Comment Fix the Icons Covering the Titles (Score 2) 18
Are they touring the Space Shuttle Cock? Really?
In an effort to make Green Bank more navigable, Schou made some requests of local businesses. A Dollar Store was opening, but its fluorescent and halogen lights would be intolerable. She asked that they were changed. “They wouldn’t do it. And without the light it gets very dark in there, so they’re not willing to turn off the power.” She took to eating her meals in the senior citizens’ centre, where a gap in the lighting gave her some peace. But walking to collect her food entailed exposure to problem bulbs, so she would ask others to wait on her.
Things came to a head. A town meeting was called. “She became very demanding, asking other people to turn their lights off or replace their bulbs,” said Stewart. “It was too much. And Schou was encouraging other sensitives to move here, and this is not a town with many jobs or houses to begin with.”
Where the locals might have been happy to tolerate one or two of the sensitives, the mass migration was beyond the pale. Another sensitive who moved to Green Bank was reported to have flown into a rage at the library, denouncing the “dumb hillbillies”. “People tell me to stop encouraging others to move here, and to stop bringing them into stores,” Schou confirms. “The hostility continues.” People would walk towards Schou with concealed electronics, in an effort to provoke a reaction. A meeting she and her husband organised to help educate the others about electrosensivity descended into a slanging match. Schou, who has called herself a “technological leper,” said the ill will went further: “I had a visitor staying, a fellow refugee, and the air was let out of our car tyres overnight.”
At best, she is a nuisance demanding everyone accommodate her invisible disability that she has zero evidence for. At worst, it sounds like she might be trying to literally take over the town by creating a solid electro-senstive voting block.
As for the townsfolk harrassing her, well we once again have only her word on that. And after almost a year seeing unverified and outright known to be false accusations of harrassment trumpeted in the media--the Guardian itself being one of the (very) guilty outlets--yeah, I'm gonna need some substantial evidence before I believe a word of that either.
a small oligopoly of corporations
That might be a major reason for this crackdown. Reddit has unbelievable traffic and reach, so stuff that earns popularity there gets spread to virtually everywhere and everyone.
It's exposure that marketers (of anything: products, politics, whatever) would kill for. They want to buy their way in, but not if some dirty peasant can tell the truth and (through sheer merit) get voted up and be taken just as seriously (or more seriously) than their bought & paid for message.
So Reddit sees advertisers chomping at the bit to throw money at it, but first Reddit has to demonstrate that it can crush contrary opinions at will.
it is no longer free speech when you threaten specific people
Amen. It's a good thing, then, that reddit provided specific evidence of such a threat in their ban announcement . . . oh wait . . .
To the systems programmer, users and applications serve only to provide a test load.
