Author: Shelley Powers

Categories
Weblogging

Pop fizzle

Ah me, what a dangerous combination: a weblog and an inability to get away from the computer with hikes and other exercise due to not being able to do more than hobble from my bedroom to the bathroom. I did not have a particularly good night last night as all the various parts of me clamored for attention.

“Feel me!” “No, no! Feel me!” “Ignore them, I hurt the most!”

Damn body parts.

Still, I am able to move about and this makes me happy, if for no other reason than I can get coffee when I want it.

I mentioned yesterday that I actually went into a Little Green Footballs post and left comments. Most people will think this a foolhardy thing to do and I tend to agree with them. However, I cannot watch people making fun of the death of another person without at least attempting to…what I have no idea.

What happened is that Joey deVilla had pointed out a cartoon and award given to Rachel Corrie as “Idolitarian of the Year” for, we presume, getting run over by a bulldozer when she was protesting the wrecking of a home in Palestine. The award was offensive enough, but the humor that was indulged in was, well frankly, beyond anything I’d seen before.

Regardless of whether we agree with a person or not, or regardless of what a person has done, I can see little justification into making humor of their death. It seems to me that webloggers can go too far in what they write and support, and if so, then Charles, the “Prince of Puerile Hatred” crossed the line, he and his band of merry, and mainly anonymous, marauders. So I entered comments to that effect, which basically only served as fresh meat for the ‘wits’ that frequent LGF’s comments.

It was discouraging to see the things said, until I noticed that there really aren’t a huge number of people agreeing with Charles. In fact, his longer threads tend to be a smaller group of dedicated devotees, and then milder comments, or even criticism from people such as myself.

It made me realize that yes a weblogger can go too far, but we don’t have to do anything about it: as they get worse in their behavior and in what they support, they’ll lose more and more people who can’t stomach the never ending hatred until eventually they just fade away, hopefully never to be heard from again. Or they’ll act as a lightning rod for all the people we would rather not have to deal with anyway, in which case they serve a useful purpose.

Weblogging, like Google, is self-healing.

Categories
Political

Why must women always be the ones to pay

I have said in the past that I am not one of the those that supports pulling the US out of Iraq without a thought or a backward glance. I didn’t want us to invade Iraq – we didn’t have the right to abrogate the UN’s authority in this matter. However, once the deed was done, we have an obligation to ensure that Iraq not descend into civil war, or become yet another fundamentally religious regime.

With the politically strategic pullout of the US scheduled for July 1 of this year, what will happen is our people, for the most part, will be home by election time in November, but not so soon that the country has a chance to erupt into civil war. And I don’t think there’s little doubt of this happening. You can’t remove an oppressive regime over peoples of strongly differing opinions and beliefs and expect to have a smooth running, fair democracy in barely a year’s time.

Unfortunately, the group of people most likely to pay the price for our short sighted thinking will be the women of Iraq.

Both Baghdad Burning and wKen reference articles about a new vote by the US-backed Iraq Council to return the country to sharia, a dogmatic adherance to variously interpreted Islamic law that is basically going to strip the rights of women in the one Islamic country that had progressed more than any other when it comes to rights for women. Baghdad Burning wrote:

I usually ignore the emails I receive telling me to ‘embrace’ my new-found freedom and be happy that the circumstances of all Iraqi women are going to ‘improve drastically’ from what we had before. They quote Bush (which in itself speaks volumes) saying things about how repressed the Iraqi women were and how, now, they are going to be able to live free lives.

The people who write those emails often lob Iraq together with Saudi Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan and I shake my head at their ignorance but think to myself, “Well, they really need to believe their country has the best of intentions- I won’t burst their bubble.” But I’m telling everyone now- if I get any more emails about how free and liberated the Iraqi women are *now* thanks to America, they can expect a very nasty answer.

Supposedly the current adminstrator, Paul Bremer, will most likely overturn this law, but what happens in June when we start pulling out? Does anyone believe that there will be a significant change in attitude among the dominant Shiite population in that time?

Think about it – this is no different than telling women in this country that they can’t work in any position that they want; that they must be accompanied by male members of their household if they want to drive somewhere; that they have to be covered head to toe in heavy draperies regardless of the weather; that they can’t go to school, vote, breath without the expressed permission of a male dominated religious majority. Doing this to the women in this country is no different that what we’ll be doing to the women in Iraq.

The current administration knows this, but has shown little evidence of caring about this. However, lest you think that the liberals among you are going to get off without a whipping, I don’t see that there’s much interest among all of you in what happens to the women of Iraq with your silly little “Pull out now” stickers and signs.

In fact, all you’re doing is giving ammunition to the Bush administration, “You asked us to pull out, we did what you asked.”

Because of the actions of our country, we are condemning half the populace of Iraq to dark servitude without any rights, and little hope. And we – both liberals and conservatives – have done this thing.

(And before you ask, what do I suggest? Bringing in the UN to work with the Iraqi people long-term to ensure that the rights of minorities and women are upheld – paid for by the US, supported by both our troops and money. However, this time with a UN leadership, in support of a basic set of human rights that must be implemented by all countries, regardless of dominant religion. Including the US.)

Categories
Burningbird

Looks and thoughts

I have been playing around with new sites and new looks. For instance, one new look for Burningbird can be seen here.

I also started a couple of new sites, at Tin Foil Project and Tin Foil President. I was going to use these for both social and political commentary, separating these topics from the Burningbird weblog.

The name ‘Tin Foil Project’ came about last year when I noticed an older article in a Texas newspaper about campaign donations from Alcoa for President Bush’s campaign. Of course, the former head of Alcoa. Paul O’Neill, is now famous for the revelations he’s making about President Bush when he was serving as Secretary of Treasury. But at one point the two were cordial, even sympatico.

I then started doing some research into Bush’s tenure as governor of Texas and found myself having to change my viewpoint of George W. Bush the man. I found myself asking a very basic question: Assume that Bush is not an evil man. If so, then why is he making decisions that are completely anethma to myself and to so many others?

I know that a lot of people who read Burningbird cannot see Bush as anything but an inherently evil man, but to do so means that you can’t understand why people in this country support him. Making foolish claims that only ’stupid’ people vote for Bush is only going to give Bush that many more votes. His reach to the American people is more complex than that, and those that indulge in primitive rhetoric only have themselves to blame if Bush is elected for four more years.

Anyway, that’s the premise behind the two new sites. However, I’m finding that the fragmentation of my site isn’t necessarily the way to go. For one thing, as has been noted, having different weblogs and then repeating comments across them is creating havoc with Blogdex. I’d rather Blogdex not have to resort to removing my weblogs from the database to prevent me dominating the top weblog spots on a too frequent basis, so I’ll need to consider alternatives.

More than that, though, is the fact that splitting my interests into different weblogs removes the context of the writing. The same person who writes about tech, is the same who writes about hiking, is the same who writes about Bush. How can you accept or even understand the context of any of the work if I splinter it off into isolated little pieces?

I orignally split weblogs off so that non-techs wouldn’t have to read my tech stuff, but the little icon I show with each entry should be warning enough – if people don’t want to read tech, they don’t have to. What I need to do is incorporate this into my RSS/Atom files so that people don’t have to click through from their aggregators if they’re not interested in the topic.

Besides, a lot of my tech stuff transcends just tech folks as an audience. In fact, my favorite tech writing is for a non-tech audience (hence the For Poets weblogs).

No, the separate weblogs are a mistake and I’m going to start pulling these together. I’ll still continue to keep separate weblogs for books I have written and am writing, but I’ll split these off from Burningbird in totality, not replicating comments from this site.

It’s a shame, though. I love the names of ‘Tin Foil Project’ and ‘Tin Foil President’. And I like the looks of the sites, too.

(Yes, that is President Bush, as a child, morphed into the photo of the Alamo.)

Maybe I’ll start my own set of group political weblogs: polemic free social and political weblogs with viewpoints welcome from all peoples, not just ‘right thinking’ people.

Oh sure, and what’s the interest in that?

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Listening to the customers

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Six Apart has released MT 2.66 specifically because of comment spam.

One change is throttle control, which means if you get hit from the same IP address with several comments in a row, MT will shut down the IP. This wouldn’t have helped with the recent comment blitz because that person used a proxy to vary the IP address with each comment. But it should help with the script kiddies.

The second change is one I, point blank, do not like. What happens is that a redirect is built into the management of comment author’s URL, so you get this silly little redirect page between clicking on the URL and getting to the URL. This supposedly is to stop the redirected URL from getting Google Buzz. However, people who have implemented this have said it doesn’t work. Not to mention that my good commenters no longer get Google goodness.

(And it does nothing about the spam comments that embed 100 different URLs into the comment body. )

I tried this at a site that’s upgraded – it busts the back button. There’s this ugly little redirect page. It’s awful.

Google is self-healing. Comment spam and Google is between the spammers and Google. I don’t care. I just don’t want to have to hand delete 500 comments, have to manually use SQL to do this, or use a blacklist that won’t scale.

I appreciate Six Apart trying, and I like the throttling, but all I want is good comment management. It’s not sexy tech, but it’s what we need. I’ll wait for 3.0 with the promised comment management. I also hope that we have the option to NOT use the redirect functionality. I don’t want to have to hack this out of the code.

Categories
Burningbird Just Shelley

Bored and bruised

A friend wrote that rather than do any kind of formal break, just write when I feel like it, don’t when I don’t or don’t have the time. Good advice. I also heard from old friends, in comments and in email, and well, it was nice. Meant a lot to me – about as much as the old, and new, friends mean to me. Time to kick this bird in the butt and do some damage.

Besides, I was getting bored. I hadn’t tangled with anyone for the longest time. So, to make up for it, earlier today I tangled with the Little Green Football folks – yeah, the Chartreuse Balls Gang – over their warped sense of humor (and most other things, too), but that’s for a later post.

I’m on a strict getting in shape campaign that has been doing wonders for my physical well being. For breakfast I have orange juice and a banana, cheese and salad for lunch, good, well cooked meals for dinner and little snacking. Hard work with weights Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and strenuous hikes Tuesday and Thursday and on the weekend. It’s paying off too, my stress is down, and I feel better.

It’s paying off, too, in general physical health. For instance, my blood pressure today was 112 over 72, which is pretty darn low. Of course, I know what my blood pressure is today because earlier this afternoon, while I was hiking, I fell on a hill when I slipped on loose rock.

Yeah, rather than paying attention to the walk I was looking around, which is mistake number 1 to 100 while hiking. When I started to slip, I tried to dig my foot in and managed to twist it completely end over end, and then joined it falling down the hill. I lay there at the foot of the hill for some time calling out for help because I had thought I had broken the ankle, but no one was around. Finally, I just picked up my butt and limped out of the park, drove home (oh, and that was really fun) and then had my roommate take me to the urgent care clinic.

No breaks, but I am on crutches for possibly several weeks with a badly sprained ankle and foot, torn ligaments, injured knee, and all sorts of fun stuff. Not to mention bruises all over.

Still, could have been worse. And I managed not to break my camera and was actually able to bring you one whole photo from today’s hike. Oddly appropriate looking, don’t you think?

oopsiewalk1.jpg