That’s the question in my mind as I read Joel’s latest.

Yeah, occassionally people are assholes. Welcome to the human race. I first started getting on local BBS’s way back in the early eighties, I was on usenet by 1986, and on the internet not long after. I was on gopher. My user id number of slashdot is 1081. My point here is I’ve been around a long time, and I’ve seen a lot of comments. I’ve seen a lot of flames (best flames: in the Asbestos Sewer on the old rBBS1 bbs at UofI- kids today have no imagination in their insults), and a lot of topic drift (worst case of topic drift: alt.sysadmin.recovery on usenet, where the average time on-topic for a thread seems to be about 3 comments). But I have to say that the bulk of the comments I’ve seen have been (more or less) on-topic.

They’ve just been confrontational. There are some kudos and thank yous (which are always appreciated), but the vast majority of comments are “You’re wrong, and here’s why”.

And I wonder if that isn’t the problem.

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Popularity: 6% [?]

Look up those in Congress who are supposed to work for you, and demand that Bush and Cheney be impeached. Impeach them for obstruction of justice, of harboring a felon (the person in their administration who undermined US intelligence by outing a CIA agent), of aiding and abetting the enemy, of showing flat-out disdain for their role as public servants — whatever. But it needs to happen, and it needs to happen now.

When they announced that they would be invoking executive privilege to protect the liars responsible for corrupting Pat Tillman’s death for political gain, I started to waffle. Now…I simply can’t believe that they’re actively obstructing justice by preventing the justice department from following contempt charges. It’s one detestable thing to pardon people or commute sentences for your cronies — it’s an outright affront to American ideals to prevent justice from even looking into a possible crime. And in this case, the crime is blatant: it’s showing contempt, both legally and personally, for the Constitutional role of Congress.

The Bush administration has finally done it. They have left the realm of simply being a bad administration and have become a real threat to America. They have declared themselves above and beyond the laws, and need to be reigned in now while there is some way to do it.

I am genuinely afraid at this point.

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Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege. (cite)

Oh, Christ…why does Bush want this showdown?

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The Enfranchised Mind blog is basically two authors at this point:

• Brian, who has authored the popular posts on Postgres, Nazis, and Lazy Lists, and
• me (Robert), who talks about the systematic problems in the US government, LOLCats, and how I wish I could do more functional coding.

Some of the less-cool syndications of our feed (like LiveJournal) don’t include the author when they are publishing the article, which has confused some people.

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The Nazis were bad, right?

I mean Adolph Hitler, the Swastika, the Final Solution, the whole nine yards. They’re still considered evil, right?

Because now I’m not so sure.
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Popularity: 4% [?]