FunnyJunk lawyer's wife wades into fray, calls critics "nazi scumbags"
Meanwhile, husband Charles pens angry poems defending his mom.
FunnyJunk v. The Oatmeal
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Charles Carreon, the Tucson lawyer currently suing Oatmeal creator Matt Inman, the National Wildlife Foundation, the American Cancer Society, and anyone impersonating him on Twitter, is something of a poet. (And, when we
spoke to him last week, we learned that he loves The Ramones.)
So when Inman cranked out his infamous drawing of a mom seducing a Kodiak bear, Carreon took his displeasure to the blank page and churned out "
Don't Mess With My Mom."
In case the subtext here wasn't clear, Carreon dedicated the verses to "Matthew Inman of the Oatmeal." Here's a small hors d'oeuvre—just imagine the lines set to a pumping, palm-muted set of power chords.
Your allies are the fools
Who cut and paste all day.
They think they're important,
But their anger is impotent.
They say nasty things,
But they don't get paid.
Their ignorance is deep,
So ya' get 'em on the cheap.
Your humor's scatological,
Your mind is pathological.
Did someone drop you on your head,
When you were in your baby-bed?
Did they take away your rattle,
And teach you how to tattle?
Whatever the reason,
You have committed treason
Against decency and sanity,
You're offensive to humanity.
Carreon and his wife, Tara, are furious about Inman's online campaign, which was designed to mock Carreon and his initial demand that Inman pay $20,000 for allegedly defaming a client. And they're even angrier about the behavior of Inman's followers and supporters, who have been peppering the Carreons with e-mails that say things like:
You are the biggest fucking asshole I have ever seen. I hope you do the world a favor and die soon.
Others have taken Carreon's pretty-easy-to-find e-mail address and signed him up for all sorts of things, including Club Nintendo, the Olive Garden newsletter, and porn sites like Tube8. The prospect of having a Tube8 user account linked to his e-mail address terrifies Carreon. As he put it in his
amended legal complaint this week:
On Tube8.com, members are allowed to “upload” explicit sexual images and video. Thus, Does 2 -100 have the ability to upload child pornography to Tube8.com, using Plaintiff’s name, that could lead to his criminal prosecution. Criminal prosecution for child pornography is swift and devastating, often resulting in the seizure of a defendant’s computers, the total destruction of their livelihood, long terms of imprisonment, and the total ruination of the defendant’s life. Indeed, filing this action is the only way to prove, conveniently and quickly to investigating law enforcement, that Plaintiff is not a Tube8.com user.
Convinced that Inman has been instigating the madness, Carreon has sued him for inciting "cyber-vandalism." And he continues to struggle with the mystery that is Matt Inman's popularity—as in his follow-up poem, "
Psycho Santa":
His prehistoric origin's a mystery—
Did he escape from the lavatory?
Was he made by the Pentagon and NSA
A living drone that shoots mind rays,
Makin' zombies of his followers—
Internet slaves!
What we need, Carreon says—and it's hard to disagree—is "thoughtful people / Who are decent and sincere."
Unfortunately, decency and thought appear to be in short supply. In a five-page thread on her website
The Ralph Nader Library, Tara Carreon has spent the last ten days tearing into her husband's detractors. If you want to understand the Carreons' worldview—and why the suit against Inman goes ahead—it's an enlightening read. It may also teach you some brand new insults.
It's also a reminder—always useful on the Internet—that real people sit at the computers behind e-mail and Twitter accounts. And sometimes those people get very, very upset.
One view of Carreon, from his critics.
Charlescarrion.com
"Nazi scumbags"
Complaining about "Mike Masnick Retard Wannabe Lawyer Writer at
TechDirt" and his commenters, Tara Carreon disagrees with the view that much of the hate directed at the Carreons is typically over-the-top, unserious Internet ranting. No, she says that hyperbolic denunciations like those directed at Carreon dehumanize one's opponents and prepare the way for actual violence. (Carreon has made the same claim in interviews.) And you know who else engaged in hyperbolic denunciations? Hitler.
These Techdirt nazi scumbags are doing to Charles what they did to the Jewish lawyers in Nazi Germany. Accusing him of greed and being responsible for the entire economic mess that our country is in. I mean, that is crazy!...
In addition to working for himself, Charles is working for You the People on this one, because who in the world would want this to happen to them? It's a very, very bad thing that's happening on the Internet right now to us, and it could happen to you. They're even threatening our children. One girl was so violent and threatening, said she was going to make my daughter lose her job, that she had to take the entire conversation to her HR manager. These people are BAD, BAD PEOPLE, these Matt Inman people. They are true Internet terrorists. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't involve a lot of the Anonymous people.
Tara was reacting to commenters who complain that Carreon contributes "nothing to society" and then say things like:
Your ego and greed are the reason millions are out of work right now. You are a contemptible butt baby that managed to live from out of the anus of mankind, polluting our lives with pre-restraint of our own imaginations and paranoia for those who have already created beautiful things. If I had 10+ billion dollars I would try to forcibly use you as a space monkey for early colonization of Mars, at least then we'd get valuable data out of your pathetic existence.
And to such commentators, Tara gave as well as she got. "This is one of the little lying bitches working for Matt Inman," Tara wrote about an apparently female commenter. In an exchange with another online commenter, Tara "jokingly" (her words) threatened that Carreon might subpoena him and search his hard drive. The bewildered commenter asked why he might possibly be subpoenaed. Tara replied:
For all of that illegal content on your hard drive. You'll have to seek a protective order to keep your porn stash private. What's your preference—het, gay, bi, BDSM?
The commenter responded, "Wait. Did you just vaguely threaten to try and out me to the general public using a subpoena and use that as a tool to embarrass and humiliate me? WOW. You, darling, have sunk lower than your husband."
Tara responded by pointing the commenter to an "archive of Italian spanking imagery, and to its screencap gallery of the lesbian bondage classic scene from Sexus, original music by Chet Baker, directed by Jose Benazaref, and you tell me which you like better." [Tara posts hundreds of screencaps from films, often with subtitles.]
This is a fight that is rapidly regressing into truly hateful territory; if there's a high road, everyone involved appears to have lost sight of it. Piled on by random Internet e-mailers and commenters, Tara kept lashing out, often against Inman personally. "You are a cancer, Matt Inman," she wrote.
This attack against FunnyJunk and Charles Carreon is an attack against law and order. Matt Inman is an Internet anarchist. Fascists always love an anarchist.
And the claims got odder over time. Who, she wondered, was behind this Matt Inman guy, anyway?
I don't know why we can't get a simple yes or no from ANYONE about whether Matt Robert Inman is related to [retired US admiral and intelligence agent] Bobby Ray Inman. Apparently, every journalist in the world doesn't seem to think that knowing WHO Matt Inman is is important. He's a man without parents, brothers and sisters, or childhood friends. A man without a past, just like Barack Obama. Sure, there's lots of famous people like that in the world! Usually, they are children of Intelligence Agents, or Intelligence Agents themselves.
Or, you know, mobsters. "What kind of connections does someone have in the world to be this arrogant towards a lawyer?" she asked. "Think about it. Inman is WELL-CONNECTED! To me, that just means one thing: mafia."
A world turned upside down
The Carreon view of Inman
The Carreons largely seem baffled about how they entered this crazy, upside-down world. All Carreon did with his initial letter was what any lawyer might; the harm here, the real bad behavior—couldn't everyone see that it was being driven by Inman?
Matt Inman is a sadist, a cyberbully, a liar, and an Internet terrorist. Here, HE DID THE BAD THING.
Put aside the rightness or wrongness of any particular party here for a moment and try to imagine how this would feel. We've all been in situations where we suddenly look around a room in shock and disbelief as people look at us with loathing—when we know it's exactly the opposite! The sense of a world gone off the rails is bewildering. It's infuriating. Tara Carreon actually sums up the feeling well:
I mean, it's so fucking absurd. Every moral virtue that is rightly on our side, they claim for themselves. This is truly the Devil reciting scripture.
From the Carreons' perspective, this whole controversy exploded out of thin air—Carreon demonized after a lifetime of service to the good and the just, by a bunch of anonymous Internet trolls and commenters.
These little cannibal kids think they're so brave, standing up for the sadist Matt Inman, tearing a good lawyer's name apart, a lawyer who is practically a saint, who has worked for the underprivileged and poor his whole adult life, while they post anonymously. If they're so brave, then why don't they post under their real names, and give us the opportunity to tear their names apart? Put up hate sites using their names? Because in this new fascist "Internet" world we live in, the anonymous people deserve free speech, while those with names, deserve to have their identities destroyed. That is so American—not!
This could have been the start of a worthwhile post on the nature of Internet anonymity and bad behavior, a topic certainly deserving of thoughtful writing and analysis. Unfortunately, when the world looks upside-down and you're trying single-handedly to right it, situations look extreme and so extreme comparisons get made.
Like I said, they are our modern-day "Hitler youth," and Matt Inman is their Hitler—not even the person Hitler, just "Hitler's port-a-potty." [A term Inman used in an interview to describe his Twitter feed.] And they're proud of it. They think it's funny. They think they can take any racist, bigoted, regressive idea and legitimize it by putting it into a cartoon.
In case you didn't get the message, it appears again later: "Matt Inman seems to be the de facto leader of the modern American Hitler Youth," Tara wrote. Also, she suspects he hates women and is a "terrible misogynist."
The question, in Tara's mind, comes down to just how much bad behavior one has to accept on the Internet. Certainly, the Internet feels like something different from the regular world in Tucson. Stir up enemies at home and you're unlikely to be called names by more than a few people at once; stir up a fight online and you might be attacked at once by thousands, if not millions—and in the most offensive possible terms. And people keep suggesting that the Carreons just sit back and let the tidal wave crash into them.
"The KKK is coming at you," Tara writes, "and instead of fighting back, you are advised to just take it. That's what Matt Inman's bunch wants us to do."
Painful as it might be, sometimes there's real wisdom in just walking away from a fight, even with hateful names ringing out in the air behind you. Because it's hard to see how trying to out-name-call the Internet, even just to prove a point, is going to help the situation. But Tara gives it a pretty good shot.
These phaggotish, conspiratorial, childish, dorkish, baseless, mindless, shameful, dumb, aggressive, jealous, reprobate, obsessed, mad, clueless, shockingly delusional, completely lost and in trouble, bottom-of-the-barrel, short-sighted, dumb-fuck, ranting, Un-American, contemptible, obnoxious, embarrassing, incompetent, bizarre, constipated, bankrupt, hypocritical, stupid, fearful, carnivorous, wolverine, ranting, foaming at the mouth, bullying, lying, paranoid, no-better-than-the-mafia, smeghead, scumbag, cretinous, lazy, delusional, demented, narcissistic, pathological, extortionistic lunatic, thuggish drama-whores, poised on the edge of a precipice, hoisted by their own petard, their holy fucking shitballs burning inside a biplane careening toward the Statue of Liberty, rhinos raping chinchillas dressed up in unicorns' undergarments, who deserve every bad thing that happens to them, having to learn their lessons the hard way, and who I wouldn't even piss on if they were on fire (they believe in name-calling at TechDirt) claim that these types of statements are not actionable because they aren't "false facts," just "satire." Where is the dividing line?
"We're going to have to sue them all"
The Carreons have been in this situation before. "It's not the first time we've been targeted as sacrificial victims," Tara wrote. "We were targeted by the entire Buddhist community when I told them to go fuck themselves, for being nihilists, elitists, and authoritarians."
As for what comes next, it's clear that Charles Carreon's lawsuit isn't going away. This week,
he expanded on his initial complaint. Tara warns that the scope of the lawsuit will be broadened as Carreon unearths new names of those who have impersonated him online.
And we're going to have to sue them all. There are a lot of people just dying to be sued on this one. If you don't have a lawyer in the family, I would recommend you start getting concerned about this now. For yourself, friends, loved-ones, and fellow-citizens. This is a lynching on the Internet frontier.
What's remarkable about the entire case is just how clearly it's driven by personal animus. A certain form of Internet culture—think 4chan's /b/ or much of Anonymous or The Oatmeal—has elevated crass speech and thought into a positive virtue. Names get called, words get said, and topics once unmentionable in "polite company" have become everyday memes—and no one's supposed to get bent out of shape about it. This is just the way we talk now.
But words sting as much as they always did offline, and the anonymous speech of the Internet means that they can suddenly pour forth in an overwhelming torrent. When directed at individuals, especially those who don't accept the speech conventions of these communities and don't consider their "humor" to be funny so much as offensive, people get angry.
Plenty of people are angry here. FunnyJunk's mysterious backers, upset when
Inman got into a war of words and pictures with them in 2011, were angry enough to hire a lawyer to go after him almost a year later. Inman was furious about the request that he, the one whose cartoons were being reproduced without attribution on sites like FunnyJunk, be asked to pay $20,000, and he responded with memorable bile to Carreon. Now Carreon and family feel like victims in their turn. Where Inman turned his anger into pictures and a $200,000 fundraising drive, Carreon has turned his into law. As he put it in verse:
So get behind me, Satan!
You're just a bit of roadkill,
Like the thief of Sex.Com,
Just another fool,
Who thought he was the bomb.
Next time, Mr. Inman,
Don't talk about my Mom.
