Trying to utilize the tax enforcement arm of a government to fuck with people you don't like is pretty evil.
I suppose, then, it's a good idea I
never suggested any such thing.
If we're referring to
@Caverlock or the one or two people who mentioned it in the Fatty thread, nothing in
anything they've done or said is indicative that any report they might make to the IRS with regard to the SFWA is about "fuck[ing] with people you don't like".
Fatty purports to be a "well-known" author - a
public figure, in other words. The SFWA purports to be a
serious advocate for persons who are authors in the science-fiction and adjacent genres.
Further, the SFWA is currently organized as a
publicly-funded "charity" which put dollars earmarked for its legal fund behind a frivolous lawsuit that, had it succeeded, would have, at the very least, stifled criticism of science fiction and sci-fi-adjacent authors, regardless of whether or not it was deserved and, at worst, potentially destroyed this website and the community of users thereof.
Whether or not they did this with knowledge of what their plaintiff's true goals were - I submit to you that they likely had no such knowledge nor did they realize their plaintiff was such an obnoxious fruitcake - or whether or not their intention was simply to defend people from abuse of "review" functions such as those on Amazon and "Good"reads [to the extent they put any great amount of thought into it at all, it probably went no farther than that] and regardless of any failure of their own legal counsel to actually delve into the individual who requested the funds and the arguments he and counsel hired on the SFWA's dime would make in the lawsuit, they did take the extraordinary step of expending even more legal funds to avoid answering the question we already know the answer to: did they fund the lawsuit.
Beyond that, one of their rationale's for their opposition to Jerry Jen attempting to obtain relevant information from them regarding the matter was that - and, again, I'm paraphrasing - their members allegedly feared their personal information being revealed to a "community of stalkers" or something along those ridiculous lines.
As absurd as all of this is when looked at objectively and when considering all the facts and nuances, there was a potentially
serious problem first for the defendants and for this website and its community [and other similar ones].
I don't fault anyone for any good-faith belief they may have that the SFWA should be held accountable in some way - and, it bears repeating, I don't endorse the idea of reporting them to the IRS for "tax fraud" for reasons previously enumerated - for putting funds received from their members as dues and from the "public" [that is the community of authors of science fiction and adjacent genres and persons who consume their works] behind what, in hindsight, appears to have been nothing but an effort by a self-aggrandizing piece of shit to use the legal system to, in your words, fuck with people who opined that he - at the very least a
limited-purpose public figure by virtue of his alleged "well known" science fiction author status and his very public [and inflammatory] social media presence - was a lousy writer [ a very clear statement of opinion which cannot be "defamatory"] who is fat and has bitch tits [two objective truths, which also cannot be "defamatory"].
It's certainly not any better than if people in the Luna Slater thread encouraged calling the police to report her and her boyfriend doing drugs. Or if people in the Peetz thread encouraged calling animal welfare agencies for his and Chantal's cats.
I don't follow either of those particular cows, so I have no idea what, if anything, they may have done to warrant any involvement by lew enFARCEment in their lives.
There is a particular cow on this site whose true identity was used fraudulently on a website very similar to the Other Forum where anyone could post using any name they liked to post a threat to commit violence against elementary school students. That person - the cow, not the person who fraudulently used his identity - was arrested, charged with a felony and spent approximately one month in jail as a result of the hoax threat made in their name [their own idiocy and cowish ways played into the charge and the jail time, but never-mind that now].
Obviously,
evil people who wanted nothing more than to "fuck with people they didn't like" were behind that effort.
That doesn't change the fact that several years prior that same cow publicly stated that he wanted to "blow up" a local business [along with a picture of what appeared to be a home-made pipe-bomb]. He was rightly reported to LE and was convicted of a misdemeanor with regard to that event.
I hope you, and others, can see the distinction between "fucking with" a person and doing the right thing by reporting what you have a good-faith reason for believing is a genuine threat.
Regardless, Null is not secret about his feelings towards the federal government's enforcement agencies, has told people to fuck off from messing with lolcows (and lolcow communities), and specifically expressed ire at using the federal government to mess with thread subjects.
Indeed, but irrelevant as far as it concerns the matter at hand as described in my responses to your first quote above.
You can't complain after the fact that there are consequences for encouraging the exact type of activity that Null explicitly doesn't want on his forum.
You're right, and I have neither encouraged the type of behavior he explicitly doesn't want or complained about the consequences.
