So what degree of schadenfreude do you condone re: the Duggars?
A) 6°
B) the nth
C) 360°
D) All of the above.
I'm still wondering if I should bother to figure out who they are.
Y'all think that the Duggars are in trouble because they are sinners, but you miss the fact that unlike you, they are forgiven. This will blow over in a hideous festival of hand wringing and crocodile tears and then they'll get back to being loved by the crazification faction. You, on the other hand, are irredeemably hellbound for your unrepentant Onanism.
You, on the other hand, are irredeemably hellbound for your unrepentant Onanism Obamaism.
If there's no more masturbating, the world is dead to me.
unrepentant Onanism
Unrepentant, you say? I think you misunderstand the fundamental nature of "cry, cry, masturbate, cry."
Mark me down for indifference towards these people, and the whole damn tribe of family values conservatives.
On a related note, just how fucking stupid do you have to be to use a govt email for that kind thing. And a bunch were accessing the site through their govt internet connection in places like the godamn White House? Gah, smart phone and a yahoo email you bunch of morons.
On a related note, just how fucking stupid do you have to be to use a govt email for that kind thing.
See, Hillary's decision to set up a private email server was actually quite reasonable.
8: Indeed, though I bet if it's not simple now to trace where someone is doing something on their phone from, it will be soon.
Is anybody else more annoyed at the self righteous moralizing 'hacktivists' than at anybody who's used Ashley Madison? I'm sure there's elements of my lifestyle that don't meet the approval of these assholes. I'm enjoying a bit of schadenfreude at some of the revelations but I'd be a lot happier if people just minded their own damn business.
The sin of presumption is a bitch, you fecund hillbillies.
The sin of presumption is a bitch, you fecund hillbillies.
I read the AP story from last night as saying that while some govt employees were that brazen, many did use a separate email account and were traceable anyway. By the AP. Using info provided en masse by the hackers. Apparently neither a separate email account nor a pre-paid separate credit card were enough separation.
14: They were traceable because they were using their govt provided internet to access the site.
And typing in their passwords from there? OK, stupid.
self righteous moralizing 'hacktivists'
Hassholes.
11 is my position as well.
lots of those neckbeard types are crazy strict sexual moralists. They are all over reddit. That was the impetus for the whole gamergater thing as well. they need to stop it.
11: I assume they just want to go back to a simpler time when you could only have an adultery with someone you knew.
I agree with 11 too. I don't mind seeing Duggar hoist by his own petard because fuck those guys, but finger-waggers about other people's private behavior are pretty goddamned annoying no matter who they are.
I love it! I much prefer to focus on the schadenfreude of the Duggars than the horrible actions of Mamma June from "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo." I thought that was such a great show about a non-traditional family with a fantastic mom that loves her kids, but no, it turns out she doesn't care at all about her children being sexually abused by her boyfriend.
I wish one of these things would finally start hammering some nails into the coffin of the entire reality show genre (which I hate across the board), but I guess there's just no escaping the race to the lowest common denominator.
11: Absolutely. Outing sucks. I hope those Ashley Madison hackers go to jail.
Fully signing on to 22 in my hatred for the reality tv. Trump is the apotheosis of the genre.
18 is sort of where I am at. I feel no sympathy for Josh Duggar, but sad sacks moaning "They're not victimmmmmms; they're cheeeeeeaters" are pretty unendurable. The one on my FB timeline is my age and has never had a gf.*
(*Not mocking him for this, but not sure his opinions about monogamous human romantic relationships are super worthwhile.)
11, 23: I'm with you. I'd been a bit uneasy, but read Ryan's take and thought "yeah, that's a serious problem too".
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RyanMacklin/posts/4m7CEmbx5YK
While I'm joining bandwagons, I'll join 22 and 24 too. I can understand it--mindless TV is mindless, and it's cheaper to make. That said, we do watch a lot of cooking competitions, and there's not a lot of distance (if any) from there to survivoring or being some's little big brother.
I'd put cooking competitions in the "game of skill" category, despite all of the contrivances designed to heighten drama. Sports also have that quality, although there is a core belief that because the sports pre-date modern television framing, they have a life of their own separate from the presentation, however attenuated now.
If you were present, at a game or roadside at a race, you'd have a different experience of the same really-existing event.
26: I've had probably 5 separate incidents of various random strangers using my gmail address to sign up for something. For some reason, my account is close enough to others that people seem to type it in when they sign up for things.
Like somebody signed up for iTunes, using my email address, so I got spammed with receipts for all the dumb shit they ordered. And there was no response from Apple in response to my "hey, get this person to fuck off and use their own email address" messages. I may have eventually logged in and turned off the account myself.
Anyway, as far as I know, I haven't been signed up for Ashley Madison, but I could totally see people who never had anything to do with the site getting hit by this.
I'd put cooking competitions in the "game of skill" category, despite all of the contrivances designed to heighten drama.
Singing competitions, too.
I'm actually really sad for him and for his sisters, just like I was when the initial allegations came out and it seemed clear the family had done damage control and doubled down on their unhealthy purity messages rather than help their kids heal. Fuck those selfish, self-righteous Duggar parents.
11: I am bracing myself for the news of the first post-AM-hack spousal murder. Yes, the vast majority of people don't turn violent when they learn their spouse has been having an affair. But a tiny minority of several million is still quite a big number.
This advice on pronunciation was actually the most important part of my post elsewhere.
32: I didn't pay close attention but I saw some claim that a gay man in Saudi Arabia had been outed by the hack. Didn't check. Seems entirely like it could be true, but also very on the nose for a particular sort of worst case scenario to make people feel bad.
Basically, people shouldn't be all up in other peoples business.
36: that was a bit of a surprise. I suppose when your greatest naval hero was famous for (as well as for being a great naval hero) having a ludicrously high-profile adulterous affair, you can't really punish other people in the armed forces for adultery without looking a bit silly.
Though on purely etymological grounds, adultery should probably be excluded from the infantry.
To 8/15: Most staffers I know have two or three phones. Everyone I know is very careful about doing only work things on the work phone. I assume the smarter ones were (a) using their personal phone with (b) a no-name e-mail address but (c) forgot that their phone automatically connected to government wifi when they got to work, which is generally allowed, barring a long list of disclaimers about not viewing lewd material or otherwise embarrassing/illegal activity.
This is going to be a major blow to the online porn industry. If Ashley-Madison goes under, they've lost one of their major advertisers. And people are going to be a whole lot more reluctant to hand over their credit card for non-free content if they are concerned about their identity getting published.
This is going to be a major blow to the online porn industry.
They're used to these.
Your greatest naval hero; ours was flamboyantly gay during the same time period.
That Hamilton Woman is really a very good movie.
No schadenfreude. What we have now can be seen as a single member of the family, representing less than 5% of the cast of their TV show, tragically sinning and violating the tenets of his heroic parents' virtuous principles. Instead of this, what would be good is if people figured out that the parents are dangerous extremists whose goal is producing offspring who are unable to exist in the modern world.
No schadenfreude; nothing the Christianist loons love more than a fallen sinner and blaming their personal failings on liberal society. (How this squares with personal responsibility is left as an exercise for the reader.) Bristol Palin makes bank as an abstinence-only speaker despite two unplanned pregnancies! So I'm pretty sure Josh Duggar will be back as a nice Promisekeeper inside of six months.
Bristol and Josh should totally hook up.
Some schadenfreude, but not because it'll impact the Duggars' reputation among the people who still love them following the whole child molestation, or the Christian forgiveness-addict loons who would cheerfully accept almost any level of misbehavior as long as it was on the part of a man they viewed as above them in their status hierarchy. Schadenfreude because it was Josh Duggar rather than any of the others, meaning that their eldest son (and hence, probably, most important!) is now the cause of not one but two unrelated public embarrassments for them within the space of a single year. I bet family reunions are getting a lot more amusing now.
I'll bet their family reunions are getting a lot more prayerful. Yuck.
Any word on how many of the accounts were real? The 30M number doesn't seem credible.
And I don't know who the Duggars are, but I have the same experience as Spike with folks using my address (almost certainly some distant relative, usually). Lately, I've been getting balance info from a bank account in Tehran.
Richard J who comments here on occasion and has a very common last name tweets on a semi regular basis about people using his gmail to sign up for some pretty weird shit. Among them Ashley Madison type sites IIRC.
How bad is this? I would think that the news that he had molested his sisters would be the bigger deal.
I've managed to learn almost nothing about the Duggars but going down the "massive, horrible privacy-infringing crime makes me happy inasmuch as it hurts people whose politics or religion I don't like" seems like a really horrible position to take.
Also IMO affairs should pretty much always be kept private unless at least one of the two parties to the affair feels otherwise, and yes I would extend this rule to public moralizing hypocrites because everyone is at some level a hypocrite, even if not about sex.
The 30M number doesn't seem credible.
I saw one thing that said 10M were fake. I would have guessed much higher, like on the order of 10% real, the rest being spam accounts.
53.last: Yeah, but when being publicly holier-than-thou is not just your claim to fame but also your business model, I'd say he forfeits his right to privacy in this case.
That said, I endorse 52.
I don't much like outing of pesronal/sexual behavior, but I am fine with the selective violation of legally protected privacy when we are talking about exposing publicly harmful behavior by state or corporate actors.
I'm fairly certain that trying to formulate moral rules like in 53.1 that let you make moral judgments without having to consider any morally relevant facts about the situation is a fool's errand, or at least a deep seated laziness. Of course it matters who it happens to, and what those actual politics and religion are.
I don't really believe in context free moral rules, but the problem with 57 is that it pretty easily becomes nothing more than special pleading for why it's OK to massively violate the privacy of people you don't like for other reasons. Do all publicly family-promoting people count as fair game for revealing and publicizing consensual adulterous affairs, even if they're not religious conservatives? What about conservatives that aren't particularly vocal about family values stuff? What about somebody like John Edwards who had great politics but was a total hypocrite about his family life? Clinton? How public do you have to be for the unasked-for adultery reveal to be totes cool -- reality TV show star, local pastor? What about a local pastor who's a liberal evangelical? Etc. etc.
Basically if it's all consensual and between adults and nobody gets hurt and no one wants to reveal an affair, I think it's almost always a dick move to force it into public for the benefit of gapers and gawkers. Doesn't mean it should be illegal (I mean, the hacking is and clearly should be illegal, the reporting on the results shouldn't be) but it's still a dick move and a little gross.
Do all publicly family-promoting people count as fair game for revealing and publicizing consensual adulterous affairs, even if they're not religious conservatives?
What if we limit it to just child molesters? Are we off the hook then?
I'm enjoying the further damage to the Duggar brand, but not much else. Knowing Josh looks at porn and paid for a cheater website doesn't really compare in awfulness to molesting his sisters, if anything this just reaffirms he has sexual issues that he needs to sort through but will never ever have access to the sort of counseling he (or anyone else he has hurt) needs. I'm also bummed out by this sort of Scarlet Letter type exposure, it feels really sex negative and judgmental. The angry misogynists on reddit (#notallredditors)/4chan need to be sent to reeducation camps.
The child molesting is clearly a crime and strikes me as pretty damn different.
58 - Yeah but then you carefully phrase the rest of what you're saying to avoid the actual reasons people are mentioning for approving of people outing him. I mean, "pro-family" is precisely the sort of moralistic rhetoric that this kind of revelation attacks.
You don't believe that public figures should be able to determine without limits what people do and do not know about them, right? So anything else is going to have to be talked about on its merits. And especially with the Duggars that case is pretty strong if any case is given how openly horrible and immoral their world view is and how strongly they promote it as being the opposite of exactly what it is and what they are.
I've managed to learn almost nothing about the Duggars
It's worth knowing the specifics, because this is the kind of case that outing was made for. Duggar isn't someone liberals don't like because he manufactures napalm or GMOs. He's the head of the political arm of the Family Research Council, the lobbying arm of Focus on the Family. He is not just a loathsome Christian reality TV show star, he is someone whose life's work is about promoting, through the power of the state, the supremacy of the "traditional" patriarchal family. It's important for people to know that he's a sexual hypocrite, because his professional and political life is about repression around sex.
Here's Dan Savage with more.
AFAICT from the little I know, the guy was part of a huge Christian conservative family thay had a reality show, and worked for and on behalf of the Family Research Council in promoting a generally right-evangelical agenda. He also apparently molested his sisters or others at some point, and had a consensual affair. The molestation is criminal and obviously legitimate to expose and point out. The affair seems like basically garden-variety hypocrisy.
Also, and this has been mentioned above, the celebration of the hypocrisy about the affair seems to miss the point of these guys' message a bit -- the right-evangelicals certainly believe (what they view as) sexual temptation exists and happens all the time and is something people are vulnerable, they just want institutions built up that will minimize them and popularize a perception of them as wrong and not OK. So I'm not sure that "conservative evangelical activist has affair" really teaches us all that much. The child molesting seems different -- giant, religious family covers up child molesting thay also affects others -- seems loke a different thing.
There's no law of physics requiring conservation of dickishness. Is outing someone a dick move? Usually, yes. Is carrying on affairs while pretending to be pure? Yes. Is being a hypocrite while actively trying to restrict right of others? Yes.
Dicks all the way down.
We need only decide whether our own conclusion drawing is dickish. Which is going to be highly individualized . . .
Also it's beginning to look like he had a fairly extensive secret life, not just one affair.
Yeah, to be clear I'm not saying this guy isn't a dick. Just that outing his consensual affair and then taking joy in the outing is pretty dickish.
Dicks all the way down.
The Dick Caterpillar.
The Dick Caterpillar.
George Washington?
I don't understand outing gin and not taking joy in it. Don't out the guy or do it and enjoy it.
I'm not going to correct that because I like it better as it appeared.
70 seems about right to me. Good people take pleasure in doing the right thing, and in seeing it done by others. If it was appropriate to tell people about his actions, which I think it was, it's appropriate to take satisfaction in the fact that someone did it.
I'm surprised at you, Tigre. I thought you, of all people, would understand Total Hatred. I would take joy in seeing him set on fire.
Me too, but if everyone I would enjoy seeing set on fire was actually set on fire the world would be a lot less populated, so I can't really take that as a reliable guide to morality.
I'm not so much anti-people as I am pro-fire.
Pro-fire's a pretty unattractive position in the PNW these days.
But when God, in His just and merciful wisdom, sets one on fire, the only right thing to do is enjoy the glow.
Speaking of fire, I am into this product:
Right on. I should be able to own a flamethrower if I want to.
78 Right, what if I need to get rid of a pesky xenomorph?
There are a lot of amazing things in that story, especially with the people arguing that of course they should be able to have flamethrowers because of the many entirely reasonable and legitimate uses they have.* My favorite though has to be this one:
The ordinance would provide an exemption for law enforcement officers, employees or members of the Armed Forces, firefighters or local, state or federal government officials who are on duty and acting within the scope of his or her employment.
That sounds... reasonable?
*All of which are either clear nonsense or variations on "You could use it to have your own flamethrower.
I don't think law enforcement should have flamethrowers either.
firefighters
They must be talking about the Ray Bradbury kind.
Whoa whoa whoa - it's dangerous to be a police officer! They need those flamethrowers. I mean, what about when they're confronted with someone wielding a gun, or a knife, or a being a black person!? What would they do if they didn't have a flamethrower handy?
Cops already have shotguns, though. They could just use a twelve-bore round loaded with powdered magnesium.
OT: Couple of US marines won't have to buy another drink in France for quite some time...http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-34023361
87: Air Force and National Guard, I believe. But the point stands. Good on them.
Apparently--others may have taken this for granted, but I just learned it--Ashley Madison was basically a scam, selling a fantasy to men. There were very few real women on it, and many bots designed to appear to be women, often apparently created by the site itself.
So all these guys being "exposed" may not have done anything actionable at all, even by the military, just embarrassing.
http://www.nationalmemo.com/fake-female-profiles-abounded-on-ashley-madison-site-data-research-shows/
89: And a scam with a built-in disincentive for anyone who felt ripped off to make a big stink about it.
All women on the internet are fake.
89 - the theories I had heard were a large percent bots and a smaller percent "escorts" and essentially no actual women looking to cheat. But more like 70-30-0 or maybe 90-10-0 than the 99.8-0.2-0 that that article mentions.
Speaking of escorts, the feds shutdown Rentboy.com. This means people with back problems will have to hire a skycap to haul their luggage.