Evidently not satisfied with simply being made into an internet verb, noted child molesting humor mongerer and thorn in the side of human decency Deb Frisch is back – with a vengeance.
Employing poorly disguised sock puppets, Frisch (a woman defended by some on the left despite her unhinged attacks on Jeff Goldstein and his two year old son) commented at Ace’s site thusly:
Do you think Jeff sux Satchel’s dick or just plays with it?
Of course, she didn’t use her true name. But the IP address on the comment – as well as the IP address on similar comments made at Goldstein’ site - traces back to Eugene, Oregon where Frisch currently resides. The comments left at Jeff’s site are so sickening that I’ve decided not to publish them here. Patterico has a screenshot of them if you feel the need to see depravity in the flesh.
That’s not all. According to Patterico, the IP address is eerily similar to one used by Deb Frisch herself in comments left at Aces, Goldstein’s, and Patterico’s websites in the past.
Patterico sums up the evidence:
Frisch previously left comments on my site, Ace’s site, and Jeff’s site using a slightly different Qwest IP address that traced back to Eugene, Oregon. That previous Frisch IP address was Qwest IP address 71.34.252.228, which also traces to Eugene, Oregon.I long ago deleted the content of comment she left on my site, under the moniker “WW†(â€Word Warriorâ€); it’s still linked here. I preserved the original text in a Notepad file.
Ace confirms that Frisch previously posted comments under her own name on his site, under that same Qwest IP address. And Jeff tells me she had previously used two Qwest IP’s on his site. One was the same as was left on my site: 71.34.252.228. The other was 71.32.126.27. That is also a Qwest IP address that traces to Eugene, Oregon, the city where Frisch lives.
In the meantime, Jeff Goldstein has felt compelled to stop posting until he can resolve his problems – “once and for all” – either through the legal system or, my recommendation, by using law enforcement if indeed any laws have been broken.
Couple this with the ongoing drama involving Seixon, Larry Johnson, Jason Leopold, and God knows who else and you have an extraordinarily disturbing picture. And I would say to my friends on the sane left who I know visit here from time to time and are kind enough to disagree with me rationally that the time has come for larger lefty blogs to stand up and be placed in the decency column by using some of that vitriol they hurl at the right and at the President with such practiced ease and send some of it in the direction of the guttersnipes, the bullies, and the dirty necked galoots who are making the internet a sewer and a place of dread.
I don’t like the direction that the blogosphere is going at all. All the great hopes for this new communications medium engendered in the lead up to and following the 2004 election are being subsumed in an avalanche of filth and threats that have gone far beyond bad jokes, inappropriate humor, or simple flame wars. It is no longer enough to “fisk” a post by a rival blogger. Now you must destroy the blogger himself, lay him low with withering personal invective of a kind that borders on threats to his person or even more disturbing, to his family.
I mentioned in my Seixon post that these tactics are a kind of hardball politics not seen on the internet before but not unfamiliar to those who have been involved in politics on the national level. Whispering campaigns of a vile nature carried out against opponents, the call in the middle of the night, siccing friendly reporters on rivals by rumormongering, digging up dirt on people’s personal lives, even veiled threats have all been part of The Big Game in Washington for decades. Somehow, you would think that the citizen journalists who inhabit the blogosphere could have immunized themselves from that kind of nastiness.
Alas, the stakes are considered so high by most that the old saw “The ends justifies the means” becomes a battle cry for those who seek the brass ring of power and the prestige that comes to those invited into the outer rings of the Councils of State. It is the politics of Court transmogrified to 20th century America. It is a game played for keeps. The victims are those who see politics as something less than life or death. And in that kind of contest, those most determined to prevail generally do.
Unless the blogosphere as one rises up in righteous anger and condemns without equivocation, without qualification, and without regard to ideology or party affiliation those who seek to sully this medium with the poisonous tactics of bullying, or threatening, or crossing over from the virtual world into the physical world in order to carry out vendettas against opponents, we will become a sideshow, a gaggle of carping, sniping, irrelevancies who deserved to be laughed at rather than taken seriously for our ideas or beliefs.
It’s not to late to take a stand. And I urge everyone that reads this to take that stand with me.
4:50 pm
I think the more likely result is going to be blogs going to moderated comments.
4:53 pm
Also, Ace’s site is now down. I’m not claiming it’s a DNS attack, but the same thing happened to Protein Wisdom after Deb made some vile comments there. Odd…..
4:54 pm
CP:
If it were only the comments that were the problem, I’d say that most bloggers already moderate comments to one degree or another.
It is when the threatleave the virtual realm of the internet and enter the real world that we have a problem.
And no amount of comment moderation will alleviate the pain of a parent who has had to endure the kind of filt dished out by Frisch. That kind of hurtful language goes beyond anything left in a public forum and strikes deep at the heart of a person’s psyche. And there’s no excuse for it.
4:57 pm
Rick, as usual an excellent post and everyone needs to ratchet it down a bit, we are all Americans and we all live here so lets at least try and be civil.
Bless you all
6:02 pm
I went to Patterico’s site and read the vile comments. All I can say is that they only reflect a severely disordered mind.
This goes to the heart of the problem with the manipulation of language I keep referring to. Robert Frost once said, “Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net.” What he means by that is “poetry” written without structure, without metre, rhythm, rhyme, is not poetry. You can call it whatever you want, but that does not make it into something it’s not.
The same is true of music. Without structure, melody, harmony, it’s not music. And the same is true of language. Without structure, grammar, syntax, punctuation, it’s not language.
This is why the “progressive” movement to abandon the teaching of traditional liberal arts—grammar, logic, rhetoric—is perhaps the most profound betrayal ever perpetrated on the American people, but especially on children. Without a structure to language, there can be no structure to thought. So by not teaching the structure of language, and more by not teaching how to structure language, the student is left without structured thought and without any way to structure thought. In other words, the student is taught to not think, and even worse is not taught how to think at all.
And we see the results all around us today. In the coarsening of our culture, the vulgarity of our communication, and the degradation of our civilization.
This is no trivial matter. We’re talking about our survival as a free people here. And about the future we bequeath to our children, whom we have allowed to be reduced to thoughtless animals and left out in the cold.
John Keats best stated the ideals of high culture in his Ode on a Grecian Urn: “’Beauty is truth. Truth beauty.’ That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” When there is no structure to language or thought, when words have no meaning, when truth is no longer relevant, there can be no beauty in anything. Only ugliness. And with ugliness comes all the vulgarity we endure all around us today.
God help our children.
7:28 pm
“If it were only the comments that were the problem, I’d say that most bloggers already moderate comments to one degree or another.”
While that is true, what I ment was I think we will see more blogs that just don’t allow a comment to go on the blog until it’s been looked at.
As for stuff that isn’t comments, I am not sure what can be done about that because people are going to say whatever they are going to say. While I agree that what we are seeing now goes beyond what would expect to see in a civilized society, I am at a loss as to any ideas of what can be done about it. It isn’t against the law to be a jerk.
A treatening email or phone call can be prosecuted but what one posts on their own blog is pretty difficult to do much about.
“Unless the blogosphere as one rises up in righteous anger and condemns without equivocation, without qualification, and without regard to ideology or party affiliation those who seek to sully this medium with the poisonous tactics of bullying, or threatening, or crossing over from the virtual world into the physical world in order to carry out vendettas against opponents, we will become a sideshow, a gaggle of carping, sniping, irrelevancies who deserved to be laughed at rather than taken seriously for our ideas or beliefs.”
I am quite prepared to stand against this behavior. I am disgusted by it. I also believe it is an example of why the extreme left is pushing itself into irrelevance; most people don’t want to be associated with that kind of public behavior.
That kind of behavior isn’t sustainable and I believe we are witnessing the coming apart of the most extreme fringe elements of the left. Everyone is abandoning them, even the Clintons. Now if they can just get Dean out of his chair, they can begin to clean things up because I think this fringe sees Dean as their source of legitimacy. But I suppose if Dean is replaced we will hear a howl of how Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Diebold, and Israel all conspired to “get him”.
8:06 pm
Most of the vitriol (and worse) are proffered and advocated by those that also offer their websites as safe harbor to their allies with whom they have found comfort in such language.
Conversations are out, and have been ‘out’ as far as these folks are concerned for a very long time. The web merely offers them the unfettered ability to say in a crass way that they’ve felt even before having such an unmoderated or uncontrolled evironment.
These types of people are not interested in any form of dialogue, or an exchange of ideas. I cannot fathom their motivation for the behavior they exhibit, and the moderating of certain forums will only limit (to a small degree) their ability to hurl their invective into cyberspace.
Water seeks its own level and these folks, like rioting/protesting crowds, always seem to find cameras and sympathetic journalists that give them a format for publicizing their stock & trade.
It just galls me that our GI’s have to defend them.
7:07 am
After reading your post and Patterico’s, the phrase that keeps sprining to mind is “there ought to be a law.” I’m with you that every decent member of the internet community should take a stand against this filth, but the problem is that Frisch isn’t a decent person and such appeals to decency will fall on deaf ears—or worse, exacerbate her activity. I am no fan of regulating the internet nor do I think we should pass endless legislation regulating the lives of our citizens, but then again on the other hand, why should citizens who are active on the internet be exempt from the laws that govern behavior in the “real” world? This seems to me the online equivalent of letters made up of things cut out of magazines and newspapers—they used to be a strategy for anonymous harassment, but now can be traced through various forensic means—just as sock puppetry is relatively easy to trace. In any event, Frisch’s behavior is escalating according to the time-honored pattern of deranged stalkers—she’s made contact with Jeff, gotten into his private life, initiated an intense exchange, started to establish relationships with his (cyber) friends—how long is it before she tries to make personal contact? I’m no expert on sociopathic psychology, but it seems to me an inevitable development unless legal action is taken. I’m glad to see Jeff has started down this road—I think what is needed in extreme cases such as this one is the online equivalent of a restraining order—something that’s more than just banning a troll.