Coattails, Botnets, Fake Lawyers, and F#ck Weasels: Notes on Something Stupid

[Tiassa]

[1/3]​

​

Once upon a time, oh, let's say, last year, Matt Jameson↱ had occasion to recall:

Around 2017, an oft-bearded Canadian named Travis Pangburn sprang fully-formed from the collective amygdala of the Intellectual Dark Web, a marketing conglomerate of "renegades" who some people think are not renegades. Jordan Peterson's coattails were expansive and lush and rocketing upward, and Travis, via his erstwhile venture Pangburn Philosophy, grabbed on for dear life.​

And with an opening like that, a downhill tumble almost inevitably awaits. Jameson observed, "Pangburn's rise never quite made sense, but the skeptics and rationalists of the IDW fully bought in", sketches the sad tale of "'A Day of Reflection,' a $500-a-head IDW symposium scheduled in NYC for November 17, 2018", which he then describes as, "Pangburn's Fyre Festival". There's a dispute with Sam Harris, more stories of unpaid debts, and even something about stiffing an old children's television show. Something else ran awry, having to do with the Kootenay Country Music Festival. And then there's the bit about "fuck weasels".

In late 2019, as the story goes:

Pangburn appears to be in the early stages of rehabbing his relationship with the IDW. He just announced promotion of a live NYC debate in March between IDW-adjacent moderate atheist activist Matt Dillahunty and far-right racist homophobic lunatic felon Dinesh D'Souza. Skeptic magazine EIC and IDW stalwart Michael Shermer has also recently talked up Pangburn on Twitter.​

That debate did happen, but Pangburn remains squarely at the center of this narrative. Indeed, Matt Dillahunty's presence in the story might seem nearly extraneous, except that's how it went. As of December, 2019:

So Pangburn 2.0 appears to be happening.

Only this time, Travis brought friends.

Very dumb friends.

Friends who are almost certainly also Travis Pangburn.​

†​

It's a pretty straightforward mess. I never got certain posts up last year, but they were tucked aside in a folder I never got rid of, and a moment of twittery this week brought the story to mind. One of the hardest things to grasp is the sheer unbelievability of it all, but still: A friend of Jameson's apparently got ratioed by "a number of tenacious Pangburn defenders", and when they looked into the details behind the "barrage of suspicious replies", "what followed was one hilarious revelation after another of what appears to be the most bumbling, obvious sockpuppet network ever assembled".

Like Dave:

"Retired Attorney Dave Schroeder" (@daveschlaw) is an atheist skeptic who loves science and Pangburn. Dave first tweeted on September 16, also known as Fuck Weasels Day.

Dave loves Pangburn so much that all of his tweets are either to defend or promote Pangburn or people with whom Pangburn aspires to associate. Being a retired lawyer, Dave's specialty is telling Pangburn critics that Pangburn should sue them.​

In fact, the "retired attorney" is what I remembered when an investigative journalist posted a fake threat pretending to be from a real civil rights organization. The terrible writing reminded me of the "retired attorney" posting from another Twitter account, which in turn hasn't posted since the day after the Dillahunty/D'Souza event:

​

Yeah, you can kind of see how this goes. Still, as Jameson explains:

Issuing threats of litigation from an account purporting to be a lawyer is not very cool, nor is calling robots retarded, but Dave's pinned tweet is on another level. Dave has issued a long "challenge" thread to Sam Harris's recounting of "A Day of Reflection," and it has quite the peculiar stat line:

[Tweet challenging @SamHarrisOrg re: Pangburn/A Day of Reflection]​

How does 2–49–8 happen to a tweet?​

It's a fair question. The punch line is an image of eight twitter accounts featuring Russian names, and the simple observation, "Oh."

Russian bots love them some Pangburn. Travis's last few hundred followers read like a phone book from Nizhny Novgorod ....

.... Would it surprise you to learn that the vast majority of the hundreds of Russian bot accounts that started following Travis all at once were created in November 2019, just in time for dozens of them to retweet Dave's "challenge" to Sam Harris?​

The thing about the article is that it gets to the point that every line reads like a joke. The subsequent three paragraphs:

Travis leans heavily upon Dave's pinned tweet thread in fashioning the "Response To Criticism" section of his new website, which addresses the fallout from "A Day of Reflection."

Travis: "I agree wholeheartedly with almost all of Dave's points." (Which points, pray tell, does he disagree with?)

Let's recap. A Twitter account that sure seems a lot like a Travis Pangburn sockpuppet (more, much more, on this below) issued a "challenge" to Sam Harris, Pangburn's chief adversary in the omnishambles that was his past year and a half, which Travis found so compelling that he built the rebuttal to his personal Everything-gate around that tweet thread, and which Russian bots that were created and began following Pangburn at the same time found so compelling that they retweeted it en masse.​

The introduction to other caricatures is amazing: HeatSeaker (@HeatSeaker6) "discovered Twitter … and immediately began spamming Pangburn critics with Dave's Russian Bot thread". PangburnWarrior (@PangburnWarrior) "only speaks to Dave and to Pangburn (with literally one exception, when, after tweeting at Dave, he gleefully informed a Pangburn critic he was blocked)", and nodded to an apparent colleague while denouncing Harris and praising Jordan Peterson. That colleague, SkeptixSocial (@SkeptixSocial), who "appeared just in time to retweet Dave's pinned thread along with Sergey and Natasha and 40 of their comrades", also spent some effort, "threatening Pangburn's critics, retweeting Pangburn and those he aspires to befriend." This might be important because the "only small accounts" SS retweeted are the retired attorney Dave, HeatSeaker, and Jig (@JigIsUpp), who:

… explores the feminine side of Pangburn obsession, sporting a classy banner and an avatar identified as "Cute Girl Wallpaper" by a bunch of weird websites.

Our spicy bespectacled heroine is a bit different than the November Crew. She discovered Twitter a couple weeks earlier and tweets more often than they do, using flowery language and copious Emojis. Jig likes everyone Dave and the November Crew like, and she always shows up exactly on time for the dogpiles, but she also occasionally retweets random news stories and articles of more general interest.

Even more than the others, Jig leapt into twitter from the top rope. Claiming to be on the "security team for the Kootenay County Music Fest," Jig's first tweet was to call someone retarded for promoting a video called "The Pangburn Implosion," followed by accusing the former Assistant Production Manager of Pangburn Philosophy interviewed in the video of getting the job by sleeping with multiple people. This is somewhat ironic given her purported professional relationship with Pangburn and the frequency with which she tweets heart emojis at him.​

There was also JanJan (@JanJan53956976), who joined Twitter after Pangburn's personally invitation, and was quickly suspended for what might seem obvious reasons having to do with looking like a bot.

Of this crew, Jameson explains:

They obsessively like, retweet, and respond to each other, often at nearly exactly the same time. They have never paid any positive attention to any small account.​

It's not very good cover, but still, "One way to disguise sockpuppets," Jameson notes, "is to space out the timing of those follows." As you might guess, "Travis does not always do this." Additionally, it probably works better to "not to systematically log in to one, do a bunch of shit, then immediately log out and log in to the next one, do the same shit you did on the last one, and then repeat that lots of times". Furthermore, "Another way to disguise your sockpuppets is by tweeting from different devices":

Phones, tablets, computers, refrigerators. But not this crew. We spot-checked all these accounts, including Pangburn's (including Jig's!), back to Fuck Weasels Day, and never found one tweet that wasn't sent via "Twitter Web Client." Every one of these accounts is operated from a computer, and, as far as I've seen, only a computer. Whenever Travis needs them to assemble and defend him, they're not only available, they're sitting in front of a keyboard.​

[(cont.)]​

 

[Tiassa]

[2/3]​

The Pangburn Equation (in development), ca. December, 2019 (via Jameson).​

Even if we make the case that one person could be operating multiple accounts as such, "is that person Travis Pangburn?" Redacted recovery emails are an interesting investigative tool: Dave, the retired attorney, for instance: "Dave's email address starts with "pa" and is probably a gmail account". A promotional tweet in July, inviting people to email pangburncontest at gmail offers a matching character count. And then there's HeatSeaker, whose email is an info address that almost boggles, unless one forgets the hyphen in pang-burn dot com. PangburnWarrior and SkeptixSocial both include a text message phone number ending in 90, which would coincidentally match Pangburn's office in Vancouver. Remember JanJan, the suspended account? "Maybe that's troops@porpoises.com, a website designed by a black ops team militarizing marine mammals. Or maybe it's travis@pang-burn.com." For the record, Jig comes through clean on the recovery email check.

And there does come a point when the sheer mass of cringe-stupid circumstantial evidence starts to feel unreal. Like the idea of saying, With a setup like that:

Trying to debunk our own claim, we thought, what if these accounts tweeted during one of Pangburn's livestreams? That would be pretty strong evidence Travis isn't behind them. So we found Pangburn's most recent stream, which, at the time, was on the night of November 29. Pangburn announces the stream at 11:32 PM EST (8:32 PM British Columbia Time)​

Something has to fall down, right?

We know the timing of the tweet matches the timing of the stream because Travis livestreams the tweeting of the announcement immediately after the stream starts.

The stream lasts two hours and fifty minutes, which means it ended at about 2:22 AM EST (11:22 PM BCT).

Oh God. Oh no. Look who tweeted.​

Whoops. That was the hypothesis, right?

Heckin' Dave just shot our theory to hell by tweeting about an hour and 35 minutes into Pangburn's stream. The absolute madman. So much for that.​

I mean, right?

You know, just for grins, let's see what Pangburn was doing 1:35 into his stream…

1:33:18:

"My Twitter is starting to get very busy."

<scanning the screen>

"I've got a lot of notifications popping up…"

<digression about posting things for the Yang Gang>​

For a guy with "a lot of notifications popping up," Pangburn appears to have received zero direct replies during the stream (other than the tweet by Dave), and, unless they've all been deleted, nobody quote-tweeted his stream announcement.​

The narrative is what it is; there's nothing fancy, here. Fast-forward:

At the exact time Dave tweeted (from a computer, as always), Pangburn took a break from his stream, remarked on all the Twitter notifications he was receiving (he was probably not receiving many Twitter notifications), then typed and sent some mysterious message that he really did not seem to know how to describe to the cursed people watching his stream.

This may be the first recorded instance of a person filming themselves tweeting from a sockpuppet account.​

Checking in with the post-show discourse, Jameson wondered at SkeptixSocial, who despite all else, "hadn't yet subscribed to the YouTube channel of their favorite person in the world?" and of course that's not really the point. Dave, the retired attorney, and Jig both checked in to diss on Harris.

At the time, a former Pangburn Philosophy account had been suspended from Twitter for rules violations; it remains so at this time.

Are all of these accounts solely operated by Travis Pangburn? Who knows. People are strange, and Twitter replyfolks are certainly not the exception. Travis could have some number of extremely dedicated friends who he convinced to join twitter and rally around him at a moment's notice. It's my understanding that wouldn't violate the laws of physics. Are none of these accounts ever operated by Travis Pangburn? That seems difficult to believe on the evidence above. Whoever's behind the keyboard—and it's always a keyboard, never a phone or tablet (or smart kitchen appliance)—they're certainly coordinated, and they're certainly doing something that isn't supposed to be obvious.​

†​

It is easy enough to wonder what Matt Dillahunty is doing getting involved with "the Jacob Wohl of the IDW", because Pangburn's initial collapse wasn't subtle. Still, though, it's not just him. Buried in the twittery following Jameson's article, someone pointed to publisher Michael Shermer's poorly-written November declarations, traded with Pangburn, of faith in skepticism and the, "application of science and reason". It is probably reasonable to expect his scientific take on the "Pangburn Equation" to be interesting, at least.

The posts I never finished include consideration of that easy cynicism arising with the contempt of familiarity. One way to say it is to wonder: 「Could you please fail to [___]?」 If the reason one behaves awry isn't this or that, we might wonder could they please stop acting precisely as if it was.

And that's the thing about the Pangburn 2.0 debacle: It's just so obvious, but certain skepticism is apparently best reserved for other things.

†​

Still, the idea that folks ranging from celebrity moderate atheist to the publisher of Skeptic magazine↱ might fall for Pangburn's flimsy ruse should not be overlooked. It's easy enough to observe what happens at Twitter and see how certain endeavors could hide inside the noise. In the proverbial dust that follows the dog that follows the horse that who rode in on, it is important to remember that, "People are strange," as Jameson reminded, "and Twitter replyfolks are certainly not the exception."

What stands out is not necessarily the fact that someone was able to see through this endeavor. Rather, it seems worth considering that someone might think they could manage such deception to any useful end. It shouldn't be so easy to deceive people, nor should anyone seeking to deceive expect it to be.

And that's kind of what bugs me, this time later, such that when I see that the note↱ to a reporter from "Zhoshua Chandter", a "new employee in the Southern Poverty Law Center", explaining, "I will process customer complaint on you till 2 pm", I can't help but recall Pangburn's mysterious friend, the retired lawyer advising, "The papers have been filed now and you will have officers from Law Court knocking on your door any day now."

Aside from the Keystone Kopski routine, another aspect that draws attention is how familiar some of the grift is. The one supporter saying, "This was great. Subbed." Jameson is likely aware the point isn't really that the one hadn't yet subscribed to the podcast, that the tweet is two-bit promotion. And PangburnWarrior's tweet thanking Pangburn for "continued confidence in intellectual discourse" doesn't really tell us anything; nor does the next sentence that Sam Harris reminds him of a spoiled baby, nor that SkeptixSocial met him once and "was convinced something was ascue", nor that Jordan Peterson "came out on top in my POV"; it's all familiar vapidity, halfway between sales and politics, pitching nothing.

Seriously, where do I put the note that HeatSeaker now uses the same avatar as Dave the retired lawyer's two accounts, which in turn is a reference to Pangburn's retort to PZ Myers? To the other, I only ask because I was actually looking up that pinned tweet, which in turn is part of a three-tweet, unfinished response to a blog post, and it is nonsense of a sort we might easily recognize, empty and wanting and self-consuming.

†​

Is it really so easy to deceive people? Who?

And while I keep trying to parse out skepticism, because the actual problem here is something else—(¿right?)—the fact remains that it's skepticism. And if organized, professional skepticism can find itself tangled up with something so apparently dishonest, why? I mean, were they fooled?

Toward that last, perhaps it's more an idwer question; the Intellectual Dark Web is another of those propositions that should have easily been seen for what it is.

But more importantly, there is the audience. Out in a range where fringe elements encounter the IDW, the target market has been unstable men easily subject to ideological pilling. The idea that the Pangburn 2.0 debacle could ever have seemed like a good idea speaks something of its intended audience.

Who does Pangburn think he's pitching to? Who did Dillahunty think Pangburn was pitching to?

And is there a warning in all of this? Pangburn's faux fan club, such as it seems, is what it is, and botnets like the ostensibly Russian operation Jameson describes are not exactly uncommon. Still, though, looking at the circumstance through an assertion of practical eyes, it somehow seems a lot of effort for what look like weak results. And while we might speculate about what such resources are really for, the question of the audience, consumer, or mark remains. It's hard to think this is simply about snaring desperate, disrupted, struggling men.

It's just a really strange, extraordinarily stupid episode.

[(cont.)]​

 

[Tiassa]

[3/3]​

Notes on #1-2 Above

@DSchlaw. "The papers have been filed now and you will have officers from Law Court knocking on your door any day now. Wonder, mystery, awe, mysticism, magic, transcendence. This is what almighty Pangburn teaches. Fall to your knees and recieve his gooey release of wisdom...". Twitter. 27 December 2019. Twitter.com. 16 October 2020. http://bit.ly/35o12M9

@MichaelEHayden. "Just a normal USA work email from my friendly new colleague at SPLC, 'Zhoshua Chandter.'" Twitter. 13 October 2020. Twitter.com. 16 October 2020. https://bit.ly/359eGUW

@michaelshermer. "Indeed, @ThePangburn skepticism, which is another name for the application of science and reason, is the best tool we have for understanding reality. And we even have a magazine promoting it! It's called Skeptic!" Twitter. 13 November 2019. Twitter.com. 16 October 2020. http://bit.ly/2FbgDUy

Jameson, Matt. "Disgraced IDW Event Planner Travis Pangburn Couldn't Possibly Be Running A Hilariously Inept Network Of Sockpuppets On Twitter". Medium. 9 December 2019. Medium.com. 16 October 2020. http://bit.ly/2RHfmf8

[―fin―]​

 

[Bells]

Mod Note

16 off topic posts removed.

Same band of people, posting the same goddamn flaming crap that has had to be moderated in other threads.

I don't particularly care what your issues are, many of which seem personal. Cut it out. It is disruptive, annoying as hell and just downright rude and offensive, not to mention is tantamount to bullying behaviour and from at least 2 individuals, stalking type of behaviour. Not acceptable.

 

[Tiassa]

I think this ends up being a thread about bad deception. The tragic Pangburn comedy is as stupid as it is messy, but what brought it to mind nearly a year later was a small episode with badly written English:

• What stands out is not necessarily the fact that someone was able to see through this endeavor. Rather, it seems worth considering that someone might think they could manage such deception to any useful end. It shouldn't be so easy to deceive people, nor should anyone seeking to deceive expect it to be.

And that's kind of what bugs me, this time later, such that when I see that the note↱ to a reporter from "Zhoshua Chandter", a "new employee in the Southern Poverty Law Center", explaining, "I will process customer complaint on you till 2 pm", I can't help but recall Pangburn's mysterious friend, the retired lawyer advising, "The papers have been filed now and you will have officers from Law Court knocking on your door any day now." (#2↑)​

†​

A quick tale from American history: In our capitalism, any second of your life in which you are not viewing an advertisement is a lost opportunity for business. In the 1990s, we had a chance to change this, but in our American way we required people to opt out of a basic presupposition: Having a phone number meant it got listed, and delisting required particular effort; having a listed number meant it was available for anyone to call you at any time of day or night. These years later, a new bonus feature we can pay for in our phone package is to block solicitations according to some unknown list. In recent months, I've been getting a recurring spam call that fronts from around the area, a cheery woman's voice saying, "Hello! This is Andrea from the Warranty Department!" and if you pay attention, she never says which warranty department; it's a cold call of some sort seeking consumers with enough disposable income to have bought something with a warranty. I get more spam calls from the Warranty and Tax Refund departments than I do regular phone calls from people I know. In the American experience, people calling you on the phone in hopes of advertsing, swindling, or both, is a normal and expected part of everyday life. But the cheery ladies from the Warranty Department are as suspicious as the serious-sounding men from the Tax Refund Department who seem to target elderly people.

That was the thing about "Zhoshua Chandter", the "new employee in the Southern Poverty Law Center", who thold a reporter, "I will process customer complaint on you till 2 pm". Compared to the smiling idiocy of the Warranty Department, the incompetent execution of a two-bit ruse to influence or even intimidate a reporter really stands out.

And that, in turn, was the thing about Dave the Retired Lawyer, one of Martin Pangburn's most devoted fans: To threaten a reporter via Twitter is one thing; to do so with that delusional masculinist mysticism can easily read like chanstyle. But the prospect of an American lawyer who says, "The papers have been filed now and you will have officers from Law Court knocking on your door any day now," is absurd; in a tangled web of apparent foreign actors working a commercial-political promotion scheme it probably helps when the lawyer doesn't sound like he's from another country.

†​

If it's about money, it's about money; when it's about politics, though, sometimes the little things stand out. A cartoonist↱ received an interesting letter, recently, criticizing his comic strip on behalf of Trump voters. Various elements stand out, like the construction of one sentence per paragraph, word selection and usage, and hashtag promotion. It's easy to see this isn't really a random reader, but an operational pitch. And while, sure, at that level, it actually reads more like a self-righteous smolder-tantrum not unfamiliar to our own community, another detail demands attention: "You should [do] yourself a favour," the complaint advises, "and check out the [hashtag] and see what you are missing."

Strange syntax, odd usage, and even international spelling. It's one thing to wonder if the ostensible reader critique is an operational production, but it also reads like an apparent overseas operation. And while there has, pretty much the throughout the Trump experience, been a question of a patriotic maga fervor so invested in ahistorical critiques from abroad, there also remains a question of who is supposed to fall for what ruse. Think of the idea that Dave the Retired Lawyer hasn't broken the law in significant part because his pretense is unbelievable, or that "Zhoshua Chandter" has done no wrong by misrepresenting SPLC because his attempt to intimidate a reporter was so pathetically, incredibly stupid. It's not exactly a stamp of innocence.

We can't rule out that the thing was written on a phone, though there aren't a lot of typos; maybe it's a bot, as the meaningless troping does read in a particularly unattached manner that seems to mean even less than much of even the louder magagaga bawling. By the time I wonder which magakag is actually spacing their hyphens like that, it would not be unfair to suggest that's more effort than ought to be neecessary.

†​

And while the missive does in its way recall federal history including letters trying to convince civil rights leaders to give up or even die by suicide, so also does it not. We would like to think that such operatives would at least put on a more sincere effort, but, honestly, the biggest difference is that at least the FBI can write complete sentences and multisentence paragraphs. To be sure, we can invent diverse backstories by which this is a homegrown, individual Trumpfan who just attends this one particular international convention, and this other obscure presentation that, honestly, proverbially nobody uses. But as with recent election crackpottery↗, it's not quite so simple. Even if the authors chose those phrases particularly as part of the pitch, there is still something off about their choices, an evident weakness that doesn't really seem intended to withstand critical scrutiny. And that's just the word usage. It wasn't intended for prime time, but, rather, feeding tinfoilers who want to believe. If there is an international whiff about that pretend quantitative analysis, we need not fret unduly; it simply stands out for not being absent, so to speak. Compared to Zhoshua Chandter or Dave the Retired Lawyer, it's not exactly the most obvious problem about the crackpot report.

And if the letter to the cartoonist has an international whiff about it, I'm not even certain which question comes next. Sure, why seems an obvious question, but line by line the whole thing is a disaster; the question of what the hell this actually is just glitters. Line by line, it's a disaster: Possible international convention in salutation; pretentious generic sentence; something about the phrase, "about 5", like maybe it was precisely four or six, instead; the double return strike before the complaint portion is interesting. So is the complaint portion itself: Laborious generic complaint; no, the DNC trails well behind the cartoonists; has the author ever actually watched SNL; the [hashtag] stories are pretentious, self-defeating bullshit; more than I can count about that sentence on Trumpers having no brain; a sentence that might feel good to deliver might have more impact if it was not so ironically wrong; the long one isn't a sentence proper, but more importantly the exclusion it describes is observably inappropriate; the actual two-sentence paragraph misses the point; the next two paragraphs actually make up a whole sentence, which is a weird coincidence, but the presupposition is not necessarily accurate, and the rest is another hashtag pitch that doesn't meet reality; another variation on centrist Democrats as some sort of marxists; the bit about the fabric of American society is Cold War stuff; and prayer is what it is, but proverbially nobody writes, "out side", that way.

The poe question can be cruel: Compared to the prospect of an AI stringing together sentences, the message would describe somehow distressed or disrupted human authorship. And, really, the diversity of the American experience can, indeed, bring such a person about. But if we take a moment to consider the salutation and a gender detail in the complaint, again, it would not be unfair to suggest that's more effort than ought to be neecessary. No, really: Did the salutation formulate his name as if it was surname first? We're back to an AI, and the question of how ridiculous this gets.

But in a context of an American basket case popping off, compared to some manner of calculated operational authorship, it's just weird.

Maybe Dave the Retired Lawyer would be a random and useless scrap of memory if these strange contexts of poorly executed deception did not keep coming up. Yes, people are going to try stupid bits seeking to influence or intimidate, but this stuff is beyond cartoonish.

Still, even as a poorly executed ruse, we might remember that truth is stranger than fiction. It's one thing to wonder at an AI, but we can never underestimate the power of human cuckery; to wit, even if it was an AI, we can easily wonder what the hell is wrong with the people running it.
____________________

Notes:

@tomtomorrow. "lol we get letters". Twitter. 18 December 2020. Twitter.com. 18 December 2020. https://bit.ly/2KhyQG6