Iamwhomiam wrote:Dr., we've been asked not to link to the site unless we do so using the anonymous linking server drew referred to earlier. Please promptly edit appropriately, for all of our sake. Thanks.
Yeah, that is way too much fear. Needless. If they were interested, they would be monitoring this board already. Google alert. Simple. You think a team of killers that sophisticated would neglect setting a Google alert? So, either they would already be watching and there's nothing new to fear, or they are not killers to be feared. (If that dichotomy should be undone and expanded, feel free.) What, however, if the ones who should be feared, are us, and what if the ones who feel the fear, is them? And yet, if that were the case, look at ourselves. Writhing in fear, of them. People, we are their bosses. If a government outsourced them to do anything, then we are their supervisors, we the People. If they are just National Guard, part-timers or full-timers, and if they had a chance to notice two creepy not-fun-having dudes drop a suspicious bulky backpack, and if it was just an epic failure, well, that would be sad, but they would still deserve some kind of public reprimand, at least as a lesson to other citizens and public servants in How Not to be Unobservant. But back to the scenario of them being cold-blooded killers, so what. If you royally piss off bad people by outing them as bad, and the next day or week you wind up inexplicably harassed or dead, fear not, because it would very much be explicable, to everyone, it would obviously be the bad people you royally pissed off, and so, that rarely happens, because it would backfire on them. Most criminal masterminds are not stupid. It would make no sense to harm the person who's accusing you of secretly being harmful, because then you'd be outing yourself as...harmful! So, we are ignored. Perhaps if any one of us draws too big a crowd, then we might get a second, dirtier look. Don't draw any interconnected octopus too big, don't write too big a book on this one really sore subject, don't write too many well-sourced articles about this one dirty thing they do. But again, what are they going to do, if we all do that? Secretly kill us all? Pfff, lol. Safety in numbers. Safety in transparency, too, believe it or not. Oh, you think you're really anonymous? [insert Willy Wonka anticipation] Problem is, if you try your best to be anonymous and then become un-anonymous to the wrong people, then you'll only remain anonymous to the right people, the people who act as insurance. That's kind of self-defeating, if the point is to forbid a worst case scenario. Also: If we're a threat to them, whoever they are, then they have much bigger problems. We are like fans at an NBA game taunting the opponent, but instead of coarse trolling, we are shouting out a well-researched and fine-tuned analysis of an individual opponent's tendencies and weaknesses, alerting the refs to the opponents' personal fouls and dirty tricks with detailed scouting reports and even pictures and diagrams. They can't just jump in the stands and punch us in the mouth. And if they do, it's liable to start a game-ending riot, with them forfeiting the game, the W ours, lol. Point is, relax. They have bigger worries. Savor the power, the power of being free to criticize and identify failure and cheating, from the safety of the stands. Maybe the other guys, our home team, will listen, take good advice, and put our rigorous intuition to good use. Maybe the bad guys will put it to use, yuck -- but by taking cues from us about which factoid or narrative is too easily impeached, and scrambling to improvise substitutions, they would only be digging themselves a deeper and more ludicrously recognizable hole, as they kind of seem to have done the last two weeks, lol. So, intuit and interpret and sleuth away, intuiters and interpreters and sleuthers! You can't plug holes in a rowboat with soft, runny bullshit. They did, and all that's left is determining exactly what kind of ordinary or exotic bullshit it is. Plus, they seem to have also fired bullets into the boat's bottom out of frustration. They're fucked, I think, they're now fated to be caught, relatively soon, in this generation at the latest, and they know it. They are probably just delaying long enough to rehearse their inevitable "Come to Jesus" moments, "Jesus" being all of the rest of us, We the People. Some people see things getting worse. I see things winding down, to a changing of the guard, and eventually to some varied but generally less violent type of a freer, fairer, less miserable existence. One can dream!