Category Archives: news

Street scene double-take

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Julian Banksy will you sign my chest?

Banksy is always jacking my steez

We’re big fans of street art around these parts, and in fact we’d love to show these parts to Banksy or Jules any time they’re ready (it may take a few whiskies), and we are not so big fans of the late Margaret Thatcher, may she burn in Hell forever, so it is only right and natural that when we saw this glorious and righteous work of street art, we wanted to blog it immediately, but we are also hella lazy, so we got only as far as sticking it on Tumblr to use later. Well, it’s like Joni said, maaaaan, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, for lo, it is gone entirely. Behold the creation, and the desecration, and realize this all happened over the span of three days.

Burn in Hell, Maggie

Burn in Hell, Maggie

That was then, almost 20 hours ago. This is now.

Burn in Hell Maggie, Leake Street, London, UK. 12th April 2013. The 'Burn in Hell Maggie' graffiti has been painted over by British Rail as it was deemed to cause offence, which is against their guidelines for the graffiti on Leake Street.

Burn in Hell Maggie, Leake Street, London, UK. 12th April 2013. The ‘Burn in Hell Maggie’ graffiti has been painted over by British Rail as it was deemed to cause offence, which is against their guidelines for the graffiti on Leake Street.

Even in death, Margaret Thatcher is an enemy of art, an opponent of free speech, and a brittle opportunist who, despite her Iron Lady facade, could not endure the free voices of the people she purportedly served.  It’s bizarre that Toby Young, a supporter of hers, says, apropos of the “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” furor, “One of the costs of living in a free society is that you’re going to be offended from time to time by your fellow citizens and it would be an insult to the memory of Margaret Thatcher, a warrior in the cause of liberty, if the BBC banned the song on grounds of “taste” or “decency”.”

Um. Actually, no.

It would be exactly what she would have demanded. Am I truly the only one that remembers that she banned this song from the nation, a perfectly-crafted song from a chart-topping star which would surely have done well had it not been banned for being nothing more nor less than a scathing, and perfectly accurate, critique of Margaret Thatcher. She forced broadcasters to dub in the voice of the Sinn Fein leader, lest they hear his true voice and be somehow enchanted into sympathizing with The Enemy (one thinks she read too many Irish fairy stories as a child)? This is no champion of artistic freedom. This is no Iron Lady. This is a person who can’t bear to hear from others the things that she knows to be true about herself.

Ding.

Dong.

Here’s a better song.

The Day That Margaret Thatcher Dies
original lyrics via Pete Wylie’s Myspace

THE DAY THAT MARGARET THATCHER DIES[a party song]

WHEN MARGARET THATCHER DIES
THERE WILL BE NO TEARS
SAVE YOUR SORROW FOR THE PEOPLE THAT SHE STOMPED FOR YEARS
SHE TORTURED NORTH OF WATFORD WITH A VICIOUS HATE
SO WHEN MARGARET THATCHER DIES
LET’S CELEBRATE
and i say

HEY HO
HERE WE GO
TELL EVERYBODY THAT WE KNOW
SHE’S GONE!
COLOUR ME WITH LOVE
BUILD A BONFIRE
PAINT THE SKY
COME ON DOWN
I’LL TELL YOU WHY.
SHE’S GONE!
AND NOBODY CRIES…

THE DAY THAT MARGARET THATCHER DIES
THE DAY THAT MARGARET THATCHER DIES

YOU WANNA GIVE HER A STATE FUNERAL?
WELL THAT’S JUST GREAT.
IRONIC,COS SHE LEFT US IN A SORRY STATE
I PROTEST!
IT’S MONEY WASTED
BUILD A SCHOOL INSTEAD
THE ONLY REASON THAT I’LL GO IS TO MAKE SURE SHE’S DEAD…

HEY HO
HERE WE GO
TELL EVERYBODY THAT WE KNOW
SHE’S GONE!
COLOUR ME WITH LOVE
BUILD A BONFIRE
PAINT THE SKY
COME ON DOWN
I’LL TELL YOU WHY.
SHE’S GONE!
AND NOBODY CRIES…

THE DAY THAT MARGARET THATCHER DIES
THE DAY THAT MARGARET THATCHER DIES
THE DAY THAT MARGARET THATCHER DIES
THE DAY THAT MARGARET THATCHER DIES

IF YOU SAY MONEY’S ALL THAT MATTERS
THEN YOU’LL PAY A PRICE
DOESN’T MATTER WHAT YOU DO
YOU’LL KILL TO GET A SLICE
COS THE WICKED WITCH OF WESTMINSTER
LEFT AN EVIL CURSE.
NOW IT’S DOWN TO THATCHER’S CHILDREN
AND IT’S GETTING WORSE!

HEY HO
HERE WE GO
TELL EVERYBODY THAT WE KNOW
SHE’S GONE!
COLOUR ME WITH LOVE

BUILD A BONFIRE
PAINT THE SKY
COME ON DOWN
I’LL TELL YOU WHY.
SHE’S GONE!
AND NOBODY CRIES…

THE DAY THAT MARGARET THATCHER DIES
THE DAY THAT MARGARET THATCHER DIES
THE DAY THAT MARGARET THATCHER DIES
THE DAY THAT MARGARET THATCHER DIES

SO DIE,DIE,DIE,DIE,DIE DIE,
DIE,DIE,DIE,DIE,DIE DIE

YEAH DIE,DIE,DIE,DIE,DIE DIE
DIE,DIE,DIE,DIE,DIE DIE

THE DAY THAT MARGARET THATCHER DIES…

hat tip to Mobilizing Mouse

Fuck Sabu: and here’s why

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Fuck Sabu, Fuck FBI

Fuck Sabu, Fuck FBI

If you don’t know who Sabu is, this post isn’t going to clarify a single damn thing, except that you, my friend, do not want to be Sabu right now, or ever, really. And you certainly don’t want to have been Sabu during the Stratfor hack, because reasons.

http://twitter.com/apblake/status/309006418369990656

If you don’t know who Jeremy Hammond is, allow me to refer you to this post and this article, and now that you’re all up to speed, I’d like to paste in here for posterity a post I made over on the completely impartial Julian Assange Fancier’s Guild.

I resent Sabu’s turning more than Lamo’s because Lamo never actually turned. He didn’t betray a movement that he’d been part of. He wasn’t One of Us, as it were. He’s said that politically we are complete opposites.

Sabu could have been a great man if he hadn’t ratted out his brothers-in-arms. I honestly don’t care about his children. I don’t. He did more harm to the world they’ll grow up in than can be conceived of. And god help me, but he really HAD IT; he had what it took to fire up tens of thousands of people and create an inspired force working for the cause of freedom. And he turned. I don’t care about his reasons: I’m sure they’re nice kids, but in a hundred years they’ll be dust just like all the rest of us. And if the US is still a prison state, it will be in part because of his failure of courage.

Let him explain that to those children he’s doomed to grow up in that state.

Say it with me, my friends: Fuck Sabu.

DramaSec, weekend edition

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Ever tried to do a simple tarot reading and keep having it come out weird? Yeah, so like that.

ninja raincoaster card

ninja raincoaster card

ron ninja card

But not to be mistaken for news that Ron IS a ninja

Ron is not a Ninja. Ron is, apparently, Asher Wolf. You may wish to get a piece of paper and pen to diagram out this particular post. As always, it gets confusing when the Lamo card is played.

ninja lamo card

lamo may or may not be a ninja, but he is clearly a Discordian

Sorry, Asher, you haven’t got a Ninja Trading Card yet like Ron and Lamo and Me.

First on Friday our old pal Ron goes apeshit on me, gloating about getting my articles edited after the fact (I have to find this out from Ron boasting on Twitter about getting the Daily Dot to eat crow? Imagine my joy). Then on Saturday, internet privacy activist and Cryptoparty founder Asher Wolf decides that doxing Barrett Brown‘s ex-girlfriend is a moral imperative. Why? Because, since Asher can’t find any record of her online prior to 2011, she must be a Fed plant.

Let’s review that: because someone leaves no tracks online, a leading internet privacy activist decides she is ipso facto an FBI plant.

As part of the pointless #DramaSec (my coinage, thank you, and you may Paypal me five bucks every time you use it if you wish. And why not? Times are tough chez raincoaster lately), Asher publicized a Pastebin someone had made of a Facebook thread in which BB’s ex and her friends, including me, basically went “what the actual fuck, Asher?” It’s not rocket science; nor is it spywork. It is ludicrous, my friends.

This of course inspired my own Facebook thread, which is reproduced here for fans of pointless, internecine internet drama. Once again, I find myself saying:

Eyes on the prize, people. Is this making the world a better place?

Continue reading →

Greatest YouTube Comment in History

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Spencer Cox would have liked this comment

Spencer Cox would have liked this comment

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:

mabonwy 16 hours ago

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.

Selah.

Spencer Cox, hero, dies

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Spencer Cox

Spencer Cox

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.

Eventually we became Facebook friends, and he read my blog from time to time. I’ll never forget the counsel he gave me about Occupy. “Make sure to have fun,” he said. “Don’t trust a movement that has no room for fun,” remarks he expanded on in his column in POZ.

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.