It’s easy to be outraged when you read about recent racist going-on in states like Arizona and South Carolina. The offenses are so egregious that they’d be laughable if thy weren’t real — Lightening the faces of schoolchildren in a mural? One serious candidate for governor calling another candidate (and President Obama) a “raghead“?

Really? This is what America has come to?

Looking around the Internet you’ll find a lot of pixels spent decrying how terrible it is, wondering why people feel it’s OK to do this sort of thing today, and generally exuding an air of smug superiority that they are so much more enlightened than those awful racists.

Ohreallynow?

I wrote this a few years ago. Exactly how much has changed?

Racism exists even in the deep-blue zones of San Francisco. We do better than most, but even here we still struggle. Look around your friends, neighbors, and co-workers. You probably can point to a bunch of people whose families come from India, China, Japan, Europe, and similar parts of the planet. Blacks and Latinos though? Not so much.

And no, I am not naive enough to think that there’s a simple solution to the problem. Just saying that before you point a finger, think a bit abut how it could be pointed back at you.

It’s hard to put together a blog post on Facebook and privacy when Stowe Boyd has already said pretty much everything I wanted to say, and said it far better than I.

Still, after seeing several friends severely cut back their Facebook presence or outright leave Facebook altogether, I though I’d have my say.

Ever since the Internet has been around, the concept of sharing not with the world, but with a select subset of the world, has been a huge part of the fabric of the social web. It still is. Wanting to share information via a website with a chosen set of people is not the same thing as wanting to share that information with everyone on the Internet (plus major search engines as well). Telling someone “well, the world has changed, get over it” is a crappy, unhelpful, and disrespectful response.

It all gets down to control over your information. If you set up a website based around the idea that you can share information with only a select group of people (and yes I am looking at you, Facebook) then don’t be surprised if people get pissed off when you change your mind and decide that catering to advertisers is more important than user privacy.

It’s why Gowalla and Foursquare are popular — because users are in control of what they share. Twitter too, for that matter. In all three cases, what’s private or public in those services is simple to understand, and the rules don’t change.

Complexity — especially when it comes to privacy — breeds distrust. Simplicity is always better.

Which, perversely, is why “if you want it private don’t put it on the Internet” makes an appealing argument to some (especially Valley geeks). It’s simple, clean, binary — everything geeks like. And most of the people who make it also operate from a position of high privilege. What I mean by “privilege” is that they are well-educated and well-connected people who do not need to worry about where their next job or paycheck is going to come from, have stable homes and personal lives, and should their privacy be breached in a serious way, they have the ability and resources to get as much assistance as they need in repairing the damage.

The world isn’t binary though. And not everyone has as much privilege in their lives that they can afford to be cavalier about their privacy.

I don’t know whether Facebook will succeed in their desire to become the one true arbiter of the Social Web (and make billions while they’re at it) or not. Short-term, they probably will do very well for themselves. Over the long haul, though, I’m not so sure. Privacy still matters.

I am still on Facebook, although I’ve locked my settings down as much as Facebook will allow, removed some information about myself, and cut back on my friends list. What happens next will depend on Facebook. Keep screwing with my sense of control and I may well join the list of people who’ve bid Facebook farewell.

This has got me really steamed — as the news unfolds after this latest air terrorism attempt, it turns out that the guy who is accused of trying to blow up a jet over Detroit was actually ON a US Terrorism Watch List. His own father even contacted authorities with concerns about his son’s activities — and he was still allowed onto an airplane without hassle.

Alrighty them. What exactly is the watch list there for if we don’t use it?!?

Even better, the TSA seems to think that punishing the entire traveling public with laughably stupid yet very annoying in-flight restrictions is the correct response to this massive cock-up.

The solution to this issue is not a mystery. You need to screen people better BEFORE they get on the plane. Yes, it’s hard. But it’s the right thing to do. Telling people they will be safe if they cannot use their iPod for the last hour of a flight is utterly pathetic.

It’s like the guy who, on noticing he’s lost his wallet, starts looking for it under the next streetlamp because that’s where the light is. You need to go where the real problem is, not where the easy fix is.

But frankly, not at all surprised.

http://www.copyblogger.com/james-chartrand-underpants/

In a perfect world, things wouldn’t be this way but (no surprise) we don’t live in a perfect world.

Updated (after reading the full comment thread over at Copyblogger): And to be clear I’m not at all angry at “James”. I admire her guts. I am angry that someone with talent and skills needed to become someone else in order to make a living in her chosen career. it’s a thoroughly sad commentary on how screwed up our society still is.

Over at “The Big Picture”, Barry Ritholtz has been doing terrific work reporting on the shenanigans in the markets and the economy. Today he let rip a rant that’s worth sharing. Here’s a taste:

When this era of excess and absurdity is treated by historians in the future, the question I expect to be asked most is not why many of these people weren’t jailed for their financial felonies. Rather, I expect them to wonder why so many of these folk weren’t placed in protective custody, and heavily medicated, for the only rational explanation for their statements and behaviors is that they have gone so far beyond the bend as to be completely and totally insane.

They say you should never blog while angry, but I am going to make an exception this morning. The Washington Post has an article out today by one Charlotte Allen that’s about the most pathetic excuse for woman-bashing I’ve seen for a long time.

It doesn’t matter that the author is herself a woman. Comments like this:

I don’t understand why more women don’t relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home.

are so thoroughly ignorant and sexist that I’m amazed the Post actually published it. What the hell were they thinking?

I just read that Mexico City has now joined several other locations, including cities in Japan, India, and Brazil, in adding women-only buses and subway cars to combat the ongoing problem of male sexual harassment of female passengers.

According to the article, the women seem to love it, and frankly, I can’t blame them. There’s scarcely a woman on this planet who has not been groped, pinched, handled, or leered at against her will at some point in her life (myself included), and not having to worry about that as you go to work every day would be a welcome relief.

But there’s another part of me that is angry, too. Why do women have to be segregated from men in order to be safe? Why do so many men seem to lack even the most basic sense of courtesy or respect when there is a breast or a butt in their vicinity? In short, why is is so damn hard for men to just keep their hands to themselves?

And please, spare me the “ohhh, they just can’t help themselves” bulls***. Men are perfectly capable of self-control. They are choosing otherwise. And these kinds of actions, however, well-intentioned, just reinforce the perception that a woman outside the ‘safe zone’ is an acceptable target.

As reported the the NY Times today, two volumes of old “Sesame Street” episodes recently released on DVD come with the following helpful warning label: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

WTF?

There are definitely old cartoons that I would not show to kids today. Some of the early Warner Brothers cartoons, for example, come off as highly racist to today’s eyes. But early-1970′s Sesame Street? How could they possibly offend current sensibilities?

Well, first off, there’s the Cookie Monster. An unrepentant cookie addict:

he can be seen in the old-school episodes in his former inglorious incarnation: a blue, googly-eyed cookievore with a signature gobble (“om nom nom nom”).

And then there’s Oscar the Grouch, who can’t seem to see the bright side of anything:

On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic.

And worst of all, the setting: a somewhat run-down city street:

The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating.

[snip]

People on “Sesame Street” had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren’t expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you “out” of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, “Sesame Street” suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading.

Nope, definitely can’t have kids seeing that.

I don’t know what’s worse, the fact that Ann Coulter can go on national TV and say that Jews all need to be perfected or that the world would be better off it it were all Christian, or that she doesn’t think that there’s anything wrong with saying so.

Appearing on Donny Deutsch’s CNBC show, “The Big Idea,” on Monday night, columnist/author Ann Coulter suggested that the U.S. would be a better place if there weren’t any Jewish people and that they needed to “perfect” themselves into — Christians.

It’s really hard for me to talk about Coulter without wanting to break into a string of profanity. She seems to enjoy waving red flags in front of bulls and then laughing at the chaos. Generally, I figure that ignoring her is better than stooping to her level or buying into her brand of craziness. But some things are over the line and need to be called as such.

To be clear: Coulter is entitled to believe whatever she wants. If she thinks that Jews are imperfect and that Christians are better than Jews, that’s her right. But there’s another name for that belief, and it’s called bigotry.

It’s wrong, and so is she.

Small wonder that with bigots like her out there as the face of Christianity, the overall perception of Christianity in the US is rapidly plummeting.

I’m feeling cranky this week, so this will probably sound whiny, but another thing that bugs me about Web 2.0 is that the focus on web web web means that there’s a noticeable lack of innovation in desktop apps.

Unfortunately, man (or in this case, woman) does not live by webmail alone, especially when it comes to office e-mail. I have been through three different IMAP clients at work in recent months (Mail, Entourage, and Thunderbird) and am still not happy with my options.

Are there any other decent options for native Mac IMAP or do I just have to live with one of the above?