"It's a little pathetic, frankly, that so many are up in arms. There are serious real-life situaitons where shit like this happens all the time (no fly lists that you can't get off of, voting blacklists, etc. ad nauseum) and there is no outcry from these jokers."
No outcry?! I hear outcry about those (yes, more important) things all the time.
The difference here is that there was a chance of the cry being heard by the relevant authority. The TSA is not only unresponsive but kind of unreachable, the voting blacklists are implemented by folks doing it intentionally and unlikely to be swayed by complaints from the folks they intended to victimize -- in both of those cases, we have to convince others, our elected representatives, to care enough to act as intermediaries (unless we want to just skip the soapbox, the ballot box, and the jury box, and proceed directly to the ammo box). At LiveJournal, there's the possibility of directly affecting the company's well-being, either by removing our subscriptions from their revenue stream or by removing our content and thus giving their advertisers less to advertise on.
I do agree that those other outrages are more important, and that it would be good to see people get as active about them as they've been about this, but a) saying that they don't complain at all about the no-fly list and caging and such is unfair, and b) after a few cranial collisions with a brick wall, it gets harder to convince people to keep trying instead of falling prey to "learned helplessness".
Hey, who knows, maybe (putting on my biggest optimist-hat, the one with the brim that obscures my vision) maybe this episode will wind up making a bunch of LJers feel empowered and make them a little bit more likely to heed the call to push for those larger wrongs to be corrected as well...
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"It's a little pathetic, frankly, that so many are up in arms. There are serious real-life situaitons where shit like this happens all the time (no fly lists that you can't get off of, voting blacklists, etc. ad nauseum) and there is no outcry from these jokers."
No outcry?! I hear outcry about those (yes, more important) things all the time.
The difference here is that there was a chance of the cry being heard by the relevant authority. The TSA is not only unresponsive but kind of unreachable, the voting blacklists are implemented by folks doing it intentionally and unlikely to be swayed by complaints from the folks they intended to victimize -- in both of those cases, we have to convince others, our elected representatives, to care enough to act as intermediaries (unless we want to just skip the soapbox, the ballot box, and the jury box, and proceed directly to the ammo box). At LiveJournal, there's the possibility of directly affecting the company's well-being, either by removing our subscriptions from their revenue stream or by removing our content and thus giving their advertisers less to advertise on.
I do agree that those other outrages are more important, and that it would be good to see people get as active about them as they've been about this, but a) saying that they don't complain at all about the no-fly list and caging and such is unfair, and b) after a few cranial collisions with a brick wall, it gets harder to convince people to keep trying instead of falling prey to "learned helplessness".
Hey, who knows, maybe (putting on my biggest optimist-hat, the one with the brim that obscures my vision) maybe this episode will wind up making a bunch of LJers feel empowered and make them a little bit more likely to heed the call to push for those larger wrongs to be corrected as well...