My previous post resulted in some serious topic drift in my mind so I decided to make a separate post of it.
You may have noticed that I have a subtitle on this blog of "Ramblings of a red-necked, knuckle-dragging, Neanderthal". There are two reasons for that.
One reason is if you call yourself something worse than what your enemies can come up with you take a lot of their power away. This was pointed out to me by firearms/self-defense instructor Greg Hamilton who I am quite fond of quoting. He said when someone calls him some derogatory name in a potentially hazardous situation (as in someone trying to pick a fight) he corrects them by saying, "Nope, I'm a goat f****er." What are they going to do after that? It's tough to say anything worse than that about you and they don't have real means of escalating the situation without getting physical with you. And how can they justify that in their minds? It's pretty much "game over" unless they planned on going the physical route to begin with anyway--in which case you aren't any worse off than you were to begin with.
The second reason I do that is because it encourages my enemies to underestimate me. When they then apply their stereotypes to me and engage with their already half-empty brains in a haphazard way they are in for a rude awakening. I think this is part of what happened with PNNL. I suspect they believed I would never know the real reason they went looking for a pretense to fire me or that I would find out for certain they didn't actually have sufficient grounds to do so. On some level they believed I was stupid. Never mind that my official title there was "Senior Research Scientist II" or that I have a masters degree in Electrical Engineering. I was just a uppity gun nut who needed to be put in his place. Never mind that they put a pile of papers in front of me, told me they were printouts from from my websites, that I needed to "fix things", but then refused, multiple times, to let me see them. What did they think I was going to do? I wanted, nay needed, to see what it was they were talking about. I was a researcher in "Cyber Security". Did they think I wouldn't figure it out or wouldn't at least give it a try? They seriously underestimated me.
Of course allowing and even encouraging your enemies to underestimate you has it hazards. Had the bigots at PNNL not underestimated me they might left me alone rather than commit a felony against me. Or they could have just been smarter about things and made in nearly impossible for me to gather up the facts. One never knows how things might have been different but two thing are certain:
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They were found out and in a big way. Not only the initial hard evidence I found in the website log files but confirmation from the inside that is overwhelming. The points of fact in this lawsuit will never be in question. This was about guns (and a little bit of explosives) and me being an advocate for gun rights.
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Because in the general case it is so hard to prove discrimination when you do have the proof you must make the punishment much more extreme than if it were trivial to detect this sort of discrimination. It all boils down to, depending on which method of modeling is more comfortable for you, economics or risk analysis. Because of this I have an obligation to punish these bigots to the maximum extent I can. What I really want is to see them be financially ruined and go to prison. But despite talking to several lawyers none of them believe I can obtain that sort of relief from the courts. I'm not so sure, I still think it is possible, but I won't be revealing those plans, until some future date when our enemies have less opportunity to evade my goals.
I'd like to explain this second point because it's may not be obvious to everyone. Suppose, as a child, you really liked cookies and your parents rationed them out at the rate of one per day. Further suppose you could conduct one raid per day on the cookie jar, score one cookie, and get away with it nine times out of ten. If you were caught the punishment was you had to do without your cookie ration for two days. You, knowing your math well enough to compute your total cookie consumption over a ten day period with and without the raids would conclude you should continue raiding the cookie jar.
Supposing it was impractical to make it more difficult for you to conduct a successful raid your parents would have two choices to get you to obey the rules. They could either increase the probability of detecting a cookie jar raid or they could increase the cost when they did detect a raid. If you were to get away with a raid only one out of ten times the cost of conducting the raids would exceed the benefits and you would likely stop the raids. Alternatively they could raise the punishment to be ten days without your cookie ration and you again would conclude you would be better off without conducting the raids.
The same sort of thing applies to big time criminal activity. Except for certain cases like "crimes of passion" and insanity there is a weighing (perhaps at an unconscious level) of the risks and rewards. In most cases of employment discrimination against gun owners the bigots will probably go undetected. When they do get caught the chances of punishment are very near to zero. In fact, to the best of our knowledge there has never been a legal case of anti-gun owner bigotry resulting in the punishment of the bigots. That will likely be my toughest problem to solve in my battle. Because it is so rare to be detected and even when detected it is unheard of to be legally punished I really don't have a choice if I want to make a difference for anyone but me. I must go for the largest punishment I can possibly achieve. This is because in the future I cannot allow them, or others, to weigh the risks and conclude committing the crime is worth the risk.
There are certain thresholds that must not be crossed without punishment being severe and perhaps out of proportion to the crime. And yes, I agree that life, perhaps death, in prison is too harsh a punishment for the crime of anti-gun owner employment discrimination--provided the crime could be detected and punished with some regularity when it happens. That's currently not the case so we have to "make an example of them". And the example I want to make of them is, literally, to have them spend the rest of their lives in prison. This is my Biggest, Hairiest, most Audacious, Goal (BHAG) in this case. I know it's possible, just unlikely. But I want them to be aware that is what they are facing. I want them to know that is possible. And even if I can't achieve it in this case I may be able to enable others to get closer in the next case. And the closer we get to achieving that sort of BHAG the less likely the bigots are to take that kind of risk in the future. Given their conclusions about "benefits" of gun control I have serious doubts about many of these bigots being able do enough math to solve even the cookie problem above. But if we make the price of their overt bigotry a significant chance at being rented out by the quarter hour to the person with the most cigarettes they won't have to know much math to conclude they don't want to go there.
Hence by giving myself the title of "a red-necked, knuckle-dragging, Neanderthal" I lured the bigots into attacking me. I didn't intentionally do that but now that they have and I've had an opportunity to regroup I realize I'm in a much better position than anyone I know, or have even heard of, to do what needs to be done. Not that I consider myself on par with him but this reminds me of a Winston Churchill quote, "I was not the lion, but it fell to me to give the lion's roar." Just as Hitler underestimated his enemies so have the anti-gun bigots in this case. And just as the only acceptable conclusion of Hitler's war was his unconditional surrender I see no reason to accept anything different in my war with the bigots at PNNL.
Update: Minor changes were made upon the advice of an attorney.