Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Somebody's answer to the question of why cats knead: "It goes back to the ancient Roman times when cats were enslaved to bake bread."

Dan Ireland said, "Laws are made to protect the public. Sometimes you have to protect the public against themselves." What was this danger-to-ourselves that the public needs to be protected from? Why, the ability to legally purchase sex toys (in Alabama), of course. The danger there, and thus the need to protect people from themselves, is ... er ... ah ... "obvious"? Maybe the Baptists at the Alabama Citizens' Action Program are taking a euphemism too literally, and confusing "self abuse" with some other form of abuse? [Story found by way of chickgonebad, who picked the same bit to quote.]

Note that (when I last checked, shortly after reading about it [mentioned/discussed several other places as well]) you can't currently use the 'search interests' function on LiveJournal to find other users interested in "family morals". Why? Because the combination of a child-related term, 'family', and a sex-related substring, 'oral', makes that icky. Or dangerous or something. I guess "sometimes you have to protect your users against themselves"? I can see wanting to a) make LJ harder for pedophiles to use to find each other or (gee, why do I find this second explanation easier to believe) b) apply some whitewash and make it harder for would-be advertisers (and the self-appointed morality police who lean on the advertisers to get the advertisers to lean on content-distributors) to notice that which may give offense ... but, as plenty of other people have already asked, have the lessons of AOL's accidental banning of breast-cancer support groups based on keyword/substring filtering[1] been forgotten already? This is actually a notch less clueful, if more subtle, than that whole "you mentioned a nastybad keyword in your interests so we're deleting your account" bullshit in the spring.

I get the impression that in the long run, LiveJournal will serve as a catalogue of mistakes for the other LJ-software-based blogging sites to try to avoid ifwhen they get big enough to start facing pressures similar to what started LJ's chain of gaffes. Maybe this is the inertia of changes already set in motion before SUP bought it from Six Apart, but so far I'm not encouraged by what I'm seeing.

And that's even without getting into the "it doesn't affect me directly all the way over here in North America" questions that, as folks who Want To See The Right Things Done and who appreciate it when not-directly-affected others stick up for us when we are wronged, we should be examining. Things like, what effects SUP's stewardship of LJ will have on Russian political bloggers and journalist-bloggers. I haven't seen a 'smoking gun' yet, but there's plenty of suspicious noises and a whiff of Cordite in the air to make those of us who consider freedom-of-speech an ideal, not just a personal convenience, a bit twitchy.

[1] By no means the only example, probably not the worst, but likely the most famous. And (again, as others have already pointed out) the folks whom they really want to screen will just adopt creative misspellings to fool the substring filters, so that only those who trip them accidenally (e.g. the 'oral' contained in 'morals') will wind up actually being screened. Hell, does anybody still spell the shortened form of 'pornography' "porn" instead of "pr0n" any more?