Tag: Boing! Boing!

The Circle Is Now Complete — Antinous Is the Master

Antinous, one of the moderators of the comment threads over at Boing! Boing! has finally surpassed Teresa Nielsen Hayden in his moderation skills. I am in awe after running across an exchange between Antinous and a user going by the handle “Harveyboing.”

Good old Harvey made the mistake of posting a comment critical of a CNN piece claiming George W. Bush had been snubbed at the G20 summitt. Harvey made the mistake of opening his post by saying, “Hey, give me a break” which Antinous righteously transformed to “h, gv m brk” before disemvoweling other parts of the post.

Harvey found this a bit hypocritical and the following exchange ensued,

#24 posted by HarveyBoing , November 20, 2008 2:22 PM

Let’s see:

“i hate bush”

“Dumber than YouTube”

“Bush is the weird pale kid who lives with his grandmother, eats liverwurst sandwiches for lunch every day, and that no one pays any attention to at all”

“an alcoholic, middle aged man desperately looking for approval one last time”

“bush is one of the shittiest leaders we ever had”

But, asking for a break, and making a factual statement about the pro-left bias in this particular CNN report, and I get disemvoweled?

Hey, Antinous…inconsistent much?

Take a look at this

#25 posted by Antinous , November 20, 2008 2:27 PM

Harvey,

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I doubt that you ever will.

Antinous is right, some of us will never get it. And, frankly, I hope I never become the sort of person who does.

Barack Obama, Bill Ayers and Political Violence

Xeni Jardin over at Boing! Boing! highlights an absurd interview with Bill Ayers featuring (in Jardins words) “his suggestions on what those swept up in the current wave of hope following [Barack] Obama’s election might do to harness that excitement.”

Ayers, of course, is the former Weather Underground terrorist and Obama associate whom McCain tried (way too late and in a lousy way) to make an issue of when it was clear that he was going to lose the election.

It is odd to see just how easily left wingers who commit acts of political violence can be mainstreamed. It is difficult to imagine that happening in a similar way on the Right.

For example, imagine that John McCain had repeatedly associated with an anti-abortion activist who had led an underground group that attempted to bomb abortion clinics around the country during the 1980s. Does anyone seriously think that such an association would have been downplayed by the mainstream media the way Ayers was? Would left-liberals like Jardin approvingly cite, say, National Review if it made the mind boggling decision to run a political advice piece from such a former terrorist? In fact, anti-abortion advocates are generally considered beyond the pale when they coordinate plain old non-violent civil disobedience.

Somehow, I don’t think so. This is the same sort of dynamic that allows some left-liberals to deplore the regime of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet while cultivating the cult of Che Guevera. It’s the sort of dynamic that Bill Clinton relied on when he pardoned 16 members of the Puerto Rican nationalist FALN in 2000, knowing that even though the group was reponsible for carrying out deadly bombings in the United States, his legacy wouldn’t suffer (even after the 9/11 attacks outraged Americans, Clinton’s pardoning of the FALN terrorists has never really harmed his public image).

On the other hand, I assume if George W. Bush pardoned Michael Griffin that this would quickly become a defining incident of his presidency.

The Cognitive Dissonance of IP Bans at Certain Sites

It is very strange to wake up one morning and discovered you’ve been IP banned from commenting at a site that has a helpful link on every page explaining how to route around such censorship.

I’m just hoping they don’t take away my birthday; that might actually be difficult to reclaim.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden Demonstrates How *Not* To Moderate an Internet Forum

As Teresa Nielsen Hayden once noted on her web site, moderation isn’t rocket science. In fact, I’d recommend a nice rule of thumb — watch what ever Hayden does, and then do the exact opposite.

I thought I’d seen everything on Boing! Boing!’s discussion forums until I read this thread. Nielsen herself shows up halfway through the conversation and replies to a number of posters, including to a user nicknamed Coldspell who apparently posted that Democrats and Republicans are equally inane. Nielsen writes,

Coldspell @25, I just lost my patience with unthinking assertions of parity. I’ve been running a center-by-center-left sometimes-political weblog for seven years now, and what you’re saying simply isn’t true. I don’t think a day has gone by here at Boing Boing for weeks now when I haven’t seen one or two dozen lazy assertions that things are the same on both sides.

They aren’t.

Did you catch Antinous, some while back, explaining that we’re not enforcing a party line at Boing Boing, and it’s not our fault that worst of the fuggheads almost all come from the same end of the political spectrum? The far right has been cultivating the dumb-and-resentful segments of the population for many years now. I honestly feel sorry for the intelligent, thoughtful conservatives whose political neighborhoods have filled up with yahoos.

Interesting. I wanted to see exactly what Coldspell had written that touched off such a nerve, but I think you can guess what’s coming next . . .

#25 posted by coldspell , October 9, 2008 4:51 PM

T b fr, n cld *sly* crt smlr vd tsd n bm rlly:

“Grg Bsh *prsnlly* crshd *bth* rplns nt th Wrld Trd Cntr! Bt nly ftr rlsng mnd-cntrl chmtrls nd rgn-hrnssng stllts vr NYC!”

Slctv dtng s th prpgndst’s frnd.

That’s right, the post was interesting enough for Nielsen to write a 137-word reply to it, but apparently enough of a threat to the tenor of discourse at Boing! Boing! to warrant being disemvoweled!

And, to go to the heart of Nielsen’s claim in her post, it is easy to live in an echo chamber when you can deface the words of someone you disagree with while then posting your own, unadulterated to said defaced post for all to see.

Nielsen’s the Dave Winer of forum moderation — forever seeing bad acts and malicious intent in anything that deviates from her point of view (and quickly disemvoweling such threats).

Finally, Nielsen and others keep claiming that Boing! Boing! is not biased in its posts for or against Democrats or Republicans. As she puts it, it just happens to be the truth that Republicans are the party of “fuggheads.” However, it is interesting that in September Boing! Boing! featured posts about Cintra Wilson twice, but couldn’t once be bothered to mention Wilson’s bizarre rant in Salon about Sarah Palin.

Again, if all you ever feature are Republican idiots, of course you are going to conclude that it is simply the case that the only idiots are Republicans. It is called selection bias.

Not All Improbable Events Are Urban Legends

Over at Boing! Boing! gadgets guru John Browlee profiles some awesome looking Lazer Tag guns, but slips in a pretty big factual error in the process,

I’m really tempted to pull the trigger on these. I’ve never played LazerTag: I’m an 80s child whose parents unfortunately bought into the whole nightly news scare when the first urban legend about a cop shooting a kid armed with a LazerTag gun in a playground made its word-of-mouth lamentable tour.

Except the “cop shot kid because he thought LazerTag gun was real” urban legend isn’t an urban legend. It in fact did happen.

According to the April 11, 1987 edition of the New York Times,

Groups opposed to war toys today condemned the laser gun game a teen-ager was playing when he was shot to death by a sheriff’s deputy.

Toy manufacturers must share the blame for the death of Leonard Joseph Falcon, of Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., said Dr. Carole Lieberman, assistant linical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles.

The 19-year-old was playing the Lazer Tag game when he was shot to death Tuesday night at Central Elementary School in Rancho Cucamonga by a deputy who was told armed prowlers were loose in the schoolyard.

The Associated Press also had a more detailed account of the Falcon shooting which is also on the New York Times website.

Before the whining activist complainers had their way, toy guns sold in the United States tended to look very much like real guns. I remember having an Uzi water pistol as a kid that aside from being plastic and only about 3/4 scale, was a pretty good replica especially at a distance.

For example, here’s a photo of the Starlyte guns which were among the first Lazer Tag gun sold by World of Wonder starting in 1986.

Originally this came in black. Later, it was sold in white, allegedly in response to the criticism surrounding the shooting death of Falcon

Versionista.Com

Versionista recently showed up in the top results from del.icio.us, which made me laugh out loud. Versionista monitors web sites and not only alerts you when they change, but also shows you exactly how they changed. Sounds like I’ll switch to that, instead of Google Reader, for surfing Boing! Boing!

The Versionista home page highlights changes that the McCain and Obama campaigns have made to their respective websites, usually to hide embarassing material (well, technically McCain’s site is still up so they’re not hiding all the embarassing material).

I am, sadly, a version whore. When WordPress implemented versioning in 2.6, I was in heaven. Also, even though I know I don’t need to be so obsessive about it, I can’t help but generate and download a full site backup of this server every night . . . which in my case is a 12gb .tar file at the moment.

Anyway, I could not find any pricing on the Versionista web page, and didn’t feel like setting up an account. From other articles on the service, it is free to monitor two pages for changes. Anything beyond that involves monthly fees in the $16-$500/month rate. It would probably be as cheap to hire a college kid to write up a CURL-based tool to do the regular downloads and feed those into any number of diff products like HTML diff.