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A lot to digest from the election, which had this cynic about electoral politics surprisingly hopeful — I care far less about the President than that we (some of the American people) voted for more equality and less drug war. But how long before Kucinich’s prediction comes true and a local police department kills someone with a drone?
An interesting development was the election of the country’s first openly pansexual elected official: Mary Gonzalez elected to the Texas legislature from El Paso. I’m exhausted from celebrating last night in one of downtown Austin’s pocket gayborhoods (the queer clubs are in clusters instead of one strip). It’d be an understatement to say the mood was jubilant as Obama referenced LGBTQ people during his acceptance speech. It was lovely to get swept away in a little bit of that enthusiasm, even if my cynical side kept me muttering snarky comments to my friends.
This is the latest open thread. What’s on your mind?
22 Comments
In a dependent ridden society everything we do grows into an industry. If we make a living killing people on a kkill list, the kill list will grow longer. If we make a living fighting drug use, the fighting will get bigger and more expensive. If we make a living building weapons for dictators and wars, there will be more dictators and wars. If we make a living foreclosing to steal homes from people, there will be more foreclosures to steal. If we make a living cutting the wages for more profit there will be a continual lowering of the standard of living. This is not the house that Jack built, it’s the one he destroyed.
I agree!
“Pocket gayborhoods”? I never really noticed that about Austin. In fact, one of the things that really attracted me to Austin was the fact that in many cases, it’s not gays getting together and partying with gays or straights only hanging with straights but a whole lot of intermingling. Houstopolis has gay neighborhoods but I never really found that in Austin. Sure, there were some places which had a greater concentration of gays than others. The Bull Creek apartments for example, had a lot of gay residents when I left but that wasn’t fixed or anything. During the five years I lived there, it went from straight to gay and back again a couple of times at least. We sure had some wonderful pool parties!
Some well-stated ideas! The support for an end to at
least the most egregious aspects of the drug wars, and
for marriage equality, was most refreshing! It is
possible to have meaningful victories. And the very
narrow defeat of Proposition 34 in California to
abolish the death penalty by 47%-52%, as compared to
the vote drastically to expand it in 1978 by 71%-29%,
is a measure of real progress — especially if we can
stave off executions here until the struggle is
finally won.
But it also remains true that the means determine
the ends — drone assassinations beget drone
assassinations. The failure to impeach President Bush
or hold torturers accountable — as opposed to a
latter-day Daniel Ellsberg like Brad Manning — warns
that the “new normal” can become harder and harder to
shake.
Looking back not quite 50 years to the first days of
my own political activism, I fear that Barack Obama
could be to the art of “kill lists” as Lyndon Baines
Johnson was to escalation of the U.S.-Indochina War.
If a Republican threatens it, it’s “extremism.” If a
Democrat actually does it, it’s “bipartisan foreign
policy.” And recalling the bombing of MOVE in
Philadelphia, it just might become “bipartisan
domestic policy” as well.
Since I (apparently like you) wasn’t all that invested in the Presidential horse race but may be able to dredge up at least a little satisfaction that the hearts of the American people may – by a slim margin – be in a slightly better place than they might have been, I’ll take this opportunity to ask a question (and do it here just in case someone might consider it a ‘complaint’):
Do people ‘get disappeared’ here? Someone who took on TBorg yesterday for some of his exceptionally execrable bullshit seemed to think that might happen but that seemed unlikely to me – until an entirely different person apparently disappeared today: diaries gone, membership gone, only a few comments left. Not someone I’ve ever been aware of here (I don’t drop by that often) – the only reason I noticed was that I had a diary tab set up to read but when I refreshed it a while later, lo and behold, ‘page not found’.
My curiosity being aroused I used Google’s cached entry and found it, plus two other disappeared diaries, none of which seemed to have anything remotely objectionable in them (nor did the few comments I found, though I don’t pretend to have done an exhaustive search).
The member was ‘wanderindiana’, and the sole indication that s/he ever existed here seems to be those few comments plus a dangling entry at http://my.firedoglake.com/wanderindiana/ with links to nowhere (but not at http://my.firedoglake.com/members/wanderindiana/ which simply dumps one back to http://my.firedoglake.com/ without comment).
I do understand that some of your links have been scrambled recently, but the thoroughness with which this person has been expunged suggests that was not the case here. While I understand why the management might not wish to go into details about such situations should they occur, I would like to know if they’re at all common.
Only the most egregious violators of the rules of engagement get “disappeared” around here and when that happens. ALL of their content goes bye-bye.
Hint: One of those rules is calling people names.
I don’t find the LGBTQ enthusiasm lovely, even though I claim to belong to that community. I find it incredibly and depressingly narrow. Have we truly reached the point where to be ‘progressive’ means espousing the interests of a section of the population, regardless of the rest? When a drone blows up a family in Afghanistan, or Libya, or US-backed killers blow up some people in Syria, or when Obama hunts down whistleblowers in the US more viciously than any president before him, or expands the police state, are civil rights and human rights really being furthered? Or are we in fact taking huge steps backwards in civil rights and human rights?
And what about the defeat of prop 37 in California, the labeling of GMOs? Wasn’t that a devastating defeat for human freedom? Do we not have a right to know what we are being fed? How basic a right is that?
I think Martin Luther King was right many decades ago and would be more right today. When the struggle for truth and freedom and justice becomes the struggle for a subgroup of the population, it turns into its opposite.
Why would you ‘disappear’ someone at all? I can see suspending someone’s privileges if they engage in some truly vicious namecalling, though I suspect different people would define that differently, but that is no justification for ‘disappearing’ them entirely, it seems to me. It’s a basic police state tactic to rewrite history by disappearing someone because they offended. The right approach is surely to address the offense, not whatever preceded it.
We do have the capability to delete someone’s account or to make their work inaccessible by labelling them as a ‘spammer.’ But neither seems to have happened here. I am bringing this situation up with our tech team.
Hi
Just to let you know I have verified with our tech team that this appears to be a bug or system error. we are looking into it, but please don’t panic. we don’t delete people’s accounts unless they violate our rules (often repeatedly) not just because they have strong opinions someone disagrees with or anything like that.
You’re right: Austin doesn’t have gayborhoods the way a place like Dallas or Chicago has them. It is one of the interesting features of the city.
But our queer clubs have tended to cluster lately. There’s a few on 4th st west of Congress & a few more in another group at 7th & Red River.
Actually, if you know wanderindiana or if wanderindiana is reading this, please contact Brian from our tech team at brian@firedoglake.com.
We are a site with a small, very hardworking staff & very limited resources. Sometimes when things break we don’t notice till a user brings it to our attention. When we find broken things we fix them as quickly as we are able. If you find something like this, bring it to our attention — a recent watercooler thread is one place to do it. thanks again.
Also to clarify my previous comment we don’t usually delete stuff, period. When someone does get the banhammer, we usually just lock their accounts so they can’t access them anymore.
Thanks for the multiple detailed responses: the policy you describe seems eminently reasonable and I’ve become increasingly fond of FDL over the years so would not like to think ill of you in this regard. As for Margaret’s comment, I’d also like to think that those actually responsible for policing could differentiate between ‘calling people names’ and suitably characterizing the content of their posts (since plain-speaking seems in general to be more the rule than the exception here) – unless she was referring to the use of ‘TBorg’ rather than whatever his/her name may actually be: the former is what stuck in my memory, and it seemed to be in sufficiently common use to make the incidental reference clear.
I’m afraid that my only exposure to wanderindiana has been that which I already described, but don’t you have an email address (it’s been so long since I registered I don’t recall whether that was something I provided, but I’d normally expect to)?
We’re aware that TBogg elicits strong opinions from some people, and that itself is not enough to get a person banned. Generally, individual writers who have their own FDL subsite (Tbogg, Dissenter, and so on) can police their own posts. They are free to moderate or delete people’s comments but of course that would not have resulted in what happened here.
We do take email addresses from people on signup, but unfortunately it seems to have been made inaccessible by the same bug.
I’ll start by saying I identify as queer, since it applies to this conversation.
This concept of ‘progress’ is not a binary absolute where either everything moves forward or everything moves backward. Sometimes things undeniably move backward. Drone warfare, the crack down on whistleblowers & free speech in general are serious, troubling problems with global implications. On the other hand, the drug war is also a serious, troubling problem with global implications which has made thousands of nonviolent people a victim of the police state.
California won’t label GMOs and didn’t successfully overturn the death penalty this time. They also adopted new anti-sex-trafficking laws which have troubling implications for consensual sex workers & their allies. We re-elected a war criminal as our President.
Most queer people are working class at best, and they suffer the same problems as the rest of the working class. Even when we can get married, we can still legally be fired in most places just because of our orientation. We’re NOT equal and we deserve to be.
I believe in working for equality for ALL people. I believe in celebrating all victories, no matter how small. Just because I celebrate a small victory for equality for one group doesn’t mean I can’t simultaneously mourn the loss for another. Just as the NAACP now supports queer equality as well as equality for people of color, activists can and do work for both queer liberation AND larger societal change.
I can sort-of answer the ‘disappearing’ question from a personal viewpoint. My husband (Fred, aka Mason or Masoninblue) and I both have personal blogs that use the same format as FDL, and that format is WordPress. Neither one of us used to understand really, why editors seem to get ‘uppity’ and ban people outright…until we had our own blogs. I have not had a problem at my blog, but Fred has a rather impressive list of folks he has banned. You simply would not even believe the things that people do when they have time to stalk, on the internet. It goes way beyond name calling, let me tell you. People have published the likes of our address and phone number on the internet, stolen Fred’s identity and used it on other sites, spammed twitter with misinformation about him, me, his daughter, and even yes, Fred’s dead father. I absolutely kid you not. They get banned and return under different names and spread the most disgusting rumors you can imagine, including, but not limited to, printing Fred’s court date for a traffic ticket online, claiming that he had “criminal charges” (felonies) pending. It’s surreal. Just like stalking only it’s online. We are collecting IP addresses and information at this point, so that he can file with authorities, in case some idiot posing as him does something really crazy online.
Fred does not ban people for saying disagreeable things. Disagreement is totally welcomed and acceptable. But, unfortunately there are online actions that go beyond the beyonds.
Just from our personal experience, I can better understand banning.
Also, I believe in free speech as much as anybody, I really do, but some places are just getting to be ridiculous. HuffPo is starting to look like a Yahoo comment thread, for example. So, I guess in that regard, at what point does an editor remove comments for just being vile and inappropriate? I do not know the answer to that one.
Professionalism is another example (see post about APA). We develop professional organizations based no credentials, schooling etc. … You get credit for everything except outcomes. IMO we live in a society where it’s acceptable for people to profit from hurting other people and difficult to make a living helping others. We need to turn the system on it’s head. No wonder we have more violence than any other developed country. I guess our violent society, in turn, makes some people think it’s acceptable to have kill lists.
(NOTE: I am speaking generally in what follows, NOT of wanderindiana who as stated appears to be the victim of a software error nor of any specific current or former FDL poster)
yeah I run my own blog and though lately I mostly post on FDL, when my site is active I’ve dealt with some of this there. Most of my trolls these days are on twitter, like the one the other day who told me I deserve to be imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay. Another troll recently went poking around on my blog, where I’ve written unflinchingly about human sexuality including my own, then tried (unsuccessfully) to hurt my standing with Occupy Austin by revealing the “shocking” information she’d dug up from where I openly display it. It sounds like Mason has gotten way more hell than I have!
I am also surprised by a phenomena you point out — that people when banned will come back over and over again in a succession of new sock puppet accounts, something we see all too often here on FDL.
I also have concern about relevance creep — deleting the comments of someone spewing, for example, misogynist hatred is moderation, not “censorship” as people sometimes decry. Censorship is when governments or other powerful public entities harm a person’s access to information, and it’s a real problem in the real world. I often wish I could magically redirect some of the energy expended in these online flame wars into real world action against actual censorship!
Well said!
Thank you for sharing your personal experience, and from what we have learned, Fred and you and others are not alone.
I am also speaking personally and am sorry to hear of wanderindiana’s software glitch predicament. This sort of thing has also happened with us on WordPress, and we have had people email us, claiming that we have deleted comments that we did not delete. We don’t have a software team or anything, but I can vouch for FDL on this occasional WordPress glitch problem because it has happened to some of our readers. So, I hope that gets resolved soon. I have no idea what the cause is, but again I can vouch: to the reader it appears that the blog owner has deleted something when in fact he didn’t.
It’s simply amazing when a troll claims to get ahold of some sort of perceived ‘dirt’ on a person like you, who has been so open and honest about your life that the supposed ‘dirt’ likely came from your own writing! I can relate to that- something similar happened to me on Twitter. I blocked and reported it, but Twitter replied with a ‘hey man, free speech, anything goes’ shrug.
I agree that moderation is not the same as censorship, and it is necessary to prevent a blog from circling the drain with hateful talk of National Enquirer quality. At this point, I am pretty disappointed with the lack of reasonable moderation at HuffPo, for example, so I hardly ever visit there anymore.
The person shot by a US Immigration Agent from a helicopter this week a few feet South of the Border was shot for suspicion of Marijuana possession.
This is already the new policy, the new standard operating procedure. A few weeks ago, a DEA coward in a helicopter massacred two pregnant Native women and other Natives who were crossing a river in Honduras:
The DEA helicopter was accompanied at the time by a US State Dept. helicopter, from which presumably the DEA received permission to carry out the Murders: These unarmed women were also killed for “suspected possession.”