Point of order: by stating the above, I’ve just guaranteed that the only people left reading this article are either A) related to me, B) agree with me, or C) are just scrolling down to the comments section so they can unleash the CAPSLOCK OF FURY.

First, let me just say that I have actual reasons for thinking Imam Rauf should be allowed to build his Cordoba House. I’m not just saying that because that’s what this month’s issue of The Evil Liberal Atheist and Gay Agenda Newsletter said I should say. My main reason for thinking they should be allowed to build Cordoba House is this:

The United States' Bill of Rights; Photo from Wikipedia (Click to enlarge.)

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
– The First Amendment to the United States Constitution

Ladies and gentlemen, utterly regardless of anything else, that’s all you really need to know. It is unconstitutional for a government, any American government, to make a law, any law, regarding the free practice of a religion, any religion. Even the Muslim religion. Which means that neither the New York City government, or the New York State government, or even the Federal government, can make any sort of law that prohibits building mosques near Ground Zero.

Which leads me to what I feel is a reasonable question: What, exactly, do the Ground Zero Mosque protesters think they’re going to accomplish?

Just standing there with signs, shouting, in and of itself, isn’t going to accomplish much. I mean, it’s certainly your right to do so; I just quoted the very amendment that gives you that right. But, it’s not going to stop Rauf from building his community center. And I can tell you right now, that even if New York City goes ahead and makes a zoning law that says “No mosques here, folks,” it’s not going to stand. Rauf will lawyer up and fight that sucker all the way to the Supreme Court, and that law or ordinance or whatever won’t stand. It’s blatantly unconstitutional.

The only way a law like that could stand in court is if it said something to the effect of “No houses of worship or religious edifices of any kind here.” Which, I suspect, is really going to pooch that memorial and shrine we were planning on building at Ground Zero itself. And I have to think something like that probably isn’t what the protesters are aiming for.

But that’s still not what I want to talk to you about. What I want to talk about, what I feel is really the crux of the matter here, is why people are protesting that community center.

Let me tell you, in one word, why otherwise decent folks are losing their damn fool minds over that building: fear.

Human beings are hardwired to fear what is different. It’s straight up Us-VS-Them-ism. Every conflict in the history of the whole world can be boiled down to that single thing. Allow me to quote a great philosopher on this point:

Jingo, by Terry Pratchett

It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.
– Terry Pratchett

Let me tell you one thing: If it was a bunch of Protestants wanting to build a community center with a chapel two blocks from Ground Zero, we’d never have heard a word about it. But because it’s Muslims? OMGOUTRAGE.

Seriously, people? Is that the best we can be?

Actually, that’s a crappy analogy. Let me rephrase that. If it was, say, Ted Haggard wanting to build a community center with a chapel in it, we’d never have heard about it. Or, if we did, it would have been for about ten minutes. And I doubt it would have gathered the kind of fiery rhetoric and volatile protesters we’re seeing right now.

(I was actually going to go with Fred Phelps right there, but then I remembered, no, everyone hates Fred Phelps.)

And let me explain why I’m changing my analogy: because just saying “a group of Protestants” insinuates that the loons who flew into the World Trade Center on 9/11 were standard-issue Muslims. And they were not. They were religious fanatics, insane zealots, just as absolutely 100% certifiably crazy as Fred Phelps, or any member of any other fringe nutjob segment of society who advocates violent lunacy and hatred in the name of their twisted gods.

By protesting this Muslim community center that will be built near Ground Zero, you are tarring normal, every day Muslims with the same brush as the psychotic fringe elements that make up groups like Al Qaida. You are, in fact, engaging in Us-VS-Them-ism. You are acting from fear.

And I ask again, Is that the best we can be?

Yeah, yeah, I get that Imam Rauf is a bit of a douche. I have bad news for you. Most big-time religious leaders are. You don’t get that much power over anything by playing nice. Allow me to direct a pointed look towards a few other religious leaders with questionable backgrounds: Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Smith, Ted Haggard (again) … I could go on.

America has a history of this sort of behavior. We have a habit of seeing those who are different than us as lesser. It’s what led to things like slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, the Philippine-American War, the current illegal immigration furor, the outcry against Muslims, and more. We have a history of Us-VS-Them-ism. It’s not a unique history. Plenty of nations have indulged the same bad behavior.

But isn’t it about time we got past all that? Aren’t we supposed to be better than that? Aren’t we supposed to be all melting pot, give-us-your-poor-your-tired-your-huddled-masses, diverse and powerful because of our diversity and tolerance? Isn’t that what America is supposed to stand for?

I mean, that’s what they taught me in kindergarten. Maybe I went to a weird school or something.

Folks, let them build their community center. Embrace it. The fact that we can and are allowed to do such a thing is what makes America great. Don’t let yourself be ruled by fear and Us-VS-Them-ism. The idea that we aren’t ruled by such things is what’s supposed to make Americans great people.

PS: CAPSLOCKS OF FURY can be unleashed directly below here.

PPS: Buy Jingo by Terry Pratchett and read it. It’s a hilarious, brilliant book.

A couple of months ago, there was a huge dust-up over at Blizzard, the folks behind WoW. In early July of this year, Blizzard announced an end to “anonymous” commenting on their message boards, and all across the Internet, a bazillion WoW geeks lost their damn minds. Blizzard announced that all their players’ various accounts, across all of Blizzard’s games, would be joined under their Real ID program. Gone would be the days of commenting under your character’s name, and more precisely, of creating throw-away accounts to troll and abuse people on Blizzard’s forums and in their games. Everyone would know who you were, and all the throw-away accounts in the world wouldn’t stop people from knowing it was Bob T. Asshole giving them grief on the forums and in-game.

Now, if you go look at that Real ID page right now, you’ll notice there’s a whole bunch of words there like “optional” and “if you choose to” and so forth. That’s because when Blizzard announced this change, their forums exploded. Over two thousand pages of hate and horror rolled all over Blizzard’s post on Battle.net, and Blizzard was forced to back down.

Now, something similar is going on over at LiveJournal. Recently, LJ rolled out a new option to connect your LJ accounts to your Facebook and/or Twitter accounts. Predictably, LJ managed to implement this change in the worse way possible, and now the LJers are pitching a spaz.

LiveJournal offers the option to filter your posts so that only certain groups can see them. You can make your posts completely private, or lock them down so only people on your friends list can see them, or even (I believe), so that only certain people on your friends list can read them. Well, their new Facebook/Twitter connect feature kind of pooches their privacy feature, because if a connected friend comments to your locked post, their comment can post to Facebook or Twitter, along with quite a lot of what they said. Which could very well give away serious personal details that you don’t want other people knowing.

For the full skinny, check out these posts by Cleolinda Jones, incredibly cool LJ person who writes awesome things.

• Comment Cross-Posting Addendum
• Two Major Issues: Pingback and Full Names
• What This Is All About

This doesn’t surprise me too much. LiveJournal is old stomping grounds of mine — it’s where I first started blogging. I was there for quite a few years (still have an Early Adopter account, as a matter of fact) before I shuffled along. Much as I enjoyed LiveJournal, they have a history of implementing new features and service changes in just about the most sucktacular way available. They were also pretty good at failing to live up to their promises. So, when they sold out to SixApart, I buggered off and found somewhere else to blog.

But anyway, we’re not here to talk about how much LJ sucks. We’re here to talk about being anonymous on the Internet.

Just about the time I started posting Black Alice for all the world to see, I gave up on being anonymous on the Internet. I wanted my real name associated with Black Alice, for both professional and legal reasons. And since I intended to cross-post between my “anonymous” site, where I was going by my long-time Internet handle, JavaElemental, and where I had some regular readership, and Black Alice‘s site, where my real name was posted all over everything, there wasn’t a whole lot of point to keeping up pretenses.

Hi. I’m Marci Sischo. I live in Corvallis, Oregon. Please don’t stalk and kill me. Jim and my dog would be very sad if you did.

Jumping out of the Internet closet is not a decision to take lightly. For example, I’ve got a ten-year blogging history dragging around behind me. Since I guarded my real identity like it was the Crown Jewels, I felt free to say pretty much whatever I damn well pleased. That often included things like “George W. Bush is a goddamn retard!” or “Fuck I hate my job!” or “I hate the assholes who own the restaurant I work at!” and similar sentiments. All of those things, and ever so many more, are still here, available to read if you care to go looking for them. And when I dusted off my real name, and trotted it out on the Internet, I made all that stuff easily finadable for anyone who wanted to find it. Like, oh, future employers.

So, you know. That could go badly. But hey, Future Employers, at least I’m not drunk and nekkid on MySpace or Facebook, right? That you know of.

The important bit here is, that was my decision to make. No one forced me to attach my real name to anything. No one forced me to blog about things it might have been wiser to keep quiet about. No one forced me to reveal any secret information I didn’t want broadcast to the world. I weighed the possible consequences, I made the decision, I was prepared to accept the consequences.

In the cases above, with Blizzard and LJ, it was a corporation making those decisions on behalf of other people, without those people’s consent.

Now, with Blizzard, they backed down over the resulting outcry. No one got outed as a WoW player, or had their real names revealed to their fellow WoW players without permission, that I’m aware of, at least. In LJ’s case, a lot of people had information they didn’t want spread everywhere, well, spread everywhere. Fortunately, LJ users seem to have caught on before any real harm was done, so far as I know, but still, it was a terrible thing to do without implementing properly, or at the very least, explaining the consequences properly.

Cleolinda gave an example of someone posting a friends-locked post, and someone else commenting to it. That person’s comment gets cross-posted to Facebook, along with context like “Oh, honey, that bastard is no good for you. You need to leave your husband.” Cleolinda asked, what if the woman’s husband was reading her friend’s Facebook and saw that? He doesn’t need to read the entry he was locked out of; he can guess what was said there, now.

What if the friends-locked entry was perfectly innocent, and the friend just doesn’t like the husband or misconstrued some comment in the post? Or, what if the husband in question was an abusive bastard, and decided to beat the shit out of his wife over that?

Bad things could result, is what I’m trying to say, here. And it’s one thing if I make a decision for myself, and bad things happen. It’s a whole other thing if some company makes that decision, and I lose my job, or get beat up, or end up divorced, or some other craziness.

There’s a certain segment of the population out there agitating for real identities on the Internet. Some of them complain about all the awful, hateful things you can find on the Internet, and claim that forcing people to use their real identities would prevent that sort of thing. They may very well have a point. Maybe Megan Meier would still be alive if Lori Drew hadn’t been able to make fake MySpace accounts.

Of course, there’s some corporate backing behind this idea, too. Corporations don’t want their employees anonymously trash-talking their company and giving them a bad rep. Anonymous people are getting fired over that even now. Imagine if companies could find their employees online even more easily. But hey, maybe fewer people would get fired for blogging if they had to use their real names.

After all, they’d probably be afraid of saying anything bad about their companies. Or anyone else.

The Commuter Gets A Facelift

This summer the staff of the Commuter tackled a big project: a complete overhaul of the Commuter’s website.

One of the major goals of the Commuter’s new web presence was to encourage reader participation. Staff writer Lacey Jarrell said of the upgrade, “The coolest thing about the new site is reader interaction. By linking to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and blogs, we’ve opened channels that we can [use to] directly interact with students and faculty, and through that, give our paper a real opportunity to become a forum for the school community. It’s truly amazing!”

A Review of Gail Carriger’s Blameless — You can read that at UFF or at the Commuter. It’s the same article.

I love Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate series. You can’t even talk to me about this series, because I go all FANGIRL SQUEE when anyone mentions it. It ranks right up there with the Dresden Files in my estimation, and I tell pretty much anyone who even so much as looks askance at Carriger’s books in the bookstore to buy them right now. DO EEEEET.

Black Alice’s Detroit

Google Maps has been one of our most invaluable tools while writing Black Alice. Particularly since James and I live about 2,500 miles away from Detroit, currently.

We use it to find locations for our scenes, get directions, and keep our bearings straight. Google Street View has been unbelievably helpful, as well. We use it to double-check descriptions, scout out locations, and make sure our routes work when we’re describing travel from one location to another.

The lady of the house was a tad worse for wear, and the bits of gristle and bone I fished out made my fingers sting and burn when I touched them. After another trip to the kitchen, I soon had half a dozen Monster McNuggets wrapped up in tinfoil and tucked into a Tupperware sandwich box. While I worked, I was treated to a rapidly improving topographic map of the house as the shadow flowed into every room in the house, sliding along the ceilings and walls and wafting through the air. She found where the man of the house had stashed his porn collection and where his youngster had tucked candy wrappers hidden away in his room. But no glyph.

“Come on, already, it’s a freaking scar on reality. How hard could it be to find?” I got up to help her look around, and within minutes found the glyph in the pool in the backyard.

I crouched at the edge, staring into the pool why my shadow sulked. She felt she’d been told to search the house, not the pool, and that I’d cheated somehow. The glyph was much easier to see in the water than it had been in the air. The mind-wrenching lines of the thing carved through the water, leaving empty spaces, almost like there was a glass shape floating in the depths.

Read More >>

Next week: Car chase! Battle royale! Blood and shadows! New to Black Alice? Start here!

(Image ‘Shopped from random bits on my hard drive. If it’s yours and you want credit, or don’t want it used, let me know, and I’ll fix it ASAP.)

I keep hearing on the news, and reading in other news sources all over the Internet, that the upcoming election is going to be really bad for the Democrats. I keep hearing about this “anti-incumbency” thing that’s going to cost the Democrats all these seats in the House and Senate and so forth …

But I’m not actually seeing it happen. What I am seeing happen is an awful lot of Republicans losing seats to “Tea Party candidates.” Tea Party Candidates who don’t appear able to win against their Democratic foes.

Even in the big primary deal a few months ago, despite all the outcry over a few upsets, most incumbents kept their seats. So apparently people are expecting to see all these incumbents fail in the big elections this fall? To … first-time-running Tea Party Candidates, many of whom have a bad case of the crazy and/or stupid, and Republicans who have nothing to run on, literally, because all they’ve done is shoot down legislation since last January?

Really?

(PS: Because I ganked the image from there, if you really need to, you can buy that t-shirt here.)