Hmmm. I smell the eerie whiff of crack being smoked, here...
Apparently this is someone who never actually watched the movie, given that Mewtwo wins. Completely. The only reason he doesn't squish the entire good guy force in a few seconds is because he wants to discover his true purpose.
Anyway...
Also, we have a notable article or three on a Seattle court judgement barring someone from posting to a skiing newsgroup due to the mighty application of a... er... wossname... um... restraining order. Yeah, that was it. That thing about coffee affecting your memory must be true. Er, anyway, the story, in brief, is that apparently a group of cheerful on-line types got into a disagreement over free skiing passes that erupted, thanks to the magic of the internet, into a factional flame war of prodigious proportions. And not a funny one, either, as it, to quote various quotes, involved stuff like threatening to break the knees of your opponents and suchlike. So a Seattle (motto: "Come see the place where Kurt Kobain snuffed it!") judge slapped one of the participants with a restraining order that applied to pretty much everything. I think this was the guy who made the kneecap threat.
To which I say, yes, and? There's talk, as there always is, of the slippery slope arguement (which I'm incredibly familiar with, having been in Debate Club in high school. It was always my favorite arguement in our toolbox. Whenever we faced an opponent, no matter WHAT we were talking about, we always pulled it out).
Okay, tangent time. There are a number of debating concepts that tend to make people want to reach out and throttle their opponent. "Slippery slope" is one of them. After all, how do you prove that the people implementing a law are NOT malicious, and won't take advantage of it? You pretty much can't. Also fun is "the exception that proves the rule", which is almost always used as a generic monkey wrench pulled out by people who haven't the brains to try to disprove a point, and never for the situation which it was probably intended, which almost certainly doesn't exist. If I had a dime for every time... But anyway. The most entertaining debating thing I ever ran into was one pair of girls who had worked out a foolproof strategy. They had amassed a tricky little set of logic that let them prove that _topicality was irrelevant_, thus allowing them to cheerfully wander into off-topic areas where we couldn't debate them at all. It was a brilliant little document. I almost managed to pinch it off them, too. Would have served 'em right.
Er, anyway. Where was I?
Right. Seattle judge. Restraining order. Slippery slope. Ahem. Well, there's an attitude today that you can say anything on Usenet. This attitude is, quite simply, stupid. Anything you can't say in real life, you shouldn't be able to say on Usenet. You shouldn't be able to libel people, break disclosure laws, or, to quote the relevant example, threaten to kneecap someone. And people shouldn't sodding well whine about it when someone points out that you just can't _do_ that, and gets a judge to agree with them. 'Free Speech' does not, and has never, meant freedom from accountability. If you want to abuse your toys, they're going to be taken away from you. Maybe this judgement will, indeed, be a slippery slope monkey wrench sort of thing that other people will use to slap restraining orders on undeserving people. And maybe not. Banning someone from a Usenet newsgroup where they're threatening other people - who, it should be noted, they actually know offline and thus can reasonably be considered to have the opportunity to carry out those threats - is no different from any of the other restraining orders that are filled out daily against whackos all over the country.
When did people get the idea that they're not accountable for stuff they do on the Internet? It's this lack of accountability - or the idea thereof - that's turned it into the unspeakably huge suck-fest it is these days. There are lines that you're not allowed to cross in civilized society. The fact that you cross them on the Internet is irrelevant. Anyone who'd threaten to cripple their opponent over fucking free ski lift passes deserves the massive can of whup-ass they're going to get.
'Just let it go' policy just doesn't work any more with the Internet. There are just too many idiots.
In other news, there's the ADA or whatever suit against AOL for having a graphical front end that won't work with blind people's speech synths. To which I say, hm. On the one hand, this suit could have wide-ranging impact on web sites and service providers who like graphic-encrusted design.
On the other hand, everything I do is lynx-friendly.
It could really go either way on this one. THIS one has a heck of a lot more of a danger of being a slippery slope, by holding the Web accountable to a everything-compatible craze (but would that really be so bad). On the other hand, with all that talk about the internet for everyone, is it really a bad thing to hold ISPs to a standard that at least has a text-backup available?
But if they're gonna regulate all this stuff, dammit, they should do something about all that data collection. Not that the lawmakers will ever pry themselves from the teat of data industry dollars, but whatever.
Well, that's all for today. Hasta.
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