There’s a common tactic that gets used against me a lot: random harassers sign me up for magazines. I’ve been signed up for gay magazines, motorcycle magazines, chicken farmer magazines…all kinds of stuff with the intent of causing me trouble.
The latest slimy move — and it coincides with Reap Paden’s angry spammy comment sprees, just sayin’ — is to sign me up for test drives at local car dealerships. And then I get a cheerful call from some sales person who, in good faith, thinks I’m in the market for a Chevy Tahoe or a Honda Civic or something, and we then have a friendly conversation in which I say they’ve been hoaxed, I’m sorry but I’m not buying a car right now, but I will keep them in mind for the future, and they apologize, and I say, “oh, no, I apologize for the trouble”, and we have a little friendly back and forth, and then we’re done.
It’s absolutely no trouble for me — I have a brief, pleasant, and entirely amicable conversation. But you know what? This game you’re playing is wasting innocent people’s time and money. In your pathetic attempt to lash out at me, you are failing completely…but you are succeeding in using otherwise uninvolved bystanders as your pawns, and costing them some effort. Effort you won’t make yourself because you’re a coward and would rather hide behind some hardworking guy at the local dealership or some clerk at a publishing house.
That makes you an asshole. Knock it off. You want to harass me? Do it to my face, don’t hide, and don’t involve others to do your dirty work for you.
Fucking scumbag cowards. All you’ve succeeded in doing is to continually increase my contempt for you. Good job.
You that guy from the magazine Tactical Response?
Well, I have been getting that magazine unsolicited for about ten years. Never requested it, never paid for it, never knew why, but it has followed me through four moves in three states.
Never knew why I got it, but come to think of it, the timing does coincide with when I was getting harassing phone calls and threats and lies etc. from some creepy types from a web forum that no longer exists.
Hmmm.
If you want to harass PZ send him something he needs but won’t use – razors, shaving cream…
That’s totes hilarious! A similar prank was played on me, circa ‘Elevatorgate’. Fielded a bunch of calls and emails from Christian Colleges responding to “my” request for more information about their programs. And that was (I presume) just from engaging as a lowly commenter. I can’t imagine the exponential increase in volume that you bigwigs attract. And yes, my overriding thought (after being icked out that someone had done it at all) was that innocent admissions office personnel got dragged into the fray for lulz. What a bunch of assholes those pranksters are.
Jafafa, at least Tactical Response Magazine has some useful information. If someone is harassing and threatening you and tracking your movements a little investment in preparedness might be in order. If you have to hurt them make sure you thank them for providing you with the information you needed for self defense while they slowly lose blood pressure.
Self-centered bastards. I doubt they even gave a second thought to the sales people.
You know what’s funny?
There’s no way to tell whether or not these stupid tactics are being used by the same old creationists and religious assholes, or by the “free thought” crew.
Indistinguishable.
In before some angry commenter wants to know what evidence you have to accuse Reap of setting up the calls.
As a true feminist, I don’t think PZ subscribes to the notion that body hair is unclean and should be shorn off.
But if you gonna, send him the good stuff at least. Silver tip badger hair brush and a nice-smelling soap. (I know, the brush is not very nice to the badger, but there just isn’t any good substitute).
Dollar bills have that nasty phrase “In God We Trust” printed on them. You haters that are reading this, why don’t you send PZ some dollar bills, so that he will be confronted with this injustice every time he opens one of your envelopes?
This is the problem of fame without money. If Dr. Myers was famous AND rich, he would have people to shelter him from all this. Plus, car dealers would just roll their eyes if someone called and requested a test drive.
Internet Famous, about as useful as tits on a nun.
I heard that people go insane if you send them large sacks of cash. Really. It should drive anyone you wish to harass into a fit of crazed concern about increased tax rates.
*sigh*
Lets not do this, yeah?
Badgers? Badgers? We don’t need no stinkin’ badgers.
Yep. People who resort to these tactics are asinine cowards, and PZ is right to call them out. Often in the sales world, one missed opportunity (because you’re busy servicing a prank call, for instance) can be the difference between a great year and a totally shitty year.
@13
I loved that guy. He was killed in a car accident while they were making that movie, which is why he wasn’t in tha last part.
I don’t understand why the religious bozos feel the need to resort to these tactics. Surely, they would pray to the Bible Bogey, (or other god of choice, or of indoctrination), & remind it to visit terrible retribution upon PZ?
I’d always heard the phrase “useful as tits on a bull”, which seems a less gender-specific kinda thing (I can see where Beatrice doesn’t like the original comment).
Maybe it’s a country/dairy farmer thing, since Mum grew up on a dairy farm. Being a city boy myself, I don’t see why tits on a bull are useless if they make bull feel better about itself.
At least they haven’t called the S.W.A.T. team on you yet.
Maybe they should. The police probably doesn’t have a lot of patience when it comes to prank calls.
I have sent PZ a few SF books and a graphic novel by Templesmith, but I don’t think it counts as harassment. I considered sending him a DVD of the Troma film “Killer Condom”, a spoof horror film, but backed off when I realised he might think it was one of those harrassy thingies.
Christ on a bike! Do they teach nothing at school anymore? The phrase is, and always has been, ‘as useful as teats (not ‘tits’) on a boar’.
And yet there are those who still claim that PZ and the others standing up to the misogynists are ‘using the same tactics’. Funnily enough, they’re never able to show evidence of that.
Trolls and assholes often think they are making me angry but it is very rare that they do. In reality I just hold them in contempt and often I am sitting around laughing at them and their stupidity. I enjoy seeing them flail. However, I have never been signed up for anything and I really wish they would. A newspaper would be good. I could use a little bit of paper for starting fires in the fireplace.
Hard to show evidence for something that didn’t happen. Certain behaviors, like those PZ mentions above, are for those with arrested development. Those who think “because I do something that is sub mature, everybody must do the same immature thing”. Which says a whole lot about PZ’s enemies.
Just realized that my above comment didnt make sense (which is par for the course for me these days.)
By “free thought crew” I meant to say “free speech crew” (aka freeze peach, etc.)
Sorry.
Jafafa, welcome to ‘advanced’ age.
Or shall we put your mistakes down to your vaccinations?
@19: I hope not, actually. Think about what would actually happen to PZ and his family: His front door will be broken down (and he won’t be reimbursed for it), his family will be rounded up by heavily-armed men and possibly taken into custody for long hours, in whatever state of dress they might be in at the time. If he has any pets, there’s a better than even chance they’ll be shot by the SWAT team (they have to play it safe, after all). And when it’s all cleared up, even if it’s resulted in extensive damage to his house and murdered pets, the most he’ll be likely to get is an apology. It’s even possible that if they catch whoever makes the false call, they’ll get off lighter than PZ, once all is told.
I can’t be sure that Paden is responsible, BUT:
– the latest flare-up in this reprehensible activity coincides exactly with Paden’s frustrated temper-tantrums here
– Paden’s repeated efforts to create new pseudonyms to sneak in and start ranting speak of an abysmal level of maturity
– the latest effort of which he was so proud was a childish animated cartoon of me…again, not only immaturity, but a willingness to put in all kinds of effort to do incredibly stupid things that he thinks will harm me somehow
This is a fairly common occurrence. There’s a constant low level of nastiness — email and that sort of easy thing — and then every once in a while some obsessed lunatic starts up with the screaming rages and at the same time I get volleys of additional nonsense, like the magazine subscriptions, or pornography emailed to me, and lots of enrollments in mailing lists. This is old familiar crap.
@Dick the Damned
Surely their omniscient and omnipotent bible monster would have figured this out on it’s own.
Uh, most of my hate mail right now comes from 1) Libertarians, and 2) atheists. Christians and creationists are a very distant 3rd. Islamic spam that I can’t read is in 4th place (they could be damning me to hell, or trying to sell me timeshares in Qatar, I have no idea).
Badgers? Badgers? We don’t need no stinkin’ badgers.
But, badgers are awesome! They coo adorably when you toss them in the air. Try it! You’ll see!
To be fair, inconveniencing a few salespeople is justified if it helps keep you from blacklisting helpless authors, herding them off to concentration camps, and then burning them at the stake for witchcraft, even for a few moments.
Libertarians… shit. For all their blabberings about freedom, why can’t they let us be free of them?!?!
Google translate is your friend, or possibly not as the case may be. Depends if you are looking for a timeshare in Qatar.
Because their freedom to tell us that we can’t do and say what we want is more important than our freedom to say and do what we want, even though they would otherwise defend our freedom to say and do whatever we want to the death (or at least someone else’s death) as long as we do not disagree with them in any meaningful way. Does that make sense to you? No? Me neither. Just goes to show that despite their supposed ideological purity they’re just as bad as the damn Commies! Apologies for slurring any damn Commies out there.
Wow. I didn’t even realize you could sign someone up for a test drive. sounds like an asshat thing to do.
I sent him a blue canary night light. :) Hopefully the good mail outweighs the bad.
No, no, no, what he clearly said was “To blaaave”.
Ya know what PZ? When it’s time for a new car, buy it from one of the guys that called you. And then post pics so we can all see how well it actually turned out for you and the salesman. That should really piss them off. Put all the porn in a time capsule that is to be auctioned off in the future when the porn becomes collectible. Have the proceeds donated to a good liberal cause, like scholarships for womens’ studies.
Ten bucks says one of those MRA asshats accuses you of libel/slander by merely suggesting that it seemed that somebody like Reap Paden is responsible.
TerranRich wrote:
…while demanding a signed and notarized confession, plus video footage of him doing it. Nothing short of that would please a true (barf) ‘skeptic’.
Harassment is childish.
It can also easily cross over into Stalking.
Stalking is a crime, a serious one.
Yo Reap Palan or whatever your current aliases are. It’s all fun and games for the ones without a life or any way to get one. Until someone gets locked up.
Reap would not be the first PZ Myers stalker to get carted away. Even if he lives in Canada, say….Montreal, it can happen.
Harassment is illegal.
I just put in a few key words in google and got 1/2 million hits. And grabbed the first four I saw.
Reap my not-friend, time to start thinking who your cell mate will be. But don’t think too hard. They don’t let you pick them.
Perhaps the net skeptic’s conference should have a session on “Arrested Emotional Development in the Atheist/Skeptic Movement”. Surely, there is enough material to do a whole conference about it – or even, a whole issue of Skeptic magazine.
Raven, settle the fuck down. There is no prove that Reap did this.
—————————————————————————————————————–
The stymies are quite indignant about all of this, going off yet again about how terrible a person PZ is. How could he even think that Reap is responsible. Rocko (He of the petition, demanding the FtB and Skepchick use critical thought) spun a story about how PZ was ranting to salesperson about Reap.
One person did state that this prank was not cool. (Though the person has a moniker with a not so clever play on “cunt”)
Just more fun and games.
proof
slinks away
Haha. Great post, as usual.
It’s a good ol’ fashioned Minnesota nice-off!
carlie, you are lucky I wasn’t drinking anything right then, or you would owe me a new keyboard.
Say what? The conversation was pretty much as I described it. The only bit I left off was that we talked briefly after we’d resolved that I unfortunately was not buying a car by talking about zebrafish and nervous systems a bit…he said he’d love to talk to me sometime about that stuff.
The goon who was wasting his time by sending him off on this wild goose chase? Nope. Not interesting.
That is a truly shitty prank. Those sales people have bills to pay and maybe family dependent upon them.
At least when I got pissed off at PZ once, all I did was send him some Speed Stick with a post-it that said, “You stink!”
And almost forgot the time I called and asked if his refrigerator was running. I still chuckle over that one from time to time. :)
Uh, no. I’m a college professor. I can’t afford a new car, and I especially can’t afford to drop $15-20,000 on something I don’t even need right now.
I have a silvertip brush m’self, but a friend of mine swears by the Men-u synthetic brushes, for those not wishing to get theirs from badgers or boars.
Reap Paden currently has 13 aliases flagged in my filter file. All of those were generated in the last two or three weeks.
He has 25 comments currently in the spam trap, caught by the filter. There were a bunch more, but I purged that file about a week ago.
A bunch of those are just repetitive spam in every sense of the word — he went on a little spree with his video earlier this week.
He’s pathetic and obsessed. It’s easy to make a case that there’s just something wrong with that guy. I’ll be more impressed when he learns a little impulse control and realizes that he’s not welcome here, his comments will all be deleted anyway, and he’d probably be more productive going back to his microphone and screaming “MOTHERFUCKER!” into it a bunch of times, which is more his style. Which isn’t saying much about how useful he is to humanity.
I met Paden briefly at a couple of NorCal skeptical events. He seemed to enjoy holding court with a few fans and also seemed to be seething about something on both occasions. This was years before FTB existed.
I was deliberately ignoring this, but…
No. Just, no. No useful information. I don’t consider killing people to be particularly useful.
I’ve managed to go 47 years without shooting anyone. Probably because I don’t have a gun.
I see no reason to change that, despite living in one of the top 10 most dangerous cities in America.
Aren’t you a middle aged man? Why are you ranting like a slighted teenager on myspace ten years ago?
Well, guess they also ordered pizza for their maths teacher in highschool.
Wow, who knew being middle-aged meant it wasn’t possible for someone to harass you!
Oh, the quality of trolls is absolute shit these days. Signing someone up for a service they didn’t ask for is the juvenile bit, you see.
He isn’t.
Next question please.
Everyone wins! You (the harasser) get to feel like you’re causing trouble, and then PZ sends the stuff to the nearest homeless shelter or food pantry (many of them will take toiletries and other non-food items, provided they are still sealed) and gets to feel good about turning some idiot’s ill will into good luck for somebody, and someone who really needs the stuff will get to use it.
Seriously, PZ, you need to get a restraining order against these people. They’ve already harassed multiple people into quitting blogging. They need to be shown that their actions have real-life consequences.
So I guess we can’t say who’s signing up PZ for test drives. It’d be interesting, though, if it were an angry Christian trying to hurt atheist PZ. Because:
The prank isn’t hurting PZ; it’s hurting car salespersons.
Most Americans are Christians.
Logically, most American car salespersons are Christians.
Thus, the merry prankster would be lashing out at PZ by… hurting Christians. (What Would Jesus Think?)
This is absolutely unbelievable. The level of vitriol and anger these people spout at PZ and the FTB / Skepchick crowd is seriously unbelievable. I disagree with people a lot – I don’t go on a spree of harassment and hatred towards them. I just disagree and make arguments to try to get them to understand my point.
quirkles
Quirkles, let me frame this in a way that you may be able to understand. How would you feel if someone did the same thing to you?
Although correlation does not equal causation (although as Randall Monroe says: “Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there’.”), let the record show that the atheists hurling vitriol at FTB, etc., are almost exclusively the ones who do not want to associate atheism with social causes.
It seems Reap is heading quite quickly into David Mabus territory. Dude really needs to evaluate what he is doing with his life. He comes across as anything but rational.
Right, PZ is the immature one by telling these pranksters they are wasting people’s time by signing PZ up to services he does not want. Are you from bizarro universe?
Reap Paden has replied on his own blog. Strangely, he does not deny pranking local car dealerships. He does claim this:
Yes, exactly. He has been banned, he knows he is banned, so he creates new email addresses to circumvent the filters. That’s a confession, boyo…you’re just too stupid to realize it. Here are the 13 entries currently in my filter file:
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
He has used every one of those to leave multiple comments here. To claim that he couldn’t possibly have 25 comments in the spam trap is idiotic: he spammed his little animated video here in something like 13 comments alone, all of which were thrown into the spam trap.
He’s a liar.
The third one is quite, well, Reapy.
Charming.
That 3rd e-address?
Charming.
Think again. There is now.
*Bleeeaugh*
It’s not proof. It’s circumstantial evidence, nothing more. If I had more solid proof, I’d give it and his name to the dealerships and let them handle it.
Those are roughly in reverse order of their addition. You can see a progression from recognizable permutations of his “dan pitman” identity to more random angry stuff as he tries to sneak past the filters.
Which he confesses to doing. It just cracks me up that he thinks that “because he had to!” absolves him of an ethical breach.
Raven, yet again I will say this; settle the fuck down. This is just proof that Reap is a spammer with very poor impulse control. Funny thing is this, most of us regular readers already knew that about Reap. We have all run into his comments that did get through the filters.
Still is not proof that he did set up the sales calls. While it is likely that he did, it is not proof.
It’s probable cause. And about as good as it gets.
Stalking and harassment at this level can be construed as a felony.
I’ll give you a hint. You have to be a very, very stupid criminal to admit your crimes on line to a potential audience of billions of people. A few of which are duly authorized law enforcement agents who carry guns and wear badges. Not that it doesn’t happen but it isn’t common.
Raven, if PZ had enough evidence, do you doubt that he would give it to authorities who could do something about it?
And even if he had evidence, would anything be done? Look at how many years Mabus pulled off his shit.
As a feminist that tries to counter some of the crackpots and weirdos that do so much to discredit the movement, I get harassed by getting called nasty names and have my motives questioned.
Likewise I notice that after posting here and other FT blogs I get dead air phonecalls, robocalls, and generally unwanted solicitations over the phone.
Any of you radfem PC thugs here want to fess up and apologize for your stalking behavior or do I need to follow the circumstantial evidence and start naming names?
tdn yrslf ths tm PZ, rlly? Y hv n grsp n hw th lgl systm wrks n ths cntry thr? nncnt ntl prvn glty. Shw prf r STF. gss w dd bsc lw t th lst lng wth skptcsm f thngs y knw jck sht bt. Y knw wh shckfgd s PZ? Y rmnd m f hm wth yr sht. H t wld mk ths knds f clms bt rlgn nd nvr hv bt f vdnc. Y r pthtc. dn’t knw wht gv y th brght d tht sggstng ws glty f dntty thft ws gd d bt cn ssr y, t wsn’t. ‘m nt gng t pll sm lm stnt lk y dscrb hr, thr s n pnt n t. Wht m gng t cntn t d s pnt t yr lck f cmmn sns nd rdcl y bcs y dsrv t. Y spk f cwrdc whl y pst blgs bt m nd prdly cckl bt hw y wll nt llw m t dfnd myslf. Y r th cwrd y npt fl. Y bnd nd gg yr ppnnt thn prdly brg bt hw y cn kck thr ss. Ww th sprr ntllct rlly s w nsprng PZ. Wh d y thnk s mprssd? Why d y nd s bdly t mprss nyn? s yr vl slf wrth rlly s lw?Th sd thng s y r nly hrtng yrslf, th nly ppl wh fll fr yr lttl gms r ll jst s blnd s y t wht bng skptcl s. knw y r md t m PZ, nd y r gng t b vn mr pst ‘m frd bcs y r jst t dmn dmb t lrn hw t sht p. dn’t nd t brk th lw PZ nd dn’t nd t l, y d thgh dn’t y? Rdng yr rpls hr mks m fl sd fr y. Wht dprssng lndscp t mst b nsd yr hd. Nxt tm y lk n th mrrr PZ tk gd lng lk t wht y s, y dsrv th flng tht shld rslt. Nw, t’s btfl dy tsd nd ‘m gng t g njy t, myb tk nc drv…. h h h
[Welp, that makes 14 different pseudonyms Reap has used here in his mabus-like desperation to draw attention. I predict he won’t stop digging any time soon, and I’ll just keep pushing the the ‘edit/delete’ button. –pzm]
abear #77
This is not really a joking matter.
@78
Paragraph breaks. Please. Assuming you’re NOT Reap and are actually going to stick around.
And for someone who seems to believe xe is an authority on skepticism, you make a lot of hyperbolic arguments.
Except this blog isn’t the legal system, and MRA fuckwits like yourself are guilty until proven innocent by your sincere apologies for being assholes.
Yawn
You aren’t in court, Reap. Of course, given your fuckwitteness, it’s doubtful you know where you are at any given time.
But you do need to compulsively break bans, right? Because you aren’t capable of getting the message you aren’t wanted.
fuckwittedness.
It’s been a long night.
Right, “abear”, because all those radfem psychos just looked up “abear” in the phonebook and got your phone number.
Well, obviously, he’s just doing it to help us all out. If Rape Pudding didn’t keep posting, it would be a terrible tragedy because then nobody would know what he has to say. And, after all, nobody on the whole Internet has wiser, more important opinions than Rape Pudding. That’s why Rape Pudding’s name is a household word, while nobody at all has ever heard of PZ Myers.
Sure we do. Some of the posters on FTB are lawyers. BTW, you are presumed innocent, not innocent. You don’t know much law either.
Just for future reference: Here are the steps.
1. Commit a crime. Being stupid and crazy helps here.
2. Get arrested.
3. The Miranda warning. It’s below from wikipedia
4. Go to trial.
5. Lose.
6. Go to prison.
Looks like we have finished Step 1 and Step 3 here.
In that case, want to help us out with Step 2, getting arrested? Just let PZ know your real name and location so the cops don’t have to do much. They are busy people, you know. If you are innocent, that won’t be a problem at all, will it?
@ abear–who are you again?
Just took a look at Reap’s blog and Twitter feed. Pretty much the entire front pages of both are posts about PZ and Stephanie. Dude has a serious problem.
I know (or at least, I hope) that the pun wasn’t aimed at me, and I’m sure it’s just me being slow on the uptake, but I really don’t get it. Any chance of a pointer, please?
Just realized Reap was on my FB friends list. Corrected that in a hurry.
Acolyte of Sagan
is from The Princess Bride
What that has to do with this, I dunno.