SoylentNews

I may be crazy, but I'm finding myself wanting an RSS feed just for SN Journals. It'd be like a blog-roll in my RSS reader of everyone's journal entries, which would be cool, and make for easy reading on slow news days...

Am I crazy...? should I head on over to the repository and submit it as a request? Not sure...

Begun, this grand experiment is. We have had some whose feefees were hurt by moderation, which is strange, since moderation should be by definition moderate, or at least moderating. But maybe we have the opposite effect occurring. Not to say that the extreme views are prevailing, but the noise to signal ratio seems to be increasing. I must confess, bear with me here, that I actually used the "disagree" mod, to disagree with someone objecting to the "disagree" mod. Perverse, yes. Uncalled for? I think not! Mod me the same if you disagree!

But all this belies the dysfunctional state of debate (or the more polite term, discourse) in America. Yes, I specify America, as in the United States of, because of the rank corruption of political discourse by the one percent, combined with a uniquely American anti-intellectualism that discounts scholarship, research, learning, schools, teachers, and basically anything that requires some effort to understand. Americans are lazy. Unfortunately, they have added scared to the repertoire. But I assume that Soylent News includes more than cowardly Americans who have to run of to former Russian Colonies.

So, topic of the day: Faith. Do you believe that free and unfettered argument will get us all closer to the actual truth? Or do you reject the same because of the possibility that your position will lose the debate?

Alright, time for confessions. I only post journals in an attempt to get Ethanol_fueled's journals off the front page. So here is my anti-Ethanol_fueled journal entry. Maybe, in a future when Soylent News is a self-respecting news aggregator, such measures will not be necessary. (And yes, I know, that at present they are futile.)

I just used my last moderation point to troll rate someone. OK, it was not someone, it was an asshole. Seriously, who are these people that in this day and age can keep spewing racism, sexism, and how they are metrically challenged in the organ department? Guns? F**king Cowards. If you need a gun to defend yourself, you are probably a criminal. Bad boyz? White Bad Boyz? KKK Boyz? You know, if you are an oath keeper, you are already a lying sack of it. Defend the Constitution? You do realize that this means you have to be able to read the Constitution first, so you know what it is you are defending? Else, perchance, you find yourself defending the Protocols of the Teutonic Knights! You know, Nazi shit?

Recently I came across a video of John Cleese explaining Fox News with the insight that you have to know at least enough to be right in order to know you are wrong, and this is exactly what conservatives are lacking. Ah, here it is! Now this is the problem, and it does point out how arguing with these people is really no use at all. Seriously? Cops saying they _are_ the cop that shot the kid? Are they actually saying that they are racist child-murderers? See: too stupid to know that they are stupid.

I think it is nice that Soylent News covers these terribly fascist events in American, if only for the edification of the rest of the world. But let not all these people who do in fact listen to Fox New think that somehow they are right, or even in the majority. Liberals have more guns that conservatives, and they are better shots, since they do not get all emotional about their targets.

So I am not saying that we kick out all the neo-conservatives and neo-liberals and neo-nazis, I am just saying that if you are one of those, expect no mercy from things like reality and logic and humanity, and ethics. We owe you nothing less.

I'm guessing the popularity of SN is increasing, as I now find myself having to filter out lame ACs and 0 rated comments on a regular basis... in a way this is a GOOD thing as it shows that SN is still attracting new members, but it's still annoying all the same.

A message to the newly joined and all those ACs - this is NOT /. so please:

a) start being more polite on your comments - civility costs nothing
b) think before you comment - are you adding to the conversation?
c) refrain from tit-for-tat one line responses (such as '...and so's your mom')
d) swear freely when appropriate, but temper your language when expletives add nothing to your point - no one likes a potty mouth.

Thank you, and good night.

-Jar

OK, my contributions of late seem to be more complaining than anything. I really try not to smite idiots with negmod points, seriously! But I do hang on to the last few mod points, just in case a late-breaking egregious post should be made. And here is my latest complaint. Mod points come with a nice notification, and even some direction to proper usage. That is all well and good. There also is a date and time of expiration for said mod points. But my expiration time always seems to be an hour off. I am assuming this time is changed to local 24-hour format, no problem. Perhaps Slashcode is unaware that not all time-zones practice Daylight Savings? Or perhaps I am not where I think I am. I guess I could just remember, for Soylent News Mod points, that 18:05 is not 6:05 local time, but in fact 5:05. Wait, is it leap ahead, or fall back, if you do not have Daylight Saving Time? (And what fools think we can save daylight? If we could, the whole solar power at night thing would already be solved.)

Any way, it is probably better that I lose mod points before I can use them in nasty ways. Live long and prosper, whatever time matrix you find yourself in.

Techi-challenge of the day:

I'm looking for something to convert an analog video+audio source to a http/rtsp/mms type network stream for easy pick up in any network aware media player.

Does anyone know of such a thing that doesn't cost the earth?

(See this SN comment for context)

I've just run off and registered greyweb.org (almost went with greyweb.me, then spotted that one of the 'holy-three' tlds was still available) - not sure what I'll do with it, other than maybe run a small blog talking about 'underground' net-systems or whatever.

My second idea was a no-ip.com type thing (hostname.greyweb.org) but with a built-in index on www.greyweb.org so people could find (if you wanted them to) the stuff you were hosting. I'm not a tor fan, and for some running tor is too close to the real Darknet that they don't want to - sometimes just not hosting out on the public cloud is enough.

Anyone got any other thoughts of stuff I could put on it?

(Of course the first thing to do is a robots.txt with full disallow).

-Jar

Once in a long while, I post something that is beyond the ken of mere mortals. Unfortunately, mere mortals take this as a disagreement of opinion. But in fact, it is not. I am right, and they are wrong. You may think I am being conceited in this, but I assure you, I have grounds for my position.

So I am wondering why, in the grande scale of things, I am disturbed when some ill-advised comment of mine is appropriately modded down. Yes, I probably had it coming. Yes, it is probably justified. And if I had just waited half a day, this would not have happened. But can't you see that I have gone from a karma rating of 50 to just a paltry 49!! Oh, really, not a big deal. We are all after the same thing here (except for those libertarian free market fucks that are trying to pump the site for all it's worth and then sell us out down the river to some corporation niced.).

Yes, I mod down posts, especially if they are ethanol fueled and full of racism, misogyny, and ignorance of too many categories to be categorized. Or Republican. We need to stand up for reason, science, evidencem and logical thinking. Any religious stuff is right out, and any libertarian/Republican economic ideology is on the same level. No bias, no prejudice, just that bullshit needs to be called bullshit, and not allowed to pass as polite conversation.

We are the last best place on the internet. We are People, we are soylent. We have to act like people, people who can think, reason, argue according to the rules of logic. That is all I ask. I hope it is not too much.

Over the past few days the submissions queue has been getting very low. Other than resolving to actually try to submit more, it led me to wonder if SN are posting articles too frequently?

Counting back the past 3 days, there were 12,13 and 14 articles per day. Some of these only had single digits for comments before being bumped off the top spot by newer article.

Surely if this site is all about the discussion and not the articles themselves then letting stories linger a bit before releasing a new one, would be more beneficial.

What's the criteria for the article release frequency, and does it need to be slowed down a bit?