What the hell is wrong with people!

Okay, this has been bugging me for a while. What the hell is wrong with people on the internet!?! How can a seemingly normal person, in real life, get on the internet and turn into a raving lunatic bully?

Example: That really horrible song Friday by that teenager. I mean, yeah, I hated the song. But I don't feel the need to log in to YouTube or e-mail her and call her names or send fucking death threats!

Other examples: I remember watching a news program who talked with a family whose daughter had died in a car wreck. The pictures wound up on the internet, and the family was getting e-mails from people saying "I'm glad she's dead," "she deserved to die," etc.

More examples: Sites like Slate Magazine are now requiring commenters to log in with a Facebook or Yahoo! or etc. ID. Because people are nicer when others know who they are.

Oh, and before someone calls me a hypocrite, because I'm semi-anonymous and I said that Rush Limbaugh needs to die! - Rush dishes it out every day on his show. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about ordinary, innocent people, who someone get their name known and then get attacked over NOTHING! People need to grow up and realize that if they wouldn't say something to that person's face, then they shouldn't say it on the internet. [And I would happily tell Rush Limbaugh to his face that he is an asshole.]

Boycott Body Scanners! Update III

The latest victim of a pat down is Miss USA 2003. She has started a Twitter campaign against the invasive pat downs and talks about the experience in a video on her blog.

Boycott Body Scanners! Update II

I started reading Wil Wheaton's blog last year. It's pretty good. Well, he just flew to Vancouver and as he left LA he was basically molested by the TSA agent giving him a pat-down. It was so bad he became physically ill and says he's going to contact an attorney. At least he has some name recognition. But how many people have to be irradiated or molested so that I can be "safe" when I fly on a plane?

Learn To Spell!

I've recently discovered a site called Passive Aggressive Notes. It's hilarious! Weird notes from people all over the world, in English. The problem is that most of these notes are misspelled. And I don't mean difficult words. I mean words like "stupid" (stuiped). Admittedly, some of these notes are written by kids or by people who have English as a second language. But the majority are written by English-speaking people who supposedly graduated from high school. After hours of scrolling through this homage to our educational system, I became rather depressed. How can I expect my students to spell, if regular adults can't?

Free Speech is Free Speech: Part 5 Supreme Court is Correct

Those idiots at the Westboro Baptist Church do have the right to protest military funerals. I'm glad the Supreme Court made the correct decision but I really feel for the military families that have to listen to that crap. Maybe individual cities can enact some kind of law that funeral protesters need a license and they can deny the license for Westboro.

More White Terrorists

So what counts as terrorism these days? Brown-skinned people in strange clothing? What about white people killing light-browned skinned people? Apparently that's not terrorism, that's activism. And it hasn't really made the TV news much either.

An anti-illegal immigrant militia (read terrorists) killed a man and his 9-year old daughter in Arizona. Who were actually American-born US citizens. But these terrorists aren't called terrorists in the news, just activists.

What really pisses me off so much about this is that the Spanish were the original conquerors in the Southwest and "Hispanics" lived there long before white people showed up. But once these areas became "American" then anyone who wasn't white became an outsider, even if their family had lived there for hundreds of years.

Health Care

I saw this and thought it was absolutely fabulous!