Wednesday, January 17, 2024

Web Log for 1.16.24

Such as it is...I've thought of calling these link log "Lynx" for the day and decorating the posts with pictures of the wild felines, but I'm not sure how many fair-use lynx photos I could find. Anyway, only one link today.

Politics: Election 2024 

Should Nikki Haley concede this election? I say it depends on the truth of the rumor that has destroyed her ratings. Is she in favor of de facto Internet censorship by tracing the real-world identities of all Internet users? If so, she's no "conservative," in fact she's un-American, and she should go home and try to avoid being seen. If not, she needs to make a very strong stand for Internet privacy, anonymity, and freedom of speech. 

Why is Internet anonymity so important? People who use the Internet very much aren't really anonymous: we have screen names that we build into brands. But it's still important that people who don't know who we are, in real life, not be able to find our homes. Without even going into what happens to activists who blow the whistles on profitable products that happen to kill people, which is something I would love to testify about in Congress, as would Karen Kingston...just consider what happens when women, even 75-year-old cancer survivors, use human female images as screen "avatars." Does Nikki Haley now, or did she ever, imagine that decent human beings would want it to be possible for the kind of guys who react to those pictures to find those women's homes?

Nufsed. No real names, no residential addresses, no dates of birth, no phone numbers for people who still use phones, no great-grandmothers' middle names, in cyberspace. If the Internet is going to be useful it needs to be private. People who are not earning "public figure" wages to pay for "public figure" security need to use screen names that are clearly different from real-world names--I'm beginning to regret having chosen a screen name that is in fact in use as a real-world name, not mine! Anyone whose employers know her as "Priscilla King" needs to make sure her screen name is something like "Lilac 32245." And her "avatar" should not look like a human face or body. And without a valid warrant for a police investigation of the location from which she might have gone online to post bomb threats, nobody should be able to find out anything beyond which city she's posting from. In the case of a small town, which county.

What happens if the Republicans aren't able to nominate Trump--never mind the trumped-up charges against him, which are a waste of public money, just consider his age and the probability that, if elected, he'd start showing his age the way President Biden is now doing. Does that mean they're stuck with Haley? If so, we're very likely to have another President Kennedy. 

Some things about Ron DeSantis I don't like. Some things about my own Governor and U.S. Representative I don't consider ideal for a President, either--but either one of them would be a better President than Vivek Ramaswamy, and if what we've all heard and read is true, either would be a better President than Nikki Haley. 

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