Slashdot

Bush to lead inquiry into Katrina

George didn't have time to help deal with the problem itself as it happened, he was too busy holidaying (day one) and fundraising for the Republican Party (day two), but now that it's all blown up in his face he's "going to find out over time what went right and what went wrong."

Here's what went wrong George: YOU did.
Your presidency has been one joke after another and now you've managed to top it all by sitting on your ass whilst your people died. Sure, other things went wrong too, but YOU are the President of the United States of America, YOU are the one in the White House (well, you are when you can be bothered to show up for work), and it's YOU who should be saying "the buck stops here".

Of course you don't want to "play the blame game", because you know that YOU are very much to blame. It's the failings of YOU as an individual (it's called "leadership", George) and YOUR administration that has cost thousands of lives that need not have been lost.

Yes, there are other people who have failed the citizens of New Orleans, of Louisiana in general and its neighbouring states, but it is YOU who is ultimately responsible. Yes, some death was unavoidable, but YOU were asleep at the wheel despite all the warnings and it's YOU whose hands are covered in blood. It's YOU who are a disgrace to your office, your country, and, ultimately, your people.

Compassionate conservative? Try showing some compassion then, and I don't mean just for the cameras.

To anyone who thinks I'm being too harsh on the man, well, on his watch he has:

1. Sat around in a classroom whilst his nation was clearly under attack;
2. Attacked a sovereign state and started what's (under international law) an illegal war on what proved to be patently false info, and reduced it to near anarchy; and
3. Failed to act for days when faced with the worst natural disaster to ever hit the US (something I bet he wouldn't have done if the state concerned was Texas, or if this was an election year).

Sorry, but to me that's three strikes. As far as I'm concerned, you should be out George (well, as far as I'm concerned, you should have been out a long time ago) and if you had any real honour you would have tendered your resignation already (and so would a great many of your disgraceful administration).

I'm sure some revisionist historians will paint a pretty picture of you, George, and talk of the "great" President George W. Bush, but I'm sure many more will agree with me: you are, without a doubt, the worst President ever.

You played, while other people paid. With their lives.

Just imagine you were King for the day. What would you do? What wrongs would you try to put right? What ills would you seek to cure? How would you change the world around you for the better?

I ask this on the eve of the second US Presidential candidate debate. Bush and Kerry are seeking election to the ultimate throne of power, and one of them will eventually be King for four years - 1461 days - so I'll be watching tonight to see their duel of words.

The President of the United States is as close as anyone has been to being ruler of the planet. He- and it's always a he, and he's always a white christian - has the power to affect every living person on the face of the Earth, be it a schoolkid in downtown Detroit or an African tribeswoman on the edge of the Sahara. He has more power and more influence on the world than Caesar, than Alexander the Great, than Ghengis Khan, than any of the Holy Roman Emperors, than Napoleon, than Hitler, than Stalin.

Fortunately, such power isn't anyone's to take. It must be given, and it must be given democratically. So, to those of you who can vote in this election and who haven't made up their minds as to who to vote for, I say this: watch the debate, and the subsequent one, and pick the candidate who you believe will do the most to put wrongs right, the most to cure ills and the most to make the world a better place.

Am I letting life pass me by? Have I not made the most of my youth or my opportunities?

(Warning: If at anytime you're feeling bored with what's below, or - ironically - just plain lazy, then console yourself in knowing that following six paragraphs are loosely summed up by my parting sentence. Read on or skip them: it's your decision.)

I ask these rhetorical questions here because I seem to ask myself them with alarming frequency. I've squandered a lot of opportunities through apathy, ignorance and laziness, and I've had a lot more stolen from me as a result of what was at one point a life-threatening illness.

Striking whilst the iron is hot hasn't ever exactly been my forte, thanks to the one-two combination of indolence and sheer bad luck. But I'd like to change that, and I'd like to start changing it now. Yet looking at the past and reliving it is a burden that I can't seem to shake: the ethereal emotional baggage of living with the knowledge of what might have been and what should have been is as much of an obstacle as anything more material. What holds me back is as much mental fortitude as it is physical strength.

When I started writing journal entries I said that I wasn't going to write anything of a personal nature in them, but I guess that that self-imposed rule has, to some extent, now gone out of the window. So, I ask you - well, I ask all two of you that are bothering to read these words that, even as I type them, sound like drivel - just what do you do to get back into the saddle when you feel that life's tossed you out of it?

How do you motivate and empower yourself to achieve your goals when you feel that motivation and empowerment themselves have deserted you? How do you get the will to pick yourself up off the ground when life seems to continually knock you to the ground and then repeatedly kick you when you're down there?

What started this introspection-cum-appeal, was reading a BBC News article about the death of funk singer Rick James, and the sudden death of a close relative, both from heart attacks. The two men had nothing in common (definitely not nine kinds of drugs in their system), apart from the rather salient fact that they both lived life to the full, which is more than anyone would be able to say of me if I were to drop down dead today.

I'm not suicidal or anywhere close to it, but I do want to emulate these men, at least in their full appreciation for life up until their dying breaths. I feel like a runner, in a desperate race against the clock, falling at every hurdle, retarded by life's maybes and should-have-beens, and I want to feel like a runner in full stride and with an open road ahead of him.

What it boils down to is that I want to be Forrest Gump. I really do.

I see that Bush wants less US reliance on oil imports: "To create jobs, we will make our country less dependent on foreign sources of energy", he said in his recent speech at the 2004 Republican Party convention.

So then, Dubya, when exactly do you plan on announcing that Iraq has become the 51st state? You sure have created enough American jobs there (especially for your oil industry friends at Halliburton, etc), and we all know that Iraq has the world's second largest oil reserves. So I guess adding Iraq to the Union is just a formality now.

After all, once Iraq's part of the family, Iraqi oil won't be imported, will it? It'll just be domestically produced, just like the oil from Texas. Finally, after all those fruitless years with Harken*, Dubya will be able to say he's struck oil!

So, expect the official announcement any day now. I wonder what the Iraqi state bird will be?

(*Fruitless for most Harken stock holders, but not for Dubya, who violated SEC rules by failing to publicly report his sale of Harken stock before it plummeted from $3 to $1 after disasterous losses. But, hey, when your Daddy's the President you can do what you damn like. Remember, rules are for little people.)

When you see moderation like this happening, then you know that someone is abusing the moderation system for his or her own nefarious reasons.

Let me elaborate.

A few days ago, I posted this comment to a frontpage story. The story summary was completely inaccurate because it twice mentioned ZDNet when the actual culprit was Ziff-Davis media, which is now a totally unrelated company with totally seperate ownership.

Now, it doesn't take a genius (not that I'm claiming to be one) to realise that when you accuse someone of doing something that they didn't do then you're screwing up. And it doesn't take a genius to realise that when you do that sort of thing in public then you're slandering them (if it's speech) or libelling them (if it's in print). Furthermore, it doesn't take a genius to realise that if you're slandering or libelling someone then that someone might take legal action to both clear his or her good name and gain some form of compensation for the potential damage done.

Slander and libel laws are good things. They protect the truth. If someone goes around town accusing you of being a rapist when you're not then slander and libel laws are on your side, there to help you stop the accuser of spreading malicious lies that will sully your good name and potentially get you physically (and emotionally) hurt. Slander and libel laws mean that when you say or print something then you better be prepared to back up what you say, even if what you're saying has been told to you by someone else: heck, especially when what you're saying has been told to you by someone else.

And, when it comes to slander and libel, you need to realise that a retraction or apology isn't enough. If the person accusing you of rape later retracts his lies and apologises then that doesn't undo all the damage: there's still going to be people out there who think that you must have done something bad, because "there's no smoke without fire", and you're still going to be living in paranoia for a long time, looking over your shoulder and jumping at shadows in fear of someone out to beat your head to a bloody pulp.

So, even when someone admits that they got it wrong, the damage has still been done and can't be totally undone.

Unfortunately, on Slashdot, this kind of casual treatment of truth and libel is an everyday occurance. (Show me the stories from any one day as they were originally posted and I'll show you a bunch of holes and mistruths to stop a herd of charging elephants dead in their tracks.) One of these days, that profligate attitude towards the truth will have the editors hoisted by their own petard. Or, to put it less eloquently, printing bullshit is gonna get the editors in real deep shit someday.

Anyhow, I've digressed. This jounal entry is meant to be another editorial abuse: moderation.

My comment, unsurprisingly, had two types of people replying to it. The first type are those that have something constructive to say, and whose comments enrich the debate. These people, although CmdrTaco repeatedly fails to acknowledge it, are the ones that have made Slashdot: without their insightful, informative, interesting and/or funny comments (add whatever other adjectives you see fit), Slashdot would just be a very bad news aggregation site more notable for being plagued by duped, faked, outdated, inaccurate and/or badly written stories. Without them, Slashdot would wither and die.

The second type of people are those that have nothing constructive to add to the debate. We all know what I mean by that so I won't expand on that comment beyond adding that I don't think they make a positive contribution to the Slashdot experience.

Anyway, let's get back on track. (Again.) Moderation abuse.

The first reply to my initial comment, by srwalter (39999) was off-topic. No ifs or buts, it was just simply off-topic, because it had nothing to do with the story being discussed. And obviously, having been dragged off-topic, my reply to it was off-topic too. But, which of these two do you think got moderated as such?

Well, within a couple of hours of my reply it had been moderated as off-topic. Twice. Yet the post that originally strayed off-topic and all other posts under that thread were unmoderated. The original offending off-topic post was still at +2 but my reply had gone from +2 to -1. In effect, my post had been deliberately buried by someone who didn't want it to be easily visible and read.

Who that "someone" is I'll leave to your own imagination. By the way, did I mention that the editors have unlimited moderation points, and can do what they want to a comment? The potential for abuse is shocking, isn't it?

Anyhow, in the last day or two srwalter's comment has been moderated as a troll, probably by someone who saw it after I posted an entry in one of FortKnox's JE's about the new site that we're hoping to build. But this isn't about trolls being moderated as trolls. It's about truths being surpressed.

I find it ironic that, having posted my original comment to alert people (including the Slashdot editors) to the true facts, the truth about many Slashdot regulars wanting away and actually putting together an alternative site is too much for some people to handle.

To the person (or people) that surpressed my comment, I say this: the very fact that you try to deny the existance of things that you find threatening shows that you can't be trusted not to abuse your powers and responsibilities. It also shows that you're scared.

Face facts. You can try to bury the truth but you can't change it.