Catherina

Catherina's Journal

January 8, 2012

Locking articles in Good Reads as "Conspiracy Theories". Shouldn't this be a jury call?

The following article was just locked in Good Reads "Judy Miller Alert! The New York Times is Lying About Iran's Nuclear Program" http://www.democraticunderground.com/10165806

The article was published by Common Dreams, which is far from a conspiracy site and was written by

Robert Naiman is Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy. Naiman has worked as a policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch.

Here is the locking message for locking it under the off-topic rule:

I'm locking this as a violation of SoP, which clearly specifies "No conspiracy theories."

The article suggests, without any proof whatsoever, that AIPAC is manipulating NYT editorial policy to further an alleged Likud plot to spawn greater war in the Middle East. IMO that qualifies as conspiracy theory

The article nowhere claimed "AIPAC is manipulating NYT" so the lock is over-stepping host authority. Here is what it says in the first paragraph

It's deja vu all over again. AIPAC is trying to trick America into another catastrophic war with a Middle Eastern country on behalf of the Likud Party's colonial ambitions, and the New York Times is lying about allegations that said country is developing "weapons of mass destruction."

I'm concerned because we were assured this wouldn't happen at DU3 so I'm bringing this to the community as we were instructed to do. How do we proceed when a host oversteps their authority? If we have no procedure, this part of things is no improvement over DU2.

This is especially troubling to me because this is a serious article about a war we may soon be embroiled in and the article points out the lies the NYT has AGAIN been publishing.

Here is what Skinner wrote on December 10

I've been trying to figure out why people seem so concerned about the Hosts

Because it seemed utterly baffling to me. As I've said many times, Forum Hosts can do only one thing: lock a discussion thread that goes against the Statement of Purpose of a particular forum. To me, it seems self-evident that it will be apparent if a Forum Host abuses their power. If they lock a discussion thread that is on-topic for their forum, then they have acted inappropriately. Sure, there will be plenty of times when a thread is borderline, and the Host has to make the call. As long as the Host is doing the job in good faith, and trying to do the right thing, then I think it's okay if they make a different choice on a borderline case. So why does this system seem to scare so many people?

Last night, in my bed, it hit me. You are all used to how we do things on DU2, our old software. On DU2, a moderator can lock a thread for almost any reason. They can -- and do -- routinely lock perfectly appropriate discussion topics because some asshat showed up and deliberately disrupts in the replies. We have so many rules, including arbitrary rules against posting stuff that is "inflammatory," to the point where nobody has any clue what the rules are. In short: On DU2 a thread can be locked for any reason or no reason at all, and many people have no clue why it happened. That confusion could potentially provide cover for moderators who abuse their power. No wonder you are so worried -- you know how the system works on DU2.

What you don't know -- and you won't know until we move into DU3 -- is how the system will work on DU3.

DU3 is designed to eliminate all those problems. All the vague civility rules from DU3 are gone -- replaced by our juries and community standards. On DU3, the Forum Hosts can't pull some random rule out of their backside to justify locking anything. They get only ONE rule to enforce: The Statement of Purpose of their forum. That's it. If they lock for any other reason they have overstepped their authority.

So, in practice, you could throw up the most offensive, most inflammatory piece of garbage, and if it was on-topic for the forum the Host could not legitimately lock it. Now, it would likely get alerted as a community standards violation, but that goes to the randomly-selected jury -- not the Hosts.

DU3 is designed to deal with actual disruption. It is designed to keep good discussions open, so bad actors cannot get them shut down by throwing a fit.

The job of the forum hosts is so narrowly defined that abusing power would be very difficult to do without being detected.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023027#post16

Hosts shouldn't be able to arbitrarily shunt things they don't like into the conspiracy theory bin. Especially NOT when we're still paying for the last precedent and so many people lost their lives.

******
Editing to add the 6-0 jury results. The whole alert is in post 138

[div class="excerpt" style="border:solid 1px #000000;"]The article suggests, without any proof whatsoever, that AIPAC is manipulating NYT editorial policy to further an alleged Likud plot to spawn greater war in the Middle East. This borders on anti-semitic hate and qualifies imo as crazy talk

[div class="excerpt" style="border:solid 1px #000000;"]The jury voted 0-6 to LEAVE IT ALONE:

Juror #1 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: No explanation given
Juror #2 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: oh brother...
Juror #3 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: No explanation given
Juror #4 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: No explanation given
Juror #5 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: Good responses to this post, and DUers are smart enough to figure it out on their own. It may be "crazy talk" as alerter charges, but we're big kids, this is the real world. We can handle it.
Juror #6 voted to LEAVE IT ALONE and said: It's an article from another source... Jesus Christ, don't read it if you don't agree with it. People need to learn how to filter shit on their own rather than trying to have every little thing hidden in the forums that they disagree with. sheez.

January 7, 2012

Pls send email. Indiana Democrats within striking distance of stopping union-busting legislation

Indiana Democrats within striking distance of stopping union-busting legislation

Thirty-seven Indiana Democrats are on their third day of denying Republicans the 67-member quorum necessary to proceed with union-busting "right to work" legislation in the Indiana House of Representatives. The Democrats continue to not show up to the chamber despite now facing fines of $1,000 a day.

...

A source close to the process has told Daily Kos that Indiana Democrats are "very close to having the votes to defeat the bill on the floor." A total of 51 votes is needed to defeat the bill, and while Democrats are united in opposition, Republicans are divided.

This information is based on an anonymous source, so obviously take it with a grain of salt. Still, there is an intuitive logic backing it up. With multiple members of the Democratic caucus actually facing the possibility of losing their homes over this (http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2103881-1,00.html), at this point they would not be staying out of the chamber if the fight was hopeless.

...

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/01/06/1052261/-Indiana-Democrats-within-striking-distance-of-stopping-union-busting%C2%A0legislation

Please send a supportive email to the Indiana House Democratic Caucus and let them know we support them: [font color=blue] ihdc@iga.in.gov [/font]

January 7, 2012

Indiana Democrats within striking distance of stopping union-busting legislation. Please send e-mail

January 6, 2012

US drones have already been helping local police agencies before this

There's a better story out there but I can't find it.

11 Dec 2011 12:55am, EST

Police employ Predator drone spy planes on home front
Unmanned aircraft from an Air Force base in North Dakota help local police with surveillance, raising questions that trouble privacy advocates.

By Brian Bennett, Washington Bureau
December 10, 2011, 6:12 p.m.

...

He also called in a Predator B drone.

As the unmanned aircraft circled 2 miles overhead the next morning, sophisticated sensors under the nose helped pinpoint the three suspects and showed they were unarmed. Police rushed in and made the first known arrests of U.S. citizens with help from a Predator, the spy drone that has helped revolutionize modern warfare.

But that was just the start. Local police say they have used two unarmed Predators based at Grand Forks Air Force Base to fly at least two dozen surveillance flights since June. The FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration have used Predators for other domestic investigations, officials said.

"We don't use drones on every call out," said Bill Macki, head of the police SWAT team in Grand Forks. "If we have something in town like an apartment complex, we don't call them."

...

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-drone-arrest-20111211,0,324348.story

Test sites? Is that what they're gonna call em?

Testing against what? They already know these can be hacked. Why do this?

January 5, 2012

Watch this if you have time, "Prevention of History"

I watched it five times and hurt each time after watching it.

http://vimeo.com/27124177

Prevention of Injury (POI) is a short film written and directed by Kyle Broom and produced by Alexandra Spector through Poly- Blue . It is inspired by the events taking place during the detention of PFC Bradley E. Manning.

January 4, 2012

A suggestion to improve the Trash Thread feature

Now that GD and GDP are combined, there are so many threads in GD I really don't want to read for a combination of reasons.

It's really time-consuming to click that x for so many threads.

When you have time, would it be possible to program the same type of feature we had in DU2's inbox where you could scroll down and check everything you want to delete. In this case it would be hide.

Could you also add that feature to our inboxes here?

Pretty please?

January 3, 2012

Back of the bus. Class War. "Woman is the nigger of the world"

Delighted to recommend this jewel of a thread. Threads like these are the reason I stay.

In the worldwide classwar, there's one group guaranteed to be at the bottom internationally and that's women.

This is what class war looks like, where the cuts fall unequally on women and children and become issues that affect women.

"God never told anyone to get to the "back of the bus.""

January 2, 2012

You're welcome. The saddest thing is such a terrible thing still happens. Meet Sister Ortiz

"out of hand" is putting it mildly.

The saddest thing is such a terrible thing still happens and it's taken seriously by people like Glenn Greenwald who fights against them everyday while others cheapen it for political point-scoring.

This particular case is well known and where I live but it's not uncommon. Watch and read this with horror. Horrifying details are in the Salon article. These things are still happening today.

"Sister Dianna Ortiz (a US citizen) speaks of her ordeal in Guatemala after she was abducted and tortured.
She identified the leader of the gang which abducted her as a fellow citizen of the US."

Torture
TUESDAY, NOV 19, 2002 11:13 AM CENTRAL AMERICA STANDARD TIME

“The Blindfold’s Eyes” by Dianna Ortiz
An American nun who survived the torture chambers of Guatemala describes her ordeal and the fear and guilt that still haunt her.

...

Dianna Ortiz is one American whose relationship to torture is different. That’s because she was tortured in 1989, during a two-year stint in Guatemala as a young, politically unsophisticated nun from a Kentucky convent, teaching children to read in a rural province. She was abducted from a convent garden one morning by a U.S.-trained Guatemalan army captain, a police intelligence officer and their campesino torture temp, and installed in the secret basement of a police training institute called the Politecnica. (This was a regular site for torture conducted on orders of the military high command.)

They took Ortiz not because she was any kind of radical but simply because she was a garden-variety Catholic missionary working with the poor at a time when the military wanted to seriously scare the church. (Priests and nuns, human-rights workers, doctors, labor activists and randomly chosen campesinos had been tortured in Guatemala for decades, not so much to get information as to terrorize entire trades and populations.)

Ortiz was held for only 24 hours, unlike many other torture victims, whose ordeals last, incredibly, for months or even years. But those 24 hours resulted in a complete loss of memory of everything in her life prior to being tortured. She had to be reintroduced to her own parents, and she still has almost no memory of her childhood, her college years, how she became a nun, or her pre-torture friendships.

...

http://www.salon.com/2002/11/19/ortiz/

Here is the letter Sister Ortiz wrote to President Obama. Greenwald is well aware of such cases, he lives down here where we see the other side of US policy, even against our own citizens and nuns. She's not the only nun this happened to in this neck of the woods to keep our profits safe. Her letter to Obama is called "Blueprint for Accountability".

I'm grateful Greenwald won't shut up about torture, war, civil rights, etc... no matter how inconvenient the truth is. I stand with Greenwald and people like Sister Ortiz with no apologies. These aren't laughing matters, or the stuff of dishonest political points.

January 2, 2012

Greenwald only had 1 twitter comment

The rest were addressed to him. It's imperative to keep the story straight and not fall for twisted manipulations that make it look as if Greenwald made the comment.

Greenwald's sole comment was that @angryblacklady would find a way to twist no matter what ugly thing Obama did (in this case, the nun rape comment made by another tweeter) into a "justified and noble" act "to teach us about the evils of rape".

There was no joke there. Greenwald was responding to a few self-avowed "cultists" (one even bragged she'd wear a shirt that said so) and making their own point.

In Greenwald's own words
"She defends assassinations, ridicules drone killing of children - he said: there's nothing you won't defend: even THIS"
"It wasn't a joke of any kind: it was a *deadly serious point* about blind defeders of evil acts"
"It is NOT a "rape metaphor": it's a statement they they'd defend ANY evil: assassinations, child-killings: EVEN rape"

If he had joked about raping nuns, I'd be outraged. The opening he left his relentless attackers was acknowledging someone else's comment about their slavish devotion after they viciously attacked him as being a racist and had their little click retweet over 1500 times.

Refuse. To. Take. The. Bait. cause that particular twitter group is on mission against anyone who won't look the other way and they've been ramping it up for months.

The stupidity displayed in yesterday's thread wasn't yours.

Profile Information

Name: Catherina
Gender: Female
Member since: Mon Mar 3, 2008, 03:08 PM
Number of posts: 35,568

About Catherina

There are times that one wishes one was smarter than one is so that when one looks out at the world and sees the problems one wishes one knew the answers and I don\'t know the answers. I think sometimes one wishes one was dumber than one is so one doesn\'t have to look out into the world and see the pain that\'s out there and the horrible situations that are out there, and not know what to do - Bernie Sanders http://www.democraticunderground.com/128040277