More LJ goat-SUP: very disturbing notions are abroad.
This has been brought to my attention. It comes from http://community.livejournal.com/lj_2008/2303.html. (Faux-Russian lack of definite article in quoted material is being verbatim, comrades!) In all seriousness, this should cool your marrow a trifle (unless of course you were having cold shape for pudding in any event).
- LiveJournal Advisory Board will be a group of informed thought leaders from the global online community, who will advise the management and board of directors of LiveJournal in the development of the LiveJournal platform;
- The LiveJournal Advisory Board will publish and update on a regular basis a clear a set [sic] of aims and values. This will address such vital community issues as privacy, security, taste and decency. It will also provide a forum to consider any relevant legal, political or religious concerns. It will also focus on access issues including usability, technology, interoperability, open source, social graph, and more. The LJ Advisory Board will also take responsibility for overseeing all ongoing charitable work;
- LiveJournal Advisory Board will be available to provide guidance to the management and the board of directors to address new issues and controversies as they arise; on occasion the management will ask the LiveJournal Advisory Board formally to vet specific decisions;
- LiveJournal Advisory Board will, in equal measure, represent the users, offering them a voice, a sounding board and a forum for addressing not only the users’ role in LiveJournal, but also LiveJournal’s role in the online world;
- LiveJournal Advisory Board will take responsibility for overseeing all ongoing charitable work, which the existing LiveJournal management supports.
Well, let’s just give that a good fisking, shall we.
‘Informed thought leaders from the global online community’ may have a slightly totalitarian ring to it - at the moment, everything up to and including the photo-op of Mr Putin and Mr Mamut (sat upon Mr Putin’s knee) reading to the infants class from My Goat Frank, has a slightly totalitarian ring to it: that’s what finding that the Russian kleptocracy is now in charge does to one’s mood, after all - but it is most likely another bit of meaningless visionary-actualised-seamless-proactive-paradigm-shifting balls. Nevertheless, one must seriously wonder what all of this implies. I will wager guineas to halfpennies that you and I, dear reader, LJ users though we are, are not the people whom SUP have in mind as being leaders from the global online community. What’s more, I cannot conceive whom they imagine ‘informed thought leaders’ to be, but if these mysterious creatures are the sort of creature that goes about, maundering on about ‘informed thought leaders from the global online community’, then we at least know in advance that they are sub-literate morons. If, as I expect, they are also in trade, they will be uncritically accepting of every bien-pensant nostrum that comes along, even as they provide a fig leaf for the unsavoury Muscovite mob who are really taking over. I believe Ilyich’s term for these people was, ‘useful fools’, was it not?
But of course the real unease is occasioned, and rightly occasioned, by the ominous statement that in SUP/LJ, LiveJournal Advisory Board governs you! - or, more precisely, by the blandly threatening statement that LiveJournal Advisory Board (no ‘the’: definite articles are bourgeois and counterrevolutionary) will pass upon ‘taste, decency, and political and religious concerns’, which is simply appalling. There is simply no way in which this can be read as anything less than disastrous.
I speak subject to correction by learned friends, but I was under the impression that an American corporation could avail itself of various safe harbour clauses precisely so long as it did not act as an editor and publisher, rather than a mere host and platform. I have regularly heard LJ Abuse Team members in years past say that the company is best protected when it does not go looking for trouble, acting only upon reports and not interjecting itself into a decision to publish (and thus becoming responsible for determining whether or not to allow publication of each entry on the site). That’s certainly what Google’s Blogspot does when a blog is flagged:
Content Warning
Some readers of this blog have contacted Google because they believe this blog’s content is objectionable. In general, Google does not review nor do we endorse the content of this or any blog. For more information about our content policies, please visit the Blogger Terms of Service. (Choose): I understand and I wish to continue / I do not wish to continue.
It is very difficult indeed to reconcile the new SUP approach with that of a company that intends to remain bound by US law, and even the reciprocal safe harbour arrangements between the US and Bloody Brussels.
In any event, the mere notion that CCUP - I’m sorry, SUP - wish to intervene in matters of taste (whose?), decency (personally, I find the re-erecting of tyranny indecent), politics (if you do really wish to see Mr Putin turn into a cringing Malfoy-owned house elf, just tell him that Gordon’s lost a confidence vote, the Baroness Thatcher has been restored to health and the leadership of the Conservative Party, and she’s on her way to Buck House to kiss hands and form a government), and religion (I shan’t even comment), is a frightful one. I will be damned if I shall permit anyone to dictate to me on such matters. And, again subject to correction by learned friends, as one who paid for a permanent account, I do not believe that some alleged contract of adhesion resulted whereunder the terms on which I agreed to use the service and for which I paid can now be unilaterally changed. If this must form a test case at law, so be it.
No Walmart-clad Paladinettes of Purity, no Old Boys from the Lubyanka: no one on earth, Left, Right, or Centre, Nonconformist or Islamist, Russian, Yank, or Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, is going to tell me what I may or may not write, in a paid-for permanent account, on any purported grounds of taste, decency, political propriety, or religious sensitivity. Unless and until I am properly found in breach of actual law, they and their nomenklatura, I mean LiveJournal Advisory Board, can sod bloody well off, ta ever so.
Nor are they going to vet my work - least of all whilst, hilariously, ‘in equal measure representing me as a user’, mind you: foxes guarding your Buff Orpingtons simply aren’t in it.
So what, actually, does all this mean? I have translated the post for us - and to get poor little nolan_ash’s knickers in a still more baroque twist.
- LiveJournal Advisory Board will be a group of cronies, who will advise the management and board of directors of LiveJournal in keeping in with the oligarchy, the FSB, the Old Kremlin Hacks, and Vladimir Vladimirovich;
- The LiveJournal Advisory Board will publish and update on a regular basis a clear a set [sic] of Party regulations. This will address such vital community issues as policing thought. It will also provide a forum to consider any relevant dissident activity and samizdat. It will also focus on access issues including usability, technology, interoperability, open source, social graph, and more. The LJ Advisory Board will also take responsibility for overseeing all ongoing propaganda work;
- LiveJournal Advisory Board will be available to rubberstamp decisions on issues and controversies as they arise; on occasion the management will ask the LiveJournal Advisory Board formally to put a fig leaf on specific decisions, as the Party Congresses and Central Committee did in the good old days;
- LiveJournal Advisory Board will, in equal measure, pretend to represent the users, offering them the illusion of a voice, a sounding board and a forum for addressing not only the users’ role in LiveJournal, but also LiveJournal’s SUP-directed activities;
- LiveJournal Advisory Board will take responsibility for staging Stalinist propaganda.
There, I think that’s rather closer to the facts. And just remember, it’s called LJ ‘news’ - izvestia - for a reason: ‘there’s no truth in The News (Izvestia), and there’s no news in The Truth (Pravda)’, as they used to say.