Posts by Chris Waugh
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Southerly: My Life As a Palm Tree, in reply to Steve Barnes,
Won’t some body think of the children?.
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I suppose one could also take this approach.
(aside: I found it amusing that the Herald had to provide a translation of tatau - where did they think the word 'tattoo' comes from?!)
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Southerly: My Life As a Palm Tree, in reply to Steve Barnes,
Asbestos got a bad rap in the eighties because some doctor said it might kill you in 20 years
Nobody told anybody here. Asbestos rooftiles are very common in China. Once helped my father in law put a new roof on the sheep pen, then immediately changed my clothes and dumped them in the washing machine and scrubbed thoroughly. My father in law happily went about the rest of his day in clothes covered in asbestos dust.
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Southerly: My Life As a Palm Tree, in reply to Moz,
The exploratory habits didn't really go away for quite a while.
My exploratory habits took a minor hit one day in Changsha in 1999 when I realised I'd accidentally walked into an army barracks. There were no signs or sentries at the gate, and the camouflage gear on the washing line didn't ring any alarm bells because all the labourers I'd seen being lowered into sewers or climbing power poles wore the same stuff. I only realised where I was when some guy behind my loudly and insistently shouted, "Hey! Hey!" and I turned around and saw a dude in camo carrying a submachinegun. Didn't bother finding out if it was loaded.
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Southerly: My Life As a Palm Tree, in reply to Rich Lock,
responding to a request to ‘play music on the computer now!
Hehe, me too. Not dubstep, though, but the opening bars of Hunters and Collecters' Holy Grail or Bob Marley's Iron, Lion, Zion have my wee one doing her absolute best to pound whatever bed she's on into eternal submission. A few other songs have a similar effect, but for whatever reason those two work best.
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Up Front: Everyone is Wrong. And Right. Whatever., in reply to Danielle,
And yet somehow, despite the sexist culture in which we are steeped, most of us manage not to send rape threats to feminists.
It is true that some people have a lot more trouble with that whole "growing up" thing than others, but as I sit around twiddling my thumb waiting for a painfully slow website to do what I need it to do, I flip through the Guardian and wonder just how widespread a problem this is. For one thing, these lads' mags really don't help. And crying "free speech" really doesn't win any respect from me. And this is disgusting. And surely a girls' school shouldn't be obstructing a feminist society founded by its students? And instructing them to take down photos protesting the need for feminism after they attracted abusive comments from boys - surely that's only empowering boys to abuse girls? And a 14-year old girl kills herself after being bullied online, then her 16-year old sister is abused as she's trying to mourn her sister and prepare for the funeral?! Sometimes I wonder just how large a majority that "most of us" is.
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Up Front: Everyone is Wrong. And Right. Whatever., in reply to Lilith __,
What these troll-men are saying is quite extreme stuff.
Two things I noticed about that article:
1: The first troll named had been arrested for his trolling.
2: The links down the righthand sidebar seem to do a very good job of helping perpetuate the sexism.
I disagree strongly with "naming and shaming" because that has been done for a number of years now here, and while sometimes it has led to actual justice being done, it's a phenomenon that is far too easy to manipulate for less than angelic ends, and far too often it goes all vigilante with some pretty nasty results. But "name, arrest and prosecute", fair enough.
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Up Front: Everyone is Wrong. And Right. Whatever., in reply to Kumara Republic,
and publicly humiliating them by outing their real identity (and other dirty laundry for good measure),
Good luck with that.
1) How're you going to identify them? Possible in many cases, but don't we all get online from many places - home, work/school/university, phone/tablet, cafe's free wifi, etc.... that would seem to translate into more than one IP address, with many of them not terribly specific as to who was doing the trolling.
2) How can you be sure you won't turn into precisely the monster you're trying to fight? You seem to be advocating what is called here in China the "human flesh search (人肉搜索), which has had some rather frightening real world consequences.
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As for the Twitter business model, isn't the obvious solution a, ummm, whatchacallit, freemium model? Basic service for free, companies and organisations have to pay for official accounts, and all users offered packages with extra cool toys and doohickeys if they want to pay?
I dunno, haven't looked at Twitter for ages. It's one of those things that when it got blocked I just shrugged and moved on. I liked it, but not enough to bother jumping the GFW. I'm @southofthemill, if anybody wants to see if one of the world's more dormant Twitter accounts still exists (I s'pose they may have deleted it for prolonged inactivity).
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Up Front: Everyone is Wrong. And Right. Whatever., in reply to Russell Brown,
I’d still be wary of any kind of automatic dumping at all.
Me too, but I'm not sure that's what Deborah suggested. I'd've thought a "report abuse" button at the bottom of each tweet and algorithms that flag suspicious tweets, with both alerting a moderator who makes the call. And records kept so that repeat abusers and repeat abusers of the report buttons face punishments ranging from tight moderation (everything they post gets flagged for moderation) through suspension to deletion of account.
That’s great. In the end, community sanction may be more powerful than anything else.
Funny, that's how I thought this place worked. Could it scale up to Twitter, though?