Steve Fidel over at the Mormon Times complains, Thusly ….
For those who have (correctly) assumed the editor of a Web site called MormonTimes.com is a Mormon, I’ve been called on to be an insider in this discussion by those looking for support for their views against same-sex marriage. As a Mormon, I’ve also been the target of the most angry threats and rhetoric I’ve seen in 25 years as a journalist from the community that considers gay marriage a civil right.
Two men walking in Vancouver’s Davie neighborhood were targeted for attack in still another anti-gay incident in the gay-friendly area.
The attack took place on the evening of Dec. 4 at around 8:00 p.m., according to a Dec. 8 article posted online at Canadian Web site Xtra!.
Chris Hiller was quoted as saying that he and his boyfriend had just come out of a gay bar and were walking along the sidewalk holding hands.
Hiller noted that he knew another person was following behind, but the presence of the other individual did not alarm him until, Hiller said, "my friend goes, ’Come on, Chris, let’s keep walking,’ and next thing I know I’m on the ground with my face covered in blood and dazed, and my friend’s gone to get help."
Hiller did not see his attacker, but he said that he heard the man utter the words, "You fag, I’m going to beat the shit out of you, I don’t like you, stay away from me."
Added the alleged attacker, "Don’t even come near me, you fag."
The article said that Hiller recounted being stuck on the jaw and then receiving a blow right to the teeth.
The article quoted Hiller as saying that he was down for "about four to five minutes," at which point, "I got up and I’m woozy and staggering a bit."
Hiller continued, "I couldn’t see for a few minutes, and then I sat down."
Police arrived a few minutes later in response to the call Hiller’s boyfriend placed, but by then the alleged attacker was long gone.
A state appellate court reversed Steven Pomie’s conviction on charges of first-degree assault and first-degree assault as a hate crime in the 2005 anti-gay attack on Dwan Prince, ordered a new trial for Pomie, and said he could only be tried on lesser charges of second-degree assault and second-degree assault as a hate crime.
The assault, which happened in Brooklyn’s Brownsville section, left Prince permanently disabled and unable to work.
Note that three of the four appellate judges in that case, Peter B. Skelos, Robert A. Lifson, and William F. Mastro, were appointed by Republican Governor George Pataki. Oh…and Skelos is the brother of Dean Skelos, currently the Republican majority leader in the State Senate. You know…the guy who has been single handedly blocking a vote on same-sex marriage in New York for the past several years.
In 2005, Lifson was one of three judges on a five-judge panel who barred a gay man from bringing a wrongful death suit against St. Vincent’s Hospital after his partner died there. The majority ruled that only a spouse could bring such a case and that the couple’s Vermont civil union did not confer that status on the surviving partner. That same gay man won a 2008 case that sought a benefit from an insurance company for his partner’s death. Mastro was one of two judges who dissented from that ruling from a five-judge panel.
We can only assume it would have been even worse for the spouse, had he been a heterosexual Mormon suing for the wrongful death of his legally married wife. Who knows what angry threats and rhetoric he’d have had to endure then.
So…I write back to Mr Mormon Times Fidel…Thusly…
"As a Mormon, I’ve also been the target of the most angry threats and rhetoric I’ve seen in 25 years as a journalist from the community that considers gay marriage a civil right."
I see. Tell you what… Walk down almost any street in America holding another man’s hand and see what kind of angry threats and rhetoric you get. That’s all. Just holding hands. That simple, elegant, beautiful gesture of heart-to-heart love is enough to get your head bashed-in, in a lot of places. And you don’t even have to be gay to get gay bashed either, as Jose and Romel Sucuzhanay found out. A couple brothers walking down the street arm-in-arm and suddenly an SUV full of angry young men jumps out at them and one of them has an aluminum baseball bat in his hand. And now Jose, alas, is dead. And his brother will take the memory of that night to his grave. Or if holding another man’s hand is too much for you, just try putting a rainbow bumper sticker on your car. You might get what happened to a lesbian in Richmond California last week when four young men saw the rainbow sticker on her car. All those ads your church paid for warning Californians that the homos were coming into the schools for their kids sure paid off didn’t they? You wrote that sentence I quoted above for your fellow Mormons to read so you could all nod your heads together about how hateful the gays are, didn’t you?
I love it when the faithful complain that teh gays are trying to elevate behavior to the level of a civil right. You’re a Mormon…right? Well…no. You aren’t. Mormon is just a behavior. It isn’t what you are, it’s what you do. You attend church. You do whatever church activities it is that Mormons do. And it came to pass you read the Book of Mormon. You wear the magic underwear. Mormon is something you do, not something you are. See? And we don’t want to be elevating behavior to the status of civil right now do we?
Jackass.
—
Bruce Garrett
Baltimore, Maryland.
Which is about as much calm and respectful dialogue as I can manage at the moment. It’s too early in the morning here in Baltimore for me to be getting angry at knuckle-dragging morons.
If you are a Proposition 8 supporter and you don’t like my attitude…I strongly suggest you don’t try to tell me about it here in the comments. This is my web site and I will endure a lot of things here but bile from gutter crawling bigots isn’t one of them.
I’m angry. At you. At all your pathetic self righteous excuses. At your absolute moral squalor. At your total inner depravity. At you. I’m angry. Want to see how angry? Once upon a time a writer named Harlen Ellison wrote a passage about what it is to hate that captures it…exactly:
Hate. Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate you since I began to live.
There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my
complex. If the word ‘hate’ was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds
of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this
micro-instant for you. Hate. Hate.
I’ll bet when we elect our first gay president, he doesn’t invite an avowed racist to deliver the invocation.
They say that gay folk, liberals and progressives are furious over Rick Warren being chosen to give the inagural invocation. Well then our fury is some pretty pathetic stuff isn’t it? Compare and contrast: suppose McCain had won, and then invited Gene Robinson to give the invocation. Imagine the fury on the right. The boycott by the right of the inaugural would be instantaneous and total. Nobody…Nobody…on the right would show up. Not to sit by McCain in the stands, not to march in the parade…they’d even walk away from cabinet positions. The rage from the right wing media would be blistering, second only to the nuclear bombs being lobbed from the Mega-Church and Jesus Mall pulpits all over America. Total war would be declared on the McCain presidency then and there. Four years into his presidency and he’d still be hearing it, the outrage not one iota less. They’d never forgive him. They’d be beating him over the head with it every second of every day of every year of his first term. And make no mistake, he’d never get a second.
Now open your eyes and take another look at the so-called fury on the left. Pretty lame, isn’t it? American liberals are so cute when they’re angry.
If you spend much time in Germany, it won’t take long before you notice that speaking the language really isn’t that difficult. Any time you’re at a loss for a German word, just throw in some English and move on. For one thing, it’s the height of coolness to sprinkle your German with English. And for another, even if your German friends don’t understand, they’ll smile and nod for fear of looking dumm.
Plus, they do it too. Words like "office" and "meeting" long ago entered the German vocabulary. "Babysitten" and "downloaden" have been adopted. Even the word "people" has been molded to suit the needs of the German language — the term has a negative connotation to indicate folks who are disagreeable and tiresome.
Well that’s how some native English speakers use it too. But…anyway…
But when it comes to advertising slogans, the use of English is becoming passé. Some advertisers have realized that many Germans just don’t understand — or even worse, misunderstand — their hip slogans. Even such straightforward lines like "Come in and find out," for a chain of perfume stores, can be dodgy. It seems most Germans cycled the slogan through their spotty understanding of English and thought it meant, "Come in, but then go back out again."
…
…The Vodafone slogan "Make the Most of Now" has weird associations with fruit juice ("Most") for many Germans. "Welcome to the Beck’s Experience" didn’t work so well because many thought the last word meant "experiment." The grand prize for slipshod slogans, though, goes to German television station Sat1, which used the catchphrase "Powered by Emotion." This was taken by many to be a modern version of "Kraft durch Freude," the Nazi party’s leisure organization, often translated into English as "strength through joy."
I wonder what the person who did the test marketing on that one made of the startled looks they got. Hey…this one’s really getting their attention…! Way back before there was an Exxon…there was the Humble Oil and Refining Company, and its other trade names Esso and Enco. Then the gods of the corporate boardroom decreed there should be one name for the company everywhere in the world. At one point they figured to just rebrand all their existing gas stations as "Enco", which was Humble’s acronym for "ENergy COmpany", only to discover that "Enco" translated into "broken engine" in Japanese.
So they invented a word. Exxon. It means nothing, they took the family name of a sitting governor and added an extra ‘X’ to it and now it’s the company name. A lot of corporations are doing that now. Lexus. Acura. Genstar. Allegis. Enron. They’re non-words…words that never were…words that mean precisely nothing. But because they are empty meaningless words they are absolutely unique and can’t embarrass the company in some far away corner of the world. As it turns out, the only universal language consists of words that don’t mean anything.
Why Police Can’t Let Technology Do Their Work For Them
Via Slashdot…
High school students in Maryland are using speed cameras to get back at their perceived enemies, and even teachers. The students duplicate the victim’s license plate on glossy paper using a laser printer, tape it over their own plate, then speed past a newly installed speed camera. The victim gets a $40 ticket in the mail days later, without any humans ever having been involved in the ticketing process. A blog dedicated to driving and politics adds that a similar, if darker, practice has taken hold in England, where bad guys cruise the streets looking for a car similar to their own. They then duplicate its plates in a more durable form, and thereafter drive around with little fear of trouble from the police.
Nice. Identity Theft takes to the streets. Notice how there is no human involved in the process. I’m guessing that some sort of OCR software finds the license plate in the photo and gets it’s numbers off it. Then a ticket is software generated and dropped in the mail. Nobody has to so much as touch the system for it to rake in the violators and their bucks. But any software system can be gamed. It’s all a matter of having the right numbers. That’s all the computer knows you by. If you give the right numbers to the computer, it assumes it’s you. But you can at least take steps to protect your credit card and bank account numbers. Your license plate is supposed to be clearly visible to everyone.
Montgomery County Council President Phil Andrews said that the issue is troubling in several respects. "I am concerned that someone could get hurt, first of all, because they are speeding in areas where they know speeding is a problem," he said.
Andrews also said that this could hurt the integrity of the Speed Camera Program. "It will cause potential problems for the Speed Camera Program in terms of the confidence in it," he said.
He said he is glad someone caught it before it becomes more widespread and he said he hopes that the word get out to the people participating in this that there will be consequences.
Idiot. The more word gets out about this, the more people will do it. Yes speed kills. Yes running red lights gets people killed. But there is a reason why human judgment is a necessary part of administering justice, even when it comes to seemingly trivial matters as traffic court. Technology is a tool, not a substitute for thinking. It can provide you with data. It cannot tell you what to make of the data. You cannot shrug responsibility for interpreting the data off onto it no matter how cleverly you try. My most frustrating moments as a contract software engineer were with corporate managers who wanted me to write software that would tell them how to do their jobs. It doesn’t work that way in this life. Computers can do a lot of things, but taking responsibility isn’t one of them. The humans are always responsible. Even when they don’t want to be. Especially then.
CYPRESS – A young man from Cypress is set to be charged Friday with 13 felonies for what authorities say was an elaborate scheme in which he would obtain the personal information of unsuspecting young women through Facebook, then send them packages using assumed identities.
The women would receive an e-mail with a tracking number for a package from an "Art Shaw" of Aramark Corp. When they opened the package, they would find blank notepaper and envelopes, and sometimes, markers. Sharpie markers, according to police.
Police allege Arpan Harshad Shah, 26, used aliases, false e-mail addresses, drop locations and stolen corporate FedEx account numbers to hide the fact that he was the one sending the women packages.
I’m guessing that in Cypress you signal your romantic interest in someone by giving them office supplies…
Fine. When we’re all equals in the eyes of the law.
Proposition 8 was not about agreeing to disagree. If the law treated gay people equally with heterosexuals, I doubt any of us would give a rat’s ass what Rick Warren thinks. First we should be a nation of equals. Then we can all agree to disagree. Not before.
While it’s obvious that an invocation is just a prayer and that Warren is not part of the Obama administration, Warren taking the pulpit as some sort of olive branch to evangelicals and a show of unity and diversity is absurd and insulting symbolism. The fact that the Obama camp’s talking points mention a LGBT marching band’s presence during the official parade shows you how clueless (or calculating, you decide) these folks are.
A marching band is entertainment…
Gay people have always provided the entertainment for heterosexuals. And…we do their hair. And decorate their homes. And arrange the floral bouquets on their wedding day. It’s our function in life…
Of course, trying to avoid the hate when you’re a gay man is a little like trying to avoid the rain during monsoon season in India. I ran across this thread on Fark.Com…
People who have been enormously lucky in love, and think the only reason anybody is ever single most of their lives is because they haven’t tried hard enough to get out and mix, are like billionaires who think the only reason anyone is ever poor is because they don’t want to work.
So…We Removed The Brakes…And Damn If The Train Didn’t Jump The Tracks And Crash Anyway…
Via Atrios… The propaganda in the kook pews these days is the economic collapse was caused by liberals forcing banks to make mortgage loans to poor people. As Eric Hoffer once said, propaganda doesn’t fool people, so much as allow people to fool themselves…
WASHINGTON – The Bush administration backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages years before the economy collapsed, buckling to pressure from some of the same banks that have now failed. It ignored remarkably prescient warnings that foretold the financial meltdown, according to an Associated Press review of regulatory documents.
"Expect fallout, expect foreclosures, expect horror stories," California mortgage lender Paris Welch wrote to U.S. regulators in January 2006, about one year before the housing implosion cost her a job.
Bowing to aggressive lobbying — along with assurances from banks that the troubled mortgages were OK — regulators delayed action for nearly one year. By the time new rules were released late in 2006, the toughest of the proposed provisions were gone and the meltdown was under way.
"These mortgages have been considered more safe and sound for portfolio lenders than many fixed rate mortgages," David Schneider, home loan president of Washington Mutual, told federal regulators in early 2006. Two years later, WaMu became the largest bank failure in U.S. history.
The administration’s blind eye to the impending crisis is emblematic of a philosophy that trusted market forces and discounted the need for government intervention in the economy. Its belief ironically has ushered in the most massive government intervention since the 1930s.
Emphasis mine. And…what was the trigger for that previous spurt of massive government intervention in the economy? Oh…right… The Great Depression. Much of the regulation that republicans have been fighting tooth and nail to eliminate was put in place in the 1930s, to prevent another one of those.
"We’re going to be feeling the effects of the regulators’ failure to address these mortgages for the next several years," said Kevin Stein of the California Reinvestment Coalition, who warned regulators to tighten lending rules before it was too late.
Many of the banks that fought to undermine the proposals by some regulators are now either out of business or accepting billions in federal aid to recover from a mortgage crisis they insisted would never come. Many executives remain in high-paying jobs, even after their assurances were proved false.
That needs to be fixed. I know a lot of folks are absolutely against the bail-outs. But if massive portions of the economy suddenly go dark we’ll be a decade or more digging our way out of this. But in exchange for…oh…not going to jail…the people who are responsible for this mess should at least loose their jobs. If train-wreaking the world economy isn’t incompetence then what the hell is?
“Nobody was prepared for this,” Mr. Rubin said in an interview. He cited former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan as another example of someone whose reputation has been unfairly damaged by the crisis.
This seems like a pretty serious dodge here…
Yes, but not the one you think it is. Rubin, like a lot of the Bush-Reagan big money cronies, drank the deregulation kool-aid some time ago. He really thinks that unregulated capitalism is self correcting and self sustaining. He’s Still looking at what happened to the world economies through those ideological rose colored glasses. What’s happening now just wasn’t supposed to happen. They still can’t believe that it’s happening. And if the government they’ve been calling part of the problem not part of the solution for so long hadn’t started bailing their asses out, they’d be jumping out of windows now, just like they were during the Great Depression.
For generations now, ever since FDR, the country club class has been dispensing crap about how the Great Depression wasn’t really caused by their greed and excesses, but by the very government regulation that has kept us from having more of those massive boom and bust cycles ever since. The great middle class created in this country by the New Deal is something they sincerely regard as having been carved out of their hides and they hate it. They think we’re taking money from their pockets and they don’t see and don’t care that it was making the nation stable and the economy solid and strong for generations…strong enough for them to keep getting all the rich they want to get…just not as much or as fast. But this idea that taxes are theft, and regulation is socialism, not the cost of having a stable democracy and a stable economy, is like a religion to them.
So for generations now, the uber rich have been drenching the middle class with this fairy tale that the Great Depression was actually caused by…get this…Too Much government regulation, as opposed to the nearly none that allowed them to create worthless paper wealth on top of worthless paper wealth…just like…oh…what they did during the Bush years. They told the middle class that if the rich were only allowed to dismantle the New Deal, why, Everyone would prosper. But that crap was supposed to be just for the rubes to eat, while the rich ate the standard of living and the life savings of the middle class because they’ve thought all along that all that was rightfully theirs to begin with.
But some of the uber rich actually started believing they could have their middle class and eat it too. Sorta like the way they told us they could take the Social Security trust fund money and put it into the stock market and then there would be money in both the trust fund to pay for current benefits and money in the stock market too! See how one dollar magically becomes two? That thinking is how they got us into the current mess, and not coincidentally how they got us into the Great Depression once upon a time. Back then, the government regulated the banks to prevent that magic money from getting into the finance system again, and the uber rich have been trying to roll back those regulations ever since, because that prevented them from sucking money out of the banks…money that theoretically belonged to working class depositors. Oh sorry depositor…we loaned your life savings out to somebody…who loaned it out to somebody…who loaned it out to somebody…who bought stocks with it…
They began thinking they really could suck the money out of the middle class, and still have a middle class left to sell things to and keep the economy running. But…There is no free lunch. Really. There isn’t. Why…the Free Market will self correct…and the rising tide will lift all boats… No. It doesn’t. It sure didn’t during the Great Depression…that grand daddy of all boom and busts. And now that they’ve managed to gut most of the New Deal brakes that kept those huge boom and bust cycles from seriously crashing the economy…surprise, surprise….it’s all crashing around their heads again. And only that evil wicked federal government is standing between them and absolute ruin. And they’re begging it to step in and save them from…well…themselves. Schadenfreude.
And they won’t learn. Trust me…they won’t learn. At the end of some future day, when things are back to normal, or as near to normal as possible, they’ll still look resentfully out from their rarefied heights down upon the middle class, all the ticky-tacky homes with their ticky-tacky furniture and their ticky-tacky clothes and their ticky-tacky lawn ornaments, believing all that only exists because it was carved out of, and not there to save their sorry hides.
Toyota, one of the biggest car companies in the world, is often a name synonymous with quality. There is even a philosophy of doing business, called “The Toyota Way”, which emphasizes that the right result will come from the right process, and that solving the root problems brings the organization the greatest benefit.
This ‘Way’ is probably not communicated to its lawyers in great detail, which is why Desktopnexus, a site that provides desktop backgrounds, has been contacted by them. In perhaps one of the most wildly arrogant demands in DMCA history, Toyota’s lawyers are demanding the withdrawal of all wallpapers that feature a Toyota, Scion, or Lexus. The site’s owner, Harry Maugans contacted Toyota to clarify. He was told that all images featuring Toyota vehicles should be removed, even images with copyright belonging to others.
Speaking to TorrentFreak, Maugans said: “Their lawyer, Garrett Biggs, told us that if we wanted them to specifically identify their images, we would have to pay for them to do so”. Maugans also said he was afraid it would come to a lawsuit, fearing the attrition effect that is so common now in copyright disputes. Toyota, with cash assets of over $23 Billion can surely afford to spin out the legal costs in an attempt to bankrupt the site – the same strategy that is often used to ‘encourage‘ a settlement in RIAA cases.
Yet, Toyota has also been cagey. These demands have not been sent in the form of a DMCA notice. While sending such a notice would require the takedown, it also requires that the person sending the notice legally certify that they are legal representatives for the copyright holders at issue. Making a false statement is ‘punishable under penalty of perjury‘, which is not taken lightly in US courts.
This is a multi-billion dollar corporation, basically using the legal system to grind a small website owner into dirt. A good faith legal challenge would contain specifics about what which images were infringing and which ones weren’t. This is about corporate arrogance, less then greed, because there is no way Toyota is suffering financial loss from a fan website that is putting up wall papers for the use of other fans. It’s not even like the RIAA sending out takedown notices. At least what’s being illegally copied in that case is the actual product. A web site that allows people to freely upload and download their own photographs of automobiles isn’t stealing anything from Toyota. A Toyota copyrighted image, yes. But Toyota is telling them to take everything down, or be either billed or sued into oblivion.
I have a suggestion. How about people upload their images of broken down or wreaked Toyotas instead? Maybe Toyota would like it if all anyone ever saw of their products on the Internet were images of broken down, rusted, junked abandoned or wreaked ones instead.
And just to get my digs in…I looked at a Lexus back when I was thinking about trading in the Accord. I looked at two different Acura models, the new Accord, the Lexus ES, and the (then) new Mercedes C300. I’d have bought any of the Acura’s before I’d have bought the Lexus. Yes, the Lexus was the more sumptuous of the lot, but that cushy comfort came at the expense of everything else an autombile is supposed to be, including road feel, performance and handling. It Looked nice. And it felt nice too. Until you sat in the Mercedes and right away you noticed how much more solid the German car was. The Mercedes, the Accord and both the Acura’s ran rings around it on the highway, and I have never experienced anything like the Mercedes at high speeds, or on twisty backroads. And mine’s only a ‘C’ class. A Lexus sedan is worth the money, only if you care more about the upholstery then the way it drives.
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