Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in JeSurgisLac's LiveJournal:

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Sunday, July 22nd, 2007
8:59 pm	I'm on Greatestjournal now I have been for over a year now. I left back when Six Apart were suspending journals for having the 6A notion of child pr0n as default icons: that is, babies breastfeeding. The latest kerfuffle in which Six Apart suspends, deletes, flails, obfusticates, and lies, struck me as unusual only in the number of people who protested what was happening: but I expect the next time Six Apart goes after some group of people, it will already have been forgotten. If you enjoyed reading my posts, you need to head over to jesurgislac.greatestjournal.com. I'm not here any more.
Friday, July 20th, 2007
1:50 pm	Six Apart: lying liars A year ago, with regard to suspending journals because of icons depicting breastfeeding, Doug Bryan said: I basically reiterated everything Carrie has already told Doug. I said that I think he should just tell the Live Journal Abuse team that breastfeeding icons are ok, period, end of story, as long as the baby is latched on. That is pretty clear cut. It's hard to know exactly what he is saying when he talks, but basically he said that he doesn't want to be "autocratic" with the abuse team members. He went on about how they are a volunteer staff and how they would have to hire 4-6 full time employees to replace them. He said the only person he can be "autocratic" (I officially don't like that word) with is Denise. In short, Doug Bryan was trying to lay all the blame on LJ Abuse. Now Abe Hassan (burr86) writes in lj_biz: We know there are grey areas and borderline cases, but there's no possible way we can make a list of what's acceptable versus what's not acceptable. (I've been reading Abuse complaints for three years, and someone comes up with something I've never seen before at least once a week.) When those cases come up, though, multiple people review them -- including members of our Abuse Prevention Team, LiveJournal and Six Apart staff, and our legal counsel. These sorts of decisions aren't made in a vacuum, nor are they made by just one person. Oh yeah: now - a year after the fact - we have an open admission from Abe Hassan that Doug Bryan was lying through his shiny teeth when he claimed that the anti-breastfeeding policy was all LJ Abuse, not Six Apart at all. Not that this will bring any of the suspended journals back. The clear and clarified Six Apart policy can be summarized much more shortly: "If we don't like it, it goes." (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 29th, 2007
5:01 pm	Barak Berkowitz is lying through his teeth barakb25: Our number one goal is to encourage and promote a free and open community. We will only intervene to the extent needed to avoid the site being used as a vehicle for illegal activities. (lj_biz) And yet: banned icons - still banned. No apologies, no unsuspensions. (Comment on this)
Saturday, December 30th, 2006
12:13 pm	Revenge killing: Saddam Hussein escapes justice at last Every time I see a blog post from Riverbend I think, well, at least she's still alive. (Even when she's posting about something like the execution of Saddam Hussein, or the state of Iraq at the end of 2006, nearly four years after the US invaded.) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 26th, 2006
7:22 pm	Republican says: Trust al-Qaeda! Republican and Bush supporter declares that he trusts al-Qaeda.
Wednesday, November 29th, 2006
1:09 pm	Remember who is changing the definition of marriage Kathryn Lopez blandly asserts: "marriage is fundamentally what it is -- between a man and a woman". But she's wrong. If marriage is fundamentally what it is, then what it is now includes - in the US and Canada, in Spain, Belgium, and the Netherlands - same-sex couples. (As John Scalzi points out: get a grip: 1. Same-sex marriage already exists in the United States. It has for two years. The definition of marriage in the US already includes members of the same sex marrying each other.)
Monday, November 27th, 2006
1:17 pm	Gold Plated Witch cites Maggie Gallagher (I really have got to stay away from this blog: I keep raising issues Sharon doesn't want to talk about, and as she's put all comments on moderation, she now doesn't have to. But it doesn't really surprise me that she's now citing Maggie Gallagher, and I feel another for-heaven's-sake-why-not-same-sex-marriage post coming on.)
Sunday, November 26th, 2006
11:03 am	Dialogue with a pro-lifer Linking to it, because I don't expect I'll believe it, otherwise. (longer conversation about people who have abortions out of economic necessity, and pro-lifers who hypocritically support measures designed to ensure that women on a low income will find it difficult to impossible to look after a child, read it there assuming the blogger doesn't delete it) Anonymous commenter: Let me translate into plain language: I'm having an abortion because I have no financial or emotional support and resources to have this baby. Get it now? Gold Plated Witch on Wheels: (asserting that conservative pro-lifers aren't hypocritical): That doesn't support the contention about pro-life supporters. Jesurgislac: Pro-life supporters like you who believe it's only right to starve women of the financial resources they would need? (GPWoW: When the survey says "can't afford a baby right now," it doesn't mean that the woman is starving.)
Saturday, November 25th, 2006
1:27 am	What kind of person believes: (Al-Qaeda are honest, and American voters should pay attention to what they have to say about US elections?)
Sunday, November 19th, 2006
11:14 am	Poverty and denial Written in response to this post by Hilzoy on Obsidian Wings: I quoted from this blog back after Katrina, but it seems worth saying it again: Well I've got news for you all -- around these here parts, $300 may well be your rent for a month. When you keep a roof over your head and pay all your bills on $10 an hour, $300 will fix your car, maybe -- or maybe buy back your car title from the shark you pawned it to in order to get groceries during a tight spot. If you're careful, it'll feed you for eight weeks, maybe longer. $300 can be the difference between going to a doctor or checking yourself into the emergency room, because you don't have any health insurance and at least the ER can't turn you away. It's the difference between taking a sick pet to the vet or tearfully dropping it off at the pound -- because you don't even have any money to have it properly put to sleep. If every single person in New Orleans had a spare $300 and a car, most of them could have run. Now turn on the TV again and look at how many stayed. Years ago, I worked for IBM, which had a policy then (don't know about now) of providing access to the internet if and only if you could show you had to have it for a work-related reason. What you could use without question was IBM's intranet, which (it was IBM) was fairly big and fairly interesting in itself, for an intranet. On the intranet, I once had the oddest dialogue by e-mail with a man who asserted - just as a matter of fact - that there were no poor people in the US - that probably the "poorest" people in the US were students, if you didn't count children not at work, who had no income at all.)
Friday, October 27th, 2006
8:20 am	Articles about Republican candidates standing for election this year --AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl --AZ-01: Rick Renzi --AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth --CA-04: John Doolittle --CA-11: Richard Pombo --CA-50: Brian Bilbray --CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave --CO-05: Doug Lamborn --CO-07: Rick O'Donnell --CT-04: Christopher Shays --FL-13: Vernon Buchanan --FL-16: Joe Negron --FL-22: Clay Shaw --ID-01: Bill Sali --IL-06: Peter Roskam --IL-10: Mark Kirk --IL-14: Dennis Hastert --IN-02: Chris Chocola --IN-08: John Hostettler --IA-01: Mike Whalen --KS-02: Jim Ryun --KY-03: Anne Northup --KY-04: Geoff Davis --MD-Sen: Michael Steele --MN-01: Gil Gutknecht --MN-06: Michele Bachmann --MO-Sen: Jim Talent --MT-Sen: Conrad Burns --NV-03: Jon Porter --NH-02: Charlie Bass --NJ-07: Mike Ferguson --NM-01: Heather Wilson --NY-03: Peter King --NY-20: John Sweeney --NY-26: Tom Reynolds --NY-29: Randy Kuhl --NC-08: Robin Hayes --NC-11: Charles Taylor --OH-01: Steve Chabot --OH-02: Jean Schmidt --OH-15: Deborah Pryce --OH-18: Joy Padgett --PA-04: Melissa Hart --PA-07: Curt Weldon --PA-08: Mike Fitzpatrick --PA-10: Don Sherwood --RI-Sen: Lincoln Chafee --TN-Sen: Bob Corker --VA-Sen: George Allen --VA-10: Frank Wolf --WA-Sen: Mike McGavick --WA-08: Dave Reichert If you wonder why I'm doing this, go thou (and do likewise).
Saturday, October 7th, 2006
2:23 pm	The Foley Report For more than a week, members of Congress said they would avoid partisan politics when they got Vince Pepperdine's report on Congressman Mark Foley. But when they finally saw it Friday, they split along party lines. (Capitol Hill: Congress sees through party-colored glasses)
Tuesday, September 19th, 2006
9:58 am	Why pro-lifers are hypocrites, again I found this story via Pandagon, where I'm no longer able to comment. (I do wonder if the women who want emergency contraception and find their doctors are in denial about "letting" them have it ...
Sunday, September 10th, 2006
8:38 am	Why the US is in breach of the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War Google orders the pages it pulls from the Internet for you to view by the number of times it is linked to. There was a time (in 2002, or earlier) where googling for "Geneva Convention" got me a set of pages I had to search through to find this page, but not any more: (these days, four and a half years since the first prisoners were sent to Guantanamo Bay, google Geneva Convention (no quotes, even) and the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War comes right to the top of the first googlepage.)
Sunday, September 3rd, 2006
9:21 am	Feminism is not a members-only club It's normally necessary to say this when people protest "I'm not a feminist" and then come out with some feminist evaluation of a situation, or an endorsement of feminist beliefs. Sars covers this in her fine essay at Tomato Nation, Yes, You Are. The recent incident at the Worldcon in Los Angeles, where Harlan Ellison groped Connie Willis on stage at the Hugo Awards, (has received many different reactions. )
Monday, August 28th, 2006
11:32 pm	Why I say pro-lifers are all hypocrites This is based on a long comment I made on Slacktivist, an American evangelical Christian blog where I have had more than one argument about the essential insincerity of the pro-life movement. Pro-lifers claim that "The term describes the political and ethical view which maintains that all human beings have the right to life, and that this includes fetuses and embryos." (The wiki definition, written by pro-lifers.) As a general rule, though, someone who says they're pro-life is against abortion being legal and easy to obtain, and claims this is because abortion means killing "an unborn baby" and this is wrong on moral grounds. (I do not believe these claims)
Friday, August 25th, 2006
5:08 am	Damn, I have GOT to stop reading Pandagon This is a really interesting thread and it's killing me not being able to comment there! (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, August 7th, 2006
3:37 pm	Yes, Virginia... Pandagon linked me to an article in the Washington Post, and as I seem to have been banned from commenting at Pandagon (I'm entirely unsure why, but I've been trying sporadically from three different computers I use regularly, and each one is blocked, so I give up) I thought I'd write about it (here.)
Monday, July 17th, 2006
9:48 pm	Christians claim they should be allowed to refuse to do their jobs A woman needed an ambulance. Stephanie Adamson was the emergency medical technician on call. When she saw why the woman needed an ambulance, she decided that her principles were more important to her than doing her job, and told her boss she wouldn't do her job. So far, that's admirable. Of course, her employer fired her, but you'd think that a principled woman like Ms Adamson would accept that as the price of her principles.)
Tuesday, July 11th, 2006
9:28 am	I'm over at greatestjournal By the way, not only am I updating my journal over at GJ, I am also copying posts from livejournal and repeating them over there so that I can link to them from GJ, not livejournal. The sad thing about this is that I lose your comments, but I am anxious in the long run to abandon the anti-breastfeeding Six Apart and move on to elsewhere. (2 Comments |Comment on this)