I am… Uniquely Dangerous (srsly?)
Back in early 2013 (if memory serves), I was undertaking one of a seemingly-endless series of phone interviews with investigative journalist Carreen Maloney. During that particular discussion, I was holding forth on the absurd misrepresentations and outright lies that were included in various filings that “The United States of America” (through Assistant U.S. Attorneys, and in particular through AUSA Susan Roe) had submitted in my various federal court appearances during more than seven years of ‘supervised release’ by the Feds.
There’s really too many of those lies to list here, else things would bog down right off the bat. Also I think Carreen has (probably) documented a good chunk of that already. Anyhow, one that was particularly absurd was the claim — made by Ms. Roe — that I was “a uniquely dangerous threat to the security of the United States of America.”
That comment was made in some filing or other she had made, encouraging the judge in my case to send me (again) to prison as a result of my activisim and (in another memorable, albeit accurate turn of phrase in this instance) my “unwavering defiance in the face of government demands”… demands for subsurvience, demands that I disavow who I am, demands that I disavow my community and my activism and my writing and, in a very real sense, my status as a human being.
Well… as a dear friend is occasionally wont to say: fuck that noise. :-P
“Uniquely dangerous”… me? Really? I highlighted it for Carreen because it was so obviously, gratuitously, painfully a total fabrication — an outright lie. (I note that I, at the least, never went back and found the specific filing from which my memory was drawing the phrase — and it’s entirely possible I misremembered it, got the quote slightly wrong, etc.., &.c so caveat emptor, your mileage may vary, and so on).
Me, with my words and words and words: always too many bloody words. My twitter shenanigans. My work as a geek within the digital security sub-world of the larger technology world. That the United States of America would categorise me — plain, ‘ole me — as “uniquely dangerous” just summed up how utterly fucking surreal things had, at that time, become in my life.
~ ~ ~
Looking back at that time from a perspective nearly five years later, I can say two things about that five-years-ago version of myself, back in that snapshot in time. One, I had absolutely no idea that the Feds’ labelling me as “dangerous” would be grindingly, methodically, brutally implemented in a self-fulfilling nightmare of years of police brutality, overtly-violent law enforcement attacks, and (as has been the case more times than I’d even bother to count by now) years of completely-fabricated press “reporting” of events in my life — reporting that never strayed beyond “take what the police say, and print it as ‘news’ and as if it were based on any factual reality.”
Once I’d been labelled as “dangerous” by the Feds — a label that was (I now know) replicated out into various state, local, and international (!!) law enforcement databases — every interaction with police thereafter would take place within a context of my assumed (physical) ‘dangerousness.’ Which, in turn, acted as jet fuel thrown on the fire of police hatred and violence directed at me… which, from there, all but guaranteed I’d be attacked with asymptotically-escalating police violence at the drop of a hat.
All without any actual, you know, “dangerousness” on my part whatsoever: no history of violence towards police (or anyone else, natch). No violent intentions on my part. None of that fact-based stuff. Instead, the self-fulfilling prophecy of my putative dangerousness did what such prophecies are definitionally wont to do: it fulfilled itself. Every time the police beat the fuck out of me and charged me with “assault” thereafter (three disctinct & separate times that’s happened so far since then, by my count), it just reinforced the “dangerous” label (“Spink charged with assaulting police…” or some subtle variant thereof) which means that, next time the police somewhere decide beating the fuck out of that “uppity zoo” (which would be me) sounds like a fun way to spend the day, they always have that generated-out-of-thin-air “dangerous” label to use in (trying to) justify their latest violent attack.
So that’s the first thing I had no idea would come to pass: that laughably-silly label — “uniquely dangerous” — wouldn’t seem so laughable and silly five years later, when it’d been bootstrapped into a (faux-)reality by the brutality of bigoted, violent, hate-motivated police. Which, yeah, basically sucks. Not really funny at all.
Two, I couldn’t have predicted that Carreen would take that phrase — “uniquely dangerous” — and use it as the title of a book about me (I don’t think that her book, “Uniquely Dangerous,” is really about me — however, everyone else seems to use that description and at some point I’ll probably acquiesce to consensus opinion on how to describe her book, tbh; that point being right now, apparently).
I just thought it was a fully, utterly, preciously absurd phrase when I first told her about it.
She thought, if I may be so bold as to impute her intent here, that it’d make a good title for the book she was writing. Once she suggested it as a title, I thought it’d kind of be awesome: “Uniquely Dangerous.” Ha! The ultimate prank, a book about me — a longtime Buddhist, a nonviolent activist, a fanboy of Nelson ‘Madiba’ Mandela, a two-legged mammal whose most notorious weapons skill is burying adversaries in an unending tsunami of words — that tongue-in-cheeks the surreal smear that I’m somehow ‘dangerous.’
Lol. Joke’s on them, innit?
Yeah well… I can’t say it’s quite so funny now, five years down the road, after all that’s transpired in those intervening years. At the same time, I can’t say I have changed my opinion about whether it’s a good title for her book. Nope — it’s still a good title.. maybe even a great title by this point in time. It’s certainly a darker, more complex, less breezily-insouicant title.
That’s not to say it’s any less apposite a title… and really, looking back, it ended up being terribly prescient, and sad, and self-fulfilling, and fundamentally tragic — which is alot of semantic weight for just one two-word title to carry. Yay for weight-carrying titles of books.
But anyway, it certainly doesn’t suck.
~ ~ ~
Because, and if you’re reading this I’m assuming that you already know this, Carreen Maloney spent nearly eight years researching and writing a book called Uniquely Dangerous (here’s Maloney’s ‘UD’ page). Now her book has been published, complete with not-so-funny-any-more title.
Eight years ago, I made a decision to do everything possible to provide full and complete access to Carreen when she approached me with her interest in writing about “my case.” (If you’ve read UD, you know why I scare-quote “my case”) For those who’ve already dipped into the book, you also have a really good sense of how that experience played out from her side of the table.
From my side of things, this was a decision made almost entirely on the basis of an absolutely unreasonable, unjustified, irresponsible, and insupportable faith in something good coming of what she was up to. To say that I had no real basis to expect good things to result is, and I’m not just puffing this up, an enormous understatement. Indeed, I had every damned reason to expect — to have all but total certainty — that all possible outcomes would be bad. Bad for my community, bad for the larger dialogue on the question of human/nonhuman relations in the modern world, bad for my friends, bad for my loved ones, and bad for me personally.
But… but fuck all that. Because I remain just naive enough, even today, to think that these awkward things called facts still matter: that, given the facts of what’s gone on in my life, of who I actually am, of my community and who we are… given those facts, it was possible to envision an outcome for her project that made the world a better place.
So I bet my life — and the lives, indirectly, of more than a few others — on my faith that something good could come of this. And it does involve an act of faith, albeit not in a religious sense but rather in the sense that the underlying belief in such an outcome being possible is a critical precursor and predicate to such an outcome actually coming to pass. Without the faith, it’ll never come off; with the faith… with enough brute-force, unquenched, unwavering faith in good things coming to pass… with that kind of faith, sometimes it happens.
And here, I think, it happened.
I only ‘think’ it happened because I actually haven’t read the entire book yet. Ok brass tacks, I’ve only read a handful of chapters. Someday I will do the cover-to-cover approach but I don’t think any time soon. Reading some of those chapters is going to be an emotional horror for me and I’ve done enough emotional horror in the past ten years that I actually do sort of veer away from it if given a fighting chance (years of PTSD treatment also have taught me that). Also it seems, I dunno… selfish and narcissistic and, well, basically weird. Which, recursively, seems a weird thing to worry about, doesn’t it? Ha.
More importantly, I don’t think anyone really knows at this early stage how Maloney’s book (I think of her as ‘Maloney” so I’m just going to go with that since it’s more honest than typing ‘Carreen’ or ‘Ms. Maloney’) is going to impact over the long term.
Right now, the book is in a “Cone of Silence” phase where everyone who has a vested interest in maintaining the bullshit, lies-based, violence-enabling, bigotry-driven version of the narrative is working triple-time to make sure that nobody notices the book.
Yes, this is a ‘thing’ — the Cone of Silence.
If, for example, you are Corinne Super — the horse thief who stole my showjumping stallion Capone I — and you’ve been living off the cash-money proceeds of his semen every day since (actually, you’ve been fraudulently selling fake Capone semen for years… which is about as perfect an example of ‘Corinne Super in distilled form’ as one could possibly imagine)— if you’re Corinne Super, you’ve been repeating a whole shitpile of lies for so many years that you long since (mostly, except late at night when the worries wouldn’t die down, right?) stopped worrying that someone is going to find you out…
If you’re that person, then the last thing you want is for this meticulously-researched, heavily-footnoted, deeply-sourced investigative journalism project to hit the streets and go big. So you are going to be working the phones (and your beloved Facebook), trotting out every little fraudster trick in the book to keep Maloney’s project within the Cone of Silence. Calling all your “friends” from the old days to brainstorm on what the hell to do now. Halp!
Which, obviously, is never going to work.
But which, equally obviously, liars like Corinne Super have done successfully enough times in their past that they can at least pretend, in their desperation, that it might just work at a scale like this. Unfortunately for them, this is qualitatively different from their earlier lives of petty, pathethic, small-scale fraud and mendacity.
All of them, all the two-bit uglies who over the years have attached themselves to me — and the fake version of “my story” — to earn a dishonest living, or vent their awful hatreds, or to fill in for the overwhelming hollowness of their broken souls, or to whatever-motivates-this-kind-of-ugly-person… all of them have a seriously vested interest in keeping the Cone of Silence fully operational for as long as possible.
Oh well… sucks to be them. (it really does suck to be them, doesn’t it?)
This is too big, in sum, for the Cone of Silence to contain for long. And, once the Cone of Silence cracks open for good — and there’s plenty of early rumbles that the cracks are already quite visible and are spreading at an accelerating rate — then it’s anyone’s guess what happens next. Nothing good for the uglies, obviously. Beyond that, there’s good on the way… that’s one thing clear to anyone with a mind to take a look at where things are headed.
Beyond that, I’m not going to make predictions… because there’s never been a book like this before. And, yes, I know it sounds creepy for me — the subject of the book — to say that. Whatever, I’m still gonna say it. :-P Because the importance of the book has nothing to do with me, or the specifics of my life, or any distractive nonsense like that.
The book matters because it tears to shreads the entire rotten, deceitful, vicious, dishonest, degrading, disgusting narrative wrt human/nonhuman relations as they stand today. It doesn’t do this in one fell swoop, obviously; rather, it removes the central, essential, critical pillar on which that disgusting old narrative rests (I leave it as an exercise for the reader to explicitly articulate just what that pillar is, in a little pile of words).
Once that pillar gets pulled — and, yep, it’s been pulled by UD — it’s merely a question of time until the whole ugly edifice itself falls to pieces and room is made for healthy new narratives to step forth, evolve, and help us all do better.
~ ~ ~
As to the fine-grained details of how that’ll all play out, I sure as hell don’t know. I didn’t know back in 2010, when I decided to go all-in and open every door within my power to Maloney as she set to work on her long odyssey towards the completion of this book… and I don’t know much more about that today, all but ten years later. Hell, I don’t know much about much tbh ;-)
What I do know, however, is this: Uniquely Dangerous is a book that doesn’t fit into any previously-defined category, class, or group. It’s catalytic, and by definition catalytic things impact in ways that don’t make for easy predictions. It tips over a whole bunch of rotten, evil apple-carts and in doing so makes the world a better place.
Its impact is going to play out over years and years, so it’ll be fascinating to see things evolve from here.
~ ~ ~
Needless to say, the book hitting the streets adds some complications to my life. Which, within the context of my complicated life, doesn’t really spook me terribly at this point in time. Still, when a well-regarded investigative journalist spends eight years writing a book about your unconventional sex life (sorta), or your non-mainstream sexual/species orientation (less tabloid-sounding and more accurate), or your groundbreaking and courageous political activism (sounds way better… but prolly isn’t totally accurate) — when that happens, things do change.
I was incarcerated in a local jail when the book was finally published. Which, yes, was a rather interesting experience to live. Not bad, actually… but very much inteeeresting. Incidentally, I beat that case — two cases, technically — and I beat both of them acting pro se. That’s another story, one I’m keen to tell and will tell as time allows. And, yes, it was another example — the worst one yet — of police illegally targeting me because of my sexual/species orientation, deploying heavy violence against me (this time I suffered a stroke from being tased nearly a dozen times, was left with a destroyed right knee from being shot, and was in coma for five days at hospital on a breathing machine), and then fabricating competely false charges of ‘assault’ against me in an attempt to cover up what they’d done.
Only this time, I fought the case(s) as my own lawyer, used discovery to expose documents showing that the local police committed perjury in falsely accusing me of assault, and then I got each and every felony charge dropped. Which is why I’m sitting here, writing this post, and not in jail with a pencil writing letters to anyone who would read them. :-)
Also this time, I filed more than a dozen civil lawsuits against local police and their various enablers, and I’m holding every single person involved in this ugly example of vigilante violence to account in court, on the record, and under oath.
Which I really think is worth the time to do it right.
~ ~ ~
Now that I’m out (of jail, silly — I’ve been de facto albeit not de jure “out” as a zoophile for more years than I can count on fingers & toes, just in case some human resident of this planet hadn’t yet gotten that particular memo), and Uniquely Dangerous is published… well, things have crossed an irreversible threshold.
Since 2010, I’ve written precious little under my own name on the subject of cross-species relations and the history of my persecution resulting from my activism. For a few years, I was subjected to a gag order issued by a federal judge which prevented me from publishing on any subject (yes, that really happened; see UD) under threat of return to my home federal prison: the warm comforts of FCC Beaumont (Texas), known widely within the federal prison ecosystem as ‘Bloody Beaumont.’ (note: I did my time at the low, not the medium which is the part of the complex that gives Beaumont its truly bloody reputation as a notoriously stabby joint)
Unsurprisingly, that didn’t stop me from publishing — but I (mostly) did so under pen names and via other shenanigans too boring and convoluted to mention here (I still ended up with U.S. Marshals pointing guns at me and threatening me with prison time more than once, so it wasn’t all fun and games).
Meanwhile, I’ve also written more than a little bit on technical matters under my (not secret, but still mildly decoupled because federal gag order plus other reasons) nom de guerre in the technical world of ‘pattern juggled,’ or just ‘pj’ for short. Along the way, I co-founded the cryptostorm private network, did a bit of posting in cryptostorm’s (somewhat internet-famous and imho fairly wonderful discussion forum which for years I admin’d as well), and did some other interesting things (like HavenLabs and cryptohaven and so on) meanwhile — within the context of ‘pj’ as noted above. So there’s a bit of writing there, if we’re going to keep a proper record of me-made words.
Apart from that, I’ve largely (well… mostly) held fire. Simply put, it would have been a waste of time for me to ‘write into the teeth of the storm of lies’ in terms of the events of 2010 (which I’ve referred to, in writing on this subject — which sort of contradicts my “I-didn’t-write-anything-summation”, I know — as “Witchunt 2010,” although now that Trump has taken ‘witchunt’ as a favourite word, I kind of don’t want to use it any more tbh); tl;dr I made the decision to wait until Maloney’s book was done before stepping up to continue the conversation that’s been a core part of my life since I was old enough to type (many, many moons ago).
(I had no idea Maloney’s book would take eight bloody years to finish; neither did she, I’m sure, and meanwhile I’ve learned a bit about patience)
Now that the book’s done and published, my self-imposed (relatively-speaking, and by my usual writing-volume-level standards anyway) silence has come to a much-awaited end.
<cracks knuckles>… that leaves us here and now, eh?
~ ~ ~
I’ve been — indirectly and somewhat haltingly — warned by local authorities where I’m at nowadays not to “start doing that stuff again”… which in relevant context was a specific reference to, you know, writing and activism and stuff. I give them (a tiny hair of) credit for their optimism as shown in their having any iota of expectation that such a warning/threat would have any influence on my writing and activism. Because really… the Feds tried gagging me for years and we all see just how well that particular gambit ended up working out for them.
But, of course, it won’t. (Nor should it, on any legal or even vaguely-rational basis… obviously) To me, unofficial gag orders aren’t worth even so much as the paper they aren’t printed on — and besides, even when printed on paper my position on gag orders is pretty well clear by now: fuck gag orders.
Good, now that’s clear — for any local folks reading this (hypothetically, of course), or for anyone (hi there, JR :-) hoping to ‘alert’ local folks that “he’s doing it again!!!?!?!” (i.e. writing stuff on the intertubes, I suppose)
No matter. My bone(s) to pick with local Powers That Be will be picked (mostly) in civil court — and are already well in process of being worked-through in professional and appropriate procedure there. I don’t have (much) to say about those Local Powers in this kind of writing because, frankly, they (Local Powers) are largely irrelevant in a larger, global/macro-context. No offense intented (mostly)… but there’s small-world and big-world. Don’t (often) cross those beams, right?
~ ~ ~
However, yes, I’ve a bit to say about some other things. No surprise, given my well-documented penchant for being say-ey about all sorts of things, to a well-documented fault.
After nearly ten years of having the world — in the form of international newspapers, countless drooling hate-bloggers, various hangers-on, jealous biological family members, and even the odd low-rent fraudster like Corinne Super, amoungst endless others — beat the living shit out of me in print and online (often from behind anonymous personas, which yea that sure shows the courage of one’s convictions right?) with the mass-destruction weapon of their ocean of lies they’d collectively made up, passed around, and published about me… after ten years of that particular little version of hell, the record has been set straight.
Repeat: the record has been set straight.
No, there were no “vaseline-slathered mice” (which was completely a fabrication of Laura Clark’s deranged, destructive, dishonest, and profoundly disturbed mind… “felching,” really Laura?). There was no “bestiality farm.” I was never “convicted of sexually abusing animals” (which is actually a thing posted in numerous law enforcement databases). And on and on and on: the more dis-credible, the less factually-based, the more salicious and degrading and completely unbelievable, the more these lies were generated and published and referenced and the deeper they sunk their roots online.
These were all whole-cloth, complete, total lies.
Yes, these lies were reprinted by the Seattle Times (over, and over, and over), and the Guardian, and who the fuck knows who else by now. They were lies then, and back then I did what little I could to challenge those lies: I demanded corrections, I provided factual backing, I referenced actual legal documents, I threatened lawsuits, I begged lawyers to help with defamation claims, and on and on and on.
My efforts — back then — failed, because the lies were {insert adjective/adjectival phrase here} than facts. Cooler? Better for ad sales? More reflective of pre-existing, bigoted assumptions? Uglier?
Yes, all that and more. Why bother with facts, when lies push all those dark buttons?
I have lived my life, in all the dark years since, under the cloud of those lies. It is not possible to understand what that means, unless one has experienced it. I have been attacked, imprisoned, persecuted, threatened, prosecuted, and seen my family and loved ones abducted, tortured, and killed as direct and proximate results of those lies. Those lies have, to a large degree, defined my life since 2010.
Those lies are now demolished.
Now, post-UD, we can get back to the actual work of talking about some subjects that matter: what it is to be a human, how we as humans get along with the other sentient beings who share our planet, and what our species’ 100,000-year-long history of intimate engagement with our partner species means as we chart a path forward on this shared planet of ours. Those are the subjects that matter to me and, now that the lies told to drown out my voice for a decade have been dissolved in truth, I am once again talking about these things — about things that actually matter. Which is a Good Thing.
And which also does feel good… even though the horrors of the eight years in between are not and never will gone from my soul. Never.
~ ~ ~
Years ago, I used to do fun stuff like posting every week the most creative death threats I received in email from anti-zoophile bigots. Inevitably, I’m sure I’ll get back into such stunts in due course. And there’s always twitter, for a channel in which to say a thing or two about this & that…
Meanwhile this is my HELLO WORLD message.
HELLO WORLD.
I am still alive.
I am still unwaveringly defiant when it comes to hatred, bigotry, and human solipsism.
I am still, I will always & forever be, unrepentant (for being, proudly, who I am & have always been) and — obviously — unrehabilitated (ironic h/t to old-school BASE history).
And, yes… I am Uniquely Dangerous. (I guess :-P)
Cheers,
~ DB LeConte-Spink (aka various aliases in process of collapsing into me)
also: I have cancer — the not-good kind, tl;dr — and rather than that allowing that to evolve as a sordid rumour circulating about, I’ll just leave this postscript here & set the record straight. Anyhow I’m not dead just yet, and miles to go before I sleep. Rage, rage against the dying blah blah blah :-P
