Kill The King

I have confidence that I am with the majority of sentient humans when I say that "professional" spammers (or even amateur pranksters) ought to be staked to an anthill, vivisected with a rusty spoon, and slowly fed their own entrails. There is no room for compromise on this, frankly; 250 things per day in my inbox, ranging from financial and pharmaceutical scams apparently designed to gull the impossibly large market of single-digit IQ's with access to credit cards, to the vilest types of pornography imaginable (and I'm not exactly a prude). And that's every day; Sundays, holidays. I spent part of Christmas Day clearing shit with headers advertising boner pills and grandma porn, before my unsuspecting 5-year-old daughter gets on to play her Dora the Explorer games.

Now, when you openly brag about your spamming practice to the point that you proclaim yourself the Spam King, then maybe the anthill's not quite enough. Maybe, as they say in Bush's imaginary West, hangin's too good fer 'im.

Richter is no stranger to the spam community. Known as the "spam king of Colorado," Richter had been sued by New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) for sending unwanted messages to New York-based users of Hotmail, Microsoft's Web-mail service.

That suit was eventually settled, with Richter paying millions of dollars in damages and agreeing to change his e-mail marketing practices.

I dunno. Seems to me that the worst thing you can do to a wannabe pirate, a pretend bandito who is in reality nothing more than a wriggling parasite in the alimentary canal of the interwebs, is fucking bankrupt them. They don't have the self-respect to just grab a gun and blow their brains out, unfortunately. So let's make sure at least that these sorts of enterprises will only bring them financial misery. Fuck "millions of dollars in damages"; this motherfucker should be pushing a shopping cart, and I don't mean a virtual one.

This is not a First Amendment issue, nor is it an entrepreneurship issue. Freedom of speech is not merely limited to not being able to shout "fire" in a crowded theater; oddly, you're also not allowed to wallpaper people's houses with flyers announcing your stupid idea, and then stand outside the house with a fucking bullhorn 24/7 reiterating said scam. And there's nothing remotely entrepreneurial about some piece of shit holed up in Colorado with bunch of bots, pestering the rest of the planet all fucking day with this miserable crap.

This is not satire; this is not schtick. I hate these fucking people, and seriously wish they would shrivel up and die painfully. Failing that, people like Scott Richter need the harshest punishment possible meted out to them -- actually having to work for a living.