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thedreadvampy · 3 years ago

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Please stop describing aroace as not wanting or seeking out a romantic/sexual relationship. The terms describe attraction, not behavior, and this is something that has been discussed and explained to exhaustion by aroace communities. I have personally also pursued relationships because I thought I wanted that kind of relationship, and too many people try to say that means I’m not really aroace. I have aroace friends who are in sexual and/or romantic relationships.

I’m not angry at you, I know you don’t intend to cause harm, and I generally agree with your thoughts on how Martin is characterized, but I am so, so tired of people who aren’t aroace telling us who we are, how we feel, and how we behave. There are so many easily-accessible resources and explanations about asexuality and aromanticism with respect to relationships, and I urge you do some research if you feel the need to define us.

I don’t mind if you don’t reply to this. It’s the sort of conversation I would rather have privately, but I’ve seen and experienced too much harassment targeting asexual identities to feel safe going off anon.

No I'm not going to stop doing that because my feeling on this is based specifically on conversations raised by and led by my aroace friends and loved ones. as in this is a frustration that a lot of people in my life who are aroace have repeatedly expressed - that there's no space to express clearly and unambiguously that you're Not Wanting Sex And Relationships because the linguistic space is slipping for that. and they've talked a lot specifically about how that's led to them feeling more pressured to push themselves into sex or relationships, or having to constantly explain and defend their space even within aspec communities. and that's a problem. not that people who want or might want sex and romance but consider themselves broadly asexual or aromatic exist, but that with the semantic drift around aroace, there's not really a term which unambiguously expresses that that's not something they do want.

Action is not the same as desire - having had or wanted a relationship doesn't mean anything for whether you're "actually" aro or ace, any more than having dated men in the past means you're not "actually" a lesbian. comphet is a hell of a situation. I'm not splitting hairs about attraction vs behaviour - I'm talking about desire versus lack of desire.

Yes, fine, good, you can act for a lot of reasons, only some of which are genuinely held desire (trust me I know this). I'm not debating that. I'm saying that the space that's shrunk away in contemporary aspec language is a term which unambiguously means "a person who does not have a desire to have sex or relationships."

In this example, Martin spends much of the story expressing desire for a monogamous romantic relationship and nothing in his story arc, his actions, his dialogue or his fears seem to imply that that's motivated by anything other than a genuinely held desire to have a relationship with a man he is into. He's not aroace in the same way he's not a trans lesbian like. yes he could be being led by common drivers - compulsory sexuality, the desire for emotional closeness, the confusion of working out which feeling's what, only knowing how to navigate relationships through a certain lens, etc - and yes he absolutely could be either of those things, but ultimately there's nothing in the text to support that conclusion as is. He is not written as aroace, and in terms of material questions like 'what assumptions do people make about you and what's a justified assumption to make' the two things that matter when it comes to "X is/is not [identity]" are:

what do they outwardly identify as

how do they behave and what desires do they experience and express

like you are absolutely right that it's shitty for people to try and tell you you're not aroace if you are. people know their own identities best. I'm talking about group terminology that's sufficiently materialist to make sense.

like when someone says they're aroace what are appropriate assumptions to make? that this is someone who doesn't want sex or romantic relationships in and of itself, surely? that sex and romance are either low priority or actively not wanted? that they're not likely to be open to attempts to initiate sex or romance, and that their rejection of that isn't personal? that they may prefer long-term to not have a partner and that not having a partner isn't a source of great pain and loneliness and doesn't indicate an unmet need?

like that's what the term means. a term boundaries a set of basic assumptions. that doesn't mean nobody in that group can then turn around and say 'actually I am sad I don't have a partner' or 'actually I think I do want to try a relationship with you' or 'actually it's very validating when people flirt with me'.

similarly like an assumption it's reasonable to make about bisexual people, and an assumption that's embedded in the term, is 'is interested in sex or romance with people of multiple genders.' that doesn't mean I can't be bisexual and also have a complex relationship to what if any sexual or romantic desires I have and why. but it means that if I'm talking about bisexual people, I'm expecting you to join me in the assumption that yes we're talking about People Who Experience Multiple Gender Attraction. sexuality is messy and complicated let's not get it twisted. saying 'this is what the word means' doesn't remove the existence of complex experiences of self and of desire. but what the implied meaning of a word is matters and people were and are acting as if the implied meaning of 'aroace' has nothing to do with inherent desire for sex and romance which seems to me to leave a pretty substantial communication gap.

as I said in the tags - is there a more unambiguous word for 'people who are explicitly uninterested in romance and sex' than aroace? what is it? what is the word that's meant to go there? because THAT IS AN IMPORTANT THING TO BE ABLE TO EXPRESS UNAMBIGUOUSLY. and it doesn't mean I'm looking for a word that means 'has never for any reason pursued or experienced romance or sex' which I feel is how you're characterising what I'm saying (and I get that this is a triggering topic with a lot of baggage for a lot of people so I absolutely get why you're reacting as if that's what I'm saying). nor does it mean I'm looking for a word that means '100% gold star virgin who's never dated or had a sexy thought.' it means I'm looking for a word that means 'is uninterested in sex and romance' to describe a reason why somebody might choose to not have relationships, or to not have sex, or might have no sexual or romantic history through choice. key word might. but the fact is every time somebody uses aroace as a descriptor of 'reasons why people may choose not to have relationships' people end up 'correcting' them to say 'some aroace people have relationships' which is. kind of irrelevant to the point. some lesbians are married to men (comphet, changing sense of self, marriages of convenience, lavender marriages etc) but when I say 'she doesn't want to date him because she's a lesbian' we understand what the common understanding of lesbian is.

ultimately idk how to end this post. my point in the original post wasn't 'nobody who's aroace has experience of sex or relationships' but 'aroaceness is a reasonable reason why someone might not have had sex or relationships' and my point in the tags you're objecting to isn't 'aroace as a term should only include people who would never consent to sex or relationships,' it's 'a lack of inherent wish for sex and relationships used to be what we understood aroaceness to imply; now that no longer seems to be the implication and that leaves a gap where a lot of people, aroace and otherwise, struggle to express that experience'

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whoneedsgodwhenyouhavejkrol-blog · 6 years ago

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I think I know how the Marauders Map ended up in Filch’s office.

Filch had been at Hogwarts under the title of Caretaker from approximately 1973, which was - coincidentally - two years after the Marauders begin their residency at Hogwarts themselves. Rather than being the long-suffering if torture-obsessed squib that most of us think of him as, I recently read @wizardlogic and his art history purist version of regular old Filch which I LOVE>>>>

Anyway, I know HPWiki goes on to theorise that it was Snape (subtle) who was the ultimate betrayer of the magical map and passed it into the hands of an otherwise controlling and under-qualified abuser. I seek to dispute this with a possibly projective, emotionally strung and fairly assumptive rebuttal. Thank you fo reading thus far. *High five*

As much as the word a l w a y s still brings more than a single tear to my eye, I feel strongly for every single woman who’s had a beloved friend abuse their relationship by pressing unwarranted feelings, leaned into a dangerous vice or group of friends against better judgement, been fighting their own demons without succumbing to the “dark side” of this friend and even been willing to lay down their life to help them only to be hurt.

Hurt people hurt people you know? I know these people. These people have hurt and maybe even scarred me. I still love these people. It’s a soft spot you want to protect. You want to protect them. It literally NEVER ENDS. You know the theory that at the time of their murder, Lily was pregnant? You know that same theory that says Lily and Severus had made a tentative amends and he was named godfather of the new little fluttering snitch in Lily’s womb? That’s what I mean! It’s like no matter whether Snape was turning a new leaf, or being manipulative, or if he was being manipulated by others - any sincerity no matter how manufactured, would have worked on Lily. She had so many well-intentioned sister inclinations that were being unfulfilled by a sister who had cut her out, she had such a strong need for family, and Snape was her family too, no matter how poorly he treated her it would be the same way Lily would have forgiven Petunia in an instant. It’s why we love the Marauders, but we love the Marauders plus Lily even more.

Family isn’t always nice. They know the boundaries with each other. They know when breaking them will hurt; like Mudblood spilled across the grass. We may not have ever met her in the pages of Harry Potter’s life properly - she wasn’t even 22 years old when she died - I’m no doubt projecting, but I know that fiery red-head wouldn’t have let the embarrassment of that nerve-edged afternoon go without her own kid of punishment. At the time of the big fight we remember from the flashback James’ threat of removing Snape’s undergarments (another trans-theory I have a particularly fond affinity for) - we remember Lily’s disgust at being blackmailed into saving her friend from any further humiliation, and then her heartbreak and anger at being attacked in a different way - from an unlikely source hanging in her mind in wait for her defence. She’s sure to recover, the word isn’t new and she’s very familiar with the new crowd her friend is spending more and more time around. It’s only a gut feeling and it’s NO WHERE NEAR the kind of horrific return of the not distant-enough fear of Grindelwald’s dogma which would have seen her family enslaved and herself treated possibly with a kind of suspicion that was really a very real metaphor of the same Cold War we were experiencing in the muggle world. She was scared but not scared enough. She felt responsible not only for Snape’s treatment but also by his downward spiral - possibly a metaphor for the same depression Jo tried to inspire with a Dementor literally years later.

Lily is a loving, empathetic but more importantly, a JUST person. Remember that her most defining quality is being a Gryffindor - they are just, they don’t care about rules - they care about justice. Lily is the one person who feels that she can see both sides - both faces of Severus Snape, a boy she loves fiercely like a brother, who she feels responsible for, who she feels a familiarity which entitles her to serve justice not just to him - but also in his defence. Remember she might have a strong and loving friendship already with Lupin/Sirius (and Peter? Very little fanfic seems to be written on THAT potential character-shattering-death-induced-heartbreak???) *BUT* she still has a pretty big wall up ready for James, a boy who is not just partaking in an adolescent rivalry with a brother she cares deeply for, but a sensitivity for a version of herself, who misses her sister and who resides, without her obvious realisation, in this child-hood friend.

Lily has never been afraid of anything except the fear of losing those who she loves, and even then she was a force to be reckoned with which I’m sure we can all agree with. How else to truely reap the kind of justice she was seeking on behalf of her friend, no matter how estranged, but to weasel her way into the perpetrator’s life and find a truely sweet way to punish his emotional abuse of her? It may have been the 70s, but women have held a sort of collective rage at being expected to resist the urge to react with whatever indifference, hurt, pain or disgust felt from unwelcome advances because of society especially in public for long enough that I’m surprised we don’t all sport red hair as metaphor to this collective furnace of rage building within. Asking her to date him in lieu of her friend’s public humiliation? She would definitely be going one better. She already had a hunch that there was a secret between those four boys and she was too controlling of her own emotions to allow the hurt of that w o r d to get in the way of her scheming. All she would be doing was exacting the same justice that James whateverthehellwasinthatfuckingmessofhair’shead Potter deserved.

It didn’t matter that she couldn’t yet imagine a future where she would speak to Severus again, it didn’t matter that James’ best friends were boys she too had begun to think of as her own friends. It frankly didn’t cross her mind that what they were doing was protecting each other with this thing they were obviously hiding, let alone protecting only one in their midst. O H NO. She was single minded to the point of clarity. Only one would be going down and she had just the womanly wiles to get this job done.

#harry potter #marauders #marauders era #marauders theory #lily evans #lily potter #fan theory #first post #femrage #feminist #transsnape #james potter #sirius black #remus lupin #peter pettigrew #gellert grindelwald #cold war #wine rant

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zucca101 · 7 years ago

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Friendship ending

A lot of people have had friends dump them because they either voted for Trump or don’t hate Trump enough.

And when they are forced to see that the friends they try to dump aren’t horrible people, they perform mental gymnastics to convince themselves that their former friends are horrible people.

The following is a long rant from one such friend of mine and my response. If you recognize who it is, I DEMAND you seek no reprisal from them. I am keeping them anonymous to protect their identity for just that reason.

... A leftist, really now. Ahaha, oh wow.

*Link to the post I made about Lincoln being shot by a Leftist*-Z

Yes, noted Confederate sympathizer and anti-abolitionist John Wilkes Booth. A leftist.I was already keeping you at a healthy arm's length while putting up a vague semblance of friendship for the sake of not rocking the boat on that one server we're in, but holy shit have you ever lost your damn marbles. I can't do this, lmaoI mean, you've got an impressive collection of bullshit on that blog of yours all around, but this? chef kissHonestly, on some level, you impress me. How someone can claim to be anti-establishment while sucking up to the establishment every possible way they can, how someone can claim to be "seeking truth" only to disregard all evidence that can't be traced back to some skeezy reactionary Facebook page or another delivered to you through the impermeable little bubble of right-wingers you've created for yourself along with the right wing side of mass media your purportedly loathe so much... tell me, just how much cognitive dissonance do you deal with on a daily basis?How does it feel to claim to be "pro life", or to claim that you care about others only to push for measures to restrict access to healthcare, or to vehemently yell against anything the government could do that would make it easier for people to come out of the vicious spiral of poverty?(edited)How does it feel to constantly pretend to care about minorities, but only ever use us as gotchas to other minorities that you've internally designated as universally bad in spite of any evidence to the contrary - not to mention, without ever listening to us if we tell you you did something wrong, instead cherry picking those of us willing enough to suck up to the establishment to tell you what you want to hear, so you never have to confront the idea you may have done something wrong?(edited)Hell, isn't that what they call "virtue signaling" in your circles?Beyond your dishonesty to others, ask yourself this: are you even honest to yourself? Aren't you robbing yourself of any kind of personal growth by doing all this? Are you really contributing anything positive to this world by constantly spreading unchecked factoids that instantly fall apart the moment you expose them to any actual scientific sources (you know, the ones people in your general political corner like to call "fake news"), or by spreading the idea that people in dire straits should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps?Or for that matter, by resisting any measure of change towards a fairer society and instead vocally gushing about the virtues of a system that, by its very nature, its very definition, its very -essence- is about fucking over who you can, and quietly plugging your ears to anything you hear about the many negative consequences it has for the world, or the people living in it?Come back to me once you've learned how to maintain a shred of integrity, I suppose. Maybe take some time to reflect on what it means to be a good person. I can't be friends with someone to whom I have to explain why they should care about other people.Goodbye.

This is my response:

In 1865 John Wilkes Booth, a Democrat, assassinated Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States.

In 1881 a left wing radical Democrat shot James Garfield, President of the United States who later died from the wound.

In 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald, a radical left wing socialist, assassinated John F. Kennedy, President of the United States.

In 1975 a left wing radical Democrat fired shots at Gerald Ford, President of the United States.

In 1983 John Hinckley, a registered Democrat, shot and wounded Ronald Reagan and paralyzed a member of his cabinet.

... In 1984 James Huberty, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 22 people in a McDonalds restaurant in San Ysidro, CA.

In 1986 Patrick Sherril, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 15 people in an Oklahoma post office.

In 1990 James Pough, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 10 people at a GMAC office.

In 1991 George Hennard, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 23 people in a Lubys cafeteria.

In 1995 James Daniel Simpson, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 5 coworkers in a Texas laboratory.

In 1999 Larry Asbrook, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 8 people at a church service.

In 2001 a left wing radical Democrat fired shots at the White House in a failed attempt to kill George W. Bush, President of the US.

In 2003 Douglas Williams, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 7 people at a Lockheed Martin plant.

In 2007 Seung - Hui Cho, a registered Democrat, shot and killed 32 people in Virginia Tech.

In 2010 Jared Lee Loughner, a mentalliy ill registered Democrat, shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed 6 others.

In 2011 James Holmes, a registered Democrat, went into a movie theater and shot and killed 12 people.

In 2012 Andrew Engeldinger, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 7 people in Minneapolis.

In 2013 Adam Lanza, a registered Democrat, shot and killed men, women, and children in the Sandy Hook school massacre.

Leftist? Maybe JWB was, maybe he wasn't. But a Democrat, he assuredly was. Perhaps I overreached in saying he was a Leftist, but I should clarify that when I say 'Leftist' I don't mean 'someone on the Left'. I mean someone who believes The Left is the ONLY way. The same way I draw distinction between Muslims and Islamists. Islamists want to push it on others. Muslims are the broadest defition of those who follow Islam.

And what establishment am I sucking up to....? I don't watch Fox with any kind of regularity. I get most of my facts from self-described 'classic liberals' whose hearts are on the Left, but their minds are more centrist. They have intellectual honesty. I listen to Gavin McInnis to blow off steam, Bill Whittle for the Right of Center take on news and Sargon for Left of Center.

I don't care for the mass media because while I suspected that they were liars and obfuscating before, to finally have iron-clad proof of it is extremely liberating.

And I CHALLENGE YOU to show me where I said that women should not have access to healthcare. Or even hinted at it. What, you think because I know Single Payer is garbage that will create a pile of corpses. I'm against healthcare for women? I've even said that my stance on abortions is that it should be between the woman and her doctor, not the woman, the government, the doctor, some pencil pushers and more. Just as my stance on same-sex marriage is that it should be between a couple and the church of their choice, not to make it legally compulsory and simply flip the oppression over rather than making it fair and equal of measure. And where abortions are concerned, the parental rights of the father are nonexistent. Now, in cases such as incest and rape (Which if you look at the stats, represent a small minority of abortions) still strongly urge the mother to consider life, but if she chooses abortion, while I find it extremely distasteful (The child DOES NOT HAVE A SAY IN THIS) I fully understand and sympathize with the decision.

As for helping people out of poverty, you know what's the BEST way out of poverty that ISN'T a government program?

A job. A simple job. And if the government creates conditions that *encourage* job growth, then you accomplish the same end without making people dependent on the governmnet.

That's not to say that there shouldn't be charity for people who TRULY cannot help themselves. That's a given. But when you extend the scope of those within the perview of the government to give money to to include people who CAN help themselves, then you create dependents. And it's not that they're bad or lazy people. They're taking the least complicated route. If you get more money for not working than you do for working, you'll take the one that affords you free time to spend with your family, friends or on your own pursuits.

Constantly pretend to.... universally bad...? WHAT....? Dude, don't even try that one. Blah-blah, anyone Right of Mao is racist, blah. Pardon my French, but go fly a frikken kite. In my tabletop gaming group, my friend Paul, 2nd Generation Japanese immigrant, is the most decent and kind man I've had the pleasure of knowing. He's a good dad to his kids and a good husband to his wife. My freind Zach is from a huge Filipino family and he's the best GM I've ever met, short of my oldest brother. John grew up in a Cadillac before his parents legally became citizens and came up to America from Mexico. These are guys I trust, literally, with my life. And none of us give a crap what the other looks like.

And I admit, for a while I was 100% not on board with Transsexualism. But since then I've come to stand that an adult who has spoken to a therapist and doctor, sorted out their feelings and decided after consideration that they wish to transition is completely fine by me. It doesn't hurt me or anyone else and if they've spoken to a therapist, then they're not setting themselves up for something regrettable. Now, trans-trenders, who want the status of being special and different, but don't want to go through the heartache and effort of making that transition, I call out for their bullshit, because not only are they full of shit, they're robbing REAL transsexuals of their credibility, their agency and their respect. And for some transsexuals to come out and say 'You don't have a right not to have sex with a transsexual', can't you see how that would rub some folk the wrong way?

Don't even try to talk to me about science, friend. I studied biology, agricultural science and psychology and I know a thing or two and when someone obfuscates or has nothing peer-reviewed, then I get suspicious. Again, I'd sorely love for you to point out where I was 'anti-science'.

And if you're suggesting that Socialism is your fluffy 'Fair Society' then I suggest you travel to Venezuala. I have a friend who lives there and the picture he paints is NOT a pretty one. How do you define a 'Fair society'? Because I define it as a society that rewards effort. You do a hard day's work, you make a fair wage and you work your way up the ladder. You can't try to take luck or privilege into account on EITHER Socialism or Capitalism, because there is no way to quantify the variable of luck and when you look at privelege, then it exists in the pipedream of Socialism too, because the people running it will ALWAYS BE BETTER OFF than the people who are not. That's simple human nature. The Great Wheel of Life as the Buddhists describe still exerts its effect on a Socialist state as much as a Capitalist. But unlike Socialism, at least in Capitalism you have, barring disability, the same shot as anyone else does to earn a good living.

I find it laughable that you sit there, where you are, and decry someone you know through occasional chats as either a good person or a not good person based on arbitrary variables.

See, the truth is that life is not as black and white as that. It's an exquisite composition of greys and other colors.

Sometimes life is good, sometimes life is not, but if you are free to self-determination (Something you DO NOT HAVE IN SOCIALISM) then you have a chance to better yourself. You DARE to accuse me of not caring about people out of one side of your mouth, while, with the other, propping up Socialism, which *DOES NOT CARE* about people to the point that a child is worthy of sacrifice due to SIMPLE INCONVENIENCE?! Sorry, but *fuck* that is the very cognative dissonance you accuse me of in plain and flagrant view.

I push myself to be a good person. I don't hurt people, I volunteer, I help the seniors at my church with many needs, I'm there for my friends and family and will drop what I'm doing to help, I treat everyone working retail with respect and actively try to make their day brighter, I don't care what color someone's skin is, I don't care if someone is disabled (My best friend back in Youth Bowling League and a better bowler than I, was a deaf boy named Arron), and I am generally considered to be very 'chill' in person and am so without chemical intervention. Does that make me a good person? I don't rightly know. I just do the best I can with what I've got. And I don't *dare* to assume that I have moral highground unless it's a truly clear-cut case. I've never killed, raped (Even though 3rd Wave Feminism insists that in every man there is a rapist that needs to be taught not to rape_) or stolen anything (Some shoplifting in my youth notwithstanding). In other words, I try to be a decent and polite person and let the world decide if I am or not a good person.

But what boggles my mind is that the line between good person and bad person is tied DIRECTLY to what side of the political spectrum they fall under. That is simplisticly childish. As is the 'Come back to me when you care about people' nonsense.

I will again wait for you to come to your senses and realize that life is not a cartoon with cartoonishly one-note people.

Genuinely warm regards,

-Zucca

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wewithus · 8 years ago

Link

The Five Minutes for Freedom series is a collection of small, step-by-step walkthroughs designed to help you take concrete political action in support of the principles of We With Us. The articles in the series are designed to be read and their steps followed in order, as later posts frequently build on earlier ones. A chronological index of all posts in the series can be found here. While this information is targeted primarily at US readers, we welcome readers from all countries and encourage you to adapt these strategies as necessary for your jurisdiction.

5M4F 12: Update Your Rolodex (Round 2) and Protest by Phone (Round 3) [Trump, Carson, Puzder, Perry, and the abortion ban] Dependencies: 5M4F10.

Much like last week, most of your 5M4F tasks this week will be to script, and then make, calls to your representatives to ask them to rigorously vet and ultimately reject the confirmation of Trump’s most dangerous cabinet and White House appointments, to protest those appointments after the fact, and/or to object to top-level legislative priorities of the incoming administration. But first, add this line to the other contact information for your representatives in your 5M4F document:

Donald Trump is now your president. That means that he is now answerable to you. You can very quickly start making him answerable to you by signing this WeThePeople petition to divest of his business interests or put them in a blind trust; and this WeThePeople petition to release his tax returns and any other information necessary to confirm that he is not in violation of the emoluments of the Constitution.

Once that’s done...

All three of the appointments you’ll be protesting this week are cabinet appointments and require Senate approval: Ben Carson, Andy Puzder, and Rick Perry (nominated for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Secretary of Labor, and Secretary of Energy, respectively). Your voice is also urgently needed to halt the enactment of a draconian abortion ban that threatens the rights and lives of womb-possessing people throughout the country.

Like last week: write yourself a script that you can use to walk you through your calls to your representatives (there is an in-depth breakdown of this process in 5M4F5, which is also excerpted behind the cut), then give your local field offices a series of calls to protest these appointments. To be most effective, you want to only call your representatives about one issue at a time, so you will need to make multiple calls throughout the week to best keep your calls focused and to the point.

I also strongly urge you to share this information with your friends and family offline and encourage them to join you in making calls with you. Our goal should be to keep the phones ringing at every field office in the country, all week long, demanding that our elected representatives do their jobs, i.e., represent us.

If you want to do this all in one go: unfortunately, these can’t be completely finished all in one go, because of the issue of keeping individual calls focused on a single issue. But what you can do is script all your calls together (that you can do today, and it’s basically a copy-paste job, so it shouldn’t be too onerous), then make your three calls about Carson in one block on Monday, your three calls about Puzder in one block on Tuesday, et cetera.

If you want to do this five minutes at a time: easier! Your three scripts for a single appointee will probably only take you about five minutes to assemble, and one call will probably take about five minutes to make. You can sprinkle your scripting throughout the day today, and sprinkle your calls throughout your field offices’ business hours during the week; or script your calls about Carson today, then call about Carson and script for Puzder Tuesday; whatever.

There is some starter info on each of the four nominees/appointees/issues, with reasons to call about them, behind the cut; as well as a template for your scripts, and some info about what to do if you can’t make calls. Shortcut links:

Ben Carson.

Andy Puzder.

Rick Perry.

Abortion rights.

A note on how to protest amid breaking news.

How to write your scripts.

What to do if you can’t make calls.

Once you've made your calls, check in on this week's poll to let your fellow humans know you've got their backs!

Ben Carson (nominated for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development): The most fundamental reason to oppose Ben Carson as Secretary of HUD is that he opposes efforts to end housing segregation. Housing segregation remains rampant in the US in large part due to racist governmental actions that themselves have ended, but the lasting effects of formal governmental racism in the past today mean that people of color are more likely than whites to live in areas without easy access to fresh, healthy food, are often more vulnerable to housing market instability and were on the whole hit harder by the crash, are more likely than whites to be zoned into de facto (previously de jure) segregated and underperforming schools, are set up for more frequent and more-likely-to-be-violent encounters with the police, and are harmed and held back on countless more metrics:

"[On] every measure of well-being and opportunity, the foundation is where you live," Nikole Hannah-Jones, the ProPublica reporter on whose reporting much of the episode was based, told TAL's Nancy Updike. "Cancer rates, asthma rates, infant mortality, unemployment, education, access to fresh food, access to parks, whether or not the city repairs the roads in your neighborhood."

[source]

Housing discrimination and the end of urban segregation needs to be at the top of HUD’s priority list. Ben Carson thinks that’s a bad idea.

Andy Puzder (nominated for Secretary of Labor): Puzder is an anti-regulation fast food executive whose employees face wage theft and a bananas 2 in 3 rate of sexual harassment, if they’re women; who opposes the new overtime rule and thinks robust worker protections constitute a “nanny state.” He is, just in case you’re curious, anti-abortion and anti-bathroom protections for trans people, but he does find it in his heart to support scantily clad women sexily eating burgers on TV. He is being nominated to run the department in charge of penalizing companies for breaking minimum wage laws and defending worker rights and safety. He thinks all of that is a bad idea.

Rick Perry (nominated for Secretary of Energy): There’s a misconception out there that the Department of Energy is responsible for handling things like the power grid; for the most part, it isn’t (it does do some stuff related to the grid, including securing it against cyberattacks, but a lot of the power-related stuff falls under the purview of the Department of the Interior). However, the Department of Energy is responsible for managing the US’s nuclear weapons and the security thereof, which I, personally, think is pretty fucking important. Rick Perry doesn’t know what the Department of Energy is called, but he is on record pledging to abolish it.

Oops.

Abortion Rights: A bill has been introduced in the house to make abortion illegal as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which can happen as early as 6 weeks, when many women do not yet know they are pregnant. I want to be really clear about this: what I am about to say here in this post is an argument for abortion rights that specifically approaches this issue from a human rights perspective; it’s very, very far from the only reason why abortion should remain legal. However, this is the reason why if you want to defend the rights of your fellow humans, you must protest anti-choice legislation, no matter how you feel about abortion on a personal level: if abortion is made illegal, rich people facing an unwanted pregnancy will go to Canada or the UK or Japan or any other country where they can still get safe, legal abortions, and they will live. Poor people facing an unwanted pregnancy will have dangerous, illegal, unsupervised abortions, and they will die. Want proof? OKAY:

In 1930, abortion was listed as the official cause of death for almost 2,700 women—nearly one-fifth (18%) of maternal deaths recorded in that year . . . . By 1965, the number of deaths due to illegal abortion had fallen to just under 200, but illegal abortion still accounted for 17% of all deaths attributed to pregnancy and childbirth that year. And these are just the number that were officially reported; the actual number was likely much higher . . . . Poor women and their families were disproportionately impacted . . . . Of the low-income women in that study who said they had had an abortion, eight in 10 (77%) said that they had attempted a self-induced procedure, with only 2% saying that a physician had been involved in any way . . . . A clear racial disparity is evident in the data of mortality because of illegal abortion: In New York City in the early 1960s, one in four childbirth-related deaths among white women was due to abortion; in comparison, abortion accounted for one in two childbirth-related deaths among nonwhite and Puerto Rican women . . . . In the late 1960s, an alternative to obtaining committee approval emerged for women seeking a legal abortion, but once again, only for those with considerable financial resources. In 1967, England liberalized its abortion law to permit any woman to have an abortion with the written consent of two physicians. More than 600 American women made the trip to the United Kingdom during the last three months of 1969 alone; by 1970, package deals (including round-trip airfare, passports, vaccination, transportation to and from the airport and lodging and meals for four days, in addition to the procedure itself) were advertised in the popular media.

[source]

You cannot force someone to carry a fetus to term inside their bodies. I’m not saying you shouldn’t; I’m saying you can’t:

Estimates of the number of illegal abortions in the 1950s and 1960s ranged from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year. One analysis, extrapolating from data from North Carolina, concluded that an estimated 829,000 illegal or self-induced abortions occurred in 1967.

[source, same as above]

I’m telling you, it was really an awful situation. It touched me because I’d see young, [otherwise] healthy women in their 20s die from the consequences of an infected nonsterile abortion. Women would do anything to get rid of unwanted pregnancies. They’d risk their lives. It was a different world, I’ll tell you.

[source]

Women came to me mostly from Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, but also from all parts of the country. It very quickly became apparent that there were too many women — I could not possibly see all of them. My primary care practice disappeared, and I ended up providing abortions full-time. And there was no way there were enough hours in the day.

[source]

The decades before Roe v. Wade were the bad ol’ days. It was horrible carnage — and every one of those deaths was preventable. These women weren’t dying of exotic diseases. They were dying of simple things like hemorrhage and infection, and any third-year medical student with adequate equipment could’ve easily handled it. But the reason those women were dying is because the country had not yet made the decision that these women’s lives are worth saving.

[source, same as above]

Abortion access is a human rights issue. Make sure your legislators know that.

A note on protesting amid breaking news: Because I’m drafting most of this several days before it’ll go live, and because I can’t know when, precisely, you’ll actually make your individual calls, the exact nature of how you protest these appointments and laws may need to change a little bit based on how far the confirmation/legislative process has got by the time you’re calling.

So. If the nominee you’re calling about is still undergoing confirmation hearings, then encourage your senators to rigorously question the nominee on issues critical to protecting the rights of your fellow humans. If the confirmation hearings for that nominee are finished, focus instead on encouraging your senators to vote against the nominee’s confirmation. If the confirmation has already gone through, either thank or criticize your senator’s vote, depending on which way they voted; and in any case make it clear to them that you continue to watch their voting behavior to see whether or not they will have your vote in 2018 (or 2020, or 2022--again, it’s worth also taking a second to check when your particular senators will next come up for re-election. Senators up for re-election in 2018 are listed here. Senators up for re-election in 2020 are listed here. Senators up for re-election in 2022 are listed here.).

Similarly, when you’re calling about legislative priorities, depending on what has happened around that legislative issue since this post went live, you will either be urging your representatives to vote a particular way; or be thanking or criticizing their vote, depending on which way they voted, and making it clear to them that you continue to watch their voting behavior to see whether or not they will have your vote in 2018 (or 2020, or 2022).

Also, when you call your congressperson in the House about Cabinet appointments, since the House doesn’t vote on Cabinet appointments, just encourage your House representative to go on-record as opposing the nomination. The goal here is to make a lot of noise, and also to try and muster the political left to come together and resist the incoming administration with full-throated determination and conviction.

Anyway, to handle how fast this is moving, I recommend that you plan on searching a reputable news source, like The Guardian, shortly before you make your calls, for any breaking-news updates on the confirmation process that may require you to tweak your scripts.

How to Write Your Scripts (excerpted from 5M4F-5):

The basic phone script for calling your representatives goes something like so:

Hi, {can I ask who I’m speaking to? <, if they don’t say when they pick up>} [Jot their name down.] Hi, <their name>. My name is <your name> and I’m one of <your representative’s name>’s constituents in <where you live>. I wanted to let <your representative’s name> know that I strongly <support | oppose> <the thing you’re calling about>, because <succinct explanation of reason why you’re calling>. Is <your representative’s name> planning to <do the thing you want>?

Then you have to plan for a few different responses:

They’re with you: Thank you. Could you please let <appropriate pronoun> know that <expression of gratitude> and <indication that you will continue to watch your representative’s behavior and hold them accountable>?

They’re neutral: This subject is very important to me because <longer, more in-depth and emotive reason why you’re calling>. I would very much appreciate it if you could let <your representative’s name> know that I feel very strongly about this and would really encourage <appropriate pronoun> to <do the thing you want>. Is there any way I could follow up with you or <appropriate pronoun> later?

They oppose you: This subject is very important to me because <longer, more in-depth and emotive reason why you’re calling>. Can I ask why <your representative’s name> is <not doing the thing you want>? [Let them give you a reason, and write it down.] Okay, thank you. I understand <appropriate pronoun> concerns, but as one of <your representative’s name>’s voting constituents, I would really appreciate it if <appropriate pronoun> revisited <appropriate pronoun> decision because <alternate succinct explanation of reason why you’re calling>. Is there any way I could follow up with you or <appropriate pronoun> later?

<expression of gratitude>! <polite send-off>!

I want to point out that you probably don’t actually really need to plan for all of these responses. You can probably make a pretty good guess where your representative stands based on their party affiliation. However, especially if your representatives are moderates and often vote across the aisle, it’s not a bad idea to spend a little time planning for all three cases, because then your behind is covered, and you can recycle this language over and over on later calls, to different representatives. And yes: we will be calling other representatives.

This is the sample script that I wrote back in November, on a different issue and to Barbara Boxer, who has been replaced by Kamala Harris, but it gives you an idea how the Mad-Libs-filling process works:

Hi, {can I ask who I’m speaking to? <, if they don’t say when they pick up>} [Jot their name down.] Hi, <their name>. My name is <Ginny Washington>, and I’m one of <Senator Boxer>’s constituents in <West Hollywood>. I wanted to let <Senator Boxer> know that I strongly <support> <her resolution to amend the Constitution to eliminate the Electoral College>, because <I think every American’s vote should count equally>. {I just wanted to thank her for all her hard work on behalf of the principles of equal representation and equal protection under the law.}

<Thank you so much for your time>! <Have a nice day>!

If you can’t make calls: I recommended before that if you can’t make calls, you copy down snail mail addresses so you can send snail mail letters, and that you grab an email address or online contact link no matter what. Calls are the most effective, if you can make them, but please, do send snail mail letters if you can’t, or an email if you also can’t swing a stamp or get to a post office. You can use the script above as a template for your letter, but you’re probably going to want to default to assuming that your representative opposes you, and you’ll have to of course make it sound like a letter and not a phone convo.

If you care about correct forms of address: weirdly, because these things are super arcane, technically the correct way to address your senator or representative is still “The Honorable <whoever>”, as in, “The Honorable Barbara Boxer.” That goes on the envelope. You can then write “Dear Mr./Mrs./Ms. <whoever>” as your salutation.

#we with us #5m4f #five minutes for freedom #oppose ben carson #oppose andy puzder #oppose rick perry #save abortion rights

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bountyofbeads · 6 years ago

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‘Stop the words of hate,’ rabbi urges leaders after synagogue massacre. Trump keeps tweeting.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/10/29/stop-words-hate-rabbi-urges-leaders-after-synagogue-massacre-trump-keeps-tweeting/

‘Stop the words of hate,’ rabbi urges leaders after synagogue massacre. Trump keeps tweeting.

By Tim Craig, Avi Selk, Shawn Boburg, Andrew Tran and Amy Wang

October 29 at 11:42 AM ET, Washington Post, Posted 10/29/2018

PITTSBURGH — At the end of a weekend that redefined concepts of religious hatred in the United States, a grieving Rabbi Jeffrey Myers directly linked Saturday’s massacre at his Tree of Life synagogue to the rhetoric of U.S. politicians.

“It starts with speech,” Myers said to loud applause at a Sunday-evening vigil attended by two U.S. senators. “It has to start with you as our leaders. My words are not intended as political fodder. I address all equally. Stop the words of hate.”

Two hours after the rabbi’s speech, President Trump absolved himself of responsibility and once again blamed others for the nation’s troubles.

“The Fake News is doing everything in their power to blame Republicans, Conservatives and me for the division and hatred that has been going on for so long in our Country,” Trump wrote on Twitter on Sunday night. “Actually, it is their Fake & Dishonest reporting which is causing problems far greater than they understand!”

The rest of the week will be marked by funerals for the 11 people killed inside Tree of Life, and very likely more debate over whether the aggressive political language that has defined Trump’s presidency had any role in fueling the gunman’s radicalization.

Robert Bowers, “onedingo,” and Trump

At the center of everything is Bowers: a 46-year-old truck driver with few apparent friends, and who left almost no impression on neighbors near his small apartment just outside Pittsburgh, which investigators finished searching Sunday.

A law enforcement source told The Washington Post on Monday that investigators recovered three handguns and two rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition after executing a search warrant at the residence. That’s in addition to at least four weapons recovered at the synagogue.

“We would have small talk, but he just seemed like a normal guy, and that is the scary part,” Bowers’s next-door neighbor Kerri Owens told The Post.

Bowers appears to have led another life under the online alias “onedingo,” posting on an uncensored social media platform called Gab that is an online haven for extremists.

Signing his posts with Bowers’s name, onedingo compared Jews to Satan and complained that Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement cannot succeed so long as Jews “infest” the country. He also posted slurs against women who had relationships with black men, repeatedly referenced nooses and hangings, and used the n-word nearly 20 times.

The White House press secretary has called Bowers “a coward who hated President Trump because @POTUS is such an unapologetic defender of the Jewish community and state of Israel.” The Gab posts suggest a feeling closer to disillusionment with the president, whose daughter converted to Judaism, but who is often accused of stoking anger, hatred and even anti-Semitism in his political rhetoric.

In February, onedingo posted a meme of a Monopoly Chance card with superimposed images of Trump dragging Hillary Clinton to jail.

In May, he wrote that he did “not vote for Trump nor own or ever even worn a maga hat.”

In October — as Trump was repeatedly tweeting about a caravan of refugees and migrants heading through Central America toward the U.S. border — onedingo began to complain about a Jewish group’s efforts to hold Shabbat dinners for refugees.

The group “likes to bring invaders that kill our people,” he wrote hours before the Pittsburgh massacre. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

The attack, the deadliest on Jews in U.S. history, targeted a synagogue that is an anchor of Pittsburgh’s large Jewish community, about a 25-minute drive from Bowers’s home. Police and FBI investigators say Bowers walked in during Saturday morning services with an AR-15 rifle and three Glock pistols, and spent the next 10 minutes or so gunning down any worshipers he came across.

Myers, the rabbi, said at Sunday’s vigil that he was praying with a dozen early worshipers when the gunman appeared at the door.

“I ran through the back of the sanctuary, up the stairs,” he told an NBC reporter afterward. “I went up into the choir loft. I heard him execute my congregants. I didn’t watch. I couldn’t watch it."

Police pursued Bowers in a running gun battle to the third floor the synagogue. When they captured him, according to a federal complaint, the quiet man who had left no impression on his neighbors ranted and raved like his online persona.

“They’re committing genocide to my people,” Bowers allegedly told police. “I just want to kill Jews.”

Hate speech

On Saturday, Trump said the massacre was an “evil Anti-Semitic attack” and “an assault on humanity.” But he has said little about Bowers, and shown little interest in joining a national debate about whether the country’s hostile political climate or loose gun regulations helped enable the attack.

Trump suggested Saturday that the synagogue should have had armed guards — as he has done after other mass shootings. Then he tweeted about a baseball game, called one of his political rivals a “crazed and stumbling lunatic,” and by Monday he was once again stoking fears about the migrant caravan, calling it “an invasion of our Country.”

In between, the president assured his followers that the “great anger in our Country” was the fault of “The Fake News Media, the true Enemy of the People.”

Democrats on Sunday said Trump’s incendiary attacks on rivals have created fertile ground for those inclined toward extremism.

So did Abraham Foxman, former director of the Anti-Defamation League, which recorded a massive spike in anti-Semitic incidents in the United States in 2017 — the first year of Trump’s presidency.

"Trumpism legitimized the bigots to come out of the sewers and gave them a platform to play on,” Foxman told the Jerusalem Post. “He has said the right things on antisemitism this week. But he needs to change the rhetoric he uses to explain his policies, which gives millions of bigots a rationale for their bigotry.”

Since the shooting, more than 25,000 people have signed an open letter to Trump in support of 11 Jewish leaders who said the president would not be welcome in Pittsburgh until he denounced white nationalism.

Pittsburgh city Councilwoman Erika Strassburger, whose district includes the Squirrel Hill neighborhood, attended the Sunday night vigil and said she sensed not just overwhelming grief, but also weariness and, in some, a desire to turn anger into action.

“It was a more general frustration of, ‘When is this hateful rhetoric going to stop?’ and that [our discourse] seems to be further inflamed by elected leaders,” she said, without naming anyone in particular. “When will the hate end? When will we be able to come together as a country?”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the letter.During a television appearance Monday morning, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway responded to another request for the president to stay away from Pittsburgh from Lynette Lederman, the former president of Tree of Life synagogue, who has said she considers Trump a “purveyor of hate speech.”

“I know that she’s very grief stricken, I can imagine, and my heartfelt condolences go to her and everybody in that congregation regardless of politics,” Conway said on CNN. “Many people are welcoming the president to go there and to help heal.”

Funerals and court

Bowers was reportedly released from the hospital Monday after being shot by police before his capture. He is scheduled to appear in federal court before Magistrate Judge Robert C. Mitchell at 1:30 p.m. Monday.

He faces at least 23 state charges, including homicide, attempted homicide and aggravated assault against police officers. He faces an additional 29 federal charges accusing him of civil rights and hate crimes.Federal prosecutors in Pennsylvania have begun the process of seeking the death penalty for Bowers, a Justice Department spokesperson said Sunday. The process is typically lengthy, involving input from relatives of the victims before the final decision is made by the attorney general.

Funerals for the 11 victims are also expected to begin this week, though it’s unclear whether the criminal investigation will delay them.

The dead included a 97-year-old woman, a husband and wife, and two brothers.

Selk, Boburg, Tran and Wang reported from Washington. Kayla Epstein in Pittsburgh and Mark Berman, Alice Crites, Sari Horwitz, Annie Gowen, Wesley Lowery, Julie Tate, John Wagner and Matt Zapotosky in Washington contributed to this report.

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nedsvallesny · 7 years ago

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Dell Lost Control of Key Customer Support Domain for a Month in 2017

A Web site set up by PC maker Dell Inc. to help customers recover from malicious software and other computer maladies may have been hijacked for a few weeks this summer by people who specialize in deploying said malware, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.

There is a program installed on virtually all Dell computers called “Dell Backup and Recovery Application.” It’s designed to help customers restore their data and computers to their pristine, factory default state should a problem occur with the device. That backup and recovery program periodically checks a rather catchy domain name — DellBackupandRecoveryCloudStorage.com — which until recently was central to PC maker Dell’s customer data backup, recovery and cloud storage solutions.

Sometime this summer, DellBackupandRecoveryCloudStorage.com was suddenly snatched away from a longtime Dell contractor for a month and exposed to some questionable content. More worryingly, there are signs the domain may have been pushing malware before Dell’s contractor regained control over it.

Image: Wikipedia

The purpose of DellBackupandRecoveryCloudStorage.com is inscribed in the hearts of countless PCs that Dell shipped customers over the past few years. The domain periodically gets checked by the “Dell Backup and Recovery application,” which “enables the user to backup and restore their data with just a few clicks.”

This program comes in two versions: Basic and Premium, explains “Jesse L,” a Dell customer liaison and a blogger on the company’s site.

“The Basic version comes pre-installed on all systems and allows the user to create the system recovery media and take a backup of the factory installed applications and drivers,”Jesse L writes. “It also helps the user to restore the computer to the factory image in case of an OS issue.”

Dell customer liaison Jesse L. talks about how the program in question is by default installed on all Dell PCs.

In other words: If DellBackupandRecoveryCloudStorage.com were to fall into the wrong hands it could be used to foist malicious software on Dell users seeking solace and refuge from just such nonsense!

It’s not yet clear how or why DellBackupandRecoveryCloudStorage.com got away from SoftThinks.com — an Austin, Tex.-based software backup and imaging solutions provider that originally registered the domain back in mid-2013 and has controlled it for most of the time since. But someone at SoftThinks apparently forgot to renew the domain in mid-June 2017.

SoftThinks lists Dell among some of its “great partners” (see screenshot below). It hasn’t responded to requests for comment. Some of its other partners include Best Buy and Radio Shack.

Some of SoftThinks’ partners. Source: SoftThinks.com

From early June to early July 2017, DellBackupandRecoveryCloudStorage.com was the property of Dmitrii Vassilev of “TeamInternet.com,” a company listed in Germany that specializes in selling what appears to be typosquatting traffic. Team Internet also appears to be tied to a domain monetization business called ParkingCrew.

If you’re not sure what typosquatting is, think of what sometimes happens when you’re typing out a URL in the browser’s address field and you fat-finger a single character and suddenly get redirected to the kind of content that makes you look around quickly to see if anyone saw you looking at it. For more on Team Internet, see this enlightening Aug. 2017 post from Chris Baker at internet infrastructure firm Dyn.

It could be that Team Internet did nothing untoward with the domain name, and that it just resold it or leased it to someone who did. But approximately two weeks after Dell’s contractor lost control over the domain, the server it was hosted on started showing up in malware alerts.

That’s according to Celedonio Albarran, assistant vice president of IT infrastructure and security at Equity Residential, a real estate investment trust that invests in apartments.

Albarran said Equity is responsible for thousands of computers, and that several of those machines in late June tried to reach out to DellBackupandRecoveryCloudStorage.com but were prevented from doing so because the Internet address tied to the domain was new and because that address had been flagged by two security firms as pushing malicious software.

On that particular day, anyone visiting DellBackupandRecoveryCloudStorage.com simultaneously would have been heading to the Internet address 54-72-9-51 (I’ve replaced the dots with dashes for safety reasons). Albarran said the first alert came on June 28 from a security tool from Rapid7 that flagged a malware detection on that Internet address.

Another anti-malware product Equity Residential uses is Carbon Black, which on June 28 detected a reason why a Dell computer within the company shouldn’t be able to visit dellbackupandrecoverycloudstorage.com. According to Albarran, that second alert was generated by Abuse.ch, a Swiss infrastructure security company and active anti-abuse advocate.

This Carbon Black log shows dellbackupandrecoverycloudstorage.com reaching out to a nasty Internet address on June 28, 2017.

The domain’s host appears to have been flagged by Abuse.ch’s Ransomware Tracker, which is a running list of Internet addresses and domains that have a history of foisting ransomware — a threat that encrypts your files with tough-to-crack encryption, and then makes you pay for a key to unlock the files.

Albarran told KrebsOnSecurity that his company was never able to find any evidence that computers on its networks that were beaconing home to DellBackupandRecoveryCloudStorage.com had any malware installed as a result of the traffic. But he said his systems were blocked from visiting the domains on June 28, 2017, and that his employer immediately notified Dell of the problem.

“A few weeks after that they confirmed they fixed the issue,” Albarran said. “They just acknowledged the issue and said it was fixed, but they didn’t offer any comment besides that.”

AlienVault‘s Open Threat Exchange says the Internet address that was assigned to DellBackupandRecoveryCloudStorage.com in late June is an Amazon server which is “actively malicious” (even today), categorizing it as an address known for spamming.

Reached for comment about the domain snafu, Dell spokesperson Ellen Murphy shared the following statement:

“A domain as part of the cloud backup feature for the Dell Backup and Recovery (DBAR) application, www.dellbackupandrecoverycloudstorage.com, expired on June 1, 2017 and was subsequently purchased by a third party. The domain reference in the DBAR application was not updated, so DBAR continued to reach out to the domain after it expired. Dell was alerted of this error and it was addressed. Dell discontinued the Dell Backup and Recovery application in 2016.”

I have asked Dell for more information about this incident, such as whether the company knows if any customers were harmed as a result of this rather serious oversight. I’ll update this story in the event that I hear back from Dell.

This is not the first time the failure to register a domain name caused a security concern for a company that should be very concerned about security. Earlier this month, experts noticed that the Web sites for credit bureaus Trans Union and Equifax were both redirecting browsers to popup ads that tried to disguise adware and spyware as an update for Adobe Flash Player.

The spyware episodes at Equifax’s and Trans Union’s Web sites were made possible because both companies outsourced e-commerce and digital marketing to Fireclick, a now-defunct digital marketing product run by Digital River. Fireclick in turn invoked a domain called Netflame.cc. But according to an Oct. 13 story in The Wall Street Journal, Netflame’s registration “was released in October 2016, three months after Digital River ended support for Fireclick as part of an ‘ongoing domain cleanup.'”

The problem with the Dell customer support domain name comes as Dell customers continue to complain of being called by scammers pretending to be Dell tech support specialists. In many cases, the callers will try to make their scams sound more convincing by reading off the unique Dell “service tag” code printed on each Dell customer’s PC or laptop.

How can scammers have all this data if Dell’s service and support system isn’t compromised, many Dell customers have asked? And still ask: I’ve had three readers quiz me about these Dell service tag scams in the past week alone. Dell continues to be silent on what may be going on with the service tag scams, and has urged Dell customers targeted by such scams to report them to the company.

from Technology News https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/10/dell-lost-control-of-key-customer-support-domain-for-a-month-in-2017/

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amberdscott2 · 7 years ago

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Dell Lost Control of Key Customer Support Domain for a Month in 2017

Image: Wikipedia

This program comes in two versions: Basic and Premium, explains “Jesse L,” a Dell customer liaison and a blogger on the company’s site.

Dell customer liaison Jesse L. talks about how the program in question is by default installed on all Dell PCs.

SoftThinks lists Dell among some of its “great partners” (see screenshot below). It hasn’t responded to requests for comment. Some of its other partners include Best Buy and Radio Shack.

Some of SoftThinks’ partners. Source: SoftThinks.com

That’s according to Celedonio Albarran, assistant vice president of IT infrastructure and security at Equity Residential, a real estate investment trust that invests in apartments.

This Carbon Black log shows dellbackupandrecoverycloudstorage.com reaching out to a nasty Internet address on June 28, 2017.

“A few weeks after that they confirmed they fixed the issue,” Albarran said. “They just acknowledged the issue and said it was fixed, but they didn’t offer any comment besides that.”

Reached for comment about the domain snafu, Dell spokesperson Ellen Murphy shared the following statement:

from Amber Scott Technology News https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/10/dell-lost-control-of-key-customer-support-domain-for-a-month-in-2017/

0 notes

jennifersnyderca90 · 7 years ago

Text

Dell Lost Control of Key Customer Support Domain for a Month in 2017

Image: Wikipedia

This program comes in two versions: Basic and Premium, explains “Jesse L,” a Dell customer liaison and a blogger on the company’s site.

Dell customer liaison Jesse L. talks about how the program in question is by default installed on all Dell PCs.

SoftThinks lists Dell among some of its “great partners” (see screenshot below). It hasn’t responded to requests for comment. Some of its other partners include Best Buy and Radio Shack.

Some of SoftThinks’ partners. Source: SoftThinks.com

That’s according to Celedonio Albarran, assistant vice president of IT infrastructure and security at Equity Residential, a real estate investment trust that invests in apartments.

This Carbon Black log shows dellbackupandrecoverycloudstorage.com reaching out to a nasty Internet address on June 28, 2017.

“A few weeks after that they confirmed they fixed the issue,” Albarran said. “They just acknowledged the issue and said it was fixed, but they didn’t offer any comment besides that.”

Reached for comment about the domain snafu, Dell spokesperson Ellen Murphy shared the following statement:

from https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/10/dell-lost-control-of-key-customer-support-domain-for-a-month-in-2017/

0 notes

melindarowens · 8 years ago

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Sadiq Khan: ‘Cancel President Donald Trump’s State Visit’

London Mayor Sadiq Khan — who has seen two terror attacks in the city since he took office in May 2016 — has called for the state visit of U.S. President Donald Trump to be cancelled after the president slammed Khan for telling Londoners there is “no reason to be alarmed” following Saturday’s terror attack.

Mr. Khan made the comments on Channel 4 News, saying the president’s policies — his proposed temporary travel ban on immigration from six Middle Eastern nations on grounds of securing the safety of American citizens — “go[es] against everything we stand for”.

“I don’t think we should roll out the red carpet to the president of the USA in the circumstances where his policies go against everything we stand for,” he said.

“When you have a special relationship it is no different from when you have got a close mate. You stand with them in times of adversity but you call them out when they are wrong. There are many things about which Donald Trump is wrong.”

This is not the first time the London mayor has called for the offer of a state visit to be rescinded.

In January, Mayor Khan called on the Government to rescind its offer of a full state visit to President Trump whilst the president stands by his travel ban policy – despite Khan hosting a party with dignitaries from 11 nations that ban entry of Israeli passport holders to their countries.

Britain’s media, including Sky News, have jumped on the comments, quizzing the Prime Minister Theresa May on whether she would support the idea. The PM responded in an answer while campaigning in Stoke-on-Trent on Tuesday, stressing the importance of the trans-Atlantic relationship, implying the visit would not be cancelled. She did however call President Trump “wrong” in his criticisms of Mr. Khan.

Following the London Bridge terror attack, which saw seven fatalities and dozens of injuries, Khan, who told Londoners in late 2016 that terrorism is “part and parcel of living in a big city”, urged the city’s residents to not be alarmed.

President Trump condemned Khan for the comments, tweeting: “At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is “no reason to be alarmed!”

He added: “We must stop being politically correct and get down to the business of security for our people. If we don’t get smart it will only get worse,” and reiterated the need for a travel ban in the U.S. “as an extra level of safety”.

We need to be smart, vigilant and tough. We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 3, 2017

That’s right, we need a TRAVEL BAN for certain DANGEROUS countries, not some politically correct term that won’t help us protect our people!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017

President Trump said that the proposed measures, which seek to halt entry to the U.S. for 90 days for people from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen and bar asylum seekers for four months, as essential to prevent attacks in the U.S.

Former UKIP leader and Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage also slammed Khan for his response to the recent terror attack, saying:

“I understand the mayor wishing to not spread panic but what I would like to hear is him say: ‘As the first Muslim mayor of London, I am going to do all I can to work with the Muslim community to drive out the extremist preachers from our mosques. To do all we can to stop radicalisation happening in schools and in prisons.’

“And I did not hear a single word of that,”Mr. Farage said.

On Monday night, Mr. Khan led a vigil near London’s Tower Bridge for the victims to the terror attack on Saturday. A procession of Muslim groups were given the opportunity to first, and separately, lay flowers at the scene.

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everettwilkinson · 8 years ago

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Sadiq Khan: ‘Cancel President Donald Trump’s State Visit’

“I don’t think we should roll out the red carpet to the president of the USA in the circumstances where his policies go against everything we stand for,” he said.

This is not the first time the London mayor has called for the offer of a state visit to be rescinded.

President Trump condemned Khan for the comments, tweeting: “At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is “no reason to be alarmed!”

We need to be smart, vigilant and tough. We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 3, 2017

That’s right, we need a TRAVEL BAN for certain DANGEROUS countries, not some politically correct term that won’t help us protect our people!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017

Former UKIP leader and Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage also slammed Khan for his response to the recent terror attack, saying:

“And I did not hear a single word of that,”Mr. Farage said.

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newstfionline · 8 years ago

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U.S. Allies Are Learning that Trump’s America Is Not the ‘Indispensable Nation’

By Dan De Luce, John Hudson, Foreign Policy, February 27, 2017

On Saturday night, President Donald Trump dined at his new D.C. hotel with the governor of Florida, Rick Scott, his daughter Ivanka, her husband and powerful senior White House advisor Jared Kushner, and Nigel Farage, the nemesis of the European Union. A few tables away, alone with his wife, sat Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the man nominally charged with charting America’s relations with the rest of the world.

Photos of the president dining with a smiling Farage, the former UKIP leader who has railed against the EU for years, and who led the populist campaign to pull Britain out of Europe, only served to reinforce growing doubts about America’s stance toward the European Union and much of the international order forged by U.S. leadership in the years after World War II.

Now, U.S. allies are resigning themselves to the likelihood that Trump’s administration will remain unpredictable and often incoherent, if not downright hostile, in its foreign policy. And they are beginning to draw up contingency plans to protect their interests on trade and security, as they adapt to a world where strong American leadership is no longer assured.

“It’s dawning on people now that what you see is what you get,” said one European diplomat, “and that the uncertainty is not going away.”

Trump has of course alarmed transatlantic allies by sending mixed messages about the value of the NATO alliance, both on the campaign trail and once in office. But a much bigger concern for European governments is the White House’s apparent desire to reverse more than seven decades of U.S. policy of fostering a strong and united Europe as a bastion of democracy and free trade in order to bolster U.S. security.

The president of the European Commission, former Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, voiced what many senior officials will only say in private when he issued a dire warning in a recent letter to European leaders. Tusk said that Washington is “seeming to put into question” 70 years of American policy, placing the United States alongside Russia, China and terrorism as a source of instability for Europe.

The White House has actively fueled those worries, chiefly through Trump’s chief strategist, economic nationalist and anti-globalist Steven Bannon. This month he reportedly told Peter Wittig, Germany’s ambassador to Washington, that the EU is a flawed and weak institution, a week before Vice President Mike Pence was dispatched to Germany to express America’s “steadfast” commitment to the EU. Last week, Bannon in a speech before conservative activists in Washington touted what he calls “economic nationalism,” and said the administration wanted bilateral trade deals with other countries. But in Europe, the EU as a whole would have to negotiate any new trade deals.

Wittig declined to comment on the details of his conversation with Bannon, but said he rejects any attempts to divide the EU or belittle it as a purely economic trading bloc.

“The EU is not just an economic club, but it’s a political project,” he said. “It has brought us unprecedented security and stability [and] as far as Germany is concerned, we will certainly fight for a coherent and resilient European Union.”

The Trump administration’s tack is precisely the approach long favored by Moscow, which prefers the leverage that comes with dealing with European nations individually rather than collectively. Russian President Vladimir Putin has sought to divide the EU--and NATO--by fostering divisions within the Western bloc. Hungary and the Czech Republic--both members of the EU and NATO--have moved closer to Moscow in recent years, while Russia continues to support extremist, anti-EU parties in countries like France and Germany.

Trade, as much or more than security, has become the nascent administration’s cudgel to attack Europe. Trump’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, accused Berlin in January of manipulating foreign exchange markets, and Trump has talked of slapping all imports, including potentially those from Europe, with punitive tariffs.

Berlin, however, views free trade as a pillar of its prosperity and the global economy. Robust trade with countries around the world turned Germany into Europe’s economic engine. And German officials are clearly dismayed about the Trump administration’s threats to slap tariffs on German car manufacturers if they establish plants in Mexico instead of the United States and subsequently seek to export automobiles to the U.S. market.

Wittig suggested such a tariff could violate World Trade Organization rules, raising the possibility of retaliation. “WTO conformity is very important,” he said.

The Trump administration, however, appears serious about taking a hard line on trade, including possibly bypassing the WTO rules that Washington helped create. Officials have asked the U.S. Trade Representative’s office to prepare a list of legal measures that would allow the United States to impose sanctions unilaterally without having to go through WTO trade dispute procedures, the Financial Times reported Monday.

A European official said pursuing a unilateral approach to trade carried serious risks. “Trump and his aides are acting like it’s the 1950s or 60s. But U.S. economic power is not what it was. I think they’re in for a surprise.”

The Germans and others, meanwhile, are clinging to reassuring messages delivered by some Trump administration officials. Vice President Pence underscored the U.S. commitment to NATO at a security conference in Munich on Feb. 18, just as Defense Secretary James Mattis has tried to convey the same message to American allies in Asia.

“We received a clear message from Vice President Mike Pence,” EU ambassador to the U.S. David O’Sullivan told Foreign Policy. “He told us President Donald Trump had specifically asked him to go to Brussels to express the strong commitment of the United States to continued cooperation and partnership with the European Union. I don’t think you can get much clearer than that.”

An EU official also pointed to a Trump interview with Reuters published on Friday where the president flippantly seemed to reaffirm longstanding U.S. policy. “The EU, I’m totally in favor of it,” said the president, who cheered Brexit and urged more countries to leave the European Union. “If they’re happy, I’m in favor of it.”

Europe, though, is hedging its bets, especially after a proposed trade deal between the United States and the EU, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, unraveled last year.

EU officials are now looking to Asia, since in one of his first acts in office, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a vast 12-nation trade deal. The jilted partners and the EU now see an opportunity for new trade arrangements--without the U.S. in the equation--and are already in talks.

Within Asia, the Trump administration has also rattled allies already unnerved by an aggressive China. Trump has repeatedly bashed China over trade, accusing Beijing of taking advantage of the United States, even while attacking longtime ally Japan over trade issues. But the president pulled back from a threat to abandon Washington’s “One China” policy, and so far the White House has sidestepped conflict in the contested South China Sea.

The administration’s mixed messages have fueled anxiety about whether Washington has a strategy for Asia, and what it might be. China, meanwhile, is forging ahead with its own Asian free trade deal, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which excludes Washington, and deepening ties with many in the region, from Sri Lanka to the Philippines.

“It’s clearly wishful thinking that there was a deeper game, a strategy at work. That’s just not the case,” said Gregory Poling of Center for Strategic and International Studies. Governments are recognizing that “what we’re going to get is uncertainty and you just have to live with that.”

Even Australia, which has fought alongside the United States in every conflict since World War II, Trump’s election is seen by some as a sign that Canberra can no longer count on the United States for economic engagement or security in the Asia-Pacific.

In Canberra, the implications of a Trump presidency cast a long shadow as officials and policy analysts draft their foreign policy strategy in a new white paper. China has long been an economic siren for Australia, sucking up giant quantities of mineral exports, while the United States has for decades been Australia’s defense shield.

“The simple fact is that throughout Asia, the balance has been always to look to the U.S. for security and to China for economic benefits,” said Kerry Brown, a former British diplomat and now professor of Chinese Studies at King’s College in London.

But those calculations are now in flux, especially for Australia’s leaders.

“They will have to grapple with Trump as a major variable that imparts a great deal of uncertainty into their own foreign policy,” said Mira Rapp-Hooper of the Center for a New American Security. Canberra may have to contemplate the possibility that “the United States may be a less predictable alliance partner in coming years that it has been in the past,” she said.

#Donald Trump #Trump foreign policy #US foreign policy

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