Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts

Monday, December 7, 2009

Does Yahoo Condone Racism & Hatred?

IThere is a service on Yahoo called the buzz. It is kind of a poor man's delicious or digg. But unlike those two wonderful link sharing services, they also allow you to leave comments about the stories/links, etc., whatever. Which sounds fine, yes?

But here is the problem: it is not moderated in any way, shape or form. I mean, sure that have scripts that change swears to "f***" and "s***" but they are easy to get around and sadly, that is the only control they exert over the content that the users contribute to the site. There is a mechanism to flag an inappropriate comment but from my experience it seems like it's a stop-gap measure so that they can claim that the site is being policed.

For instance, take this story about a black, female politician from Ohio, state senator Nina Turner being portrayed as Aunt Jemima. Here are some choice comments:

Blacks need to perpetuate the myth of Racism as an excuse for their short comings and failures. No other race has been so dependent on misfortune in order to maintain the "you owe me attitude!" Historically, even to this day, they continue to fail because of themselves and themselves alone.
- C. W.

Well what stereotype should they use? A gansta? A crackhead? A muslim? A welfare mom who dont know who her babies daddy's are?
- Joe

BOO f***** HOO MONKEYS
Log Cabin tastes better anyway
- Will

This is about as silly as condemning Minstrels. What's next a remake of " Gone with the Wind, and making Scarlett the servent ? Or how about we fight the Civil War all over again and make the Negro free the White Man. After all, that's who the minority is in America today. The Middle Class, taxpaying American who signs the Welfare Check and keep[s Osama's Aunt in Public Housing until he figures a scheme to keep her here. By the way, Aunt Jemima was a Half-Breed. Her father was a Quaker Oat.
- Desederatta (Not only is this person the antipathy of the uplifting poem "Desiderata," he cannot even spell it correctly)

If it's not favorable to blacks, it's racist. Get off your PLANTATION mentality.
- Mark

This not about Aunt Jemima. Its about the fear Black Leaders have of losing Affirmative Action, quota's in hiring, preference in promotions and obtaining scholarships and precious college seats in Ivy League Colleges, Law and Medical Schools. Not to mention the lists of grants available to minorities. For every Affirmative Action a White Employee loses their job, A white Student loses their College money and seat. Millions of Whites have lost promotions, money, and retirement to promote Affirmative Action. Now, after Trillions of dollars and sacrifice of so many what is the result??
- JimmyFox

Funny stuff. These clowns are no different than monkeys in the trees throwing sh-t at each other. Let's all have a chimp out ! The black race is doomed by it's own stupidity,but it will limp around on the crutch of slavery for many more years untill they finally all shoot each other. There is nothing more brutal than black on black anger. I guess it's the law of the jungle,but these fools never figured out they're not still in the jungle. Maybe they want to bring the jungle here? Im so..... sick of these people.
- JOHNM

Black people continue to keep themselves segregated, not individually, but as a race. They still promote racism by refusing to speak proper English, by playing the race card every chance they get, by following racist bastards like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, by refusing to take advantage of free education, by not marrying and raising their children as a family, by committing the majority of the crimes and blaming white people for all their troubles. As a race, they need to hold themselves to a higher standard like everyone else does, and stop whining. That will lead to the end of all racism.
- Tim S

Aunt Jemima is NOT racist. Sounds like the blacks are ashamed of their herratige. They straighten their hair and lighten their skin by interracially breeding with whites...looks like they have serious issues. The blacks need to be proud of who they are and stop the whinning. Also, they don't like when they are called ni##er but yet they call each other ni##er.....now that is ignorant. They dress like clowns and complain when people make in fun of them. Like I said..they have serious issues.
- TakingBack

It amazes me. Blacks want to raise hell about Aunt Jemima. Her image makes just about everyone have good thoughts about great tasting pancakes. Blacks don't, however, seem to have a problem with: an 80% bastard birthrate, opportunistic theft, having children without being able to support themselves, rampant drug trafficking and use, a disdain for education, destroying community or rental property, violent behavior, perpetrating racism, driving with no license or insurance, grand theft auto, carjacking, home invasion, and 90% of all violent crime committed in this country. What they choose to get upset about is very telling. Maybe her image should sport a different colored bandanna and a Newport hanging from her lips.
- Donald

And I could literally go on and on... And this is just from one story on one day. If you didn't see the Yahoo logos all over the site you might be liable to think that you'd stumbled across a white supremacy website. I've complained to Yahoo numerous times and I have received absolutely no response. There is a Terms of Service that warns the user that they might be exposed to content that they may find offensive. BUT in the agreement it also states that user agrees not to "upload, post, email, transmit or otherwise make available any Content that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable." Well, that certainly isn't being enforced looking at the comments above.

So, the bottom line is if Yahoo makes it a violation of the terms of service to post hateful, obscene, racist remarks and then does nothing to enforce those rules, isn't that a tacit approval of such behavior? Hypothetically speaking if I put up a sign that tells people to stay off my lawn yet sit on my porch and politely nod to people who cut through my property and give them a knowing wink isn't that actually condoning that trespassing of my property? If so, then Yahoo is condoning the hateful, racist behavior of its users? At what point does not enforcing the rules become a tacit approval of ignoring the rules and has Yahoo crossed that line? I think so...

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Salon.com Redesign

To quote Mr. Horse from Ren & Stimpy, "No sir, I didn't like it."

I tried to give them feedback on their website about the redesign, which is still in beta but the form didn't work. So, Ms. Walsh, here is what I would have told you had the site functioned properly:

If I were grading the design team or designer a letter grade for the new layout it would be a D. Looking at the code, it's a mess. If, in the future, you decide to redesign again it would be a nightmare for the person doing the redesign. It would be easier to scrap it all and start from scratch. The HTML & CSS is much more complicated than it needs to be. The beauty of doing a layout with CSS is that it is simpler, lighter, etc. I could understand if this were a site that utilized dynamic pages (JSP, ASP and the like, but they aren't.)

Moving beyond the mechanics of the pages, the layout is awful. Nothing flows, everything is disjointed, and the scale of elements and their relationship to one another is completely out of whack. The War Room for instance, the logo is cut off on the left hand side (which a new reader would not notice but is a bit of a shock to people who been visiting the site for a while) and is smaller than the headlines of the stories. Having all the navigation and links to the right side of the page is a good choice, but they are all over-sized and awkward. The advertising comes between the content and navigation, placing, perhaps, too much emphasis on the ad over the content. On some pages there are huge gaps of empty space between the content and the navigation at the bottom of the page. On most pages the ad comes between the top navigation and the content of the page - awful... why interrupt the flow of the page to place an ad there? It makes the top navigation, which I like seem separate from the rest of the page.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

I am a horrible blogger...

I haven't updated in quite a while...

Duh!

When I logged in I had to agree to all kinds of new user agreements, got a notification that my login is now tied into my Google ID or some such nonsense. Interesting thing happened though. I can now access my old blog, which was somehow lost for quite some time. That one is pretty old, the last entry is from 2002! I think that it was tied into my old domain, bigmisterc.com.

If you're curious what was on my mind seven years ago, go check it out. I know I'm going to go look it over, myself...