Bret Fausett reports on today's Friday Board Meeting at ICANN, including this item:
ICANN has provisionally reserved (countrynames).jobs and (countrynames).travel pending further review and consideration of a request from the GAC. The issue will go to the GNSO for discussion and possible resolution.
This seems like a good opportunity to plug my article on the legal status of country names in top and second-level domain names: When We Say US™, We Mean It!.
I have been puzzled and perturbed by the comments on my most recent post in which I quoted from a description of the reception of a polite but hostile questioner at a Coulter speaking event (note that this is ostensibly a lecture, not a brownshirts rally we are talking about) and suggested they sounded proto-fascist.
Here's the key quote:
At the same moment, several Republicans hurled obscenities at my wife, a Navy veteran, and one threatened her with physical violence, stating he would kick her in the head if she didn’t “shut up,” when she was asking Coulter a question.
Hissing questioners you disagree with is, I believe, quite appropriate. Booing I can understand although I think preventing people from being heard usually is an error in judgment. Even screaming “shut up” is tolerable. But threatening to kick you in the head?
Yet my readers – whom I choose to think are likely literate and well-educated – are trying to excuse it. One writes that this comes from both sides of the political aisle and has been happening for years. Rubbish. Another says that complaining about threats of violence is somehow a cheap shot on my part, and suggests that life in the ivory tower has made me forget about the rough-and-tumble of real life. The writer then equates a threat of physical violence with (unnamed) professors being verbally tough on students!
Another commentator says we should not call it “fascist” until “thugs show up”. To which I offer the following deal: how about we'll call battery fascist and mere assault — defined, please recall as “an unlawful threat or attempt to do bodily injury to another” — merely proto-fascist.
Yet another commentator says they were asking for it! (And when the Coulter fans whose rally they were at told them to shut up (did they really find this surprising?), our narrators became offended. That falls squarely into the category of “those who actively seek to be offended will usually be successful.”) Yes, those poor shrinking violets, both military veterans, had their feelings hurt…when someone threatened to kick them in the head.
We are indeed in parlous times when the articulate people — intellectuals — are providing cover for, and thus encouraging the thugs. It's enough to make you think that David Neiwert is on to something when he warns about the ill effects of eliminationist rhetoric and the rise of pseudo-fascism.
Another disturbing sign of the times: no one is allowed to dissent:
First Draft – More from the Mail Bag: My wife and I, both veterans of the U.S. military, found out the truth about Republican support for veterans at Ann Coulter's lecture last Tuesday. After I, a former Marine infantry sergeant, asked Coulter how she defended her promotion of the war, based on lies, which has sent 1,500 of my brothers and sisters to their deaths and 100,000 Iraqis to their graves, she responded that, “you're even stupider than I thought.” This received an abundance of applause from the party that claims to “support our troops.”
At the same moment, several Republicans hurled obscenities at my wife, a Navy veteran, and one threatened her with physical violence, stating he would kick her in the head if she didn't “shut up,” when she was asking Coulter a question.
Sound proto-fascist to you? It does to me. (But subversive performance art is not the answer.)
The site seems to have been hit by three simultaneous problems in the last 48 hours. Oddly, they seem to be unrelated.
First, the site kept crashing. Dreamhost tells me this is due to abuse by one of the other users of the machine I share, and that they are dealing with it. I hope the site will speed up as a result.
Second, comments stopped working. This seems to have been due to a combination of problems, one of which was that the MT-Blacklist plugin uploaded a regex from the updates site that gave it heartburn. I've deleted it twice, and if comes back I will have to stop the automatic updates. Comments are working now — if you encounter error messages (as opposed to sloooooowness), please contact me.
Third, I've had some erratic google API issues, which I think are resolved now.
So I tried the Starbucks Delocator that everyone is talking about (except of course one organization that got sat on by Starbucks.)
So, yah, it's great everyone is googlebombing the site so it's the top hit for Starbucks Delocator.
But have you tried USING the Starbucks Delocator? I found the initial results to be somewhat depressing.
How is it that the Administration can flout a law that requires it to tell all the members of the Intelligence Committee what it is up to? According to White House Has Tightly Restricted Oversight of C.I.A. Detentions, that's what it's doing.
The White House is maintaining extraordinary restrictions on information about the detention of high-level terror suspects, permitting only a small number of members of Congress to be briefed on how and where the prisoners are being held and interrogated, senior government officials say.
Some Democratic members of Congress say the restrictions are impeding effective oversight of the secret program, which is run by the Central Intelligence Agency and is believed to involve the detention of about three dozen senior Qaeda leaders at secret sites around the world.
By law, the White House is required to notify the House and Senate Intelligence Committees of all intelligence-gathering activities. But the White House has taken the stance that the secret detention program is too sensitive to be described to any members other than the top Republican and Democrat on each panel.
My first reaction was, 'these people don't care at all about the law.'
My second reaction was, 'Congress could force disclosure if it wanted to. The problem here is that Congress is being supine.'
To date, Congress has not opened any inquiry or held hearings on the C.I.A.'s detention program, despite indications that agency personnel were involved in abuses of some prisoners. That record is in contrast to the public scrutiny that the Congressional armed services committees have imposed on the military's involvement in interrogation and detention, including the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Yup, pretty supine.
But then there's a third reaction, and that one is if anything worse than the first two: Congress doesn't want to know. Could it be that lots of Senators — especially the Republicans who, were they guilty with knowledge might have to take part in internecine warfare — are secretly grateful to have the secrets kept away?
[Plus, on close reading, call it a fourth reaction, the NYT article is a little ambiguous as to whether the Admnistration is flouting the law overtly, or just abusing the classification system. And it being late, I haven't the energy to research it right now.]
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