Or, probably, in the future as well. In all of recorded time and space, in fact. And just think, Nick Denton, if your place hadn’t become a cesspool of festering Deadspin lunkheads, you could have had this on your site.
In response to an AIDs denialist in the comments on the video of Spencer Cox from the previous post:
Oh, honey. Spencer’s toenails were better than you. They had a higher IQ, more credibility, and a better likelihood of being remembered with fondness. Spencer is now redecorating the halls of Valhalla while the best thing you can think to do with your completely unjust continued life is to troll YouTube, forsooth, in order to eke out tiny shreds of the attention you crave but can gain no other way. Because you have nothing to offer the world. You are wholly contemptible. Go pour salt on yourself.
I’ve been procrastinating this for thirteen hours now, but I can no longer put it off. I have to write the obituary for a friend of mine, a great man, and a hero to millions.
Spencer Cox, founder of ActUp, and one of the key reasons an HIV diagnosis is no longer a death sentence, has died of pneumonia.
There is literally no way to explain the impact he had on people, including me. He was a righteous warrior who gave no quarter, not an inch, to those he felt were in the wrong. He was (rightfully) called the Dorothy Parker of HIV, and was a sensitive enough man to take that as a cue to be kinder, although he never shied away from dishing out what was due.
He was the kind of hero who, when asked about his participation in the documentary How to Survive a Plague, could say the following:
One of the visceral things the film brought back for me is the rage that is still almost as fresh as the days when I first discovered it. Footage of virulently homophobic North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms reminds me even today of how much I hate (present tense) this man. I found out he’d died a few years ago when a ‘porter called me to ask for a comment, and while usually I’d ask for fifteen or twenty minutes to compose my thoughts, on this particular occasion it came slipping out before even I knew what I was saying. “It’s too little, too late.” I wanted him to suffer, and I deeply regret that the last few years of his vicious life were spent deep in the fog of senile dementia, leaving not enough consciousness for genuine suffering. His colleagues, including New York’s John Cardinal O’Connor, Mayor Ed Koch, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, Patrick Buchanan, even the low-level Reagan press staffer who, in a transcript of an early White House daily briefing, is asked about AIDS, and reduces it to a smutty joke worthy of a quick chuckle. Karma be damned – I hate these men, and probably will until the day I die.
I met (“met”) Spencer in the comments section of Gawker, which was, for a time, the Algonquin Round Table of the 21st Century. That was some time, and a whole comment model, ago, but back in the day genius could make itself felt, and Spencer‘s always was. He didn’t throw his weight around: hell, in a pseudonymous world, none of us knew who he really was. We respected him because he was visibly wise, visibly kind, visibly passionate, and visibly a marvellous human being. He was also funny as hell.
He would get a kick out of the fact it took me two double Martinis and thirteen hours to bring myself to write this.
If I have one piece of advice for young, aspiring activists, it is to always hold on to the joy, always make it fun. If you lose that, you have lost the whole battle.
And now, if you’ve never met Spencer Cox, allow me to introduce him.
That’s what I like about Anonymous: yes, NYPA, but ask and ye shall (sometimes) receive. This started in a thread on the OpLulzcart page on Facebook, where some Anons were tossing around ideas for a new Free Anons video, to support those incarcerated. Lulzcart, for instance, needed several hundred dollars to get to court, stay in a hotel overnight, and get back, and he’s needed it every month since his arrest. Not easy, for somebody in Romania ten hours away from court. Free Anons also helps with bail, with lawyers, and with postcards and other forms of support, as we’ve mentioned previously, and has a store selling Anon-related gear where all proceeds go to support the incarcerated Anons.
So there I was, hanging out in the thread wishing I had mad video skillz, and I said I’d always wanted to make a vid out of Canadian band Soul Side In‘s cover of Pat Benatar‘s “Invincible,” which is a fantastic song. And the next thing you know:
LulzSec hero Jeremy Hammond had his bail hearing (denied) last week, and now the transcript has been uploaded to Issuu, so here it is. Sixty-five pages, but they seem to be mostly about half full, so it’s not as intimidating as it seems.
And here’s video from the press conference once it was revealed that the judge’s husband is a Stratfor client (Stratfor, as you may know, was allegedly hacked by LulzSec, a circumstance which may lend some skepticism to the concept of a fair and impartial trial).
I don’t do this often, but I’m doing it today: sending you to a different site to read the story, because it’s a Storify and it won’t embed here. But it’s an important story and you will be very, very glad you read it. A fifteen-year-old girl was on the brink of suicide when her real life enemies jumped on Twitter to encourage her to do it. That’s when Anonymous and Rustle League stepped in. I’ve never been prouder of them.
