Sure it's the same thing as we see in school rooms, workplace coffee rooms, irc channels, and web forums like this one.
The difference is: you or I post a flame, we don't have the police dragging us away to JAIL.
I'll spot you the benefit of not fully understanding why this is important, but it IS important. It's not the way it's supposed to work in America.
I hope the ACLU, the EFF, the Justice Dept., and freedom-lovers of all stripes go after this town with both barrels; if we're lucky, some cops, mayors, and school officials will see some jail time of the Koons/Powell/Briseno variety, and no one involved in this fascist debacle will be left with a dime to his name.
What I wanna know is, where's this guy's website? _____
You sure you didn't catch A List Apart out of the corner of your eye, years ago, as you walked past an Internet cafe in the Mission? Mm-hmmh. That coulda been it.
I always thought it sounded too much like "coq", which is chicken, as in, Coq au Vin.
Maybe KFC should get involved... Chicken addiction is a terrible thing. _____
That's 100% percent of the people who matter.
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Victory in Holland
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In this government, unless you're willing (and able) to start a civil war, you don't matter unless you exercise your Constitutional right to VOTE. This is good or bad, depending on how you view it, but most of all it is fact.
When you don't vote:
You not only don't affect the process, you also don't get listened/pandered to. Your concerns don't get registered, such that you might come in contact with other people who agree with you, or even find that a majority of people sharing your belief haven't been listened to, either, and that had you spoken up, you may have been able to effect your world in your way.
People diametrically opposite to your values, issues and way of life come out of the woodwork to pass as many laws and elect as many people as possible to shut you out of the process. They figure you're either not caring, or not noticing.
I refer you to the Term Limits, Anti-Campaign Finance Reform, Anti-Alternate Voting Methods, and Tax Reform (two-thirds majority clauses, all increases subject to a public vote that you already don't care about) movements as examples of how some people who understand their civic duty are actively trying to exclude you from participating in your government by either limiting your choices, marketing you to death so that you won't give a shit, or otherwise making it tough on you to remain interested in shaping your circumstances.
The thing is, 1) it's your fault they're able to do that to you, and 2) if you already delude yourself into thinking that you can't even write in a candidate you'd like, or otherwise make a lame-ass excuse, they've already won.
People who would normally listen to you and agree with your value system have to move away from your concerns. You can't help them back, because you didn't stand up for your convictions. You don't give them the benefit of your support, so there's nothing in it for them to help you.
Believe me, I've heard personally from more than one Senator, Congressman, or other elected official that our generation (18-35 yrs. old) doesn't get its concerns on the table because we turn out for elections at anywhere from 9% to 16%. That's as in percent of us who can vote.
And if we don't get our shit together, we in that age group can expect to be shut out of any meaningful role in our government our entire lives. We're not suddenly gonna get religion with regard to voting when we get old. The people who are old now (and turning out at something like 62% - minimum) have been active their entire voting careers. They voted during the Kennedy/LBJ Vietnam era, some even before that, and they haven't stopped.
Again, the people who took the time to vote in Holland's election are the ones who matter, and who deserve to tell Holland's public library how their iboxes will be configured or not with regard to content filters. Whether 41% turnout deciding a vote is bullshit or not isn't their problem, and it certainly isn't their fault.
A word about my qualifications: I haven't got any. My web pages are as guilty as anybody else's of HTML errors -- maybe more so: my web page editor, Symantec's Visual Page, makes some dandy HTML 4.0 transitional, but then it goes and slaps a 3.2 DTD on top of it, so web page validators barf when they come within 10 feet of it. I kept hoping Symantec would fix that bug, but they ended up ditching the product. If only it weren't easier to use than Dreamweaver for what I do....
This would seem to belie the statement that Rev. Bob is a hypocrite.
Peer review doesn't work when people get self-conscious about errors in their own work. If the list of people who could participate in open source projects were limited to those who had never written a logic error, or misplaced a semi-colon, or otherwise erred themselves, there wouldn't be open source software.
So it is with webs - the central fact is that help is better than no help, and heads>=2 is always better than heads<=1.
Whether or not Rev. Bob admits his own fallibilities as a HTML jockey is less important than whether or not he is right about his criticisms. That he does in fact admit that he's not perfect (either) is good enough for most serious web designers. _____
Jamie actually has a better idea than I did. All I wanted was the ability to turn off tool tips, either as a client option or as a code instruction on the page (better yet) so it wouldn't interfere with rollovers. _____
It seems to me that at least public corporations aren't governed by free-thinking "people" in every sense of the word that that conveys, because of the concept of Fiduciary Duty.
The way I've heard that defined (corrections welcome) is that the people who actually make decisions on behalf of a corporation must, in doing so, end up at a sole motive: profit. In shorter terms, the fiduciary duty of a corporation to its shareholders is to make a profit.
Not: preserve the environment, do well by the employees, take care of poor people, or any other such altruistic or otherwise lofty goal. Even if the shareholders voted overwhelmingly for some other such "corporate" goal, it wouldn't matter. So one of the basic axioms we deal with when we confront the intrusion of corporations into our civil freedoms is that corporations must attempt to profit above all other goals, or die. In other words, they couldn't not try to profit even if they, the shareholders, wanted to.
And to me, that draws the distinction both in the argument between "people" in the "can't we all just get along" sense perpetrated by tomwhore and some other posters to this board, and the "People" with the fiduciary duty to consume all tangible aspects to our world, including our ideas, thoughts, feeling, and actions. The People don't have the freedom to use their shared entity as an agent for positive social change.
Then, what if that concept changed? What if government released public, for-profit companies from fiduciary duty? It'd be as easy as changing the definition of fiduciary duty to "any tangible, justifiable end." Dare I say it: an OPEN SOURCE legal/value system!
Profit would still be an acceptable one of those, but then the "people" who happen to own shares of a company, in sufficient numbers, wouldn't be limited to it as an option. People would actually have a choice, making them more like "people."
I guess coupled with that would be the elimination of the designation, "non-profit." There'd be one code of conduct for ALL companies, and even if we had to decide what that was, it'd be uniform. Currently, certain non-profits, in order to get tax breaks, are not allowed to espouse a particular political issue or candidate; yet, for-profit companies can and do insert themselves into the political process, almost to the exclusion of regular citizens. Whether you decide if that stays or it goes, it would be one set of rules for everybody.
I welcome replies to this, but until it happens, THERE IS a realistic distinction between us (those who decry corporate intrusion) and those who benefit excessively from ownership and corporations.
I generally appreciate Jon Katz's articles because, to me, he seems willing to paint a picture of technology as it relates to those around us. Laws and the outside world effect all of us, and we deserve to hear and respond to them where they do.
That's not to say that Jon, as a regular "columnist" on Slashdot, doesn't commit egregious errors in language that would get his editor, if not himself, out of a job in the print world. And to continue to submit his posts to Slashdot without the same degree of care he would exercise in Wired or his books is disrespectful, and it smacks of a double standard, like we don't deserve his best shot. But that's only part of the whole picture.
A for content and topic, C- for execution. You can do better, Jon.
That being said, [FLAME ON]
As far as this article is concerned, Jon Katz could not be more wrong about his premises about a "solution" for his "problem" on Slashdot, much less his ideas for possible solutions.
[Be sure to tighten that bun in your hair, Jon, lest any oxygen seep into your brain.]
First of all, Jon's wrong about freedom of expression being a relatively new idea. The concept has existed at least since the time of the Ancient Greeks, if not since the time of language; it's just that many governments weren't sufficiently enlighted until after that time to see such freedom as an asset to progress and their ability to govern.
But the United States is one such government, and has been ever since they framed it into the 1st Amendment as a trade-off for the "consent of the governed." And any constitutional scholar will tell you that that ironclad assertion was meant to cover situations that even the framers couldn't imagine, INCLUDING Slashdot. That rules all and trumps all in terms of this discussion.
America DOES have its prudities, and is too censorious, but that in itself is an injustice, not a premise for change on this forum. Racism's a fact, too, Jon: should we change Slashdot to be more inclusive of racism? Of course not. So why then must we increase Slashdot's propensity toward censorship even more than it is?
None of the rest of it matters, even for such ambiguous, vapid, high-school ideals as "inclusion," "a more accepting community," or even "more filthy lucre." Slashdot is what it is, warts and all, but I promise you we're not having this 'conversation' on Slashdot if it were more accessible to and accepting of newbies, or were interested any more than it is now (moderation, meta-mod, et. al.) in whether or not someone's feelings were hurt. That model is better served by other big-money, sanitized-for-your-protection fora such as cnn.com, ZDNet, and the AOL chat rooms. In other words, if it wasn't hard, fast, and scientifically intolerant of non-factual content, people wouldn't come here to form the community.
Slashdot's members don't deserve to have to F up their system just because Andover went public, or you got your feelings hurt.
No, Jon, Slashdot's value to this community is measured one person at a time, up or down, like it or lump it. Each member has different criteria for that decision, and your criteria aren't any better than theirs just because your prose appears in the balcony of the page, and not in the orchestra pit with ours.
However, the optimal response to this, if you still have a problem, is to appropriate the code (or write some yourself), install a server, hook it up, and set up a Slashdot forum in YOUR OWN image, the way YOU'D like it.
I wish you the best of luck if that's what you decide you'd like to do. Hell, I'll even stop by once in a while to see how it's going.
[FLAME OFF]
(Maybe I should leave my [FLAME] tag open in case I'm not done yet.) _____
She said herself that her kids go to the library to access the Net - what better place to live than in Holland, Michigan: a city where mandatory filtering software is about to be installed on the library's computers (if Wildmon and his minions have their way)?
Of course, the ultra-Orthodox Rabbis are going to have to learn how to code their own porn filter; I would imagine that Jews have different takes on what is and isn't acceptable content than do fundamentalist Christians.
Of course, if the edict is to be taken seriously, that might be a real simple blacklist:
Private entities must donate censorware to the library that they would like available, enough for one copy on each of the public computers at the library, or it does not get installed. This ensures that the burden of expense belongs to the people who desire the service, and not those who are opposed to it.
No using the computers with out a card scan.
Cards should be free to sign up for.
Booths would be visually separated and monitored to make sure disturbances would not occur, and all laws (public exhibition, disturbing the peace, etc.) would be enforced.
Upon request, the censorware must be installed on a box if the patron asks for it, or if a minor or other ward's library card is encoded for it.
Upon request, a computer must be made available that is censorware-free if a non-minor or a minor with permission (or the code) asks that it be done.
Parents would be able to control the censorware code on their children's library cards at all times.
Citizens would be able to control their own code at all times.
I think this adequately addresses the concerns adults have the right to have regarding their children and wards, without trampling the rights of free citizens.
Jamie's entitled to his opinion, which seems to be that the co-opting of the expression 'Y2K' by Christian marketing groups is lame, and that he would like to prank the signs that have such an expression. I admire his imagination: I wouldn't have the energy to do anything else besides laugh at how completely stupid that is. Besides, whatever happened to "I Found It!"? That was pretty clever.
I suppose it is censorship if someone actually goes out and does it. I doubt that would ever actually *happen* in Holland, Michigan (wink, wink). Actually, it's vandalism, which is punishable by law, if the Holland PD decides to enforce it.
You could argue ignorance, but if anything, it seems that Jamie has all the facts necessary to craft an *informed* take about how he feels.
The morality of a flame depends on its context and content. I'll leave that as an exercise to the informed readership of Slashdot.
But there's a huge difference between 'thinking some signs are stupid and wanting to harm them' and 'forcing government through a rigged public referendum to pay extra money to install crappy commercial censoring software (with an agenda) on the *public* computers at the library, and then forcing everyone who uses the computer to be subject to its decisions over their content choices.'
I think that's the major point, here (the second part). Some of us are against it, like Che Guevara was against rich white people owning most of Cuba. _____
You're assuming I meant that 'all Southern white folk are ignant,' which is mistaken. My premise is that cracker may be defined in one sense as an ugly name for a white person who isn't very smart, usually from the South. If I'd wanted to perpetrate a racial stereotype, it would have read '(in the Southern White Folk sense).' But it doesn't. Nonetheless, it applies to Wildmon, and believe me, it's not the only term I can think of for him and his ilk that does.
IOW, I didn't coin the phrase, but I'm using it.
So while you're right that I called him names (of which 'cracker' was probably the gentlest - believe me, I hold much more contempt for this man than I could ever find one name for - maybe 'cancer on and traitor to this country' is apt, but that's 7 words, not one.), you didn't read my post thoroughly enough, and I can't be responsible for your mistaken conclusion that I'm stereotyping with that post.
Does it say Anonymous Coward on your Voter Registration Card? _____
I knew there'd be at least one post in here to the effect of, 'Never mind - move along. This isn't an issue that concerns you (and oh yeah, by the way, I agree with them).' And I disagree with that premise to the extent I can decipher its meaning.
For many reasons, Holland, Michigan's public library is important to ALL of us, not the least of which is that it sets focus and precedent.
For one thing, if they weren't sure that a smaller community wasn't more likely to house lunatic elements of the Right than a large city, you'd be reading about this fight down the peninsula in Detroit or Ann Arbor, not Holland. But they wouldn't dare.
For another thing, if this passes, it only encourages Wildmon and his merry bunch of crackers (in the ignant Southern white folk sense) to descend upon other small communities with their patrician, contemptuous message of censorship and hate.
For example, Lon Mabon was and is our local Chief Hater of homosexuals here in Oregon. When the infamous Ballot Measure 9 (a statewide ballot initiative designed to deny homosexuals their civil rights) got soundly defeated here, Mabon went to the smaller communities with the same measure, to pass as city ordinances. He succeeded in a couple of communities, and now those communities don't get tourism revenue like they used to, except from hate groups like Mabon's.
Wildmon learned his lesson from Mabon and others like him. The larger the group you're trying to preach hate to, the less likely it is you'll get converts.
And make no mistake, this is a hate issue, under the premise that because conservatives don't feel they should pay (or pay much) for public services like these, they're only going to support it if they can inject their 50s-era sense of morality into it. Even though, in this case, it COSTS MORE MONEY to do so.
They know full well that public resources such as a library's Internet connection are most likely to be used by folks who can't afford their own personal Internet connections. They're hoping that poor folk (and those who would, in their good consciences, defend the civil liberties of poor folk) are likely to feel too disenfranchised, too often attacked and too often let down by their elected government to think that it's important enough to vote on the measures at the Republican primary, when the good Christian conservatives are out anyway.
In fact, Wildmon and his minions are counting on it. That's why this ballot is not set up for a General, when the Dems would normally vote, too.
I'd add too, that that's why this is rightly pinned on Republicans, Christians and Conservatives as a by-product of their general attitude: If you're poor, we know what's best for you, better than you do.
Groups like Wildmon's attach themselves to parties in their own self-interest, not the parties. It's up to parties to deny these groups access to the platform if they want to shed blame for the ideology. When there's an important Republican, Christian, or conservative who will denounce censorship, and the hatemongering activities of the AFA, on the podium of the Republican National Convention, THAT's when we can all start believing bullshit attempts at sympathy like "Republican != Censor."
You think it's an accident that John Engler staggered his state's Republican primary? Do you think that he didn't know that Nazis like Wildmon would come out of the woodwork to capitalize on *Republican* sympathies at this election time?
THAT's the big benefit. Not that Michigan would get some additional pub and increased candidate attention - that's the innocuous reason he trots forth to the press for doing it. Michigan does fine for the Republican Party already.
But mostly, this hate leads Wildmon and those who think like him to abandon Christian principles of charity and 'what you have done to the least among Me, you have done to Me' and presume to claim the right to make these people's lives a little harder whenever they can.
If they win, they'll point to Holland, MI as an example of their 'good' work, at least until the Michigan Supreme Court comes to its senses and strikes this down for the blatant assault on our First Amendment rights that it is. And then they'll find other small, sympathetic communities, such as Troy, AL; Springfield, OR; or the nearest tight-laced 'Christian town' near you. Count on it.
If you need this in geek terms, try King's Theorem: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. _____
I could bet the house a pint that none of you had a straight face when you added your helpful tidbit about convection-like currents and N2/CO2 ratios, and I'd win.
On a serious note, I know at least fifty people who could stand to get up from their VDTs long enough to amble down to O'{whatever}'s and tip one back, preferably not alone.
Here's to you guys...you made me laugh, and that's a blessing that goes way underappreciated, way too often. Thanks. _____
This doesn't surprise me at all. Look at what corporate media does already:
Decisions of editorial boards are subject to veto from marketing departments, so that content will not offend advertisers
Most radio, but especially talk radio, prohibits on-air disparagement of advertisers either through use of the dump button, call termination or call screening
Major newspapers, especially those in Dallas, Texas and Portland, OR (owned by the Belo Corporation) routinely omit content that would shed light on questionable business practices and/or the corporate community (the Washington Post had to break the Bob Packwood story, and Monsanto's Terminator Seed Technology scandal was spiked a full year after it broke)
Nearly every major media outlet, save this one, had the wrong take on the Columbine massacre, carefully spun so as not to cast aspersion on the social structure of a highly-conservative suburb of Denver, CO
Conservatives and other corporate media interests successfully fought during the Reagan Era to overturn the "Equal Time for Opposing Viewpoints" rule of the FCC, and for Term Limits for Elected Officials, thereby eroding both institutional memory of political issues and exposure to political messages beyond the mainstream political parties
There's ample reason to distrust mainstream media already, such as CBS. That they're now doctoring allegedly live video through the marvel of technology is only a drop in the bucket, compared to the grander snow job they've been trying to perpetrate on the global public for years. _____
Well, I do believe in censorship. There are some things which are not appropriate for some people. I believe rather strongly in kids being protected from things like porn and vulgarity.
Irrelevant.
Whether you "believe" in censorship or not, your right to exercise it is carefully controlled by the Constitution, even when it comes to other people's kids.
As such, you have the right of enforcement of your pro-censorship beliefs over a select few groups of people: Yourself, your children, people who work for you (while on company time, i.e., your time), children in a school you administer (in loco parentis) and other dependents in your home.
As a citizen, with regard to the people outside that group I mentioned, it doesn't matter what you think is right when it comes to this discussion, except that that decision is left to a majority of the people in your community, and IS STILL subject to the rights of individuals, even children. Even in this plutocracy we call America, it has been demonstrated countless times that when your cultural beliefs come up against my constitutional rights, my rights will prevail.
A public library is a free resource that government provides to all its citizens, and by law, must be respectful of everyone's rights. You do not have a right to command the library to parent your children for you. That job is yours, and yours alone. The library will not prevent you from accompanying your children to the library, or from being over their shoulder every time they browse, or from not sending your children to the library at all. It's not like a net connection isn't within your children's reach at home, where you could most closely monitor them. The library won't interfere with you if you want to filter, or proxy, your children's Internet connection at home.
Where your pro-censorship argument runs into trouble (and resistance) is that you assume that letting you be the public's censor (or part of the public censorship effort) is equivalent to "treating you like an adult," which I take your meaning to be 'giving you the rights you are due as an adult citizen of the US.'
Your rights as an adult citizen of the US are protected without forcing libraries to filter content; it's just that you don't have (and never had) the rights you think you do.
Even if you limit your argument to children, there are two groups: children under your jurisdiction (i.e., yours, which you have full parental control over, IF you decide to use it), and children that aren't. Children that aren't under your jurisdiction are afforded their constitutional rights, such as access to the public library. Their parents may or may not do any of the things I just outlined to control their children's intake of information, but within the law, that's their right, not yours.
When you impose rights you don't have, often you deprive other people of the civil rights that they DO have. Be careful when you do so - it's prosecutable under Federal Law to do so knowingly. At least this country, for all its faults, still has that going for it. _____
I think the "Hellmouth" series was Best Story (to date).
Go ahead and pile on, but it can be argued that Jon Katz, for all the crap he writes, and all the crap this community gives him in return, actually helped the geek community on a lot of levels:
He helped a lot of junior geeks tell their stories from high school hell, and all of the sometimes extreme consequences thereof.
He brought attention from this community to what was and still is happening to young people who don't conform,
He provided a visible counterpoint to all of the baseless Columbine babble brought to you by CNN, and the like, and
He got geek-friendly parents, teachers, and community members to act on and change this unfortunate situation.
Okay, crucify me. _____
Looking in the wrong place
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Apocalypse Not
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Actually, terrorists such as those who blew up Olympic Park and the Murrah Building would not have been caught at the border unless they were leaving the country; that is, they are (or are suspected of being) American citizens.
Granted, the threat of non-Americans committing terrorist acts exists, such as Rahman et. al. with the World Trade Center bombing, but in America, it's dwarfed by the threat of terrorism from Americans themselves.
In fact, Eric Rudolph, the person suspected of the Olympic Park bombing and several clinic bombings, is still at large. Ted Kaczynski went years without being caught. McVeigh and his accomplice were Americans.
Even here in Oregon, someone blew up an 80-foot power tower near Bend over the new year. AFAIK, that person hasn't been caught.
My point is, rounding up every suspicious-looking, olive-skinned person at the border may remove part of the threat (if there was to be one), but it doesn't come close to removing ALL of it. _____
I agree in principle, too, that government should effectively serve the people, but there's one oversimplification in the post I'm responding to that bears a counter-explanation, if you'll bear with me.
When you go to a government agency and ask for some public information, the person who helps you is not Jesse Helms, Jesse Jackson Jr, or anyone else Americans had to vote for to hold that job. They're people like you and me, who applied for and got a job in the public sector, and who are being paid your tax dollars to help you get that public information. Even if they could or wanted to, they do not have the freedom to think outside the box to help you the best way that they or you know how. They operate under a system that clothes, feeds and protects them, and tells them how they will "help" you. The system has a larger set of rules than you (or they) could imagine.
Does the system need fixing? ABSOLUTELY. [I currently contract for a branch of the Feds. I know this firsthand.] If there are things "that need fixing" in your job in the private sector, you can bet you'll never see a job in more dire need of fixing than there are in the public sector. It's worse than the oldest, most tradition-infested private company could ever, ever be.
But does it need fixing because "The goverment I expect to do what I (not particuarly *ME* but the majority) to do because that is why they hold a public office."?
To merely answer this question NO doesn't do it justice. My answer is more in the category of "What the f**k?"
It's not politicians or even public employees that need "punishing" to fix the problem. In order to make it work like you want it to, you've got to change the system under which the government and its employees currently operate.
It involves removing a couple dozen layers of management, modernizing a whole bunch of people who fear change as a matter of principle, hacking (as in slash and burn) a couple million pages out of the Rules for Government Workers, and rewriting the rest into something that people can do their jobs by in a manner that pleases the public. That's for starters.
Moreover, you've got to come to a concensus as a public that that's even what you want to do, much less decide on the manner that pleases the public.
The entire job will take a more monumental effort than has produced Open Source Software. By orders of geometric magnitude.
Al Gore tried to do this by himself early in his first term of service as Vice-President. You saw him on Letterman in safety goggles smashing glass ashtrays with a hammer. He was only half kidding. He actually did some of the job, for some agencies. But there's no way in hell one guy could unf**k Federal Government.
It's not a small job, but until you're ready to do it, just bitching about it isn't going to help much. And even then, it helps to bitch at the "right" people. _____
Oh, there's ABSOLUTELY a consistent moral code that allows for both positions to be held at the same time, and we certainly CAN have it both ways.
It centers on the principle of a demand-driven information economy.
Clients will demand the information of their choice over the Web, and have a right to expect privacy (and sometimes even anonymity) in browsing. That's part one.
Spammers, on the other hand, by definition send undemanded email to clients, which costs clients storage space, bandwidth, and personal time to delete. Therefore, they should be punished.
Marketers don't have a right to my attention. They must earn it based on the criteria I specify, whether I tell them what that is, or not. _____
[I apologize for rhyming my title. It was inadvertent.]
I work for a company that contracts to the Federal Government, and it is constantly merging and renaming itself to keep the people who work for it employed. This has the advantage of giving us several options for spiffy new business cards, and not much else. But this latest round of renaming produced more bowing of heads in shame and suicidal tendencies than if we had merged with AOL - It went something like this:
Our company started out as IDI (Infotec Development Inc. Pronounced eye-dee-eye, not Idi as in Idi Amin Dada). The first merger produced Pacer Infotec, and we are now -- drum roll --
AVERSTAR.
I kid you not - everyone I worked with was like, "WTF - Average Star?? AAUGGGH! That sucks! Who the F thought of that! Oh my God - that's so f**king lame!..." and all the rest of the Kubler-Ross stages.
Don't get me wrong - this company's great to work for, but even now, that name is generally considered a big honking failure.
It's not all success stories, or even sweetness and light, boys and girls. Some times it hurts like stigmata, and the scars are just as permanent. _____
So, on the ballot, the liberal views are generally the ones passed...
Fellow Portlander(?), you are woefully misinformed as to what passes for a "liberal" view, and how often said view becomes law of the land in Oregon.
If it were that way, you can rest assured we would have light rail, corporate taxes at an equal level with personal ones, legal marijuana (not just for medical patients, like it is now), clean rivers (instead of about-to-be-Superfunded ones like the one that runs through the middle of our fair city - if I wanted to live in Cleveland, I would have moved there, but I digress), non-clearcut forests, and enough money to run our freaking schools.
Instead, we have a Republican legislature, a run at the ballot measures every other year by this hate-driven religious freak called Lon Mabon, major industry in our community that pollutes the shit out of us and doesn't have to pay one red cent, lest they pack up and refab in Mexico like everyone else, murders and beatings of queers and immigrants by skinheads EVEN IN PORTLAND, and a University city (Eugene) surrounded by a right-wing logging community and several backwoods villages in the other directions.
I'm surprised that Eugene can even sustain a long-running group of young anarchists, but they do, and when said anarchists are not being misguided f**king idiots and are instead working for constructive change, they can sometimes come up with decent civic ideas.
Of course, having only lived here regularly since age 6 months, I may not have the enlightened perspective of say, some carpetbagging corporate nimrod who trundled up the I from Cali when the jobs had dried up and they'd finished ruining that state with the same wacky bullshit they're now trying to perpetrate here. Not that I'm saying you fit that description, that's just what in large numbers has crawled up the pike and infiltrated our government and business communities, and they obviously have a different take than me.
Naw, Portland, Eugene and Ashland notwithstanding, as a state we're much closer to Idaho (especially, as you noted before, in the more backwoodsy parts) than San Francisco. _____
Slashdot Mirror
If it would keep him from screaming when unattended, I'd make 'em set it up. Hopefully, it AppleTalks...
_____
Sure it's the same thing as we see in school rooms, workplace coffee rooms, irc channels, and web forums like this one.
The difference is: you or I post a flame, we don't have the police dragging us away to JAIL.
I'll spot you the benefit of not fully understanding why this is important, but it IS important. It's not the way it's supposed to work in America.
I hope the ACLU, the EFF, the Justice Dept., and freedom-lovers of all stripes go after this town with both barrels; if we're lucky, some cops, mayors, and school officials will see some jail time of the Koons/Powell/Briseno variety, and no one involved in this fascist debacle will be left with a dime to his name.
What I wanna know is, where's this guy's website?
_____
You sure you didn't catch A List Apart out of the corner of your eye, years ago, as you walked past an Internet cafe in the Mission? Mm-hmmh. That coulda been it.
You get all the permits for your club yet, Jamie?
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When they made Dune into a movie, they compressed 500 pages of mostly history/scenesetting type stuff into 15 seconds of footage.
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I always thought it sounded too much like "coq", which is chicken, as in, Coq au Vin.
Maybe KFC should get involved... Chicken addiction is a terrible thing.
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In this government, unless you're willing (and able) to start a civil war, you don't matter unless you exercise your Constitutional right to VOTE. This is good or bad, depending on how you view it, but most of all it is fact.
When you don't vote:
You not only don't affect the process, you also don't get listened/pandered to. Your concerns don't get registered, such that you might come in contact with other people who agree with you, or even find that a majority of people sharing your belief haven't been listened to, either, and that had you spoken up, you may have been able to effect your world in your way.
People diametrically opposite to your values, issues and way of life come out of the woodwork to pass as many laws and elect as many people as possible to shut you out of the process. They figure you're either not caring, or not noticing.
I refer you to the Term Limits, Anti-Campaign Finance Reform, Anti-Alternate Voting Methods, and Tax Reform (two-thirds majority clauses, all increases subject to a public vote that you already don't care about) movements as examples of how some people who understand their civic duty are actively trying to exclude you from participating in your government by either limiting your choices, marketing you to death so that you won't give a shit, or otherwise making it tough on you to remain interested in shaping your circumstances.
The thing is, 1) it's your fault they're able to do that to you, and 2) if you already delude yourself into thinking that you can't even write in a candidate you'd like, or otherwise make a lame-ass excuse, they've already won.
People who would normally listen to you and agree with your value system have to move away from your concerns. You can't help them back, because you didn't stand up for your convictions. You don't give them the benefit of your support, so there's nothing in it for them to help you.
Believe me, I've heard personally from more than one Senator, Congressman, or other elected official that our generation (18-35 yrs. old) doesn't get its concerns on the table because we turn out for elections at anywhere from 9% to 16%. That's as in percent of us who can vote.
And if we don't get our shit together, we in that age group can expect to be shut out of any meaningful role in our government our entire lives. We're not suddenly gonna get religion with regard to voting when we get old. The people who are old now (and turning out at something like 62% - minimum) have been active their entire voting careers. They voted during the Kennedy/LBJ Vietnam era, some even before that, and they haven't stopped.
Again, the people who took the time to vote in Holland's election are the ones who matter, and who deserve to tell Holland's public library how their iboxes will be configured or not with regard to content filters. Whether 41% turnout deciding a vote is bullshit or not isn't their problem, and it certainly isn't their fault.
Vote or Die, folks.
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Peer review doesn't work when people get self-conscious about errors in their own work. If the list of people who could participate in open source projects were limited to those who had never written a logic error, or misplaced a semi-colon, or otherwise erred themselves, there wouldn't be open source software.
So it is with webs - the central fact is that help is better than no help, and heads>=2 is always better than heads<=1.
Whether or not Rev. Bob admits his own fallibilities as a HTML jockey is less important than whether or not he is right about his criticisms. That he does in fact admit that he's not perfect (either) is good enough for most serious web designers.
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Exactly my point with ALT tags.
Jamie actually has a better idea than I did. All I wanted was the ability to turn off tool tips, either as a client option or as a code instruction on the page (better yet) so it wouldn't interfere with rollovers.
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It seems to me that at least public corporations aren't governed by free-thinking "people" in every sense of the word that that conveys, because of the concept of Fiduciary Duty.
The way I've heard that defined (corrections welcome) is that the people who actually make decisions on behalf of a corporation must, in doing so, end up at a sole motive: profit. In shorter terms, the fiduciary duty of a corporation to its shareholders is to make a profit.
Not: preserve the environment, do well by the employees, take care of poor people, or any other such altruistic or otherwise lofty goal. Even if the shareholders voted overwhelmingly for some other such "corporate" goal, it wouldn't matter. So one of the basic axioms we deal with when we confront the intrusion of corporations into our civil freedoms is that corporations must attempt to profit above all other goals, or die. In other words, they couldn't not try to profit even if they, the shareholders, wanted to.
And to me, that draws the distinction both in the argument between "people" in the "can't we all just get along" sense perpetrated by tomwhore and some other posters to this board, and the "People" with the fiduciary duty to consume all tangible aspects to our world, including our ideas, thoughts, feeling, and actions. The People don't have the freedom to use their shared entity as an agent for positive social change.
Then, what if that concept changed? What if government released public, for-profit companies from fiduciary duty? It'd be as easy as changing the definition of fiduciary duty to "any tangible, justifiable end." Dare I say it: an OPEN SOURCE legal/value system!
Profit would still be an acceptable one of those, but then the "people" who happen to own shares of a company, in sufficient numbers, wouldn't be limited to it as an option. People would actually have a choice, making them more like "people."
I guess coupled with that would be the elimination of the designation, "non-profit." There'd be one code of conduct for ALL companies, and even if we had to decide what that was, it'd be uniform. Currently, certain non-profits, in order to get tax breaks, are not allowed to espouse a particular political issue or candidate; yet, for-profit companies can and do insert themselves into the political process, almost to the exclusion of regular citizens. Whether you decide if that stays or it goes, it would be one set of rules for everybody.
I welcome replies to this, but until it happens, THERE IS a realistic distinction between us (those who decry corporate intrusion) and those who benefit excessively from ownership and corporations.
We're NOT all just 'people' anymore.
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I generally appreciate Jon Katz's articles because, to me, he seems willing to paint a picture of technology as it relates to those around us. Laws and the outside world effect all of us, and we deserve to hear and respond to them where they do.
That's not to say that Jon, as a regular "columnist" on Slashdot, doesn't commit egregious errors in language that would get his editor, if not himself, out of a job in the print world. And to continue to submit his posts to Slashdot without the same degree of care he would exercise in Wired or his books is disrespectful, and it smacks of a double standard, like we don't deserve his best shot. But that's only part of the whole picture.
A for content and topic, C- for execution. You can do better, Jon.
That being said, [FLAME ON]
As far as this article is concerned, Jon Katz could not be more wrong about his premises about a "solution" for his "problem" on Slashdot, much less his ideas for possible solutions.
[Be sure to tighten that bun in your hair, Jon, lest any oxygen seep into your brain.]
First of all, Jon's wrong about freedom of expression being a relatively new idea. The concept has existed at least since the time of the Ancient Greeks, if not since the time of language; it's just that many governments weren't sufficiently enlighted until after that time to see such freedom as an asset to progress and their ability to govern.
But the United States is one such government, and has been ever since they framed it into the 1st Amendment as a trade-off for the "consent of the governed." And any constitutional scholar will tell you that that ironclad assertion was meant to cover situations that even the framers couldn't imagine, INCLUDING Slashdot. That rules all and trumps all in terms of this discussion.
America DOES have its prudities, and is too censorious, but that in itself is an injustice, not a premise for change on this forum. Racism's a fact, too, Jon: should we change Slashdot to be more inclusive of racism? Of course not. So why then must we increase Slashdot's propensity toward censorship even more than it is?
None of the rest of it matters, even for such ambiguous, vapid, high-school ideals as "inclusion," "a more accepting community," or even "more filthy lucre." Slashdot is what it is, warts and all, but I promise you we're not having this 'conversation' on Slashdot if it were more accessible to and accepting of newbies, or were interested any more than it is now (moderation, meta-mod, et. al.) in whether or not someone's feelings were hurt. That model is better served by other big-money, sanitized-for-your-protection fora such as cnn.com, ZDNet, and the AOL chat rooms. In other words, if it wasn't hard, fast, and scientifically intolerant of non-factual content, people wouldn't come here to form the community.
Slashdot's members don't deserve to have to F up their system just because Andover went public, or you got your feelings hurt.
No, Jon, Slashdot's value to this community is measured one person at a time, up or down, like it or lump it. Each member has different criteria for that decision, and your criteria aren't any better than theirs just because your prose appears in the balcony of the page, and not in the orchestra pit with ours.
However, the optimal response to this, if you still have a problem, is to appropriate the code (or write some yourself), install a server, hook it up, and set up a Slashdot forum in YOUR OWN image, the way YOU'D like it.
I wish you the best of luck if that's what you decide you'd like to do. Hell, I'll even stop by once in a while to see how it's going.
[FLAME OFF]
(Maybe I should leave my [FLAME] tag open in case I'm not done yet.)
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Move to Holland, Michigan!!
She said herself that her kids go to the library to access the Net - what better place to live than in Holland, Michigan: a city where mandatory filtering software is about to be installed on the library's computers (if Wildmon and his minions have their way)?
Of course, the ultra-Orthodox Rabbis are going to have to learn how to code their own porn filter; I would imagine that Jews have different takes on what is and isn't acceptable content than do fundamentalist Christians.
Of course, if the edict is to be taken seriously, that might be a real simple blacklist:
*.*
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- Private entities must donate censorware to the library that they would like available, enough for one copy on each of the public computers at the library, or it does not get installed. This ensures that the burden of expense belongs to the people who desire the service, and not those who are opposed to it.
- No using the computers with out a card scan.
- Cards should be free to sign up for.
- Booths would be visually separated and monitored to make sure disturbances would not occur, and all laws (public exhibition, disturbing the peace, etc.) would be enforced.
- Upon request, the censorware must be installed on a box if the patron asks for it, or if a minor or other ward's library card is encoded for it.
- Upon request, a computer must be made available that is censorware-free if a non-minor or a minor with permission (or the code) asks that it be done.
- Parents would be able to control the censorware code on their children's library cards at all times.
- Citizens would be able to control their own code at all times.
I think this adequately addresses the concerns adults have the right to have regarding their children and wards, without trampling the rights of free citizens.Thoughts?
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Jamie's entitled to his opinion, which seems to be that the co-opting of the expression 'Y2K' by Christian marketing groups is lame, and that he would like to prank the signs that have such an expression. I admire his imagination: I wouldn't have the energy to do anything else besides laugh at how completely stupid that is. Besides, whatever happened to "I Found It!"? That was pretty clever.
I suppose it is censorship if someone actually goes out and does it. I doubt that would ever actually *happen* in Holland, Michigan (wink, wink). Actually, it's vandalism, which is punishable by law, if the Holland PD decides to enforce it.
You could argue ignorance, but if anything, it seems that Jamie has all the facts necessary to craft an *informed* take about how he feels.
The morality of a flame depends on its context and content. I'll leave that as an exercise to the informed readership of Slashdot.
But there's a huge difference between 'thinking some signs are stupid and wanting to harm them' and 'forcing government through a rigged public referendum to pay extra money to install crappy commercial censoring software (with an agenda) on the *public* computers at the library, and then forcing everyone who uses the computer to be subject to its decisions over their content choices.'
I think that's the major point, here (the second part). Some of us are against it, like Che Guevara was against rich white people owning most of Cuba.
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You're assuming I meant that 'all Southern white folk are ignant,' which is mistaken. My premise is that cracker may be defined in one sense as an ugly name for a white person who isn't very smart, usually from the South. If I'd wanted to perpetrate a racial stereotype, it would have read '(in the Southern White Folk sense).' But it doesn't. Nonetheless, it applies to Wildmon, and believe me, it's not the only term I can think of for him and his ilk that does.
IOW, I didn't coin the phrase, but I'm using it.
So while you're right that I called him names (of which 'cracker' was probably the gentlest - believe me, I hold much more contempt for this man than I could ever find one name for - maybe 'cancer on and traitor to this country' is apt, but that's 7 words, not one.), you didn't read my post thoroughly enough, and I can't be responsible for your mistaken conclusion that I'm stereotyping with that post.
Does it say Anonymous Coward on your Voter Registration Card?
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I knew there'd be at least one post in here to the effect of, 'Never mind - move along. This isn't an issue that concerns you (and oh yeah, by the way, I agree with them).' And I disagree with that premise to the extent I can decipher its meaning.
For many reasons, Holland, Michigan's public library is important to ALL of us, not the least of which is that it sets focus and precedent.
For one thing, if they weren't sure that a smaller community wasn't more likely to house lunatic elements of the Right than a large city, you'd be reading about this fight down the peninsula in Detroit or Ann Arbor, not Holland. But they wouldn't dare.
For another thing, if this passes, it only encourages Wildmon and his merry bunch of crackers (in the ignant Southern white folk sense) to descend upon other small communities with their patrician, contemptuous message of censorship and hate.
For example, Lon Mabon was and is our local Chief Hater of homosexuals here in Oregon. When the infamous Ballot Measure 9 (a statewide ballot initiative designed to deny homosexuals their civil rights) got soundly defeated here, Mabon went to the smaller communities with the same measure, to pass as city ordinances. He succeeded in a couple of communities, and now those communities don't get tourism revenue like they used to, except from hate groups like Mabon's.
Wildmon learned his lesson from Mabon and others like him. The larger the group you're trying to preach hate to, the less likely it is you'll get converts.
And make no mistake, this is a hate issue, under the premise that because conservatives don't feel they should pay (or pay much) for public services like these, they're only going to support it if they can inject their 50s-era sense of morality into it. Even though, in this case, it COSTS MORE MONEY to do so.
They know full well that public resources such as a library's Internet connection are most likely to be used by folks who can't afford their own personal Internet connections. They're hoping that poor folk (and those who would, in their good consciences, defend the civil liberties of poor folk) are likely to feel too disenfranchised, too often attacked and too often let down by their elected government to think that it's important enough to vote on the measures at the Republican primary, when the good Christian conservatives are out anyway.
In fact, Wildmon and his minions are counting on it. That's why this ballot is not set up for a General, when the Dems would normally vote, too.
I'd add too, that that's why this is rightly pinned on Republicans, Christians and Conservatives as a by-product of their general attitude: If you're poor, we know what's best for you, better than you do.
Groups like Wildmon's attach themselves to parties in their own self-interest, not the parties. It's up to parties to deny these groups access to the platform if they want to shed blame for the ideology. When there's an important Republican, Christian, or conservative who will denounce censorship, and the hatemongering activities of the AFA, on the podium of the Republican National Convention, THAT's when we can all start believing bullshit attempts at sympathy like "Republican != Censor."
You think it's an accident that John Engler staggered his state's Republican primary? Do you think that he didn't know that Nazis like Wildmon would come out of the woodwork to capitalize on *Republican* sympathies at this election time?
THAT's the big benefit. Not that Michigan would get some additional pub and increased candidate attention - that's the innocuous reason he trots forth to the press for doing it. Michigan does fine for the Republican Party already.
But mostly, this hate leads Wildmon and those who think like him to abandon Christian principles of charity and 'what you have done to the least among Me, you have done to Me' and presume to claim the right to make these people's lives a little harder whenever they can.
If they win, they'll point to Holland, MI as an example of their 'good' work, at least until the Michigan Supreme Court comes to its senses and strikes this down for the blatant assault on our First Amendment rights that it is. And then they'll find other small, sympathetic communities, such as Troy, AL; Springfield, OR; or the nearest tight-laced 'Christian town' near you. Count on it.
If you need this in geek terms, try King's Theorem: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
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This is why I love Slashdot. Right here.
I could bet the house a pint that none of you had a straight face when you added your helpful tidbit about convection-like currents and N2/CO2 ratios, and I'd win.
On a serious note, I know at least fifty people who could stand to get up from their VDTs long enough to amble down to O'{whatever}'s and tip one back, preferably not alone.
Here's to you guys...you made me laugh, and that's a blessing that goes way underappreciated, way too often. Thanks.
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- Decisions of editorial boards are subject to veto from marketing departments, so that content will not offend advertisers
- Most radio, but especially talk radio, prohibits on-air disparagement of advertisers either through use of the dump button, call termination or call screening
- Major newspapers, especially those in Dallas, Texas and Portland, OR (owned by the Belo Corporation) routinely omit content that would shed light on questionable business practices and/or the corporate community (the Washington Post had to break the Bob Packwood story, and Monsanto's Terminator Seed Technology scandal was spiked a full year after it broke)
- Nearly every major media outlet, save this one, had the wrong take on the Columbine massacre, carefully spun so as not to cast aspersion on the social structure of a highly-conservative suburb of Denver, CO
- Conservatives and other corporate media interests successfully fought during the Reagan Era to overturn the "Equal Time for Opposing Viewpoints" rule of the FCC, and for Term Limits for Elected Officials, thereby eroding both institutional memory of political issues and exposure to political messages beyond the mainstream political parties
There's ample reason to distrust mainstream media already, such as CBS. That they're now doctoring allegedly live video through the marvel of technology is only a drop in the bucket, compared to the grander snow job they've been trying to perpetrate on the global public for years._____
Well, I do believe in censorship. There are some things which are not appropriate for some people. I believe rather strongly in kids being protected from things like porn and vulgarity.
Irrelevant.
Whether you "believe" in censorship or not, your right to exercise it is carefully controlled by the Constitution, even when it comes to other people's kids.
As such, you have the right of enforcement of your pro-censorship beliefs over a select few groups of people: Yourself, your children, people who work for you (while on company time, i.e., your time), children in a school you administer (in loco parentis) and other dependents in your home.
As a citizen, with regard to the people outside that group I mentioned, it doesn't matter what you think is right when it comes to this discussion, except that that decision is left to a majority of the people in your community, and IS STILL subject to the rights of individuals, even children. Even in this plutocracy we call America, it has been demonstrated countless times that when your cultural beliefs come up against my constitutional rights, my rights will prevail.
A public library is a free resource that government provides to all its citizens, and by law, must be respectful of everyone's rights. You do not have a right to command the library to parent your children for you. That job is yours, and yours alone. The library will not prevent you from accompanying your children to the library, or from being over their shoulder every time they browse, or from not sending your children to the library at all. It's not like a net connection isn't within your children's reach at home, where you could most closely monitor them. The library won't interfere with you if you want to filter, or proxy, your children's Internet connection at home.
Where your pro-censorship argument runs into trouble (and resistance) is that you assume that letting you be the public's censor (or part of the public censorship effort) is equivalent to "treating you like an adult," which I take your meaning to be 'giving you the rights you are due as an adult citizen of the US.'
Your rights as an adult citizen of the US are protected without forcing libraries to filter content; it's just that you don't have (and never had) the rights you think you do.
Even if you limit your argument to children, there are two groups: children under your jurisdiction (i.e., yours, which you have full parental control over, IF you decide to use it), and children that aren't. Children that aren't under your jurisdiction are afforded their constitutional rights, such as access to the public library. Their parents may or may not do any of the things I just outlined to control their children's intake of information, but within the law, that's their right, not yours.
When you impose rights you don't have, often you deprive other people of the civil rights that they DO have. Be careful when you do so - it's prosecutable under Federal Law to do so knowingly. At least this country, for all its faults, still has that going for it.
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Go ahead and pile on, but it can be argued that Jon Katz, for all the crap he writes, and all the crap this community gives him in return, actually helped the geek community on a lot of levels:
- He helped a lot of junior geeks tell their stories from high school hell, and all of the sometimes extreme consequences thereof.
- He brought attention from this community to what was and still is happening to young people who don't conform,
- He provided a visible counterpoint to all of the baseless Columbine babble brought to you by CNN, and the like, and
- He got geek-friendly parents, teachers, and community members to act on and change this unfortunate situation.
Okay, crucify me._____
Actually, terrorists such as those who blew up Olympic Park and the Murrah Building would not have been caught at the border unless they were leaving the country; that is, they are (or are suspected of being) American citizens.
Granted, the threat of non-Americans committing terrorist acts exists, such as Rahman et. al. with the World Trade Center bombing, but in America, it's dwarfed by the threat of terrorism from Americans themselves.
In fact, Eric Rudolph, the person suspected of the Olympic Park bombing and several clinic bombings, is still at large. Ted Kaczynski went years without being caught. McVeigh and his accomplice were Americans.
Even here in Oregon, someone blew up an 80-foot power tower near Bend over the new year. AFAIK, that person hasn't been caught.
My point is, rounding up every suspicious-looking, olive-skinned person at the border may remove part of the threat (if there was to be one), but it doesn't come close to removing ALL of it.
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I agree in principle, too, that government should effectively serve the people, but there's one oversimplification in the post I'm responding to that bears a counter-explanation, if you'll bear with me.
When you go to a government agency and ask for some public information, the person who helps you is not Jesse Helms, Jesse Jackson Jr, or anyone else Americans had to vote for to hold that job. They're people like you and me, who applied for and got a job in the public sector, and who are being paid your tax dollars to help you get that public information. Even if they could or wanted to, they do not have the freedom to think outside the box to help you the best way that they or you know how. They operate under a system that clothes, feeds and protects them, and tells them how they will "help" you. The system has a larger set of rules than you (or they) could imagine.
Does the system need fixing? ABSOLUTELY. [I currently contract for a branch of the Feds. I know this firsthand.] If there are things "that need fixing" in your job in the private sector, you can bet you'll never see a job in more dire need of fixing than there are in the public sector. It's worse than the oldest, most tradition-infested private company could ever, ever be.
But does it need fixing because "The goverment I expect to do what I (not particuarly *ME* but the majority) to do because that is why they hold a public office."?
To merely answer this question NO doesn't do it justice. My answer is more in the category of "What the f**k?"
It's not politicians or even public employees that need "punishing" to fix the problem. In order to make it work like you want it to, you've got to change the system under which the government and its employees currently operate.
It involves removing a couple dozen layers of management, modernizing a whole bunch of people who fear change as a matter of principle, hacking (as in slash and burn) a couple million pages out of the Rules for Government Workers, and rewriting the rest into something that people can do their jobs by in a manner that pleases the public. That's for starters.
Moreover, you've got to come to a concensus as a public that that's even what you want to do, much less decide on the manner that pleases the public.
The entire job will take a more monumental effort than has produced Open Source Software. By orders of geometric magnitude.
Al Gore tried to do this by himself early in his first term of service as Vice-President. You saw him on Letterman in safety goggles smashing glass ashtrays with a hammer. He was only half kidding. He actually did some of the job, for some agencies. But there's no way in hell one guy could unf**k Federal Government.
It's not a small job, but until you're ready to do it, just bitching about it isn't going to help much. And even then, it helps to bitch at the "right" people.
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Oh, there's ABSOLUTELY a consistent moral code that allows for both positions to be held at the same time, and we certainly CAN have it both ways.
It centers on the principle of a demand-driven information economy.
Clients will demand the information of their choice over the Web, and have a right to expect privacy (and sometimes even anonymity) in browsing. That's part one.
Spammers, on the other hand, by definition send undemanded email to clients, which costs clients storage space, bandwidth, and personal time to delete. Therefore, they should be punished.
Marketers don't have a right to my attention. They must earn it based on the criteria I specify, whether I tell them what that is, or not.
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[I apologize for rhyming my title. It was inadvertent.]
I work for a company that contracts to the Federal Government, and it is constantly merging and renaming itself to keep the people who work for it employed. This has the advantage of giving us several options for spiffy new business cards, and not much else. But this latest round of renaming produced more bowing of heads in shame and suicidal tendencies than if we had merged with AOL - It went something like this:
Our company started out as IDI (Infotec Development Inc. Pronounced eye-dee-eye, not Idi as in Idi Amin Dada). The first merger produced Pacer Infotec, and we are now -- drum roll --
AVERSTAR.
I kid you not - everyone I worked with was like, "WTF - Average Star?? AAUGGGH! That sucks! Who the F thought of that! Oh my God - that's so f**king lame!..." and all the rest of the Kubler-Ross stages.
Don't get me wrong - this company's great to work for, but even now, that name is generally considered a big honking failure.
It's not all success stories, or even sweetness and light, boys and girls. Some times it hurts like stigmata, and the scars are just as permanent.
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Naw, Judge Tommie needs to punish MS and its shareholders by making this kid the CHIEF EXECUTIVE.
"I want a cookie! WAaaah! You'we fiewed, Mistew Bawmer!"
"I can't spell Mhyrvold, so yower name will be Stumpy."
"Stewawt Awchin, wead me bedtime stowie."
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So, on the ballot, the liberal views are generally the ones passed ...
Fellow Portlander(?), you are woefully misinformed as to what passes for a "liberal" view, and how often said view becomes law of the land in Oregon.
If it were that way, you can rest assured we would have light rail, corporate taxes at an equal level with personal ones, legal marijuana (not just for medical patients, like it is now), clean rivers (instead of about-to-be-Superfunded ones like the one that runs through the middle of our fair city - if I wanted to live in Cleveland, I would have moved there, but I digress), non-clearcut forests, and enough money to run our freaking schools.
Instead, we have a Republican legislature, a run at the ballot measures every other year by this hate-driven religious freak called Lon Mabon, major industry in our community that pollutes the shit out of us and doesn't have to pay one red cent, lest they pack up and refab in Mexico like everyone else, murders and beatings of queers and immigrants by skinheads EVEN IN PORTLAND, and a University city (Eugene) surrounded by a right-wing logging community and several backwoods villages in the other directions.
I'm surprised that Eugene can even sustain a long-running group of young anarchists, but they do, and when said anarchists are not being misguided f**king idiots and are instead working for constructive change, they can sometimes come up with decent civic ideas.
Of course, having only lived here regularly since age 6 months, I may not have the enlightened perspective of say, some carpetbagging corporate nimrod who trundled up the I from Cali when the jobs had dried up and they'd finished ruining that state with the same wacky bullshit they're now trying to perpetrate here. Not that I'm saying you fit that description, that's just what in large numbers has crawled up the pike and infiltrated our government and business communities, and they obviously have a different take than me.
Naw, Portland, Eugene and Ashland notwithstanding, as a state we're much closer to Idaho (especially, as you noted before, in the more backwoodsy parts) than San Francisco.
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