Emotional Incest Syndrome

From the front jacket flap of Patricia Love's book, The Emotional Incest Syndrome. "You've never caused me a minute of trouble."

Decisions, decisions...

Apparently, the sexual version is legal in Rhode Island when both (or all?) parties are at least sixteen years old.

Thirsty Thursday

Lance Reenstierna & Tim Pilleri: Episode 84

This is an interview with Karen Mayotte, a potential witness in a possible major crimes case. So, wouldn't police have wanted to watch the entire interview before it became public?

Was Episode 84 reviewed by LE before it was shown online?

What if Mayotte had, even if unknown to her, said something important that LE did not want publicly known? 

How, and by whom, were editing decisions made? Was law enforcement involved in this editing?

If Tim and Lance knew LE requested certain parts edited out, then are Tim and Lance, in effect, working for LE? If so, for how long have they been working for LE?

Didn't Tim and Lance, by Lance's own admission, turn over to law enforcement a list of names of those who attended one of their Somerville appearances?

Have Tim and/or Lance and/or Josh Leonard signed confidentiality agreements with any law enforcement agency?

If LE requested certain parts of the interview edited out, then would that not clue in Tim and Lance to something important?

What might be inferred had law enforcement told Tim and Lance, after reviewing the entire interview, that there was nothing in the interview that could not be seen?


Also, how many college educated women in Massachusetts with advanced degrees, who are roughly 30 years old (when Renner interviewed her), have 4-5 kids? IMO, statistically speaking, Karen is yet another person involved in this case who's more than likely pro-life/religious. In fact, the kidney thing Karen mentions near the end of the episode is a popular debating tactic used in the abortion wars.

Regardless of Mayotte's beliefs, which I would almost certainly respect, there sure are a surprising group of pro-life, Christian Church, anti-Muslim, trigger-happy, truther extremists hanging around this case, including a few cops and ex-cops. Not to mention a lot of liberal, pro-choice (for lack of a better term) pro-fems.

These two groups are normally at each other's throats, but there are times, and maybe the Maura Murray case is one of them, when they make for strange bedfellows. 

As Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker write in the their book, Satan's Silence:ritual abuse and the making of a modern American witch hunt:

Feminists were particularly susceptible to sex-abuse conspiracy theories. Indeed, the alliances women's activists struck with conservatives around these claims often turned bizarre: as when Gloria Steinem contributed money and public support to a ritual-abuse proponents' group whose coordinator later claimed that it was the U.S. government, and not an ultraright militia movement devotee, who bombed Oklahoma City's federal building in 1995.

This is why people like Maggie Freleng, for example, might be found working from time to time with someone like John Smith.

Have any other groups, such as those speculated to exist by "FalconsClaw0002," signed confidentiality agreements with law enforcement?

All of this, of course, brings up a much larger issue: to what extent are apparently civilian/journalistic efforts actually a clever front for law enforcement?  Sound far-fetched? Just read Anna Funder's (Stasiland) interview with former East Germany's (GDR/DDR) leading "journalist" Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler. Read how all governments use so-called journalists to further both criminal and political aims. They are not all journalists; they are too often cheap propagandists.

The problem with this is, especially in the age of social media, that the line between objectively presented information and the corrupt aims of authoritarian (overt or Trumpian) become blurred. Podcasts become not the voice of the people, or just a section of the people, or just a couple of ordinary guys; they become the mouthpieces for an increasingly corrupt and authoritarian government - whether left, right, or even both.

They become lowlife snitches, which always furthers authoritarianism more than anything else.

The 2016 Hampshire College Protest

connection is the first thing I noticed about Matamoros.

Grace Lucas and Horror Theater Vids

I can’t say it’s exactly a lift to see the reaction - of someone who says she is a Hadley resident no less - to the way Scare Theater represents me: as a monster, a lunatic, as the subject of "horror theater vids," as Grace Lucas puts it.

Naturally, I wonder whether people like Grace, and her friends and family, speculate about me. Do they discuss me at the kitchen table? Spread the word around town? Make sure everyone knows I live among them? Do they drive past my home to get a better look at me? Do they think about slashing my tires, pushing me around? Punching me? Kind of like this recent comment on the same Scare Theater video?

Which is pretty light stuff compared to comments like these, that expressed a desire to beat, torture, or kill me.

I assume commenters like Grace know that I see their comments. Why wouldn’t I? After all, I’m the subject of the very video on which they are commenting. I am the person Grace Lucas and many others in the Hadley area are talking about. Why would I not monitor the comments on Scare Theater? 

I just don't know whether Grace and her family and friends, considering the nature of the Scare Theater video, might be nervous that I actually live among them, maybe even next door or just down the street, that I stand near them at the grocery store or pass by them at the mall or on the sidewalk. That I stroll past their schools, sit behind them in church or at town meetings. I hope not.

A Troll Turd

Carole Lord Wants to Move?

Carole Lord writes: "I live in Hadley.... Well im moving!" I can only assume she means Hadley, Massachusetts.

What is the purpose of saying something like this? To let me know that my neighbors, and people all around this small town of Hadley, are watching me? Keeping tabs on me? Talking derisively about me? Isolating me? Maybe cooking up a little vigilante justice? Reminds me of my next-door neighbor’s comments not that long ago.

Should I just automatically assume Carole Lord has kept this to herself and not gossiped about it? Discussed it with her family or friends? Spread it around? Shared it online? Or was she put up to it by a local cop who hopes to build a fashionable case of cyberstalking? Or is “she” herself a local cop? In the age of social media, anything is possible.

Carole Lord claims that I’m making her move out of town? Seriously? Doesn’t take much, does it? A little Scare Theater and away she goes. Because she believes Scare Theater??? I hope the door doesn’t hit her on the way out. (No, I don’t think Lord means this literally.)

Just the same, I’m not to believe that the purpose of Scare Theater’s video is to collect as many threats and attempts to ostracize me as possible; all based on total lies, lies that ordinary people are all too easily convinced to believe?

I have no idea who Carole Lord is or whether she is even a real person, but the message inferred is clear: people, assisted by local police, all over town are wagging their tongues. No job interviews, no new friends, no friendly neighbors, not even a church supper (blocked a couple of years ago by two "open and affirming" Congregational churches).  I better watch my back? Is that the message? 

No exaggeration: this is what the early stages of fascism look like. No, I don’t mean Nazis or Communists. I mean fascism with a small “f.” Sure, vigilantism, both spontaneous and sustained, has been going on forever. But now it has the blessing of local police, which means it’s state sponsored. It’s no longer just some whacky townies. It’s fascism. This is your government talking.

Fascists are selective. They focus less on ethnic heritage, such as being Jewish - although they do that, too - than on random fears within themselves but projected onto others.

They beat, ridicule, torture, murder, and ostracize women who have had abortions, men who drink too much, homosexuals, mere readers of political pamphlets with which they disagree. And men who laugh on YouTube for no known reason.

They constantly, in concert with police, keep people under surveillance, intimidate them, spread nasty and false rumors about them. In no small numbers do they focus on people they regard as merely odd – misfits, the socially unskilled, the handicapped.

It is striking not only that the Happy Anniversary video has been uniformly mis-characterized from the start, but that there is such a huge audience hungry for whatever red meat is dangled in front of them by the latest huckster – with the avid assistance of local police.

Significantly, people want to believe that Maura Murray was the victim of a horrible crime, probably on a lonely road in New Hampshire. They believe this for about the same groundless reason they themselves imagine that I’m a monster of some kind, a boogeyman, a Boo Radley.

The need of fascists to feel victimized is a constant theme with them. The chance – the very good chance – that Maura Murray ran from the Vasi hit denies them the perverse luxury afforded by self-victimization. Unfortunately for them, it’s impossible to identify with Maura Murray if she’s a common criminal. She must, then, in their minds, be elevated to the status of a Missing White Woman. 

Boogeymen and White Women: an incendiary brew that enlarges the authority zone of fascist local police while comforting the cowards of Hadley, Massachusetts.

Never Enough

Here's a hypothetical example of a self-fulfilling prophesy started by cops. Historical precedent can be found in Michael R. Ebner's thoroughly researched book, Ordinary Violence in Mussolini's Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Pages 57 and 82 are very helpful.

The parallels are relevant to our own times, illuminating and frightening. The emphasis placed by police on surveillance, including open shadowing, is beyond worrisome. Those who have not experienced it themselves turn a blind eye, deny it happens, facilitate it by vilifying and ridiculing the state's target of surveillance. This is what fascism looks like, always led by cops.

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Typical online bullying by proxy cop

Above, fascist police claim the bullied are dangerous, need to be spied on. They recruit often unreliable rumormongering informants from bullied person's friends, neighbors, teachers, even family. All of them gossip, which on social media, never ends, is never enough.

Bullied person discovers fascist-state surveillance, considers it further bullying.

Bullied person learns of fascist-state surveillance, which once started has no end, tolerates no criticism, operates in secrecy without oversight. Police can't get enough of it.

Maura Murray Family's True Friend

Is this the kind of person Maura Murray's family has endorsed and used - for fourteen years! - as their New Hampshire spokesperson?

I've always sort of liked John and tried to accommodate his unique style, but this? Especially in these times? No. Not for a single second.

Will Fred, Julie, or Kurtis Murray distance themselves from this?

Will even one other person say one word about this?

It's despicable.

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Here's the same meme.

Or check out the Happy Merchant meme.

And other similar memes such as the Angry Merchant and the Worried Merchant. 

The Anti-Semitic Meme of the Jew.

*******************

I have directly informed Julie Murray, Tim Pilleri, James Renner, and Erinn Larkin of John Smith's tweeting of the anti-Semitic Merchant meme. I hope, despite our differences, we can all strongly and conspicuously condemn Smith's behavior.

John Smith and others

might, if they haven't already, ponder this recent Exeter NH case concerning Robert Frese. 

The Exeter police chief, William Shupe, went criminal on Frese when, if he felt compelled to do anything at all, he could have gone civil.

The Union-Leader: "Frese believes the [criminal] misdemeanor charge is meant to revoke the suspended sentence included in his plea deal, which would land him in prison for 2 to 4 years."

Although the charge against Frese was eventually dropped, cops everywhere surely must applaud Shupe for having sent a strong signal about the risks of criticizing police.

The sentiment in the above meme became reality in the charge against Frese.

The meme was posted by Guardians of the Thin Blue Line, the same group from which another meme, widely described as racist, was recently shared on the Hadley Police Department's official Facebook page by, according to the Gazette, a police admin, Sgt. Ken Hartwright.

The meme was taken down from Hadley PD's page after they were alerted to it by one or more Hadley residents who found it deeply offensive.

While I did not attend the Kumbaya, paper-it-over meeting at the Hadley station (I wasn't exactly invited), I found it hard to accept Hartwright's explanation as described in the Gazette.

Hartwright allegedly said he skipped over the first half of the meme, which was about the Starbucks arrests, and took in only the second half of it, about the Florida assassination of two cops. But somehow he posted the whole thing.

The false equivalency of the entire meme was quickly and emphatically pointed out. I'm just not sure how posting half a meme makes much sense, but that was apparently Hartwright's explanation.

Coincidentally, Hartwright, according to his own personal Facebook page, lives in Vernon CT, 

which is a good drive from Hadley. So, naturally, I recalled the "mcsmom" of Topix.

And I wondered whether they share the same-but-different implicit feelings about a Missing White Woman as opposed to, say, a Balkan immigrant left for dead on Triangle Street in the town next to Hadley. Or is that another false equivalency?

I don't think so.

In fact, I think it's becoming increasingly clear, despite claims like those by UMPD's Sgt. Jeffrey Skinner, that there is a troubling convergence of, on one hand, racist authoritarianism within right-wing law enforcement and, on the other hand, a sexist authoritarianism within left-wing social justice movements, a convergence frequently and virulently exemplified in the Vasi/Murray case(s). 

This marriage of convenience is maintained, in this instance, by the vigilante swiftness with which Vasi's known plight is contemptuously swept aside in favor of the imagined fate of a young, attractive, and, of course, helpless (thus needing the protection only men can provide, as if women were objects like vintage cars) white woman who is known only to have disappeared after she went to a liquor store.

No matter how much attention is focused on Maura Murray and New Hampshire, nothing changes what BSG saw.

Nothing about the Saturn's Haverhill spinout changes what happened to Petrit Vasi in Amherst, Massachusetts, a case that both right-wing police and left-wing SJWs have consistently gone out of their way to trivialize, dismiss, and ignore.

In this week’s NYT Book Review, Timothy Snyder writes the following about Benjamin Carter Hett’s recent book, The Death of Democracy: “...the Nazis were the great artists of victimhood fiction.”

No one does victimhood fiction in this country, in these times, better than police on the far right and SJWs on the far left. Strange bedfellows indeed, as the Vasi/Murray case(s) continually demonstrate(s).