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Pepsi pressured to pull Livejournal ads

So:  Pepsi was running a really obnoxious "sponsored v-gift" campaign on Livejournal.  The ads were shown to paid users - something which Livejournal promised they would never permit, when they started permitting ads in the first place.  Now someone on Insanejournal, apparently a Livejournal expatriate, wrote a shit-disturbing letter to Pepsi telling them that their ad was running on a site that "allows the hosting of graphic violent material, linked to the inciting [sic] of racial hatred[.]" And Pepsi has pulled the campaign.  (Note:  I am not taking a position on whether this is cause and effect; the user seems to be claiming credit for the kill, but of course one can think of lots of other possible explanations.) On the one hand, I hated the Pepsi ads too, and I'm not sorry to see them go.  But substitute accusations of "child pornography" for the accusations of "racial hatred," and you've got exactly the pressure campaign that Warriors For Innocence is trying to run.  I don't think WFI's tactics are acceptable.  I don't see JackAndAHat's tactics as being meaningfully different.  Lowering oneself to WFI's level is not a clever idea. (29 August 2007)

The terrible secret of Livejournal

I'm hearing another round of rumours about Six Apart, the company that runs Livejournal, and its deletion of Livejournal users.  It sounds like they've changed their code to make it less obvious when a user has been deleted (by hiding usernames or something, instead of showing them in strikethrough), and they're continuing to not follow their stated policies of issuing warnings and conducting reviews and so on.  The fandom community is up in arms, and the current situation is seen as an example of Six Apart not sticking to the promises it made last time there was a round of deletions.  I think the time has come for me to reveal the terrible secret of Livejournal - the one big issue behind this situation, that neither side wants to admit even to themselves.  Because of this one big issue, I think that fandom is making unreasonable demands of Livejournal.  This is a sort of open letter or reality check for the fandom community:  you can't expect Six Apart to give you what you're demanding, and you need to recognize why. (9 August 2007)

The law is not magic

People have the wrong idea about the law. They think it's magic. They think that the law consists entirely of arbitrary rules, technicalities, and loopholes, and that dealing with the law is primarily about getting around the challenges the system creates. The idea that there might be real standards of conduct with a point to them that you're supposed to actually follow instead of getting around, doesn't count for much. I think it's partly the fault of the media, in showing us ten examples of dysfunctional nonsense in the law for every one example of the system actually working as it's meant to, so that we think the dysfunctional nonsense is what it's actually meant to be about. It's also the fault of the legislators, courts, and lawyers, for putting way too much dysfunctional nonsense into the law in the first place. But it's not all dysfunctional nonsense. The law generally does have a point to it, and the system is meant to actually work and to be for real.

(4 August 2007)