Discolor Online

Still here, though we had a busy week last week with our man from GW in town for meetings and then with my DSL acting completely unreliably when I did find myself with a few minutes to post.

Probably for the best, because I find myself in a really unpleasant mood.

I've never much cared for people who would try to tell me what to think, which of my personal beliefs are acceptable, or whether or not I should be "allowed" to express my opinions. I've seen plenty of evidence this year through the whole GAMA debacle that there are certain people who without question will do ANYTHING they think they can get away with to further their own agendas, including driving smaller companies out of business (to prevent them from "cluttering up" the shelves where the products of the Big Guys more "rightfully" belong), committing invasions of privacy, acts of libel and slander, bribery, applying pressure through personal and professional influence, and outright lying (as long as they believe they will not be caught).

Things have reached such a point in this country that such behavior is not unexpected anymore. Not only is it acceptable to sweep such behaviors aside as "no big deal" and "not worth pursuing" so we can just "get on with business" but those who would use these tactics have become so emboldened by the lack of consequences and the appalling absence of demand for defensible ethics and better behavior that I fear we're in a hole so deep there's no way to live a moral, ethical, honest life of integrity without being personally ruined by despicable retaliations.

Need some non-GAMA examples? Recently Mr. Tynes shared a cute, innocuous link to a site called The Infinite Cat Project. What is it? Pictures of cats looking at pictures of cats. Oh, and if you scroll down a little you'll see the owner of the site is using Cafe Press to sell bumper stickers and things using his little infinity-cat logo...one of which is Kitties for Kerry. Seems FOX news picked up the story of the site's existence, which so enraged their viewers that the poor guy was not only flooded with hate mail, but someone actually made a concerted effort to bring his site crashing down: "The latest trick involved bloating my bandwidth usage by running scripts that continually load and reload my pages. Bandwidth usage has ballooned six-fold since then but the tech's at my host are addressing this problem as I write this. We have the culprit's IP addresses and legal steps will be taken if necessary."

Need more? How about the woman in Alabama fired for her Kerry bumpersticker? Not for campaigning for a candidate in the workplace, nor for proselytizing political ideals on the clock, no... for having a bumper sticker on her own vehicle and for supporting a candidate for President. In what version of tour so-called Land of the Free is this acceptable?

Or how about the fine state of Virginia, which passed this year a restrictive, discriminatory law that goes beyond the bounds of even the odious so-called Defense of Marriage laws that have popped up in recent years. Virginia's law is so broadly defined in its discrimination against gays that it demands the right to deny ANY contract between non-heterosexuals.

Virginia is for Haters tries to expose the situation to people who believe that this sort of legislation is discriminatory, unconstitutional, and needs to be fought. The above link also tells how they, too, were the target of an attack that temporarily forced them off the web. The fact that there IS opposition seems to be too much for these bigots to stand; they've decided that you may not hold or express an opposing view, and they're going to work to fix it until you're silenced.

There was a time when I believed that this kind of thing was an aberration. I wish I could still believe that.