andygates: (Default)
A few years ago I tried to work out what was going on in these people's heads.  I alted on one of the UK's extreme nationalist/racist boards, and played a female character so they'd open up to me. *

It's fear.  The kernel at the heart of all of them is fear.  Fear of change, fear of strangers, fear of not being the big dog.  And it's fake fear: it's the same fear your Mum will feel when you bike across town, because she imagines it to be more dangerous than it really is

Fear leads to the Dark Side, as Yoda sez, and wise he is.


* Yes, this was a "now wash your soul" kind of exploit.  For a lesser depth of contamination, you might want to read the BNP manifesto; do it while the oleaginous Griffin is pleading that they're just another political party and this is all a witch hunt.  Prepare some unicorn chasers for afterwards.

andygates: (Default)
The panopticon isn't always a bad thing.  The BNP's* membership list has been leaked online.  You can even check it yourself and see just how many knuckle-dragging racists there are in your town!  And for giggles, here's one of their blogs: you can smell the panic among the big strong boys who sign on as "anonymous". 

Bless.  They're worried that they might lose their jobs (plenty of jobs formally preclude political activism such as party membership).  Give 'em a week and they'll find a way to blame it on the Muslims, darkies or Poles, you bet.

Yes, I'm gloating.  Light exposes cockroaches.  You see, I'm a kind of tolerance-fundamentalist.  That means that I'm fiercely antagonistic to intolerance.  This has to be the case: if tolerance tolerates intolerance then it gets swamped and less tolerant; to be maximally tolerant, it must be maximally intolerant of intolerance. 

No, I won't repeat that three times when drunk.

How could this secret club have done better?  Well, they could have encrypted everything, but this looks like a deliberate leak: someone with a grudge published the list.  Can't really defend against that one.  How does this affect other secret clubs which, maybe, don't stink as much?  Will my Sea Shepherd sponsorship come out?  Or my Masonic Lodge dues?  Maybe it's time for real secret societies to come back: ones with handshakes and deadly vows, and no access to email.  I don't think it will work.  

So: don't join anything you'd be embarrassed to be identified as a member of.  Anywhere.  Ever.

Meanwhile, I have to work out what to do to the three scaredy-cat thugs in my town.  Suggestions?




* Basically homegrown nazis, "send-em-home" Little Englander racist cretins.  (
wiki)

andygates: (Default)
A while back, I noticed a trend in our heavy media files: For the first time, user-created content had topped media-produced content.  In short, there were more home movies than there were MP3 rips.  Which is why I'm genuinely surprised that Western Digital have launched a portable hard-drive with crippled file sharing.  It's dumb file-type stuff, so you can share your holiday photos but not your holiday movies.  Only copyright-breakers share movies, after all.

Now, that seems like an annoying-but-understandable thing to do in a shiny dumbed-down version of the world where only media output matters.  But from what I've seen of my own users' data space, it seems glaringly daft.  Regardless of your stance on DRM and file-sharing and all those hot-button issues, there's a lot of 2.0 fat content.  This product isn't protected: It's just plain broken. 

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