, there are about 10,000 active subreddits out of nearly 100,000 total, spanning a dizzying array of topics from funny pictures, to Power Rangers, to pooping. If a post gets enough "upvotes," as they're called, it can be propelled to the front page of Reddit and a massive audience. The breadth of topics and dedication of users has made Reddit, which calls itself the "front page of the internet," the single dominant force in internet culture today, boasting over 3.4 billion pageviews this August. It reached a new level of legitimacy last month, when President Obama held a Q & A on Reddit. These days, Reddit is mentioned in the same breath as Twitter and Facebook by pundits expounding on the power of social media. But Reddit's laissez-faire attitude towards offensive speech has led to a vast underbelly that rivals anything on the notorious cesspool 4chan. And with Jailbait, Violentacrez decided to create a safe space for people sexually attracted to underage girls to share their photo stashes. I would call these people pedophiles; the Jailbait subreddit called them "ephebophiles." Jailbait was the online equivalent of systematized street harassment. Users posted snapshots of tween and teenage girls, often in bikinis and skirts. Many of these were lifted from their Facebook accounts and thrown in front of Jailbait's 20,000 horny subscribers. Violentacrez and his fellow moderators worked hard to make sure every girl on jailbait was underage, diligently deleting any photos whose subjects seemed older than 16 or 17. Violentacrez himself posted hundreds of photos. Jailbait became one of Reddit's most popular subreddits, generating millions of pageviews a month. "Jailbait" was for a time the second biggest search term bringing traffic to Reddit, after "Reddit." Eventually, Jailbait landed on CNN, where Anderson Cooper called out Reddit for hosting it, and Violentacrez for creating it. The ensuing outcry led Reddit administrators to reluctantly ban Jailbait, and all sexually suggestive content featuring minors. Michael Brutsch at a Reddit meet-up. On the phone, Michael Brutsch insisted he is not a pedophile but was unapologetic about Jailbait. He compared the photos of underage girls he posted to Britney Spears' sultry "Hit Me Baby One More Time" video. She was 16 at the time, he said—how was that different than what he was doing? Brutsch said he only reposted photos that he'd found elsewhere, mostly on 4chan, and that he promptly removed any outright child porn that was posted. "I've always been upfront about the sorts of things that I find attractive," he said. Brutsch didn't create the creepshots subreddit which was launched earlier this year. But when it started to get heat after a teacher in Georgia was fired at the end of September for allegedly posting covert pictures of his underage students, it only made sense that the section's moderators would bring Violentacrez on to help deal with the newfound attention. He was a moderator until Creepshots was banned this week amid increasing controversy. (The circumstances surrounding Creepshots' ban is unclear, as Reddit's General Manager had told Buzzfeed they would not ban the subreddit because it wasn't breaking Reddit's rules.) Having his screenname mangled by Anderson Cooper on CNN for Jailbait was Violentacrez's biggest moment as a troll, but it wasn't his first time in the spotlight. Since Brutsch stumbled on Reddit from a link on the internet culture blog Boing Boing in 2007, he has pushed the boundaries of Reddit's free-speech culture. He has done this mostly through creating offensive subreddits to troll sensitive users. Some of the sections Violentacrez created or moderated were called: Chokeabitch Niggerjailbait Rapebait Hitler Jewmerica Misogyny Incest You can look those up on Reddit and visit them if you'd like to ruin your day, but the content is self-explanatory. Unlike Jailbait, which apparently sprung from a sincere interest, many of Violentacrez's most offensive subreddits were created just to enrage other Reddit users. At this they were very effective. What happened was, some do-gooder would stumble upon one of his offensive subreddits and expose it to the rest of Reddit in an outraged post. Then thousands more would vote the thing to the front page of Reddit. Cries to censor it would sound out, to be almost inevitably beaten back by cries of "free speech!" The idea of free speech is sacred to many Reddit users, a product of the free-wheeling online message board culture from which Reddit springs. If you criticize someone else for posting something you don't like, you are a whiny fascist. Violentacrez explained his trolling philosophy to the internet culture website the Daily Dot in August of 2011. He had sparked yet another controversy by posting a graphic image of a partially clothed woman being brutally beaten by a large man, in "beatingwomen," a subreddit dedicated to glorifying violence against women. A Redditor had called out the picture in a post, and it was voted to the front page. "People take things way too seriously around here," Violentacrez said. " I was not surprised by the outrage of the person who made the post, because I see it all the time. What was surprising was the community support for it. Most posts that complain about these things never do very well, and are quickly buried or deleted. I think it's interesting how many people defend my right to act the way I do, while decrying my posts themselves." A troll exploits social dynamics like computer hackers exploit security loopholes, and Violentacrez calmly exploited the Reddit hive mind's powerful outrage machine and free speech values at the same time. It was this pattern, repeated to various degrees dozens of times, that made Violentacrez an unlikely hero to many of the white male geeks who make up Reddit's hard core. They saw Violentacrez as a champion in the fight against the oppressive schoolmarms: "He upheld a certain amount of freedom for the worst of us to ensure freedom for all of us," wrote one user in a post mourning his departure. Fans followed him wherever he went on the site. As his fame grew, Brutsch began selling T-shirts with an illustration of a zombified version of Reddit's alien logo, designed by a professional illustrator, that he had adopted as Violentacrez's logo. He created a subreddit called Violentacrez, dedicated to news and posts about himself. Last year, the Daily Dot named him the most important Redditor of the year. Violentacrez was the most influential user of one of the most influential websites on the internet. Violentacrez was a troll, but he was a well-connected troll. All the while, Violentacrez's critics cried out the same refrain: "How does he get away with this?" One reason Violentacrez continued to occupy such a high-profile position on Reddit was of course his free speech rhetoric. But Violentacrez has historically had a close relationship with Reddit's staff, a fact far less well-known than his controversial behavior. Violentacrez was a troll, but he was a well-connected troll. He told me he was close with a number of early Reddit employees—many of whom have now moved on—chatting with them on IRC or sometimes even on the phone. A few years ago, while Jailbait was still going strong, Reddit's administrators gave him a special one-of-a-kind "pimp hat" badge to honor his contributions to the site, which he proudly displayed on his profile. Brutsch said he was even in the final running for a job as a customer support representative at Reddit last year. During the Jailbait controversy, Erik Martin, the site's General Manager, reached out to Violentacrez beforehand to warn him that they were going to have to shut down his prized possession, according to a chat conversation Violentacrez leaked at the time. "Want to give you a heads up," Martin wrote. "We're making a policy change regarding jailbait type content. Don't really have a choice." (Martin did not respond to requests for comment.) Violentacrez's privileged position came from the fact that for years he had helped administrators deal with the massive seedy side of Reddit, acting almost as an unpaid staff member. Reddit administrators essentially handed off the oversight of the site's NSFW side to Violentacrez, according to former Reddit lead programer Chris Slowe (a.k.a. Keysersosa), who worked at Reddit from 2005 to the end of 2010. When Violentacrez first joined the site and started filling it with filth, administrators were wary and they often clashed. But eventually administrators and Violentacrez came to an uneasy truce, according to Slowe. For all his unpleasantness, they realized that Violentacrez was an excellent community moderator and could be counted on to keep the administrators abreast of any illegal content he came across. "Once we came to terms he was actually pretty helpful. He would come to us with things that we hadn't noticed," said Slowe. "At the time there was only four of us working so that was a great resource for us to have." Administrators realized it was easier to outsource the policing of questionable content to Violentacrez than to dirty their hands themselves, or ostracize him and risk even worse things happening without their knowledge. The devil you know. So even as Jailbait flourished and became an ever-more-integral part of Reddit's traffic and culture—in 2008 it won the most votes in a "subreddit of the year" poll—administrators looked the other way. "We just stayed out of there and let him do his thing and we knew at least he was getting rid of a lot of stuff that wasn't particularly legal," Slowe said. "I know I didn't want it to be my job." Violentacrez's close relationship to administrators made him an elite member of Reddit's army of moderators, known as "mods" on the site. Though much is made of the millions of users who submit content to Reddit, it's Reddit's over 20,000 volunteer mods who are the real secret behind its success. They act as janitors and editors, keeping their subreddits clean and well-stocked with content. Reddit's main innovation has been to move these users up the food chain, from simple content-generators to management positions. This allows Reddit's mind-boggling breadth of content and users to be overseen by just a few paid employees. The downside is that it requires Reddit's official management to enter into uneasy symbiotic relationships with sketchy but effective moderators like Violentacrez. And sometimes those relationships become more trouble than they're worth. After the Jailbait controversy, Violentacrez claimed repeatedly on Reddit, he was cut off from administrators who had been burned by the controversy. In fact, when I spoke to him, Brutsch said Reddit admins had been keeping their distance for a while. He suggested that the site wasn't what it used to be. In recent days, he has been posting less, stirring up less drama. When it comes to mods, the political model of Reddit is not so much a vast digital democracy, as it's often framed by fans and users, as online feudalism. Moderators like Violentacrez are given absolute control over their turf in exchange for keeping the kingdom of Reddit strong. Moderators become more or less powerful in direct relation to the number and popularity of the subreddits they moderate, so they try to take over other subreddits to boost their profile in the community. Inevitably, Reddit's administrators develop relationships with the most influential moderators. Like feuding medieval lords vying for the king's favor, moderators form alliances or wage epic flame wars over power struggles. This is how Violentacrez, Reddit's creepiest user, also became its most powerful. Sure, he was responsible for the absolute worst stuff on Reddit, and by extension, some of the worst stuff on the internet. But Violentacrez was also seen to be, as Chris Slowe put it to me, "a trustworthy and a positive member of the community." He moderated more than 400 subreddits and had many high-profile friends, amassed over many years. His stable at times included hundreds of popular mainstream subreddits, like Funny and WTF, that reach audiences of millions. Violentacrez further solidified his reach by becoming a mentor to other moderators. He created the first FAQ for Reddit's rather unintuitive moderator interface. He also helmed a number of subreddits dedicated to providing guidance and camaraderie for other moderators, including the essential modhelp. So it was no surprise that when news got out earlier this week that I was working on a story that would expose Violentacrez's real identity, other moderators on Reddit rallied to defend him. The popular politics subreddit led the charge, by banning all Gawker links. "As moderators, we feel that this type of behavior is completely intolerable," they wrote. "We volunteer our time on Reddit to make it a better place for the users, and should not be harassed and threatened for that. We should all be afraid of the threat of having our personal information investigated and spread around the internet if someone disagrees with you." Some have taken this as an expression of Reddit's users' fondness of Violentacrez's pornographic generosity. In fact the ban was probably more an expression of friendship by the Politics subreddit moderators. Violentacrez probably trained some of them. They were mad that their buddy was going to be outed for simply, in their mind, exercising his free speech—his unalienable right to anonymously post stalker shots of women. *** When I called Brutsch that Wednesday afternoon and told him I knew who he was, I was a little taken aback by how calm he remained during our intense but civil hour-long conversation. I had figured that a man whose hobby was saying horrible shit just to screw with people online would rise to some new horrible level when conditions on the ground actually called for it. Instead he pleaded with me in an affectless monotone not to reveal his name. "My wife is disabled. I got a home and a mortgage, and if this hits the fan, I believe this will affect negatively on my employment," he said. "I do my job, go home watch TV, and go on the internet. I just like riling people up in my spare time." I asked if he regretted anything he had posted, now that he'd be found out. No, he said. "I would stand by exactly what I've done." The problem was, he explained, that if his identity got out, his many enemies would start attaching lies to his name because they simply don't like his views. They would say he was a child pornographer, when all he had done was spearhead the distribution of thousands of legal photos of underage girls. They would say the fact that he created a subreddit dedicated to Hitler meant he was anti-Semitic, when really it was just trolling. (Brutsch says he's got Jewish blood himself: "If you see a picture of me, I'm about as Jewish looking as they get.") They would Google-bomb his name and the word "pedophile" along with his publicly-traded company's name. I asked if he regretted anything he had posted, now that he'd be found out. No, he said. "I would stand by exactly what I've done." He needed to keep his anonymity to protect his ability to express things many people think but hardly anyone says. With Violentacrez, "I got the freedom to talk about my personal life, my personal feelings... I'm sure there's more than one person in this building who's a pervert," he said, referring his office building. He asked a number of times if there was anything he could do to keep me from outing him. He offered to act as a mole for me, to be my "sockpuppet" on Reddit. "I'm like the spy who's found out," he said. "I'll do anything. If you want me to stop posting, delete whatever I posted, whatever. I am at your mercy because I really can't think of anything worse that could possibly happen. It's not like I do anything illegal." I told him it wasn't my place to tell him what to do, that I was just reporting on what he'd already done, but this did shake me a bit. It didn't help that our phone call had been unplanned and I hadn't properly steeled myself for a tough conversation. In the beginning it was just supposed to be a friendly gchat conversation with Violentacrez, not a confrontation with Brutsch himself. I had initially told Violentacrez I was interested in profiling him in light of the new controversy surrounding creepshots. I arranged the Gchat interview without hinting that a former online friend had tipped me off to his real identity during the Jailbait scandal, after the friend had become disgusted with his obsession with underage girls. Since then, Violentacrez had recorded the geek podcast The Drill Down with other high-profile Reddit moderators, outing his voice. All I had to do was call up Michael Brutsch and match his voice to Violentacrez's. My plan that Wednesday was to have the chat with Violentacrez before calling Brutsch. I didn't want to risk calling Brutsch first, only to have him shut down completely once he realized he was outed. Unfortunately, I've never been good at keeping secrets. My poker face is so bad it can be read even through a computer screen, apparently. In our Gchat, I pressed Violentacrez about his anonymity enough that he grew suspicious. We were chatting about why he feels comfortable attending IRL meet-ups of Redditors if his anonymity was so important to him when he caught on. me: it seems like you're not super careful about keeping your identity under wraps, if you meet people in real life. A lot of trolls I've talked to would never do that or give out as many details about themselves as they do. violentacrez: have you been given my real name? me: yeah violentacrez: that's not good me: it seems like you've told a lot of people. Are you surprised it would get out? violentacrez: yes, I thought I could trust those who know. Are you going to out me? Panicking a bit, I quickly picked up the phone and dialed the number I had found on Brutsch's online resume so I could hear Brutsch's voice to see if it matched Violentacrez. It did. "So, are you going to out me?" he said. *** One thing that Brutsch wasn't worried about when I talked to him on the phone was his immediate family finding out about his online habits. "He won't really care," said Brutsch of his teenage son, the one about to join the Marines. "He thinks I'm creepy as it is." The Violentacrez clan seems to have walked out of a Todd Solondz movie, and a significant part of Violentacrez's mythos on Reddit comes from the details he's shared about his family. In 2010, Violentacrez hosted a legendary "Ask Me Anything" thread"—the same Q & A feature Barack Obama took part in last month. He was asked what was the creepiest thing he'd done "IRL" and delighted readers with a tale ripped out of Penthouse letters. "That'd be a tough call," Violentacrez wrote, "Perhaps oral sex with my 19-year-old stepdaughter." It was completely consensual, he claimed in the post, and went on to brag about how awesome it had been in graphic detail. This happened over ten years ago, Violentacrez claimed. When his then-wife, the girl's mother, found out, she "got mad, then got over it," Violentacrez wrote. He says they were married for ten more years. His current wife is similarly accepting of Brutsch's unsavory side, according to Brutsch. She is not only aware of his online habits, she's also a prolific Redditor under the handle not_so_violentacrez. She is a founder of the Fibromyalgia subreddit. She has diabetes and plays the online game Kingdom of Camelot. Violentacrez said that at home, the two would lie in bed together with their laptops, both on Reddit, him posting his porn, she posting cute animal videos and pictures of dolphins. About a year ago, Violentacrez's teenage son did his own Ask Me Anything thread. His son uses the handle Spawn_of_VA and he is dad's biggest fan. Interspersed among talk of family game night, Spawn_of_VA regaled readers with more weird tidbits about his father, including the fact that he has a "suitcase full of dildos in his closet" and a "roller type thing with spikes on it, he uses that to roll on his balls." When I first read Violentacrez's and his son's AMAs I, like many other readers, figured this was just some next-level trolling. Violentacrez's wife and his son were probably just sockpuppets, right? But on the phone, I asked Brutsch if Spawn_of_VA was really his son. He is, Brutsch said. I asked if everything he and his son had said in their AMAs were real. As far as he could remember, he said, it was. *** The extent to which trolls separate, or fail to separate, their online and IRL lives is as varied as people themselves. There's an idea of the troll as an information age Jekyll & Hyde, with the anonymity provided by the internet playing the role of Hyde's serum that transforms the mild-mannered geek into a monster. Observers often cite the psychological theory called deindividuation, which argues people literally lose themselves when granted anonymity. But Violentacrez/Michael Brutsch upset this idea by blurring his online and offline lives. Brutsch adopted a new name for trolling, but he built his horrible character on many details from his real life. In real life, Brutsch is an unabashedly creepy old man with seven cats and two dogs and a disabled wife and a teenage son about to join the Marines. He was all of that online, too—only he was famous for it. Both offline and online he could be either a creepy uncle, or a loyal friend and helpful guide. Violentacrez had a surprising number of friends on Reddit, for someone who once created an entire subreddit dedicated to pictures of dead teenage girls (Picsofdeadjailbait). He helped organize IRL meet-ups, where he showed up in a t-shirt with his zombie logo on it, and told everyone there to call him "VA." Attendees agreed to blur his face in any resulting pictures before posting them to Reddit. Brutsch is an internet minister, and he said he once married a pair of Redditors in real life, though they only knew him by his "clean" handle: mbrutsch. One longtime Redditor I spoke to talked about Violentacrez with the warmth of an old college friend. "He's a really a good guy," she said. This user was in the Arlington area for business once, and she stopped by Brutsch's house for lunch. "He has the manners of a Southern gentleman," she said. "A bunch of neighborhood kids were over playing at his house." The only thing missing was joining the name Violentacrez to the name Michael Brutsch, and even that information he had given to many of his online friends. Reddit administrators have long known his real identity, Brutsch said, which he gave them in order to prove that he had nothing to hide. But Brutsch was still anonymous to the people he wanted to be, mainly his employers, and by unmasking him I am sure to get criticism for supposedly violating his privacy. Even before I published this article, Reddit had already exploded in outrage. (Gawker sites are now banned from over 60 subreddits, and some pissed off user has signed me up for approximately two dozen mailing lists.) The irony of being upset that a noted custodian of "creepshots" is getting some unwanted attention himself is obvious. Jailbait defenders would often argue that if 14-year-olds didn't want their bikini pictures to be posted to Reddit, they should not have taken them and uploaded them to their Facebook accounts in the first place. If Brutsch did not want his employers to know that he had become a minor internet celebrity through spending hours every day posting photos of 14-year-olds in bikinis to thousands of people on the internet, he should have stuck to posting cat videos. But for Reddit, the stakes are higher than just one man having to answer for things he's done online. To them, the "doxing" of Violentacrez—"doxing" is hacker slang for publishing someone's personal information in order to intimidate or punish them—is an assault on the very structure of Reddit itself. The Daily Dot sums up their logic: At Web communities like Reddit, which thrive because users are free to say and do anything they want, doxing is a severe crime, both to users and the site's staff. It's far worse than offensive speech like racism and homophobia or, yes, even posting surreptitiously snapped photos of innocent women for creeps to perv over. Why? Because doxing undermines the community's structural integrity: Reddit simply would not exist as we know it if users weren't operating under the freedom of a flexible identity. So redditors aren't banning Gawker to protect violentacrez, they're doing it to protect themselves. Under Reddit logic, outing Violentacrez is worse than anonymously posting creepshots of innocent women, because doing so would undermine Reddit's role as a safe place for people to anonymously post creepshots of innocent women. I am OK with that. *** Brutsch shut down the Violentacrez account abruptly this past Tuesday, six days after we spoke. When I Gchatted him that night, Brutsch told me, "I guess I just got tired of all the hassle." He said he was done with Reddit for good. "Reddit ceased being fun a while ago," he said. Now he's going to spend the hours he used to lose to Reddit on work. "Oh, and possibly looking for a job will obviously keep me busy ;)" I asked what he'll miss most about Reddit. "The people," he said. "Reddit is nothing without the community. I've already gotten a few cheery goodbyes from people: 'Keep in touch. You are still a good friend.'" But he didn't stay away long. In the past couple days, he apparently popped up in a private subreddit called "modtalk," where moderators and administrators talk clear up some misconceptions about why he'd left. (Including one rumor that I had somehow "blackmailed" him into quitting.) In the ensuing discussion, a user named themanwithnoname wrote, "VA, I don't know you personally, but I've appreciated some of your comments over the years. I hope your life rocks from here out." To which Violentacrez replied, under the handle VA_11102012: "I miss posting porn.

[YOUTUBE]og35U0d6WKY[/YOUTUBE]

Are you saying Obama is as good a campaigner as Vinick? Leo McGarry - The West Wing Characters - ShareTV

Good Post Rev.... At a raw moment, well summed up.... as usual.

A whale's vagina..... well 60% of the time, it works every time.....

Those links to Libya 360° (under 'See: Kony 2012') are most if not all pro Gaddafi propaganda.... Some real interesting revisionism on that site.....

I believe Pig started this one back in `09... http://www.liverpoolway.co.uk/forum/gf-general-forum/78754-world-tlw-map.html

goal Bayern... Dortmund 4:2 Bayern

I can only hope that when and if an offer comes thru.... he tells them to fuck off and refuses to play for that shower of shite.... I can only hope....

Should have been 5 there.... Dortmund making Bayern defending look amateur..... If Bayern play like this on the 19th, Drogba, Mata and Lampard will have a field day....

Another great ball by Kagawa.... and even the commentators are crapping on about Ferguson watching him.... Dortmund 4:1

What the Fuck was that..... Dortmund newly subbed keeper decided to play as a sweeper with 3 of his defenders around him, one Bayern attacker and 35yds in front of his goal..... Fuck and then a high foot and decent free kick to Dortmund at the other end.... decent match this.....

Nice quick turns and movement from Kagawa....

Fuck Me... what a pass by Kagawa.... Shite defending by Bayern though.... Dortmund 3:1 46min.....

Pen Dortmund.... 39min Dortmund 2:1 Looking at the replay Neuer nearly got it too

Dortmund just subbed their keepr on 33min....... i can only assume due to an injury.... I can't tell.... my German stream isn't saying much..... in english....

Good Call.... Pen: Bayern..... Robben 24min.... ish 1:1

Very, very good!

Not sure if you guys have had a chance to view the following...... The last link from Yahoo is a beauty..... BBC News - Public fury over 'racist' Trayvon Martin killing Public fury over 'racist' Trayvon Martin killing Comments (156) Trayvon Martin was carrying only sweets when he was killed Related Stories Probe into killing of US teenager 'Shoot first' law under scrutiny There's mounting outrage at the shooting dead of an unarmed black teenager in Florida - it is online and it is on the streets. The reason for the fury is the belief that 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was a victim of racism. Not what is now called a "hate crime" - not that he was targeted for random violence because of his colour. Not that sort of racism, but the racism of assumption: that a black teenager in a hoodie in smart neighbourhood must be up to no good. It is the assumption by police that the man who shot him was telling the truth, that it was self defence, even though Trayvon was near his own home, armed only with a bag of sweets and a soft drink. The anger is all the stronger because a series of emergency calls to the police are very revealing and disturbingly graphic. In the first, the neighbourhood watch captain, George Zimmerman, shows his suspicion of the teenager: his anger that could be summed up as "they" keep getting away with "it" and his refusal to listen to police advice to not go after Trayvon Martin. There are disturbing 911 calls from neighbours where you can hear prolonged screaming in the back ground. And then a single shot. Then there is the testimony of a friend who Trayvon called moments before his death, when he asks why he is being followed. Then there are sounds of a struggle. The police did not arrest the man who shot the teenager, even though he, unlike Trayvon Martin, had been arrested in the past. Florida, though, has a law - often known as the "stand your ground" that makes it far from certain that those defending themselves can be arrested for a crime. A very few see the outrage as orchestrated by a liberal media. There has been a bit of an odd argument that Mr Zimmerman was not white but Hispanic. But it is pretty obvious a lot of black people think it self-evident that this is about race. Chauncy De Vega has some profound reflections on this which are well worth reading. It is only 72 years since Congress would not pass a law making lynching illegal. The US has travelled a long way since then, but it is not surprising that cases like this stir up fears that some lessons have not been learnt well enough. Trayvon Martin and Life Lessons for Young Black Boys - Chauncey DeVega - Open Salon Scholars have long maintained that race is merely a social construct, not something fixed into our nature, yet this insight hasn’t made it any less of a factor in our lives. If we no longer participate in a society in which the presence of black blood renders a person black, then racial self-identification becomes a matter of individual will. And where the will is involved, the question of ethics arises. At a moment when prominent, upwardly mobile African-Americans are experimenting with terms like “post-black,” and outwardly mobile ones peel off at the margins and disappear into the multiracial ether, what happens to that core of black people who cannot or do not want to do either? Trayvon Martin was killed for the crime of being black, young, and "suspicious." Like many other young black boys and grown men throughout United States history, he was shot dead for the crime of possessing an innocuous object (and likely daring to be insufficiently compliant to someone who imagined that they had the State's permission to kill people of color without consequence or condemnation). The facts are still playing themselves out. From all appearances,the police have failed to investigate the incident properly. Trayvon Martin's family has been denied the reasonable care, respect, and response due to them by the local authorities. Observers and activists have gravitated towards racism as the prime motive for the shooting and murder of a young black boy by a grown man and self-styled mall cop, Charles Bronson, Dirty Harry wannabe vigilante. Common sense renders a clear judgement here: if a black man shot and killed a white kid for holding a bag of Skittles he would already be under the jail; in this instance, the police are operating from a position where a young African American is presumed "guilty," and his murderer is assumed innocent. Yes, race matters in the killing of Trayvon Martin. However, and I will explore this in a later post, it is significant in a manner that is much more pernicious than the simple calculus of whether to shoot a young black boy for some imagined grievance or offense--as opposed to being asked a question, or perhaps sternly talked to. The latter is also problematic: it assumes that black people's citizenship and humanity are forever questionable, and subject to evaluation, by any person who happens to not be African American. Cornel West famously suggested that all black children are "niggerized" at some point in their upbringing. Moreover, black children learn to live in a state of existential dread because they are always subject to wanton and unjust violence. Trayvon Martin's murder reminds me of a parallel and complementary observation. Black people live a paradox. We are simultaneously both children and adults in the white racial imagination regardless of our age. Black people are treated as adults even when they are minors. In the courts, black young people are disproportionately subjected to punishments which are typically meted out to adults. As research has repeatedly demonstrated, to be young and black is to be an adult for purposes of arrest, the gas chamber, or imprisonment. Historically, black people have been treated by whites as though they are children in regards to political matters. Thus, the contemporary rhetoric from conservatives that African Americans are childlike, zombies, on a plantation, or somehow hoodwinked or tricked into supporting the Democratic Party. Despite all of the available evidence, grown folks who were either heirs to, or participants in, a Black Freedom Struggle that salvaged and saved American democracy from its own weaknesses, lies, and hypocrisies, are depicted as naive infants, unable to be full and equal political actors. The sociological imagination draws many connections. To point, Trayvon Martin's murder is also a surprising (and for many, counter-intuitive) complement to The New York Times' excellent series of essays on race, interracial marriage, and identity. As someone who has loved across the colorline, and also believes that there are many ways to create a family, I have always held fast to a simple rule. In this society, in this moment, and given what we know about how race impacts life chances, if a white person is going to have a child with a person of color (especially one who is African American or "black"), a parent is committing malpractice if they do not give their progeny the spiritual, emotional, philosophical, and personal armor to deal with the realities of white supremacy. By implication, young black and brown children must be made to understand that they are not "special," "biracial," or part of a racial buffer group that is going to be given "special" privileges because one of their parents is white. These "multiracial" children are some of the most vulnerable and tragic when they are finally forced to confront the particular challenges which come with being a young black boy or girl in American society. In post civil rights America, this notion is politically incorrect. Nonetheless, it remains true. Here, Thomas Chatterton Williams offers a great comment on blackness and the dilemma of "post-black" identity: Still, as I envision rearing my own kids with my blond-haired, blue-eyed wife, I’m afraid that when my future children — who may very well look white — contemplate themselves in the mirror, this same society, for the first time in its history, will encourage them not to recognize their grandfather’s face. For this fear and many others, science and sociology are powerless to console me — nor can they delineate a clear line in the sand beyond which identifying as black becomes absurd. Question: what happens for those young people who do not see themselves as "black" or "brown," yet run into the deadly fists of white racism? Do they have the skill sets necessary to survive such encounters whole of life and limb? Because we are both part of a diaspora, the wisdom of our Jewish brothers and sisters is also instructive here. Continuing from The New York Times piece: For Judt, it was his debt to the past alone that established his identity.Or as Ralph Ellison explained — and I hope my children will read him carefully because they will have to make up their own minds: “Being a Negro American involves a willed (who wills to be a Negro? I do!) affirmation of self as against all outside pressures.” And even “those white Negroes,” as he called them, “are Negroes too — if they wish to be.”And so I will teach my children that they, too, are black — regardless of what anyone else may say — so long as they remember and wish to be. Trayvon Martin was likely taught the life lessons necessary to survive an encounter with the police (or their posse cousins) by his parents and other elders. Because black life is cheap, a young person of color can do everything "right" and still end up dead. What does this mean for blackness, when a century or more after the end of slavery, and decades after the end of lynch law, that your guilt is still assumed? Whiteness and White privilege involve the luxury of being able to decide how, in what ways, and under what conditions, you will be allow yourself to be uncomfortable. White privilege also involves the luxury of not having to have a conversation with your kids about how to avoid being murdered by the cops because of your skin color. In many matters of life and death, white supremacy remains, in many ways, unchallenged. Black and brown folks, if they are responsible parents, cannot avoid such conversations with their children. The foot-dragging by the police in regards to the murder of Trayvon Martin reveals this ugly truth. Dr. King is gone. A black man is President. Yet, life remains unfair...does it not? Don't Re-Nig purveyor Paula Smith says bumper sticker isn't racist | The Sideshow - Yahoo! News Last Friday, I wrote about the racist, anti-Obama "Don't Re-Nig in 2012" bumper sticker that has been making the rounds across social media circles. While people were questioning the authenticity of the photograph showing the bumper sticker on someone's car, we were able to track down a website selling the sticker along with several other controversial items. Writing for Forbes, Roger Friedman interviews the site's owner, Paula Smith. Ms. Smith, who hails from Hinesville, Georgia, insists that neither she nor the sticker are racist. Who knows what Smith really believes, but her logic is a stretch, to put it gently. "I do find it amazing and entertaining that one of our stickers has become a racist thing," Ms. Smith told Forbes. She even tried arguing that the dictionary does not define the "N-Word" as racist. Wisely, Friedman posted the actual definition from dictionary.com, which says the word, "is now probably the most offensive word in English. Its degree of offensiveness has increased markedly in recent years, although it has been used in a derogatory manner since at least the Revolutionary War. Definitions 1a, 1b, and 2 represent meanings that are deeply disparaging and are used when the speaker deliberately wishes to cause great offense." Her protestations aside, Ms. Smith appears to have removed the bumper sticker from her site. Under the "Anti-Obama" section of the site (advertised as her No. 3 bestseller), you'll now only find a sticker reading, "I was Anti-Obama Before It Was Cool." In what may be a reference to the controversy her other bumper sticker has caused, the description below reads, "Show the world how you feel! (but be careful, you may hurt someone's feelings)." Ms. Smith then goes on to argue that President Obama is "not even black," but rather, "a mixture of race." When Friedman asks Smith if she thinks the N-Word is offensive or derogatory, she says no, but then claims that she herself does not even use the word. "I have kids here around me that are black kids. I call them my own kids. I've helped black families…to guide them in the right direction," Smith told Forbes. "We like to laugh and have a good time. That's our way of life."