Wings Over the Pyre - May 30th, 2007

11:21 pm - Urge to Rant ... Rising ...

Though not as much as you might think.

Why? Well, let's talk about Warriors for Innocence. Let's talk about Six Apart. Hell, let's even talk about Warren Ellis.

Don't bother going to the WfI site, incidentally. Aside from being possibly the worst designed website on the face of the Earth and possibly including orbital bases, it's about as useful as tits on a boar-hog, as my father might say. Even ignoring the swath of JavaCrud it attempts to spew on you.

Why would I want to talk about Warren Ellis, you might ask?

Warren, Hell love 'im, decided to post this in response the current tempest-in-a-teapot:

Until such time as LiveJournal/Six Apart work out how to tell the difference between fantasy fiction communities/support groups/fashion discussion communities/survivor histories and actual criminal use and traffic, and restore those fiction groups and survivor support teams to full working order, my own LiveJournal will become read-only, and I will produce no new content to be read on that system.

I do believe that some stupid people got what was coming to them today. But a lot more people have been mistreated by LiveJournal for no reason beyond blind panic. I see no reason to tacitly support that by continuing to write under a LiveJournal URL.

My main website, is, of course, warrenellis.com, and that already exists as LJ feed warrenelliscom.

No, Warren, buddy, if you really cared about the issue, you'd just yank your LJ wholly with just a forwarding message to your new home on, oh, any of the ten-thousand alternatives to LJ that exist (barring Vox, TypePad, or MovableType, since all of them are owned by Six Apart) with nothing but a charming forwarding-message left behind to quell the dust. That is, pointedly, not what you did. What you actually did was what pretty much evertyne else I see around is doing, scurrying about looking for the most wretched excuse for social posturing that is conceivable. You gave out what, at best, can be seen as a very low decible whine, and muttered, "I'm going to take my balls and go home!" while meaningfully stomping your feet.

This is not, let me be clear, to say that Six Apart has been behaving in anything more than the most boneheaded and incredibly stupid of manners in this context. Can SA truthfully do nothing more than rock back and forth like an autistic child and randomly blurt out names that someone's complained about before sending them off to the cornfield? We're not even talking about some kind of sustained suicide-bombing effort against the SA compounds, which we might actually accept as a poor-but-understandable motivation. We just have SA getting what appears to be an email flood from a given organization that has a site that's about as unprofessional as they come, has no official backing that folks can turn up (and which legitimate groups post clearly and frequently), and who doesn't even seem to have the basic underpinnings of anything more than a well-orchestrated hoax.

"Hoax?" I hear you saying. "What do you mean, man!? These kooks comvinced SA to shut down communities!"

Hoax is exactly what I mean. Did anyone but me notice the recent meme-exploit that moved across LJ in the guise of Yet Another Quiz? How about the revent Eve Online / Goonswarm situation, with all the Goon's "conveniently revealed" information coming just before a holiday period such that Eve couldn't respond for a crucial several day period?

At a certain point in every social group, the number of assholes becomes self-selecting and spontaneously-organizing in a self-supporting way. It appears the number of folks on the Net with factional agendas has reached such a point with various subcultures. Oh, joy. Moreover, the number of idiots in positions of decision-making power has always been unnaturally large, as a result of the rest of us promoting them just to keep them away from the things that really matter to keeping an organization running. Thus, SA's decision-making in this environment.

So, bottom-lining it, my take on this whole situation is that Warriors for Innocence is an elaborate hoax taking on the mantle of an anti-pedo front, but really just a few idiotic shit-stirrers with too much time on their hands. Compound this with Six Apart being suddenly paranoid about how things might be taken (despite the fact that in their own ToS, they disavow responsibility for things posted to LiveJournal) and the fact that a lot of the folks in the most-affected communities are the inhibitors of a universe which is constructed of two things, themselves and drama. The result is predictable: A chunk of stupid from the SA admin and a whole swath of hand-wringing from a whole lot of people no one would have given two-farts-in-a-whirlwind about two days ago ... and still don't.

I don't care if you think it's Confederate-flag-waving anti-UN Redneck Mafia members behind it. I don't care if you threaten to take 0.000000001% of the LJ population with you and go home. I really don't care if you think you need to change your interests and blog content for fear of being shut down, because that's just being a drama queen.

What I do care about is the fact that yet another tempest-in-a-teapot is exploding with much overwrought bullshit floating around and nothing at the root of it. Don't trust Six Apart anymore? Roll out and change your blogging site, it's not hard. "The Net recognizes censorship as damage and routes around it appropriately." If you don't decide to do that, then you really don't care enough to do something about it beyond a token amount.

Me? I don't care enough to do anything about it beyond a token. But I have a great token!

The phrase you're looking for here is "bring it."

( Incest, Demonology, Vivisection, Rape, Sodomy, and All Those Other Good Things )