Mabus goes quiet
Tim Farley’s History of Mabus is terrifically useful, and naturally rather shocking.
But let me assure you, Mabus’ threats go way beyond the norm, both in content and sheer volume. I talked about the volume above, so let’s see some of the content.
He tells people they are going to die that day or “cease to exist”. He threatens executions. He uses offensive terms starting with “bitch” and getting far worse. He threatens people’s loved ones…He threatens to cut off people’s heads and tells them they are “finished.” He asks people if they think they “deserve to live”. He says he is going to “pound you into the dust” and that you will suffer the “worst form of torture.”
But the Montreal police did nothing.
Phil Plait gave a report to a sheriff by telephone. Michael Shermer told me he obtained a restraining order to ensure Mabus would stay clear of him. Canadian skeptic Steve Thoms and blogger Greg Laden also filed reports. There are no doubt others.
On February 10, 2011 I was finally able to get a copy of my report from yet another Atlanta Police office across town. I quickly took it to a local print shop and faxed it to the Montreal Police.
And nothing happened. For me or for anyone else.
Farley tweeted some journalists, which was the right idea, but he picked the wrong journalists.
Montrealer William Raillant-Clark (@wraillantclark) is a press atttaché for the University of Montreal. He would have been the right journalist, had I found him.
On the morning of August 8 he was monitoring Twitter as part of his job. He noticed this retweet by science writer Carl Zimmer…
And the rest is history. Then there was that petition…
Meanwhile, the retweets of the Tumblr post were working their magic. At some point on Tuesday, they caught the eye of Kyle VanderBeek, a skeptic who works for change.org in San Francisco.
Kyle saw those tweets with the emails in them, and knew he had a potential tool right at his fingertips. He created a petition titled “Montreal Police: Take “Mabus” death threats seriously” and configured it to send responses directly to the SPVM public email address (which we saw above).
Yup. I linked to it here (and signed it of course). Some of you will have signed it. And it worked. Yes, Virginia, petitions actually work (some do). Whaddya know.
Best case scenario: Markuze has a Thing askew inside his head, which can be fixed with a little tug and pull and suture. He is released to live a sane and happy life, volunteering for the local CFI by way of reparations.
Update: apparently I didn’t link to it here; at least I can’t find it, so I must not have. I suppose I posted it at Facebook and Twitter and meant to post it here but forgot. Bad priorities. First duty is here.
I don’t understand why his threats were not taken seriously, many of the horror stories we read about begin with this kind of harassment and threats. No one puts that much effort into death threats when they don’t really mean it. Sure its the internet and people say stupid stuff all the time, but rarely do people go to such lengths and usually its in the middle of a heated argument.
The following is pure conjecture, though it is based on some experience in the area:
Its probably a cost-benefits thing. If they spent the resources it took to identify and prevent serious crime, they get little credit for it and are questioned about their expenses.
If they wait until a serious crime is committed by the same person, they get high-profile coverage and kudos for solving the case. The criticism for not preventing it is soon forgotten until the next time.
This bit from the Vancouver Sun report of Mabus’ arrest jumped out at me:
Why “pseudo-religious”? There is nothing at all bizarre, beyond-the-pale, or even slightly unusual about Mabus’ conservative Christian creationist religious views. His fanatic, clearly disturbed way of defending those views lies many, many miles beyond even the somewhat vague boundaries of reasonable behavior, but his actual religious views are perfectly ordinary and quite widespread. The only conceivable reason to label his views “pseudo-religious” is to distance his beliefs from those held by many Christians, but in fact no such distance exists. Must the overblown deference shown to all religious beliefs extend so far as to deny that a mentally disturbed person might adhere to the same basic set of beliefs as other religious adherents? At the Vancouver Sun, the answer is clearly “Yes.”
David- The most likely reason his threats weren’t taken seriously is because in a city of any meaningful size, the sheer number of threats made and reported to the police is sufficient to prevent the police from spending any time on them unless something is brought to their attention to suggest that a particular threatening incident is more serious than others. And the sad fact is that the police aren’t going to go looking for those extra details on their own.
Good point, G. I saw that but didn’t register it.
The petition was effective because it triggered an e-mail to be sent to the Montreal police everytime someone signed :)
G Felis has hit it on the head. The literalist might point out that “pseudo” in fact means “false” or “fraudulent” in Greek. Which makes perfect sense with terms like “pseudoscience.” In this sense, there’s nothing pseudo about Mabus’ worldview. For he isn’t masquerading as a religious zealot, rather, he’s the real deal.
The use of “pseudo” there is kind of a big deal because of the context. I think it’s also meant to somehow prevent, well, people like us from saying that this fellow was capital-R Religious. No no, you see, he was pseudoreligious.
Re ‘Mabus’ conservative Christian creationist religious views’, I seem to recall hearing some years back that, oddly enough, Markuze is actually some variety of Jew. And had spent some time in Israel.
… damned if I can remember now where any of this comes from, mind you.
Somehow, I think if he was an atheist making threats to religious people (or people with pseudo religious views?), he would have been arrested a lot earlier– and Christians would use this as evidence that atheists were dangerous.
I read somewhere today (the Ars Technica story, I think) that Mabus is also very enthusiastic about the prophecies of Nostradamus, and had engaged in the same sort of obsessive internet stalking and issuing of threats against a few people who pooh-poohed those for the complete bunkum they are. If Mabus had focused primarily on defending the reputation of “the divine prophet Nostradamus” with his stalking-and-threatening behavior, I could see classing his beliefs as pseudo-religious. But that simply isn’t the case. Most of his venom was inspired by defense of perfectly ordinary conservative/creationist Christian dogma, and was directed first and foremost at critics of creationism in particular, and secondarily at atheists in general. If the journalist who wrote the Vancouver Sun piece had mentioned the Nostradamus stuff, maybe I’d consider the addition of “pseudo” justified: But he didn’t mention Nostradamus at all, and I’d bet good money that he didn’t even know about that aspect of Mabus’ beliefs when he wrote the article because that’s waaaaay too juicy/weird to have been left out of the story if he’d known. That means he should have seen that however bizarre and disturbing Mabus’ behavior in defense of his beliefs was, the beliefs he was defending seem perfectly ordinary on the available evidence.
“Pseudo-religious,” indeed! Hmph!
I should add something about Nostradamus one of these days.
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