How Scott Cleland and the Zodiac Killer are Alike

Ever since he’s been blogging, Scott Cleland’s blogging has been in overdrive. However, anyone willing to look behind the curtain of his latest post will discover that many of the attributes of Scott Cleland are attributes that are shared by the Zodiac Killer.

• First, Scott Cleland, like the Zodiac Killer, has a face. Eyes, nose, mouth—they’re all there. They are alike in this respect—Scott Cleland and the Zodiac Killer are both, unrepentantly, people with faces.
• Second, Scott Cleland, like the Zodiac Killer, speaks English. We know this from his blog posts—which are written in English—the same language the Zodiac killer used during his murderous spree in the San Francisco Bay Area between December 1968 and October 1969.
• Third, delving more deeply into the language of the Zodiac Killer and Scott Cleland, both use articles like “the”; “a”; and “an”. An equal propensity to use prepositions inhabits the writing styles of Scott Cleland and the Zodiac Killer.
• Fourth, like the top suspect in the Zodiac Killer case, DNA evidence does not implicate Scott Cleland. Diabolically, he has done nothing to indicate his participation in these crimes.

(Dropping the imitative send-up) Scott’s recent post implicating Google as similar to China is probably best described as conflation, a logical fallacy in which similarities between two distinct entities collapse them together.

Scott has many similarities to the Zodiac Killer, but lacks the one that matters: he never killed anybody.

Likewise, Google has many similarities with the Chinese government—all organizations do—but it lacks the one that matters: Google makes no claim to exclusive power to initiate force. That is the hallmark of government which is what makes government so dangerous. Related: Unlike China, Google never killed anybody.

In the struggle between Google and China, there is no moral equivalency. China oppresses a billion people. Google enlightens.

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