Every once in a great while, something happens that makes you think that, while you’re not lucky enough to live in one, there are pockets of true justice that do exist in the world. When one of those pockets just happens to coincide with one of your favorite organizations, it’s all the sweeter.
Last week, the story broke that some politicians had been having staffers edit their own Wikipedia articles. Gee, politicians spending our tax dollars trying to spread good PR about themselves? There’s not a big enough :rolleyes: for this.
Still, it’s one in a whole string of challenges that Wikipedia has been facing lately – and considering it’s a really revolutionary idea, it’s sad to see this stuff happening. Still, challenges make us stronger, and that definitely seems to be the case with Wikipedia. I mean, how do you respond to a situation like that? You could ignore it altogether, downplay it and say that changes like that often get edited back to normal quickly, write up a press release chastizing these politicians and their minions…
or you could ban Congress.
This is so fucking cool that it deserves a alpha-blended
Yeah, I know, it’s only for a week, it’s happened before and it’s not a final decision but it is nice to see an organization standing up and telling our tidy collection of cocksuckers that they may be rich and powerful and owned by major corporations and usually don’t have to obey the laws they create but they can’t fuck with Wikipedia.
And by that I mean, sometimes it makes more sense to quote somone else wholesale when they say something that so plainly describes something you’ve been trying to put across for quite some time. Take this quote here about atheists and agnostics by Uranium 235 of the SA Forums:
Atheism does not require a leap of faith because saying “I don’t believe in God” is completely congruent with logic and reason. Since there’s not positive evidence that there is a God, there’s no rational reason to believe that a God exists. Therefore, not believing in God is rational and not based on faith.
However, saying positively that God does not exist is a different matter, since there is no positive evidence that God does not exist.
Nevertheless, I would argue that believing that a God does not exist is very close to rational. It’s the equivalent of saying positively that there is no goblin that lives in your shower, but disappears every time you enter the bathroom. You can never prove that such a goblin doesn’t exist, but that doesn’t mean you should take a neutral stance on its existance.
edit: One more thing: I wanted to point out that it is definitely possible for one to be an agnostic atheist. I do not believe it is knowable whether or not a God exists, I do not believe that it really matters, and I also believe that a God probably does not exist. I feel that my atheism is justifiable because there’s no reason to believe in something for which no positive evidence exists.
This and Bertrand Russell’s china teapot example are some of the more interesting things I’ve found in a day thorougly filled with blasphemy against God (i.e. rational thought.)
More to come, eventually.
I remember a really, really long time ago we used to have these things called bulletin board systems where we shared messages, played online games, and did other various legal and illegal activities. These activities were almost exclusively done in text mode, if only because they were often done at 1200bps or so, and sending graphics took a really, really long time. Thus led to the rise of ASCII art, and ANSI color extensions after that. (I still have a working copy of TheDraw, and a bunch of my old art.) So when I saw this particular spam message I felt both a twinge of nostalgia for the good old days (let’s face it, there was something that just seemed more honest about plain text) and a bit of perturbation over the corruption of yet another institution to the god of advertising. Oh Internet, what won’t you ruin?
It’s missing a few things, though, so it can’t be ‘true’ ascii art. Among the notably missing are
- greetz
- 0l4-sk3w1 133tsp34k
- starred-out numbers for boards you’re not l33t enough to know about
(i’d bet nobody reading this blog even knows what the fuck i’m talking about… I can feel the ‘old’ setting in.)
Thankfully, though, it may be a clever idea but it didn’t work anyway, Mail’s junkmail filter caught it anyway. Suckers.
I finally captured it! I have seen advertising Mecca, and it is South Park Studios.
Check out the ad they’re displaying in the side banner on the page for Episode 501.
Now that’s product placement.
