The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Lis:

Just call me Sister Garrote of Courteous Debate

For a more fannish topic, the OED is seeking pre-1950 citations of the term fugghead (see this request over on rasff), if anybody has old fanzines or writings of Francis Towner Laney.

Hopefully I'm not the only one here who thinks the OED's SF citation project to be really really cool. And it's already garnering results, as the online version has draft definitions for fannish terms like Sturgeon's Law, filk (noun & verb), fanfic, slash...

I hope this isn't spamming, as I posted the same comment to Making Light, but I thought both of you might like Digby's post on the red-state/blue-state division as seen through American history? [I blogged it here]

A young reaction to not getting what you want is to take your ball and go home (or run away from home, as the case may be). An older reaction would be to be to not get what you want and yet stay true to what you want.
I've thought of leaving -- not in a "take my ball and go home" way, but because I don't entirely recognize this country as the America I believe in, and it scares me.

I am a grandchild of Holocaust survivors. Two of my grandparents survived the camps. Another spent the war in hiding. I can't say with 100% confidence that "it can't happen here" when I look at my family history.
One of Ian's uncles lived in Austria before the war. A friend in the police department tipped him off and he fled the country. He tried to convince *his* relatives in Austria that they should leave also, but they said he was overreacting. He was the only survivor of his family.
Are you really calling that an immature reaction?

I've had this discussion with my husband several times during this administration's tenure. I agreed the responsible thing to do was to stay through the election, and try to get at least one branch (presidency, House, Senate) out of GOP control. But that failed.
I do feel a responsibility to this country. But I also recognize a responsibility to protect myself, and when it comes down to it, personal survival is a powerful trump card.

I'm making no decisions yet; but just wanted to share another perspective on the possibility of leaving.

Brace yourselves:
Bill Bennett is calling the election results a mandate for Bush to pursue the culture war.* :(

Oh yeah, we can also feel good about Obama's election, but that was a given.

Any other good news?

Fifty-five million people voted for Kerry But more people voted for Bush. And even more than that were satisfied enough with the status quo not to vote at all.
And that's a status quo that perpetrated Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
Dave Johnson has a particularly cynical view this morning, that I'm rapidly growing to appreciate.

What *are* we optimistic about? Massachusetts voters didn't fall for anti-gay rhetoric, even though eleven other states did?

can't stand to see an opposition button
even from a high school student who's too young to cast a vote anyway...

Also, what does it say that Bush is making appearances before captive audiences of schoolchildren, while John Kerry is holding open-air speeches for hundreds of thousands?

Blatantly unconstitutional is what it is. I hope some parent successfully sues whoever thought up that cockamamie policy.

[And yes, I know Bush rallies in other public places have had similar restrictions, but the Supreme Court has ruled that schools, in particular, are special.]

I've had some back-and-forth emails with websense, and I think things may not be as bad (nor as malicious) as they first seemed.

I'll post the details at a more decent hour when I'm more awake, but I was quite impressed by how responsive the folks at websense have been.
Teresa, you might want to email them to say somebody told you that your site was blocked, and ask them what's going on. I asked them about javajane and LJ, and they acknowledged overbroad errors and claim to have fixed them both.

If you do, let me know how it goes, ok?

TNH, PNH, one more thought.
I'm trying to figure out why MakingLight might be blocked, while Electrolite isn't. Teresa, I believe you've linked to ginmar's posts from your main page (outside of comments). Patrick, have you?

I'm wondering if somebody didn't do some kind of search for links to Ginmar's posts, and put those sites up for blocking.

Just speculation, and it would partly depend upon ginmar finding other sites she's visited or sites that link to her to look for a pattern.

Like I said above, I've been looking up URLs in websense's own Site Lookup Tool, and they give both LJ and nielsenhayden.com innocuous categories.

That either means (a) there's an updated database with different rankings, or (b) somebody within the organization has taken it upon hirself to assign site-specific categories to LJ and this site.

I sent websense an email asking about this in general terms, extremely careful not to identify Ginmar in any way, and we'll see what feedback I get.

In the meantime, might *not* want to give this more publicity until she sees if she can't take care of things on her end.

Also, I cannot get to making light
Weird. I just looked it up in the websense database, and it's categorized as "Business and Economy" which should be inoccuous.
Again, may be a decision made by a websense admin between the master dB and ginmar's computers.

Actually, Websense has a site lookup tool to see how it categorizes sites in its "master" database. Livejournal is "Message Boards and Clubs"

Now I would assume that organizations can add their own private filtering list, perhaps specifically blocking a competitor's site, for example. But LJ doesn't appear to be wrongly categorized by websense, which implies that this is some decision somewhere in the military chain of command.

re:Ginmar, there's a new post on her blog (by one of her friends) that says that she can't get to LJ at all

How about:
#45 Their celebrities are politicians and Hollywood actors. Our celebrities are writers, editors, artists, and musicians.
Funny, the Harvard Book Store managed to find enough authors attending the DNC for several signings and a panel discussion.

#61 At our convention, none of the reading matter is likely to be redacted.
And this is a good thing?

Thanks.
That actually made me laugh out loud.
I needed that.

I literally cheered aloud when I read that quote by Dean. I'd been worried that disaffected Dean followers might give up on the Democratic party altogether, and I'm pleased to see that he's still rallying the troops to unseat Bush, even though he's not the nominee.

Not only is he doing Letterman, but the top ten list is precisely poking fun at the rant.

10. Switch to decaf.

Tina wrote: I can't cite actual references for the ratio of executive:peon compensation increasing
Quoting Whiskey Bar (Billmon) back in October:

The most common benchmark of income inequality is called the Gini coefficient, which measures the distribution of income across quintiles -- fifths -- of the population, ranked from poorest to wealthiest. Inequality is measured on a scale of 0 to 1, with a higher number indicating greater inequality.
...
America's Gini rating now much more closely resembles that of a Latin American banana republic than it does the other major industrialized nations.

Read the entire post. They say pictures are worth a thousand words, and he's got graphs of the American Gini coefficient over time, along with average U.S. household income measured in mean vs. median. It's not a pretty picture.

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