MegaAwesome

I’m late to the party, and Elizabeth Britt said just about everything that I would want to in a far nicer way than I would have anyway:

There is no bright line rule about what constitutes a personal attack as opposed to constructive discussion, but some types of comments are never acceptable:

1. Racial, sexual, homophobic, ageist, religious, political, ethnic, or other epithets (such as comments against people with disabilities). Disagreement over what constitutes a religion, race, sexual preference, or ethnicity is not an excuse to indulge in bad behavior.
2. Using someone’s affiliations as a means of dismissing or discrediting their views - regardless of whether said affiliations are mainstream or not.
3. Linking to external attacks, harassment, or other material, for the purpose of attacking another person -

These examples are not exclusive. Insults or disparaging remarks against another person is a personal attack regardless of the manner in which it is done.

Councilwoman Laurie Caskey-Schreiber shouldn’t have called Gwen Hunter an idiot in a public forum, that was just rude. She should have called her an idiot to her face. Civility is important but it isn’t a free pass to act like, well, an idiot whenever the mood strikes. I wonder if the prominent role whisper campaigns have achieved in our local politics hasn’t simply grown out of an understanding that no-one will challenge the people who spread them publicly.

Over at Sam’s blog a commenter said something about holding our elected officials to a higher standard and I agree completely. Our elected officials, and candidates, should be expected to shut down any idiot who tries to spread such garbage. This isn’t junior high anymore, and the blind repetition of petty lies and ham-fisted intrigues are turning local politics into a joke. I wish that the Councilwoman had done it another way, but she did exactly what I think we should expect her to do.

Next time I hope that she will be more direct and address them personally. Everyone has to learn at some point in their life that if you’re going to be an idiot, you shouldn’t get surprised when people call you on it.

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I’m still catching up after a radical schedule shift at work last week kept me from my usual morning ritual of poking around online for an hour and drinking six cups of coffee. Finally things are settling down enough that I’ve got some ‘me’ time (drinking beer and watching the worst martial arts movies that EveryDay Music has to offer). I think it helps that my cell phone is now completely broken and people can’t get in touch with me.

Criticism of the Herald’s comment policy is making the rounds again (such as here, here, and here). I don’t want to just wind up repeating what I’ve said before, so I’ll just add this:

The current commenting system, both the use of Haloscan and whatever moderation policy may exist, is a complete teardown. The whole thing needs to be rebuilt from scratch (if at all). There is no shortage of ways to participate in discussion online, I think it’s time to let this one die.
Read the rest of this entry »

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..for the local reporter that has everything:

For a new art project, the designer Martin Postler has investigated the history, the aesthetics and the lethal seductiveness of the Kalashnikov. He has freed the AK-47 from its terrible capacity to injure and kill by deconstructing it into a paper model construction set. When putting the detailed model together, the builder is automatically confronted with the Kalashnikov and its significance – both historical and personal. At the end of the construction process each person can decide if they would like to hang their own AK-47 on the wall, paint it, customize it with stickers or simply burn it. Then ultimately this AK-47 thankfully remains a piece of paper.
[…]
If you’re gonna play with guns, use paper ones!

Unfortunately, they only ship to Europe.

via Boing Boing

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In the comments to the last post I said that Charter Amendment 1 had passed with 61% of the vote, but I was wrong. It actually passed with 67%, and I apologise. This is a screenshot of the PDF the Audiors office put out for that year (click for the bigger version):

I had divided the ‘Yes’ votes circled by the total votes cast (also circled). The actual number of votes cast for or against that amendment was a bit lower:

Sorry about that.

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I just got a great packet from my shadowy masters at Living Liberally that had more buttons (yay!) so if you don’t have one, come on down to Drinking Liberally next week and I’ll hook you up.

There was also an flyer for the awesome new T-Shirts. My favorite is this one:

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I’ve heard a lot of very negative responses to the new KGMI comment policy (Scroll down to the bottom, KGMI does not have permalink technology), but I’m not too concerned about it. I think that KGMI has a responsibility to weed out certain types of comments, and if they choose to shut down criticism on their site then that is their prerogative. I don’t think that it’s reasonable to assume that anyone is allowed to say anything they like anywhere they wish.

But it is very draconian and unnecessary. I think that there is a lot of benefit to be had from having a open exchange of ideas and part of that is going to be negative feedback, and some of that negative feedback isn’t going to be nice. Not being able to say “What is this, the USSR? When do we get permalinks?” on their site is annoying, but it’s not like I can’t just say it somewhere else.

On the other hand, there seems to be a lot of dumb people out there who use open systems to hatch ridiculous plots or say whatever fool thing comes to mind. Recall the Whole Foods CEO scandal, where that idiot logged on to Yahoo!’s finance boards and trashed the company that his was trying to buy. Maybe if Yahoo!’s policy had been more strict, they could have protected this fool from himself.

I assume that KGMI wants their website to be a online hub for their listeners, and therefore they need to adopt a strict and clear policy on what is allowed. I don’t think that this is the right policy, but it’s a policy and since I don’t habitually read comments on their website it’s not really a big deal to me.

There is an interesting juxtaposition here, though.

• The Herald’s open comments policy made participating in any of the comments pointless because so much of it was garbage that would drown out whatever witty and insightful thing that I had to say.
• The KGMI comment policy makes reading their comments pointless because they’ve all been pre-screened and all of the wit and insight would probably be edited out of any comment I submitted.

The situation in Yakima, however, is a little different. As I understand it some anonymous person started up a blog and trashed a council candidate, and then later it turned out that the blogger was the other candidate’s wife.

Disregarding for now any ethical issues involved, I would suggest that something went awry here if an anonymous blogger’s unsourced rumors were taken seriously by anyone. For that matter, even if there’s a name attached to it, it still shouldn’t be taken seriously. It’s hard enough to be taken seriously when just about anyone can register a domain name (or not) and start up a blog.

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The promised ranting about internet idiocy will have to wait until this evening/tomorrow morning I’m afraid. I’ve got guests in from out of town and the Kitten Wars aren’t going to fight themselves.

In the meanwhile, there’s a fascinating property case playing out in Boulder right now that you should check out.

Also, my favorite non-political/non-tech blog seems to be ending.

The TSA has announced that it’s alright to bring your holiday pie on an airplane, but it might be subject to “additional screening.” Translation: We are going to eat your pie.

And finally I got the best spam email message ever today. The content is irrelevant but the subject line was “Baby Highway Toilet Arm Flower Chair Saddle” which I think I might have to use for the Dubious Quality band name contest next week. It’s a banner day, most of the time the garbage email I get is more along the lines discussed in this Slog discussion (not safe for work, children, or people with certain heart conditions).

That’s it for now, travel safe and have a great holiday.

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There’s a great article on the New Scientist blogs about internet trolling:

My pet theory about why people behave so rudely is that online commenting is treated, by most people, like a pub conversation – they don’t necessarily expect to be taken seriously and the social rules are fairly relaxed. And yet, because comments appear in cold text without important cues like friendly body language, they can easily seem more offensive than if they would otherwise. As a result some people get annoyed, and the flaming and trolling begin.

After being described a few weeks ago as “a self-lobotomised liberal who can’t face the facts”, I decided to look into the psychology of online behaviour a bit further. Much of the research on online communication has looked at email, but it seems that many of the results can be generalised to apply to chat rooms and forums too.

It’s well worth checking out for anyone who’s trolled or been the victim of trolls in the past. More on this tomorrow.

(via /.)

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The rumors are true. On Friday I finally manged to get together with Sam Taylor for coffee. I dispute his account of the meeting on only one important point: we both did quite a bit of ranting. It was a regular rant-off.

One of my points of contention was the limited number of blog entries per page over there at the Herald. Sam was clearly won over by my brilliant argument and today the post-per-page setting has been changed from four or something to fifteen!

Other topics were things like the local political climate and how he should join us at Drinking Liberally and knock back a few pints (apparently he’s got some rule about not drinking on the job that I didn’t fully understand). Actually, most of the time we were talking shop and it was very interesting to get his perspective as an observer. Most people I know are either ardent partisans or don’t know and don’t care to know about politics.

I really had a lot of fun, and I highly recommend to anyone who’s got an interest in his beat get together with Sam any time that they’re able to drag him away from work.

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Servais points today to the lack of updates to local blogs and he’s right and I’m sorry. I’ve been working on some side projects for the site that I’m hoping to have live before next year’s election drags me into it and there’s a couple of stories that are still coming together. While I’ve got real stuff in the queue I feel a little ridiculous going back to less important things, like complaining about how my variety pack of Quaker oatmeal only has dinosaur facts on the Apples & Cinnamon packets, no matter how much those things drive me crazy.

I’m also waiting for the abstracts for this election to be released so that I can see how the voting broke down in the race for Council District 2 and Bellingham Mayor. There’s still something like two weeks to go before those need to be in to Sam Reed’s office, so it might be some time.

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