Who Owns Your Comments?

When blogging gets this complicated, it's not democratic media anymore.

Terp-sichore

“Gah! I do not understand why Allah does not allow us to eat the pork when it smell so good.”

Speechless

So I'll let the commenters have a go at this.

If You're Not

following this, you're missing the fun.

Blogroll

I've been slowly weeding out the blogroll. It's a sad process, because many of the logs that have gone dark were so well written or so sane. Only the shrill survive, it seems sometimes. I had known for a long time that many of them were inactive, but I gave them time to come back to life.

Generally I axed ones that haven't posted since February and didn't indicate a move to a new venue. If I dropped you and you have a new home, please let me know. Also, if any of the readers have a site in mind they think I ought to link to, please post a comment about it. Thanks!

No Fly Zone

This is why I don't want to be a big-time blogger who gets paid to do this. Seriously. Both Andrew Sullivan and Matt Yglesias link to the story of an Icelandic woman who came to America to go shopping. At the airport in New York, however, security discovered she had overstayed a visa a decade ago, and refused to let her enter. What followed for her was a nightmare of deprivation and humiliation that would seem cruel and unusual even for a death-row inmate.

Here, in English on an Icelandic blog, is her story. It's been out there for a while, and U.S. diplomats have gotten involved, and apologies have been issued. The story isn't bogus.

However, neither Matt nor Andrew linked to that site. They linked to a word-for-word lift of the original on this site, which uses it as the liner for a litter box full of vile 9/11-truther and Israel-conspiracy nonsense. Thousands of readers following their links went there, instead of the original site.

How'd that happen? I imagine someone sent in a link, they read the story, found it link-worthy, and did so. If you're trying to crank this stuff out on deadline, that's going to happen. You don't have time to poke around. You don't have a staff of fact-checkers and copy editors to back you up. No, thanks. Not for me.

As for the story itself, it makes you want to smack somebody, but there doesn't seem to be any one culprit and you can't smack a bureaucracy. The commenters -- on both sites -- stupidly see it as evidence of America's fascism. An awful lot of Canadians, especially, seem to be convinced of this.

It's not. But it's why Americans hate to turn anything over to federal government control that is going to touch them more than once in a lifetime. This article will remind you they don't just treat "young Icelandic blondes" that way. They treat U.S. citizens that way, too.

The last person in my family to fly was my (then)-16-year-old son, who went to Japan on an exchange program this summer. My ex-wife, who hasn't been overseas since the Reagan Administration, packed his bags and unwisely put a plastic bottle of barbecue sauce -- a gift for his host family -- in the carry-on bag. It wasn't just that it was confiscated at the gates. It's the way the employees handed it around, commenting on how they looked forward to using it themselves, that made it grating. As for ethnicity and terrorism, my kid looks like any fair-skinned American boy and the security employees who dealt with him were south Asians in turbans. So much for surrealism.

That's the difference between fascism and stupid, mindless bureaucracy. In fascism, the higher up the chain you go, the meaner it gets. In this case, the apologies came from high up. In fascism, you're persecuted because of who you are and who your parents were. In an American airport, you're persecuted because you're there.

For some reason, people who get their paychecks from "public" entities just seem to have a different experience of employment than the rest of us. Their idea of what they're paid to do, and how they're supposed to do it, and what they deserve in return, doesn't seem at all like mine.

Privatize it? The trouble is, some jobs are just so big that the only private entities that can do them are no better than governments. Worse, in some cases. Actively malignant instead of sluggishly thuggish.

UPDATE: Oh, snap!

Naughty, Naughty

Here's a warning lesson to all you comment spoofers.

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Bloggers and free speech advocates are calling on prosecutors not to file charges against a teacher arrested for allegedly posting an anonymous comment online praising the Columbine shooters.

Some were disturbed by the post police say James Buss left on a conservative blog, but other observers said it was a sarcastic attempt to discredit critics of education spending.

The suburban Milwaukee high school chemistry teacher was arrested last week for the Nov. 16 comment left on www.bootsandsabers.com, a blog on Wisconsin politics. The comment, left under the name "Observer," came during a discussion over teacher salaries after some commenters complained teachers were underworked and overpaid.

Buss, a former president of the teacher's union, allegedly wrote that teacher salaries made him sick because they are lazy and work only five hours a day. He praised the teen gunmen who killed 12 students and a teacher before committing suicide in the April 1999 attack at Columbine High School.

"They knew how to deal with the overpaid teacher union thugs. One shot at a time!" he wrote, adding they should be remembered as heroes.

The comment disturbed at least one teacher, who called police in West Bend, 40 miles north of Milwaukee and home of the blog's administrator. Police traveled to arrest Buss at his home in Cudahy, south of Milwaukee, last week after the blogger gave them the anonymous poster's IP address.

After his arrest, Buss spent an hour in the Washington County jail before he was released on $350 bail. He did not return phone messages and e-mails seeking comment, and it was unclear whether he had a lawyer.

The reporter can't come out and say it for sure, if he knows, but anyone who has been around political blogs, and who can compare Buss' background with his comment, will recognize this particular subclass of troll: Spoofus strawmanicus. He pretends to be a Yosemite Sam caricature of the hotheads among the people he opposes, urging them on while uglifying them by his presence among them.

It's one reason you shouldn't read the comments threads at many sites as an honest representation of people's beliefs. It's a particularly nasty behavior, and it gives me pleasure to see this particular example run into trouble, however temporary.

Sarcasm (or satire, which it resembles in this case) that deals with very edgy and horrifying ideas, depends absolutely on the sympathy of your audience, granting you the benefit of all doubt about your intentions. And online, you can guarantee that some segment of your audience will be highly unsympathetic and not inclined to go along with the joke because you're such a good guy, really.

A teacher ought to be smart enough to know that. On the other hand, maybe he's grown so accustomed to grade-mongering students laughing heartily at his tired humor that he thinks it's sincere.

The Artificial Honkey

Shaun Mullen calls Clarence Thomas a white man:

Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and John Roberts, nominees of Bush père and his son, are all conservatives except when it comes to their judicial activism, the very outrage that conservatives decried when Bill Clinton was president. And with O’Connor, the great equalizer, retired, these four white men (yes, Thomas, too) will be imposing their agenda on all of us for many years to come.

"Race" is an artificial idea, biologically. However, it is an ironclad reality in American life, past and present. To pretend it can be changed by a person's statements and political votes is, frankly, one of the ugliest, stupidest things anyone every typed into existence.

We've now gone completely mad in the way Orwell warned. Language has become unmoored from reality. Barack Obama, who has better claim to the literal sense of "African-American" than most modern American blacks, is denied the label. But while racial identity has become something bestowed (or withheld) by some self-appointed sanhedrin of social purists, gender is a personal choice and nobody can call you anything but what you decide to call yourself.

Exaggeration? Not where I work. According to the Associated Press stylebook, the newspaper copy editors' bible:

transgender Use the pronoun preferred by the individuals who have acquired the physical characteristics of the opposite sex or present themselves in a way that does not correspond with their sex at birth.

If that preference is not expressed, use the pronoun consistent with the way the individuals live publicly.

Yo! Anyone Want To Say Something?

[Posted by reader_iam]

Just curious.

Speaking Of Heds

[Posted by reader_iam]

nTodd's exactly right here, and that's emphatically so even if the pedophile in question offers an attractive hook for headline-writers because he was a blogger who blogged on his execrable (ex-)blog. Way to imply correlation/causation (and don't even pretend that the, probably, slot editor in question is too thick to realize what he/she did, at least in retrospect--unless you're also saying he/she is too incompetent for the job at hand to begin with).

Sometimes "Flame Wars" Spark Memories

[Posted by reader_iam]



Thank you, Althouse and TRex.

At Althouse, I had this to say:

To be upfront and honest, I thought TRex's "vlog" was very funny. Also, I hadn't thought of Buster Poindexter in quite a long, long while.

If I didn't know better, I might think that skeins of performance art were being cooperatively interwoven into entertainment for us all (and, of course, for the benefit of the bloggers involved).

Perish the thought (yet fancy that!)!!

But then, I also thought the hed on Althouse's post was one of her best ever. When it comes right down to it, what the hell do I know? No matter: Sometimes it's fun as all get out just to sit back and watch the show(s) from the peanut gallery.

Somehow, I think that everyone referenced in this post gets that, exactly.

What's Up

[Posted by reader_iam]



Summer daze? Lazy ways?

Less is more.

Well, I Just Liked This Comment of Mine...

[Posted by reader_iam]

...and its follow-up so much that I'm gonna post it here:

reader_iam said...

Did I ever mention that I enjoy picturing blog-commenting in terms of chess or bridge?

Move it!

11:47 PM

reader_iam said...
That should be "blog-commenting/blog commenters."

Heh!

11:50 PM

Except that here, of course, I can actually embed the video:

But If You Must Snark ...

[Posted by reader_iam]

Here's a glossary to help you do it liberally. Any nominations for 1) most useful words, 2) funniest words, 3) most unfair words, 4) most fair words or 5) your choice?

(If anyone knows of a comparable tool from other perspectives, let me know; having come across this glossary, I did poke around for something similar, but without success.)

Bestest Reason Evah Not To Post

Posted by reader_iam

I have nothing to say and no desire to say something anyway. Refreshing, really.

Got Your Parent Or Guardian With You?

[Posted by reader_iam]

Rating via Mingle².

The explanation:

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:
* death (3x)
* gay (2x)
* zombie (1x)

Well, I'll be ... nevermind.

Hat tip.

Denouncement Day II

[Posted by reader_iam]

A reprise, inspired by these three posts and their comments threads.

Here's the drill:

Whom or what do you want to denounce?

Denounce away/Have your say/ It's the truest blogging way!

I'll start:

I denounce the silly chickenhawk meme.

On a lighter note, I denounce heat waves that inexplicably seem to descend every time I try to hold an outside birthday party. Large, round cold-cut trays DO NOT fit into coolers! Cakes do too wilt! (So much for paying for pretty.)

WTF

[posted by Callimachus]

First, Noah Shachtman at Wired reports Wednesday on "new rules" that would effectively kill military blogging:

The U.S. Army has ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages, without first clearing the content with a superior officer, Wired News has learned. The directive, issued April 19, is the sharpest restriction on troops' online activities since the start of the Iraq war. And it could mean the end of military blogs, observers say.

Military officials have been wrestling for years with how to handle troops who publish blogs. Officers have weighed the need for wartime discretion against the opportunities for the public to personally connect with some of the most effective advocates for the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq -- the troops themselves. The secret-keepers have generally won the argument, and the once-permissive atmosphere has slowly grown more tightly regulated. Soldier-bloggers have dropped offline as a result.

The new rules (.pdf) obtained by Wired News require a commander be consulted before every blog update.

"This is the final nail in the coffin for combat blogging," said retired paratrooper Matthew Burden, editor of The Blog of War anthology. "No more military bloggers writing about their experiences in the combat zone. This is the best PR the military has -- it's most honest voice out of the war zone. And it's being silenced."

The directive is here. I have waded through a lot of military jargon during historical research, but this one gave me a headache, and I confess I still don't know what it intends to do.

The reaction in the 'Sphere, needless to say, was blunt and furious. I think Captain Ed got closest to what I would have said (if he hadn't said it first), if the "Wired" account is essentially correct:

The Army gets paid to protect operational security. In this war, more than any other, the enemies of our troops use the Internet to their advantage, both in their own communications and to scope out their enemies -- the American military and government. If troops have leaked classified information either deliberately or inadvertently through their on-line communications, this would be a large area of concern to the Pentagon.

However, no one has any evidence that milbloggers have violated Opsec orders in their communications. The one example offered in Wired is an old story about how people noticed a lot of parked cars and an uptick in pizza deliveries to the Pentagon on January 16, 1991, which presaged the imminent activation of Operation Desert Storm. That seems rather picayune, not to mention outdated.

If that's the extent of their concern and the extent of the violations, then they have sacrificed a powerful voice of support for the Army and the mission in favor of an almost-useless silence. The author of the new rules, Major Ray Ceralde, claims that it won't kill milblogging, but the regulations make it so cumbersome that it will be impossible to maintain blogs -- or even e-mail.

... In practical terms, a commanding officer would have to approve every blog post, every e-mail, and every forum post before the soldier could complete it. With the prodigious red tape of the military and the other duties of commanding officers, that means it could take days, weeks, or even forever before those requests get addressed. The immediacy of the information will be lost, and so will interest in it.

Milbloggers have provided a vital voice in this war, reporting from vantage points unattainable elsewhere. We have learned about the successes in this war, such as rebuilding efforts and the enthusiasm of Iraqis in neighborhoods protected by American forces, that we do not get in our mainstream media since the embed program ended. Nothing appears ready to replace it except for official Pentagon statements, which carry less weight with the reading public than the soldiers on the front line.

See also here, here, here.

By tonight, the wire services were on the story. Which only made it more confusing. AP presents it as nothing new at all, just a stronger warning about an old policy, and in fact seems to suggest this fresh version of the regulation is less explicit.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Army is taking stronger steps to warn soldiers they will be punished if they reveal sensitive military information on Web sites or blogs.

While the possibility of punishment is not new, the Army spells out in recently published regulations the range of actions if soldiers "fail to protect critical and sensitive information."

Some Web logs, also called blogs, raised alarms this week, suggesting the Army was cracking down anew on soldiers who have blogs. But the bulk of the regulations released April 19 mirror rules published in 2005 that required soldiers to consult with commanders before "publishing or posting information" in a public forum.

The regulation is not as explicit as the one issued by commanders in Iraq two years ago that requires soldiers in war zones to register their blogs with the military.

Army Maj. Ray M. Ceralde, who worked on the new regulations, said Wednesday the intention of the 2007 rule is not to have soldiers clear every public posting with commanders.

"Not only is that impractical, but we are trusting the soldiers to protect critical information," he said.

He said there is no effort to block soldiers from setting up or posting comments to blogs. "We're not looking for them to seek approval each time a blog entry is posted," Ceralde said.

The rules, he said, do not affect personal, private e-mails that soldiers send. "Soldiers have a right to private communications with their families," he said.

Instead, Ceralde said, soldiers are expected to consult or clear with commanders when they start a blog, in part so they can be warned about information they cannot publish.

Ceralde said Army leaders wanted to emphasize the importance of maintaining operational security. Soldiers will be punished if they publicly reveal sensitive information, such as troop movements, planned raids, travel itineraries of senior leaders, or photographs of casualties, new technology or other material that could compromise their location.

Reuters, on the other hand, makes it a "tightening" of restrictions and hints it's directed at service people no longer on the frontlines.

WASHINGTON, May 2 (Reuters) - The U.S. Army is tightening restrictions on soldiers' blogs and other Web site postings to ensure sensitive information about military operations does not make it onto public forums.

Soldiers in war zones are already subject to restrictions on blogging and public posts. But the Army's new regulation could affect service members who have returned from war zones and started blogs about their combat experiences.

Under a new directive issued in April, soldiers must consult with their immediate supervisor and an officer responsible for what's known within the military as operational security, or OPSEC, for a review of planned publications.

Reviews will be needed for Web site postings, blog postings, discussions on Internet information forums and discussions on Internet message boards, according to the Army directive.

E-mail that will be published in a public forum is also subject to review under the regulation. But Army officers said personal e-mails will not be reviewed, calling that impractical.

"We're not asking that people not blog but that people be cognizant of OPSEC," said Army spokesman Paul Boyce.

Not for nothing do the more hot-headed Iraq supporters call this agency "Al Reuters." Note the truncated "Army officers said personal e-mails will not be reviewed, calling that impractical," where the fuller AP account, presumably from the same press conference, has " 'Not only is that impractical, but we are trusting the soldiers to protect critical information,' Ceralde said."

The WaPo talks to all the right bloggers, gets the good quotes, and fails to shed any light on what this really is or whether it's a dramatic new policy or an old one juggled.

If the Wired take on it is anywhere near right, however, here's a message from me to Mr. President: "It's the stupid, stupid."

Foolish Claws

[Posted by reader_iam]

Would you want to place your career prospects in the hands of a business--which supposedly touts its savvy with regard to how networks "work"--that could be this unplugged about an obvious network?

Netlag, indeed.

I didn't think I'd be posting just now, but I have to come out in solidarity with Kat Coble of Just Another Pretty Farce, a blogger whose blog I blogrolled at the old site relatively early, though the link there leads to her old blogspot site, from which she migrated a month ago. (Well, those who visit here but still drop in there know that I'm not exactly maintaining that site, and haven't touched the blogroll, as far as updates, in I don't know how long--a year?)

One of the reasons I included her in that blogroll was the sense of the genuine and the honest opinions she brought to her posts, a certain openness to posting her thoughts and experience, which, frankly, I both admired and, in a certain sense, envied. Apparently, that's what got her into trouble. There's a chilly wind afoot, and like all chilly winds, it's going to have a faster cooling effect on everything and everyone on the warmer side before it does on the cold-blooded, and bloody-minded. Still, if it keeps up, that nip will cut closer to every bone (to be picked), and make no mistake.

Read the original post, the source of the catalyst for the controversy, [JL Kirk Associates being the source]. (Note the comments--which, by the way, includes response from a JL Kirk employee--because they are cited in the letter from JL Kirk Associates' legal representation.) Does it strike you that it makes sense for that post to inspire the legal response?

The defensiveness, thin-skinnedness, and lack of awareness on the part of a business in an industry which relies on the reputation of superior connectedness is breathtaking.

One wonders: Had Coble's account taken the form of an interview for a newspaper article, for example, would that firm have threatened her with a lawsuit? Would it have threatened the newspaper?

And Etc.

Now, back to my own warm burrowing.

Denouncement Day

[Posted by reader_iam]

Whom or what do you want to denounce?

Denounce away/Have your say/ It's the truest blogging way!