ouij

Give me those twelve people's names, and I will go talk uncharacteristically nicely to them, and tell them what wonderful people they are, and maybe they'll think about the country.

FF, she were to accept a VP offer from the Obamazoid campaign, let's keep our wits about ourselves and realize that we don't have to and we shouldn't support the ticket. I fully and absolutely expect that if she accepts an offer, it's to get this chump to pay off that debt and to make sure she looks like a "team player" so she can get geared up for 2012, because let's face it--Obama can't win. I don't care who his VP is. Not to mention, we should not be supporting this Democratic(?) Party as it is at present anyway. Did the Rules and Bylaws Committee not just give us all the finger just six days ago? Keep your wits people.

At $3 a gallon, Americans just grin and bear it, suck it up and, while complaining profusely, keep driving like crazy. At $4, it is a world transformed. Americans become rational creatures. Mass transit ridership is at a 50-year high. Driving is down 4 percent. (Any U.S. decline is something close to a miracle.) Hybrids and compacts are flying off the lots. SUV sales are in free fall.

The wholesale flight from gas guzzlers is stunning in its swiftness, but utterly predictable. Everything has a price point. Remember that "love affair" with SUVs? Love, it seems, has its price too.

America's sudden change in car-buying habits makes suitable mockery of that absurd debate Congress put on last December on fuel efficiency standards. At stake was precisely what miles-per-gallon average would every car company's fleet have to meet by precisely what date

What I say is based on Koranic science. He [the physicist] bases his arguments on the kind of science that I reject categorically-- the modern science that they teach in schools. This science is a heretic innovation that has no confirmation in the Koran. No verse in the Koran indicates that the earth is round or that it rotates. Anything that has no indication in the Koran is false.

The eldest girl (who was 13) explained that they were on their way to the Hannah Montana concert at the Verizon Center and that they were lost. I offered to help them find their way, but demanded to know where their parents were. Apparently, tickets to the concert being scarce, their parents had bought them one way tickets on Metro and sent them to the concert unescorted.

I was shocked. What parent would send their sub-13-year-old daughters into Metro DC unsupervised? Surely, this had to be an aberration. But as I exited the Chinatown Metro to walk the girls toward Will Call, I saw several more groups of young girls trying to navigate the large crowd alone.

Many, if not most of you who are reading this have met me in real life. You know my name. You know what I look like, how I sound. You probably know my taste in food and drink. Yet my proper name appears nowhere on the blog. I don't reveal my personal e-mail address. Those of you who haven't had the dubious pleasure of meeting me in the flesh know me only as ouij.

It's a weak form of anonymity, of course. So why don't I post under my real name? The easy answer is that LJ made me choose a username. I picked one that suited me, and went with it. It's short, sweet, to the point. .

The username abstraction probably has its roots in the utterly boring world of system administration: real names are both too long and too complicated to use as user names, so early on, sysadmins handed out user names. This had the happy side-effect of allowing users to make a "virtual" name for themselves. As one cartoon famously observed, On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog.

Safe in their online identities, anonymous Internet users feel free to write and think in ways that would expose them to ridicule--or worse--if expressed openly. Of course, that same anonymity shelters that most odious denizen of the Internet--the troll--who hurls his rhetorical Molotov cocktails, safely concealed behind his "handle."

In an article in yesterday's Washington Post, Tom Grubisich frets that the Internet's anonymity--which he sees as a lack of "transparency"--is enabling "hate-mongers," allowing them to dominate and corrupt the ideal polis of the Internet. As a means of letting some "sunshine" into the Internet, Grubisich proposes some means of compelling people to post under their real (verifiable) names, except in those cases where Website administrator deems the poster worthy of "whistleblower" protection. The result, according to Grubisich?

If Web sites required posters to use their real names, while giving the shield of pseudonymity when it's merited, spirited online debate would continue unimpeded. It might even be enhanced by attracting contributors who are turned off today by name calling and worse. Except for the hate-mongers, who wouldn't want that?

I wouldn't, for one. Who judges when pseudonymity is "merited"? If Grubisich is suggesting that individual administrators are doing the judging, then I fail to see how his ideal Internet is any different from the Internet that I use every day. Site administrators and moderators--and I count myself among their number--are, if nothing else, human. There are countless blogs, message boards, newsgroups, etc. Each one of these is ruled by its own administrators. Not all of them are going to be upright and righteous. Admins can be petty and capricious rulers, shamelessly protecting their friends and harassing their enemies. No single standard of "merit" for pseudonymity exists other than what each administrator will permit. Absent any compelling reason to do so, why should they change to suit a newspaperman who's been trolled one too many times?

But let's imagine Mr. Grubisich's Brave New Internet comes to pass, with some presumably benevolent force compelling us to speak in our own names. What happens if our opinions put us on the wrong side of the government? Mr. Grubisich airly reassures us that our identities are protected by a "high legal bar from subpoena seekers." All well and good, the fact remains that under this regime, our the data that would reveal our identities would be retained by site administrators. What's to say that those administrators won't bow to public pressure to reveal our identities? Why should the state need a subpoena to compel them to do so? Recent history suggests that the State could appeal to administrators' "patriotic" sensibilities, and, when that fails, well, nothing stops them from seizing the data themselves by sheer extra-legal force. The chilling effect on free speech should be too obvious to merit further discussion. Would The Federalist have been written if Publius had been compelled to post as Madison, Hamilton, and Jay?

Mr. Grubisich complains that common Internet users have no way of being ignored and "frozen out" of the process. This is false. Internet users have been dealing with trolls since the early days of the Internet with common sense and basic decency.

First, and most importantly, we ignore the trolls. Just because a comment is posted does not mean that it deserves to be read. It is easy enough to know who the trolls are in any given community. Once spotted, it's a simple matter of instructing your software to ignore all traffic from them. Starved of attention, the troll rants and raves in his own private world, safely rendered irrelevant by the online community's disdain. As I've said many times before--a well-configured killfile is often your best defense against being trolled.

Second, we can drown the trolls out. The fact that some users insist on bringing down the tone in any given community should make us fight that much harder to keep the tone civil. If enough of us persevere in doing unto other as we would have them do unto us, we can easily overcome the minority of trolls. Calling for extraordinary help to combat trolls is surrendering to their brutishness. If Mr. Grubisich wants Big Brother to verify the truth and civility of online discusions, then, sadly, the terrorists have won.

Of course, simply ignoring the trolls was a lot easier when Internet discussions were truly decentralized on USENET: every user had his own killfile, which he could use to instruct his newsreading software not to download offending messsages. Unfortunately as discussions have shifted to more centralized forums--web-based boards and blogs--that individual filtering ability has not kept pace.

Surely this suggests the virtues of *less* centralization, rather than more? Users are their own best judges.

Amid all the continuing hype that continues to surround the internets, one thing continues to amaze me--the sheer number of ways that we can connect to each other, if we so choose. I, myself, have at least a half-dozen e-mail addresses--some, naturally, get checked more often than others. I am an active member of a few bulletin boards/web forums. There's this blog of course, along with the comments I leave on other blogs. There's my Flickr photostream and my last.fm profile. Oh, yeah, and the myriad social networking websites, too. If you need me in a hurry you could IM me--I've got accounts on at least three major IM networks--or even call me up on the phone: land line, office, or mobile.

In previous generations, personal communications was, well, personal--one would have to speak to people directly, or at the very least, one would have to write to them in one's own hand. Of course, if one happened to be a large corporate entity--a government, say--there was a large spectrum of possible contacts and levels of communication: technical-level talks among low-level representatives, embassies, foreign ministers, heads of government, summit talks, and so on.

In 1962, as the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. faced off in the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev engaged in an elaborate kabuki of signal and counter-signal: public declarations, secret telegrams, statements read over shortwave radio.

This complex web of signals--of contacts across different media--is the bread and butter of diplomatic relations. A skilled diplomat will be able to use these varying levels of contact to keep lines of communication open almost constantly. Richard Nixon's trip to the Peoples' Republic of China only became possible because of the success of his earlier, informal, Ping-pong diplomacy Meanwhile, on the other side of the Taiwan Straits, the Taiwanese government maintains quasi-diplomatic ties with the rest of the world through a network of "trade offices." Messages can be passed through third parties. Multilateral organizations become "back channels" of communication, even among enemies.

The Internet has given me--and everyone on it--the same back-channel communications abilities that were previously the realm of foreign ministries. We can be, as it were, in diplomatic contact with each other over the Internet--passing messages and receiving signals over any number of channels, public or private. Every new account I open, every profile I post, every forum or newsgroup or listserv, I am saying to the world "I can be reached here."

It's liberating, in a way. I can now be in contact--if only diffidently--with people with whom I would otherwise not be in contact. But, on the other hand, personal diplomacy brings with it the same ambiguities as real diplomatic relations do--I can never really be sure whether my message is getting out, or what channel to use to get it out.