Strikethrough: Three Questions

[sabotabby]

Is it just me, or is The Big Apology a bit on the passive-aggressive side?

The whole thing is quite absurd, anyway. Would an actual rapist or pedophile intending to solicit victims put "rape" or "pedophilia" as an interest? Wouldn't be more likely to put something like "free candy" or "I lost my puppy"?

So, are we still posting pr0n tomorrow?

ETA: symbioid has a nice post here about why this is a free speech issue, even though it's a matter of censorship by a private corporation rather than by the government:

Here's the thing. You say that only the government can engage in censorship. Wal-Mart, Livejournal, etc... don't. They have every right as private entities to prevent you from saying what you want on their turf. This effectively limits free speech to 1) Your Home (which if you're renting, isn't even technically yours, so if you're landlord has an anti-free speech clause, you're SOL, yes I'm speaking in jest, here) or 2) Government Property.

In this day and age, more and more public space is becoming privatized. Speech can be further stifled by pure prevention in the ever growing private regions (no pun intended... "you can't sell "Rape Me" by Nirvana, in Wal-Mart, for example), or by effectively limiting access to the speech by charging some sort of cost. (thus it isn't "free as in beer")

When every space becomes a commodity to purchase and close off (even if in a public area), the public good is endangered.

Comments

Reminds me of...

[grimreaperess.livejournal.com]

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 much?

Re: Reminds me of...

[sabotabby]

I still don't know what that whole thing was about.

Re: Reminds me of...

[grimreaperess.livejournal.com]

Geeks found the code for cracking DVDs (enables users to copy DVDs to their PCs).

Code was posted on Digg (Digg is big on free speech, quite anti-censorcship).

The person who posted the code was deleted overnight. The code was posted again by a different user, then that user was also deleted along with any mention of that code.

Digg were given legal advice to censor the posting of the code because it was an illegal number (proprietary, top sekrit).

Digg users were furious and only posted stories including the code for several hours until Digg was shut down and forced to post pretty much the same apology "We sucked, we were trying to enforce our TOS on legal advice, you guys were right". Etc.



There are more details and politics (we wouldn't need to crack your top sekrit code if we were able to watch our DVDs how we wanted to anyway, etc), but it was essentially the same thing as this LJ censorship drama.

[jamie-miller.livejournal.com]

[grimreaperess.livejournal.com]

I was wondering what that meant...I would hate to be a concept every hour too...

Earlier adamthebastard said to me "Man that guy is creepy-lookin'. He should be deleted and banned."

[sabotabby]

Oh dear Lord, that's creepy.

[roter-terror.livejournal.com]

I hadn't heard about this but I can't say I'm surprised. Livejournal has a history of deleting the accounts of innocent users. When my blog was deleted for making "unsolicited comments," they wouldn't even explain what that meant or what comments were in violation of the TOS.

[sabotabby]

Oh, I'm not at all surprised. What they did wrong this time was to target a group that's huge, well-organized, and tends to have paid accounts and extra features.

They quietly delete the rest of us on a regular basis.

[lopukhov.livejournal.com]

I remember that. Now is this after Six Apart bought out livejournal? Because I can remember clear as daylight when livejournal did not look like movable type.

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

Sheesh, I posted it today. ;)

And, yeah, I largely agree that corporations have privatized all space so we've got to be able to protest on private, esp. corporate, space. And that corporations are governments, hehe. Seriously, folks, who actually controls your life more? The government or the corporation you work for? And something like 90% of you do work for corporations.

[sabotabby]

Even with the current far-right government we've got, I'm unlikely to get thrown in jail for something I say (my skin's the wrong colour, for one thing). I am quite likely to lose a job or be barred from certain professions, though, which is a damaging enough consequence of acting like one has freedom of speech.

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

Which is, of course, my point, yeah. Western governments are unlikely to do anything about anything you say, but your job will move to punish your exercise of free speech pretty fast, on whole.

Also stuff like . . . the government has never told me how to dress. It has never told me I need to be at a given spot at a given time, it has never compelled me to do particular tasks, stuff like that, without the least input from me.

Tho' the US government works pretty hard to make sure you are submitting yourself to the authority of a corporate master. They are definitely in it together, which is why corporations are governments. The government is outsourcing its authority to corporations.

I suspect none of this is new to you, tho'. ;)

Wildly Off Topic

[rohmie.livejournal.com]

kittum.

Re: Wildly Off Topic

[sabotabby]

Mine was trying to warn me about that recalled contact lens solution last night, but I thought he was just whining to be let out on the roof again.

[jvmatucha.livejournal.com]

Virtually all of the censorship that goes on in the western world is corporate censorship, which lets the government claim it's still running a "free" country.

But as disheartening as the Six Apart jellyfish move, (aka spineless knuckling under to some Christo-fascists,) what is inspiring is the reaction by so many LJers, many of whom aren't politically and socially active, to this move. At least SA realizes, to some extent, that they made one major boo-boo.

PS - Someone needs to use that argument with YouTube, who've become censor-aholics lately. (And not just with us looney leftists and counter-culturists. Far right and conservative chiristians have also been getting censor-bombed by YouTube!)

[sabotabby]

Someone pointed out:

That people get a little testy when those in charge take away their rights, kill hundreds of thousands or drive the environment off a cliff, but if you want to get them really angry – and a protestin' and a writin' and organisin' – then threaten to take away their porn.

Which is, perhaps, a bit cynical, given that certain elements of fandom already overlap with certain elements of activism, especially around GLBTQ rights and freedom of speech issues, but I can only hope that this spurs more people to get up in arms about other issues.

[jvmatucha.livejournal.com]

Cynical yes, but it smacks of a bt of truth. Someone else said recently that the real reason political pressure in the U.S. to end the war in Iraq isn't really working is because we don't have a draft, and, ergo, that since a lot of middle class families aren't worried about their kids getting in harm's way, the pressure can still be resisted by the neocons.

If only we could get these fanfic people up in arms about global warming! >:/

[seanmonster.livejournal.com]

Free candy? Sign me up!

[sabotabby]

Did I mention my van full of kittens?

[peterbilt-47.livejournal.com]

lmao.

[wlach.livejournal.com]

That is all kinds of awesome. Your creation?

[sabotabby]

I wish. I don't know who made it.

[peterbilt-47.livejournal.com]

Well, I for one, am a bit put out. I used to get most of my rape victims from my "interests" list.

[sabotabby]

Don't worry. There's always GreatestJournal.

[esizzle.livejournal.com]

I didn't understand the Livejournal apology, are they unsuspending all the accounts or just the ones where the users agree to change their interests to something acceptable? I'm confused :(

What about this part where they say: "WFI or anyone else may complain but we are responsible for applying our policies to those complaints. Even idiots can be right about some things." Why are they telling us that WFI are idiots, everyone, besides LJ, already knew that.

PS I hope one day you'll catch me in one of my better moods, I do try though! ;P

[sabotabby]

I think they're going through them all manually to see who's a pedo and who's just into kinky fanfic, and they're deleting the latter. As far as I know, they're making everyone change their interests.

And you're always charming, even after an awful workday.

I'm not hiding anything, honest!

[jordansc.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Does that mean that LJ admins somewhere have access to friends only or private posts?

Re: I'm not hiding anything, honest!

[sabotabby]

They must.

[elgordochico.livejournal.com]

Did they ever get around to suspending the account of that baby-raping lawyer from Virginia last year? Last I looked it was still up, and that was a month after he had been charged. I guess it's not enough to be a convicted child-rapist to get your journal suspended at LJ; you have to write bad Harry Potter fiction, too. Such high standards.

[sabotabby]

That's still up? I thought it was taken down after pages of OMFGWTF U R A BABYRAPER! comments.

Apparently, LJ has always refused to suspend journals of actual pedophiles (and racists who've made death threats, and other nasty characters), even when people have complained, citing "free speech." It's only when the fundies threatened their ad revenue that they went nuts and started picking on Snarry69 or whatever.

[elgordochico.livejournal.com]

I don't think it was the ad revenue as much as to fight the perception that LJ is not smacking anyone while MySpace cracks the whip, and flyover states are passing laws to execute pedophiles. You have to love the American corporations and their zeal: if they're not crusade against teh Jihad and for America, they're persecuting the mentally ill pedophilic fan fiction. I think science showed us that pedophilia is, in part, a type of mental illness, which doesn't excuse it but should inform our reaction; maybe solving the problem isn't going to be so easy as just executing and suspending the journals of pedophiles. Ya know?

[sabotabby]

Oh, I hear ya. It's bizarre, though, that after all the complaints (some from legitimate watchdog groups), that LJ would freak out over a complaint by a fundie site run by three lunatics.

[jordansc.livejournal.com]

If Starbucks won't let me write "fuck" on my notepad while I'm in their establishment, that's one thing. If Starbucks won't distribute my latest album, "Fuck, I Prefer Local Coffee Shops," that's another. I don't think this is merely a free speech issue. As I said in another post, unless we were to make the means of distributing albums and LJ posts publicly owned and supported, we're going to run into this.

[sabotabby]

On one hand, this is exactly what we can expect from large, soulless corporations. On the other hand, that doesn't make it right.

[jordansc.livejournal.com]

True.