Tag: politics

Advice to those upset with LJ lately

Don’t waste time and energy fighting with, yelling at, and ganging up on the people who are assigned to deal publicly with “abuse” and “content review.” You may succeed in getting some of them fired, others of them to quit, all of them to feel like shit, and most of them to dislike you, but nothing will change.

Having been on both sides of this ridiculous scene at AOL, I can tell you that people at this level do not make policy. They are not allowed to change policy. Anything they communicate to their superiors about the impossibility and insanity of the policies will be at best ignored and at worst punished. They are not the secret police. The secret police would make you shit your pants.

Yelling at support people because their bosses are behaving poorly is misguided. It’s like beating up the Wal-Mart greeter because your downtown stores went under. Throwing a rotten apple at a meter maid might feel good, but showing up at every city council meeting and being loud there might get the meters moved.

If you’re angry about oppressive censorship and double standards, a concerted effort directed at the management of Six Apart might be effective, especially if you can enlist the support of Internet freedom of speech advocates and organizations. Six Apart has behaved very poorly, and the board and management need to change that situation in public and on record, rather than letting their first-line employees get roasted alive while they let the whole thing go to voicemail.

Even a real-mail letter writing campaign would be more effective than flamewars with people who can’t make a difference.

Unhappy Anniversary: 1968-2008

There are a few reasons 2008 will be 1968 in the U.S. Notably, the Democratic Party has fallen apart and will nominate an unelectable candidate in a fixed convention. It won’t be necessary for cops to remove their badges and beat up delegates this time.

It’s likely that an unpopular war will have its worst year yet.

Let’s hope that the worldwide events of 2008 don’t match 1968, though. Let’s review, in roughly chronologic order, how much fun that year brought us:1968 blam

There were some good things that year too, but I don’t think they make up for the body count and the loss of freedom and the defeat of idealism worldwide. Let’s hope we get a better 2008.

Note: links are to Wikipedia because I am lazy.

Now that’s what I call mail fraud

Impersonating the U.S. Government? Yup. False Census mailer? Yup. Official-looking eagle and star logo? Yup. Aimed at seniors? Oh yeah.

This time the Rev. Lou Sheldon, chief huckster of the religious right, has really boned it. I reported it so far to the Census Bureau and the Post Office. Oddly there’s an article from last year about this from the SFGate site but no one is yet in jail.

cut for large scan

local politics: white supremacists, soccer, and newspapers

The publisher of our local rag, Tom Johnson, is a sensible guy, and he wrote a thoughtful editorial on Friday. He
rightly points out that one of the city’s parks has been designated a “passive park,” which is an entirely new concept, exactly to keep Mexican-Americans and other soccer fans from playing in the park.

This is of course the work of Costa Mesa’s racist-majority city council, which includes now internationally known Mexican-baiter Mayor Allan Mansour. But Johnson moves past Mansour to the real force behind the local spiral into race war.

The editorial called out our local white supremacist bile factory, Mr. Martin H. Millard. Millard straddles the border between mainstream politics and skinhead neo-Nazism adroitly. He delivered support and votes for Mansour while keeping his scarier buddies out of the picture. He’s slime. And Johnson points him out very accurately as one of Costa Mesa’s biggest problems.

The response from Millard at CMPress would be funny if he wasn’t so powerful.

Tip of the hat to Geoff West at A Bubbling Cauldron for this story.

…since Keyser Soze flew his book depository into the Reichstag towers…

I am in a crabby mood because I blew off some things I shouldn’t have, and because I got sunburned on one side of my face due to inattention, and because weltschmerz. Therefore I would like to point out that this U.S. holiday called “Memorial Day” is the original day of remembrance for the dead of the U.S. Civil War, which was the worst thing ever to happen in this country, and which we should remember because so many people died or had their lives wrecked. And that the day we call Veterans Day was originally Armistice Day because it commemorated the end of the Great War which was the worst thing ever to happen in the entire world, and which we should remember because so many tens of millions of people died or had their lives wrecked.

And finally that the day our current administration wishes to call Patriot Day commemorates a disastrous terrorist attack on our nation and the final irreversible step from republic into empire, forever.

Hail Caesar and have a nice barbecue.

POLITICS

Because I am having a bad work day and I didn’t sleep, here’s a cranky political bit.

I read and hear and see various thoughtful “analysts” and “pundits” and political types discussing the Iraq war lately, and they keep saying things like this: “How did this intelligence failure occur?” and “How is it that we proceeded on bad evidence about weapons of mass destruction?” and “How can we improve/reform/rebuild our intelligence services to avoid these blunders in the future?”

There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The WMD rationale for the war was a deliberate lie from beginning to end. Anyone who stood up to the lie, especially in the intelligence services, was fired or sidelined. Parallel intelligence services were set up exactly to repeat the lie in official documents. An ugly revenge was taken on an official who stuck to the truth. This is all common knowledge.

So why are these beard-stroking collaborationists musing in a measured and dignified way about the strange and certainly unfortunate case of the not-quite-accurate intelligence estimate? Why hasn’t Hillary or Obama or anyone at all with access to the microphones and the rabbit-ear TV come out and said “J’accuse, Mr. President: you have lied to us and done so deliberately, and you know full well there were no WMD, and you and your lackeys have sent us into a bloody unwinnable war out of pride and greed?”

I’m supposed to understand all the cynical reasons why politics is shitty but this one is just past me. These people have so much to gain from telling that truth loudly; what are they afraid of, exactly?