Daily Archives: 10 May 2019

Wrong Vote Outcome

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They didn’t vote the way they were supposed to, so there’ll be a whole new election.  No, not for Georgia governor, but for Mayor of Istanbul.  Based solely on Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s plaint that there were “numerical mistakes,” “irregularities,” and outright “corruption” in that mayoral election—Erdoğan’s party didn’t win there; the Republican People’s Party’s Ekrem Imamoglu did—the Supreme Electoral Council has completely annulled the election and required a new one to be held.

Echoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D, CA) claim that if her Progressive-Democratic Party didn’t win big in 2020, President Donald Trump would refuse to accept the outcome, Erdoğan did just that in Istanbul:

a margin of only 15,000 votes in a city as large as Istanbul was too close to be fair.

And

He [Erdoğan] said a difference of “13,000 to 14,000 votes” was not enough in a city of 15 million inhabitants.

So his election board tossed the results.  This, after AKP spokesman Omer Celik, speaking for Erdoğan, promised

At the end of the day, we will accept the final result regardless of whether it is to our advantage or disadvantage[.]

Former German Greens leader Cem Özdemir, who has Turkish roots suggested that this shows Erdogan to be a

bitter old man, who has long passed the zenith of his power. …  In the world of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, everyone who thinks differently to him is a terrorist, and every election he loses is a sham election[.]

Apparently not so far past.  And there’s that echo, again.

A Politician Demands Doxing Occur

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Doxing is the deliberate exposure of personally identifying information, things like phone numbers and home addresses of individuals—often including family members: wives, husbands, and children—in order for each of those folks to be personally confronted with opprobrium at their homes and schools.

Pennsylvania State Representative Brian Sims, a Progressive-Democrat, called for precisely that when he confronted and harassed a woman and her two teenaged daughters who were praying outside an abortion clinic in Sims’ Philadelphia district. He went far beyond his on-scene harassment, though. He recorded his verbal assault and posted it on line, with this request for doxing:

So, here’s the deal.  I’ve got $100 to anybody who will identify these three, and I will donate to Planned Parenthood.

When he started catching flak for his assault and his call for the dox, Sims posted his follow-on:

I can do better.

He masqueraded that as a sort-of apology.

Here’s one of the results of doxing.  Swatting is a false call to emergency facilities claiming a deadly event—usually a domestic violence claim—in progress and please hurry. This is done while identifying a doxed address as the location of the supposed deadliness.  For example,

a call from a man who said he had shot his wife and then tied up his children inside his house, where he had several pipe bombs.

And this:

A perpetrator was recently sentenced to 20 years in prison for launching a swatting attack in December 2017 in Wichita, KA, against a man who was killed by police responding to the call.

Given the emotional tension and outright violence already extant surrounding the abortion/anti-abortion conflict, it’s ludicrous to the point of insulting our intelligence to consider any premise that Sims didn’t know these risks.

Sims’ subsequent post is, to use the technical term, BS.  He was speaking—shouting, really—from his heart when he engaged in his verbal assault and subsequent call for his targets to be doxed.  His later commentary is nothing more than words mouthed for his personal benefit, politically spoken to dodge his culpability.

Sims needs to go. He can have no value in a State government purporting to represent its constituents.