Three till Seven

I’m so disgusted about yesterday’s result on the FISA amendments. I’ve emailed Kentucky’s senators, complaining about how if our own President, ideally someone who breaks no laws himself and especially not someone who asks other entities to break the law, can commit felonies and not get in trouble for it, why on earth should any regular citizen obey the law? A government by and for the people should be held accountable to the same laws that govern those people.

I’m also disgusted with Obama voting to approve the amendments. Clinton voted against them, so remind me again why Obama is to be the democratic nominee in this year’s presidential election? He’s the one caving to the Bush administration while she’s the one trying to support the Fourth Amendment. I feel now like I have these options this November: 1) vote for Obama and maybe something will change but most likely things will stay the same (new absolved-from-all-crimes dictator, same slop), 2) vote for McCain and things will definitely stay the same, or 3) vote for some other candidate who has no chance of getting elected and things will stay the same.

Here’s some news:

1. The surveillance controversy:

   President Bush acknowledged the existence of the Terrorist Surveillance Program in December 2005, after it was first reported by the New York Times.

   The program — under which the National Security Agency monitors electronic communications, including e-mail and phone calls — was aimed at identifying potential terrorists who were communicating with people in the United States. As part of the program, U.S. telecommunications companies secretly granted government access to e-mails and phone calls on their networks. Bush said the program had thwarted a number of attacks.

   Critics have alleged that the program circumvented the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. That law created a secret, independent court to handle government requests for electronic surveillance in terrorism and espionage cases. The law was enacted as a check on executive power after the Watergate scandal.

2. Get FISA Right Campaign
3. Send an email to your senators
4. Congress votes to immunize lawbreaking telecoms, legalize warrantless eavesdropping by Glenn Greenwald:
   

   The Democratic-led Congress this afternoon voted to put an end to the NSA spying scandal, as the Senate approved a bill — approved last week by the House — to immunize lawbreaking telecoms, terminate all pending lawsuits against them, and vest whole new warrantless eavesdropping powers in the President.
   …
   Today, the Democratic-led Senate ignored those protests, acted to protect the single most flagrant act of Bush lawbreaking of the last seven years, eviscerated the core Fourth Amendment prohibition of surveillance without warrants, gave an extraordinary and extraordinarily corrupt gift to an extremely powerful corporate lobby, and cemented the proposition that the rule of law does not apply to the Washington Establishment.

5. Betrayed by Obama by Joan Walsh:
   

   The only thing Obama has going for him this week is that McCain is matching him misstep for misstep. While we’re railing about Obama’s craven vote on FISA — rightfully; Glenn Greenwald is a hero for his work on this topic — McCain was outdoing Dick Cheney with neocon crazy talk, warning that Iran’s test of nine old missiles we already knew they had increases the chances of a “second Holocaust.” Every time I wonder whether I can ultimately vote for Obama in November, given all of his political cave-ins, McCain does something new to make sure I have to.

6. Bloggers Slam Barack Obama on FISA Vote

Aaaand here’s a video that about sums up the stupidity of it all:

I found a collection of five videos online that supposedly showcase “American soldiers at their worst.” I didn’t find all the videos to be conclusive evidence of soldiers at their worst, so here are my opinions of each of them. First off, though, here’s the page I found containing those five videos: Five YouTube videos show American soldiers at their worst.

Video #1

This is the harshest to me and also the one that I thought was most clear-cut between right and wrong. A man dressed in army gear holds up a little puppy, adorable and whimpering, before drawing back and flinging it across the desert, over a cliff. He and a fellow soldier are talking in high-pitched voices beforehand about how it’s such a cute little puppy. After the guy throws it, another man whom we can’t see—though from the sound of the voice, I would guess it’s the camera operator—says that it was mean to do that. The thrower just grins and shrugs.

To me, this indicates a sick individual. Either some fucked-up guy joined the army or some regular guy joined the army and became fucked-up because of what he went through there. I find it very sad that a person could become this way, or was that messed up from birth, but of course I know such people are out there, and this video is a clear demonstration of that.

Video #2

This one to me doesn’t necessarily mean that the soldiers involved are sick fucks, since all that happens is a tank drives over the front end of a car. The tank’s rolling forward across an intersection and some car darts out at the last second, right in front of the tank. I think it’s reasonable to assume the tank couldn’t stop in time, or steer out of the way in time. Does it suck that no one got out of the tank to check on the passengers of the car? Yeah, maybe, but maybe there was someplace urgent that the soldiers had to get to. Maybe it’s not a bad thing at all that the soldiers didn’t stop, either, because we’re at war, and whoever is in that car isn’t guaranteed not to have a machine gun or be an enemy.

Video #3

In this one, the point of view is from the back of a truck, though we can’t see any people in the truck. The truck is driving on a road, alongside of which a herd of some type of animal (sheep? cows? I can’t tell) is running. All of a sudden, what looks like fireworks go off amongst the animals, while people in the truck laugh. Is this cruel and unnecessary? Yes, definitely. The thing is, you can’t see anyone operating the camera or around the cameraman, so we can’t tell if the asshole is an American soldier, an Iraqi native, or a Canadian goose a long way from home.

Video #4

This is one almost as bad as the first, because we can clearly see American soldiers around the cameraman, the cameraman sounds American himself, and the group is doing something to injure a dog that isn’t offering them any harm. From the little clouds of dust coming up around the animal, it looks like they’re chucking clods of dirt or rocks at it. At one point you can see one of the soldiers picking something off the ground, further supporting this idea. The dog whines at being attacked and the men laugh. Finally, the dog runs off, tail between its legs, and it’s running strangely. One man comments, “That is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my life!”, while another laughs, “It’s walkin’ on two legs, too.”

I can’t make out the beginning of one sentence, but it ends with “…want to kill him, dude, I really do,” to which someone else responds “You wanna go over and kill it?” Now, if the guy sounded sad about having to put down an animal that they felt was suffering needlessly, I could understand and condone this behavior, but the guys are still laughing and sound like they’re discussing something completely normal. Maybe some people out there are otherwise normal folks but get a kick out of killing animals. I’m no psychiatrist, but that doesn’t seem normal to me. I’m going to have to say that attacking or wanting to kill animals is a sign of mental upset. To put it in layman’s terms, shit ain’t right. Note that the video doesn’t show the men killing the dog, just hurting it and driving it off.

Video #5

This one is less clear cut for me. The P.O.V. is from the inside of a dark building, and the camera is pointed at a soldier holding a rifle. An opening in the wall is to the left, through which you hear a dog barking. The camera points down and to the right, into the dark building, and you hear a gun go off. Is it from the man with the rifle? I’m guessing so, because when you last saw him, his gun was up as if about to be aimed. However, the shot doesn’t sound nearly loud enough for the close proximity the camera had to the rifleman.

The camera points back to the man with a rifle and another shot goes off, though this time I don’t think it was from that particular rifleman. The video switches P.O.V.’s to point at a dog rolling on the ground. A professional male voice has been dubbed over the tape, saying that one of the soldiers shot a dog “he said was about to attack him”. Some man with a turban around his head walks over to the dog, crouching down beside it; he puts his head in his hands. A male, American voice in the background says “We tried, sir.” The dubbed-over voice says, “We had seen the entire incident” before being cut off mid-word.

Who knows what “entire incident” was seen, since the video ends here. The man saying “We tried, sir” didn’t sound like he was laughing or happy to see the dog hurt—he sounded unhappy.

So what’s my overall take on the videos? The ones that I can interpret as showing an American soldier doing nasty things are sad, and they’re indicative that there are a lot of negative side affects to a war that aren’t human injuries or death. An obvious one I can garner from the videos is animal suffering and almost certainly death (I’m referring to the first video), but also the trauma soldiers must go through to cause them to enjoy that sort of thing. Maybe they were messed up to begin with, before even entering the army, or maybe the war over there is what’s caused them to be that way. Who knows, and it’s sad either way.

However, there are a few where the situation is hard to determine, and one where I thought flat-out that the soldiers involved didn’t do anything wrong. That’s the main reason why I posted this entry, because many of the comments I’ve seen about these videos imply that all people involved are worthless, sorry excuses for human beings, and I just don’t see it that way. Here are some sample comments:

Hope they all catch shrapnel in the balls.

— Truculent

Getting shot in the face isn’t horrible enough for that sick fuck. Puppies = all that is warm and furry and right with the world, and people who hurt them deserve to die excruciating deaths.

— Yellowbug2001

Is it too much to ask for a friendly Hell-fire bomb to drop on their sorry asses.

— TripsyDaily

What a rip! I just joined Classmates.com because I see their darn ads everywhere and I finally figured, what the hey, maybe I’ll sign up and see if anyone I knew in high school is on there that isn’t on Facebook. Turns out a girl I was friends with in elementary school but with whom I’ve since lost touch was listed, so I sent her a hi-how-are-ya message. Classmates.com tells me the message was sent successfully, then asks that I become a “Gold” member so that she can read my message. What, you mean the site is so cheap it won’t even exchange member email without charging someone?? How ridiculous is that. Here Gmail is giving away multiple gigabytes of space free, and Classmates.com is sooo self-important and awesome that it both puts a limit on the number of characters I was allowed to type, as well as informing me that either the recipient or myself will have to pay for her to read the message I sent. I was also inundated with requests to register for premium membership with them throughout my brief stint there. Maybe that’s why I see their ads everywhere: they’re a complete scam.

I was just visiting a site and saw a comment by someone named Vera, which is what prompted this whole entry. Thank you, random Vera, for your name’s inspirational qualities! Anywho, can you think of any particular names of places or people that irk you because of their pronunciation? I can, as I’m about to show you… umm, now!:

• Vera - All my life, I thought this was vair-uh, then finally a friend corrected me about a Vera Bradley bag. I can actually see why this should be pronounced as veer-ah, though: the a drags out that e, making it long. I just have a problem with this name because I thought for years it was pronounced differently than it is, so the correct pronunciation takes some extra thought processing on my end.
• Haggin Hall - This is my first piece of evidence that Lexington, KY is on crack. Not being a native of this city myself, when I first came to UK and saw the name of that dormitory, I immediately thought “hag-in hall.” Oh no, apparently, because everyone says it hay-gan hall. Tell me how the %$@*(#@ you get that pronunciation out of that word! This irritates me to no end, especially when others correct me saying hag-in. Is it Bilbo Bay-gans? Tay-gan for tagging? Lay-gan for lagging? I could go on, because there are a ton of words ending in -ging, and if you’re a southerner the -g sound mysteriously disappears anyway, making it like Haggin. I’ve been told hay-gan was how the guy for whom the building was named actually pronounced his name, and all I have to say to that is… Um, dude, you said your name wrong. Change the spelling if you want English to work with your stupid pronunciation.
• Mason Headley - My second piece of evidence that Lexington natives are crazy. That street name is pronounced may-son (sounds fine) heed-ley. Wait, what? What makes ‘ea’ have an ee sound? Is it the e two letters over? That doesn’t make sense to me because e is a weak vowel, so I didn’t think it could adjust the pronunciation of preceding vowels. I say this as may-son head-ley.
• Versailles - The third bit of evidence that Lexington people, and actually everyone in central Kentucky, are wacky: they pronounce that French word, which is the name of a city near Lexington, as ver-sales. Now if I had no geographical knowledge (which comes pretty close, actually, but I have a little!) and had never heard of Versailles, France, I’d agree with that pronunciation. However, I’m kind of, fairly, pretty, completely sure that the city in France came first. What’s up with us stealing their city names and then English-izing them? If we were going to change the pronunciation, why not change the spelling to be less French, too? Wouldn’t Versales have worked just as well? Every time I see “Versailles” and know it’s intended to be Lexington’s neighboring city, and not the one in France, I mentally have to correct my pronunciation of ver-sigh and bastardize it to ver-sales.
• proselytize - For years I said this as prah-SELL-ih-tize, then Kathy one day corrected me that it’s PRAZ-uhl-ih-tize, shocking the devil out of me because it totally doesn’t look like it should be said that way. I guess I see the syllables differently: pro-sel-y-tize, as opposed to pros-el-y-tize, which leads to the correct pronunciation.
• awry - This one looks like such a neat, predictable word. Two pleasant little syllables, chopped right down the middle: aw-ree. Nope, it’s gotta be difficult. I found out about this one from my dad, who said he had made the same mistake I did when he was in middle or high school, and that a teacher corrected him. Ah-rhy indeed!

I don’t think I could ever live with French because it seems like they leave out too many syllables for the letters they have. Maybe I should switch to Spanish entirely, because I think it’s very logical and phonetic. German would be okay, too, except they throw words willy-nilly, creating new words on the fly that sometimes have lots and lots of syllables, which just scares me.

I’ve been asked before why I hate President Bush, and I never can back it up because I don’t remember specific events that have triggered my anger. Well, now I’m writing down a couple before they get buried in my memory:

White House says phone wiretaps back on “for now”

The Bush administration said on Saturday U.S. telecommunications companies have agreed to cooperate “for the time being” with spy agencies’ wiretaps, despite an ongoing battle between the White House and Congress over new terrorism surveillance legislation.
…
President George W. Bush has said he would not compromise with the Democratic-led Congress on his demand that phone companies be shielded from lawsuits for taking part in his warrantless domestic spying program.

Holes in the Wall

While the border wall will go through her backyard and effectively destroy her home, it will stop at the edge of the River Bend Resort and golf course, a popular Winter Texan retreat two miles down the road. The wall starts up again on the other side of the resort.
…
In the small town of Granjeno, population 313, Garza points to a field across the street where a segment of the proposed 18-foot high border wall would abruptly end after passing through his brick home and a small, yellow house he gave his son. “All that land over there is owned by the Hunts,” he says, waving a hand toward the horizon. “The wall doesn’t go there.”

In this area everyone knows the Hunts. Dallas billionaire Ray L. Hunt and his relatives are one of the wealthiest oil and gas dynasties in the world. Hunt, a close friend of President George W. Bush…

I guess you could call it a web trend, but recently I’ve seen several sites that offer hosting, and I’m just not sure how they work. One I saw just now is CrownedHost, which was advertised on Snark Forums. Here’s a snippet of the very beginning of the index page’s HTML:

If you’re familiar with HTML, the sight of that should send you screaming into the night. The rest of the source is equally bizarre and poorly formed. Now, if you’re new to the web design scene and don’t know HTML yet, it probably wouldn’t bother you to see the source of your host’s site looking like that, but there are other problems here that make me wonder how anyone could possibly buy hosting from a place like this:

• One of the owners of the site admits on her personal site that she is 17 years old, a senior in high school. I don’t feel it’s a slight against her to say that I’m not exactly rock-solid on her business skills, considering her age and education level.
• The ‘About’ page of CrownedHost acknowledges that it’s a reseller bought in 2007, so it hasn’t exactly been around for ages, working out any kinks and letting its owners get experience.
• The site doesn’t look professional or impressive to me at all. Three till Seven is hosted by Dreamhost, and whether you like or dislike their hosting skills, they at least look the part. Their index page at the time I’m writing this is bragging about how they’ve been hosting for ten years now. Their copyright statement goes from 1997 to 2008. They have links to such things as a Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, and Contact Us along the bottom of the page, which are things I’ve come to expect from any business’s online site. Proceeding to their signup page, I notice that they’re using a secure connection, which is reassuring to me. Things like this help to inspire confidence, and I don’t get any of that from reseller sites like CrownedHost; they just feel amateur.

The only reason I picked on CrownedHost is because I saw them on Snark today and they were the last in a series of unprofessional reseller sites I’ve seen lately. Nothing against the two girls that run it, I’m sure they’re lovely people, I just don’t trust them with my money and web site.

Do people really make money from those things? How do they even form? Two BFF’s in high school with no real-world experience decide, hey, let’s try and sell domains, hot dog. I don’t see how that would work at all, because I’m so leery of companies I’ve never heard of if they don’t look legit. Pretty much if I think you’ve never had to file taxes before, I don’t want to buy something from you, except at maybe a bake sale or a raise-money-for-our-New-York-trip car wash.

This should perk up your evening: me being grouchy! Because nothing exciting happened in my life the past couple of days—save seeing Juno, which was a good movie—I have for you a couple things that get under my skin:

• “of” mistakenly used for “have” - While I normally salute the contraction, not in small part due to my [over]use of them in speaking, I hate it when people expand contractions incorrectly. In particular, I hate seeing “would of come”, “could of done”, and their ilk. I know mistakes like these have got to be because of how “would’ve” and “could’ve” sound like “would of” and “could of”, but if you just take a second to think about what you wrote, you’ll see that “of” makes no sense in place of “have”. I’m just waiting for C++ programmers to start typing out “would int” and “could int” for “wouldn’t” and “couldn’t”. :P
• “deep” questions such as “if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” - I remember hearing this question when I was a child and even then it didn’t make me think for longer than two seconds before I came up with, “What if you left a tape recorder in the woods and walked away?” (There’s a sign of my age—tape recorders!) Now that I have a small understanding of sound waves, the idea that a large hunk of matter crashing into another large hunk of matter would cease to generate sound waves because of the lack of a human presence is laughable and pretentious. What, people are so important that, in their absence, the laws of physics cease to function?

I have discovered that the most annoying part of using Facebook is the applications. Some of them are pretty cool in that I can show what music I’ve been listening to recently, my political interests, and other things that I want visitors to my profile to know. However, I hate the ability to tell spam other users with invitations to use whatever crappy application has caught your eye. No, I don’t want to take the Friend Quiz, I don’t want to take the ‘What color are you?’ quiz, just because I went to high school with you doesn’t mean I want you to know my ‘Sexual Personality’, and I don’t want to participate in the Pirates v. Ninjas or Vampires v. Werewolves wars. There are all these ridiculous things and I always ignore them. The problem is that I can’t just block all my friends from sending application invitations to me, or at least that I’m aware of–if you know of a way to do this, please, let me know. I hate logging into Facebook and seeing dozens of invitations to stupid applications that I have to turn down. It makes me just avoid Facebook, because it’s effing annoying.

I was just reading the latest entry on Atourworst, Apparently Dreamweaver is a time-saving software, and it made me wonder not for the first time why folks online are often mean. On so many sites, I find sneering attitudes from nearly all the posters. If you ever read comments on Digg or Fark, everyone makes fun of everyone else, often harshly. If a person isn’t making ad hominem attacks, they’re completely rebuking your ideas.

On Fark, for example, the comments threads always seem take these stances:

• Christianity is stupid, therefore if you are a Christian, you are stupid;
• Bush is stupid;
• Government is evil;
• Children are worthless; see crotch droppings;
• All celebrities are morons;
• Everyone from Florida is brainless.

And the list goes on. Whether you agree with any of those statements/stereotypes or not is irrelevant; what I’m getting at is that there may be 300 or more comments about a story on Fark, and the majority of them all follow those ideas above. You’ll occasionally get a dissenting opinion, and it’s often more well written than the hundred others surrounding it. It gets ridiculous after a while; you read Digg or Fark comments long enough and you get to where you can predict what any random person will say.

What I want to know is if everyone online is just an asshole. I’ve talked with Todd before why he thinks so many normal people turn into jerks when they get on the Internet, and he and I agree it’s because of the anonymity. Sure, I may know you call yourself Jordan on your web site, but I don’t know if that’s even your real name, let alone if you’re completely making up your online persona. I’m referring to Jordan of Atourworst, who apparently gets enjoyment out of upsetting some other jerk online about Dreamweaver and web development (see the blog entry linked above). I guess I’m just wondering what the point of all of it is.

It seems like all the “e-drama” I find online within the sites at Perfection and Snark is caused by people that use lolcat terminology way too often. By that I mean half their sentences consist of slang like “srsly,” “ZOMG”, “plzkthx”, and other terms used in cat macros. If I find someone trying to point out the flaws in another person’s site or character, I tend to think they’re just in it for the hits if they’re talking like that, as opposed to writing a serious article about something they really believe in.

There’s entirely too much talk of how some random person is being a “complete n00b” and how they’re just ridiculous for using some application/believing whatever/acting a certain way. Have people like Jem, who has a huge following and frequently writes derogatory posts about other online identities and sites, made this sort of thing popular? I’d hate to blame Jem for this trend in its entirety, but I have to think she has a lot to do with it, at least in the little web scene I’m part of.

My theory is that a lot of the bloggers that visit her site try to emulate her, whether they claim to hate her because they received a Pants award or for some other reason, or because they like her writing. Like her or not, I bet a thought running through the mind of her copiers is, “hey, this site gets a lot of hits, maybe if I trash talk everything and present myself as a sassy, sneering grump, I’ll be popular, too!” Not to say that Jem herself is a grump, because she has seemed like a regular person when I’ve spoken to her via email, but on her web site, she certainly presents that same better-than-you attitude. Hell, her site’s motto is “ultimately better than you.”

In real life, you may appreciate someone’s sense of sarcasm, but I doubt you like hanging out with people that are always:

• Complaining about one thing or another;
• Putting you or others down; or
• Taking a scornful attitude toward everything.

If this attitude isn’t appreciated in real life, why is it so often found online? There’s a big disconnect between the common statement of personal bloggers, “I don’t care what people think,” and the reality that, if they didn’t care what others thought, they wouldn’t be posting their opinions, beliefs, and rants in such a public medium as the Internet. It’s as if some of the desirable qualities of a friend in real life are exactly opposite online, or at least some people act like that by portraying themselves as they do.

Maybe the e-drama trend exists for the same reason there are shows like The Soup and Best Week Ever, and blogs like The Superficial: trash talk sells. Those three examples all deal with celebrity scandals, and the hosts/writers mock said celebrities to no end. Anyone who ends up on those pretty much gets lambasted, and a lot of personal sites are like that toward other personal sites. Posting controversial content on your blog will generate comments, too, and it’s nice to get feedback on your ideas. I think a lot of people just try to stir up controversy for the sake of controversy, though, and that gets old after a while.

A lot of it stems from a lack of maturity, too, I think, since so many of the blogs whose owners are the most condescending are all of 15. I was a jaded, grouchy teenager myself, so I can understand how someone who is already pissed off at the world could use their blog as a place to vent about everyone that gets in their way. Then as some people have pointed out, some folks are just assholes, plain and simple, and that carries over into how they act online. It seems like a really jaded, unrealistic view of the world to see the majority of its inhabitants as being mean-spirited, though. I think most people take an indifferent to caring attitude toward others, based on my experience with people around me from different cultures, religions, and geographical regions.

What it comes down to is that a lot of people online, for whatever reason, don’t write civilly. They get hot under their collars and their arguments all show that. It’s like anytime you get on a heated subject, the Internet turns into an epsiode of the Jerry Springer show. Arguments happen all the time in real life, but you’re not perpetually surrounded by people yelling and throwing chairs, so why should the equivalent happen so much online?

Edit: TIME has noticed this trend as well: see their article Post Apocalypse. — 2008-07-13

Last Friday in the local student newspaper, the Kentucky Kernel, there was a comic that has sparked all kinds of protest. I didn’t even see the comic, but boy have I heard about it since. Here’s a description of the comic from yesterday’s Kernel:

The cartoon, which ran on Friday and was drawn by staff cartoonist Brad Fletcher, depicts a black man in chains on an auction block being bid on by three fraternities, “Aryan Omega,” “Alpha Caucasian,” and “Kappa Kappa Kappa.” The caption reads, “UK Greeks lead the way on integration with this year’s new bids.”

The opinions editor of the Kernel resigned, the president of the university sent out a campus-wide email saying that the comic didn’t reflect the university’s views, there were protests at the journalism building, etc. Everyone’s all in a tizzy, and I just can’t see why. Or rather, I could understand being upset, but I think they’re upset for the wrong reason.

When you look at sororities and fraternities on campus, I always see a group of white kids. I hear tell of historically black fraternities and sororities, but I never see their members, or at least I’m not aware of it; maybe they’re not required to carry around bags with Greek symbols on them like Chi Omega or Delta Delta Delta. *shrugs* These black Greek communities are kind of like the Easter bunny and Santa Claus to me. Nevertheless, the comic was poking fun at how everyone’s trying to become all tolerant of racial differences by allowing those of other races into their fraternities. Accepting those of a different race into your fraternity doesn’t necessarily mean you aren’t racist, it just means you’re trying to cover up your prejudices.

If it were me getting all upset, I wouldn’t be angry at the messenger for pointing out that our Greek communities are very segregated, I would be angry about the Greek communities being very segregated—don’t shoot the messenger. Hell, I barely see sorority girls that don’t have blonde hair, let alone dark skin. *rolls eyes*

Here are some links to articles about the controversy:

• UK Freshman Caught In Cartoon Uproar - MSNBC
• Hundreds Of UK Students Protest Cartoon - WKYT
• UK newspaper apologizes for cartoon - Courier Journal

Something Jess just pointed out is that the cartoon was meant to be satirical. People are getting all worked up over the cartoon’s offensiveness. I think the cartoon is offensive, too, but because it shoves in our faces the truth of the segregation of Greek communities on UK’s campus. I take the comic in a sarcastic light: “ha, the fraternities all want to be seen as racially tolerant, so they’re trying to get this black guy to rush their particular frat house by bidding on him at an auction.” There have been all kinds of articles recently in the Kernel about how UK is trying to diversify, yadda yadda, and I believe that’s what sparked the comic.

The opinions pages of the past few Kernels since Friday have been filled with all kinds of reader comments, the majority along the lines of, “This was horrible, I was really offended, it should have never been published, you should be fired,” and blah blah blah. I just want to tell them all to suck it up, you pansies! Everyone’s going to get offended by something, and you can’t pander to it all or no one will be able to say anything! One idiot went so far as to say:

I have come to learn of the freedom the American press enjoys, but to see that freedom being violated to such an extent makes me wonder if freedom of press really is justifiable.

Honestly! Because someone makes a damn racist comic, we shouldn’t have freedom of press because, ooh, your delicate sensitivities got offended? Get over yourself. Now here’s an opinion article I can agree with:

As a member of the Class of 1968, I feel I am entitled to see the “offensive cartoon.” Where can I view it? I will make my own decision about whether it was right or wrong and whether or not it should have been published.
…
Also, I know I cannot do anything about it either way, but it seems every time someone’s “feelings” are hurt, everyone has a mental breakdown. The breakdown usually results in a further loss of free speech.

I am sick and tired of this fascist politically correct movement that is threatening free expression everywhere—especially on the college campus. I am not a liberal or a conservative; I simply believe that “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

Roy Lee Lawrence Jr., UK alumnus

Thank you, Mr. Lawrence! He brings up a great point in his first paragraph about viewing the comic. I tried looking on the Kernel’s web site but couldn’t find it. The Kentucky Herald Leader asked to republish it, but the Kernel turned them down, saying something about not allowing something that shouldn’t have been published in the first place to be republished. Not being able to find it on the Kernel’s site stinks of 1984 by George Orwell to me: rewrite the parts of the past that you dislike. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia!