Slutwalk Toronto

So, apparently in Toronto earlier this year a police officer speaking to a class at Osgoode Hall Law School said that a good way for women to avoid being raped was to not dress like sluts. Because as we all know, rape only happens when you’re saucy enough to deserve it. Sort of like how cancer can only kill you if you’re a smoker, or how you can never get in a car accident so long as you’re a good parent.

Slutwalk Toronto, earlier last week, was a protest designed to draw a bit of attention to the sort of ridiculous victim-blaming that sexual assault seems to bring out in people. Be sure to read the comments, particularly the ones that say “I know it’s not PC but…”

There’s something about pretending to be a tough person, someone who understands that the world is a hard place and can deal with it, that really appeals to people talking about tragedies that don’t affect them. Completely ignoring the fact that of course the actual terrifying part of the world we live in isn’t that you can only avoid danger and harm by being appropriately tough and smart, it’s that you can’t ever guarantee your own safety because terrible events can occur no matter how prepared you are. Knowing the risks only takes you so far, because at some point that bus might hit you even though you’re at a crosswalk.

But so long as you can convince yourself that you’re smarter, tougher, better than whoever was just brutalized you know you’ll never have to worry about something happening to you. Of course, the moment your mom dies of cancer, suddenly I’m the asshole for telling you that it’s mostly her fault because I heard somewhere that if you just stay inside you can’t get skin cancer. Duh, use some common sense.

A particularly affecting example of why this sort of pretend-toughness is incredibly awful to engage in is this tweet by Sarah Nicole Prickett, “”A lot of signs here are angry, but one made me die inside: ‘Xmas 1985. 14 years old. Bundled in layers. Was it my fault too?’”

And of course, the best part is that like all “Common Sense” advice, there’s absolutely no evidence that it’s got any basis in truth. So that’s nice, too.

Etsy Privacy Concern Update: Etsypocalypse

Update: So a lot of the sites that reported on this issue are basically calling it solved. Etsy admins have made buyer feedback private, solving the privacy problem. There are a couple of issues with that. First of all, that doesn’t really alter the basic indecency of their making all this shit opt-out instead of opt-in. That was an insulting violation of trust, and a blatant attempt to sneak some shit under the radar because they weren’t certain it would fly if they informed everyone. Second of all, some sellers I’ve spoken to say this fix makes feedback basically useless, as it’s now completely unaccountable and therefore pretty exploitable. Though honestly I don’t know much about the seller end of things. They said it sucked like eBay now, if that helps. Third, this doesn’t really do anything about the release of the real names of anyone who signed up with their actual name. The thing is, the real fix would be pretty simple: don’t try to be facebook, and ditch the real names being public. People can put their real name in their handle if they want.

There’s also the fact that this change came only after disgruntled Etsy users fled to other forums to complain, and drummed up dozens of articles on the subject. Doesn’t really inspire the sort of trust they seem to be asking people to give them.

 

To sum up: Etsy is a site where people buy and sell artwork/random crap. They recently decided the way to riches was becoming a shitty low-rent version of Facebook, getting people to use real names if at all possible, encouraging that you join “circles” with friends and buyers and sellers and whatnot. Then, they decided to finally pull the switch and make usernames and other information easily searchable with a feature called “people search”. Now, if you gave your real name to Etsy at any point ever, your likes and dislikes and feedback and basically everything tied to your Etsy account can be searched for on Google. Even if you didn’t bother giving your real name, if you gave your real email address people can now find you and link it with say, Linkedin, Facebook, whatever. Essentially, if you signed up with Etsy without your spam account and a fake name, now you’re paying for it.

And it’s opt-out! Which means that by default, if you have ever purchased anything on Etsy or sold anything on Etsy, no matter when you did it, your information is now startlingly public. They make the argument that because they emailed all their members (though it isn’t clear they even did that as many people report not getting one), they should be in the clear. However, they only emailed people about slight updates to the privacy policy in January, and told them that changes coming down the line were something they’d have to watch for on the forums when they were asked what exactly was happening in February. In fact, here’s the exact email:

Hello!

We recently launched a new feature, Circles, that lets you connect with other people on Etsy. When you add someone to your Etsy circle, you can follow along with their favorites in your activity feed. It’s illuminating!

Right now it’s hard to find people you know on Etsy, and that’s sad. Well, we’re changing that. We’re making it easy to connect your email address book to Etsy, so we can find people you know who are also members.

(If you don’t want people you know to be able to find you, you will be able easily to opt out through your account privacy settings.)

We’re letting you know about this in advance, and will be launching this feature in mid-February.

We have also revised our Privacy Policy in anticipation of this feature. You can review our Privacy Policy here: http://www.etsy.com/policy/privacy

If you have any questions or comments, please visit http://www.etsy.com/contact to get in touch.

You’re receiving this email because you registered on Etsy.com with this email address.

Thanks!
The Etsy Team

This is a service-related message from Etsy.com. Etsy’s headquarters are located at 55 Washington Street, Suite 512, Brooklyn, NY, USA, 11201

They emailed a ton of people (me included) at old addresses that aren’t being checked anymore. It’s the halfest of ass-coverings possible, and speaks to a pretty immense lack of basic ability to understand that other humans are actually there and not just ticks on a balance sheet.

I find it interesting to contrast the experience of one of the sellers with the creeping privacy issues with the PR from Etsy on one of the comment threads. Basically, the seller describes privacy issues that began with Etsy encouraging people to fill in and display their real name to create a “community”, and ended with them doing this silly opt-out BS. They hated it because it got in the way of actually selling things, and came at the expense of other features that would have been more useful to develop.

The PR guy said:

We encourage the use of your real name and the sharing of your purchases and favorites because Etsy is a handmade marketplace where people connect and exchange. Part of being “handmade” is knowing who you’re connecting with — who you’re buying from, and who’s buying from you. Real people buy from other real people on Etsy. It’s different than buying from a retail site, and the rules followed by traditional retail sites do not always apply. We actually want to change how commerce works, and provide a platform for more meaningful and mindful transactions. You can call us hippies if you want, but we’re not nefarious and we’re not violating the trust of our members.

That’s some high-quality BS. Basically “we want to exploit your relationships like Facebook does”.

Since then, a few things have happened:

Etsy has decided to make feedback from sellers about buyers invisible. It in no way addresses the People Search privacy concerns, and makes Etsy a less useful place for sellers as they can no longer figure out whether or not a buyer is trustworthy. They also announced plans to address privacy concerns in the near future. Not like, rolling back the service that no one wants and everyone is a bit creeped out by, but something. Soon, too! They promise not more than days and days after the damage has been done.

Also, lot of sites that aren’t kickin’ rad members of the new media elite finally got around to reporting on this.

For more see:

– Ars Technica, one of the first big sites to pick up the story. Also has some interesting stuff in the comments section, as we see the first attempts at damage control by Etsy president Rob Kalin

– BoingBoing, Blog of note, has a short blurb that mostly references the Ars posting, but also fields some comments from Rob and disgruntled Ex Etsy users.

– Consumerist, big-time consumer info blog, was understandably piqued by the news.

– Forbes, big-time actual for real business news thing, giving a pretty reasoned and well investigated take from the perspective of possible business ramifications. Interestingly, according to the article “An FTC decision from an incident at Gateway Computers in 2004 specifies that companies must get opt-in consent from users before making a material change to privacy policies. An email sent out notifying customers of a change likely doesn’t count.” That’s really sensible! I wonder if anyone has ever actually been made aware of this fact.

– MSNBC, third-place but still pretty serious giant news organization, even got in on the story!

– Regretsy is just kind of funny, if occasionally NSFW.

PAX East Impressions!

 

 

 

What’s PAX East, you say? Generally a good time is what!

PAX is a convention the was begun in 2004 by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins, better known as Gabe and Tycho, creators of the smash hit webcomic “Penny Arcade”. Basically, there have been some industry conventions and expos geared more towards insiders and press for a variety of game-related things for a long time, the big ones I know about are E3 for videogames, Gencon for tabletop/card/board games and the San Diego Comic-Con for comic books (and games and movies and…)

So, being giant dorks with an enormous and dedicated fanbase that shared a passion for a variety of games, Gabe and Tycho figured hey why not hold a just “we all pretty much like games” convention?  The first year drew a (relatively) small number of people, about 3,000. People were generally entertained, a massive LAN party was held, and a game competition called the Omegathon began the tradition of holding a tournament that featured an eclectic variety of games, in keeping with the spirit of the thing (the first round of the initial Omegathon was a dice game, the last was Pong).
So, good times. It grew, though. Shit did it grow. It’s sitting pretty at about 90,000 attendees in Washington and has spun off recently, producing PAX East in Boston in 2010. PAX East began at 50,000 attendees and has also grown crazy a lot. Between the original PAX (now called PAX Prime) and PAX East, basically almost 150,000 people attend these things over the course of the year.

And one of them was me! I was there! That’s what you should take away from this: it was important this year because I was there. Some other people I knew were there too, but they shouldn’t really figure in your opinion. They were there as dressing, mostly.

It was a nice time!

Initial impressions:

Pros:

-Really crazy big convention center, plenty of room for all the events

-Many interesting games on display on the Expo floor space with various levels of actually having shit to do at them. Some were tiny little booths where you could try an indie game on a Calecovision (Fez still isn’t out, and yet looks to be fucking finished), and some were humongous ridiculous extravagances without actually having anything anyone could play.

-A huge room dedicated to tabletop gaming stuff, including a “library” where we could try out games that crazy people who are super into boardgames buy that cost like $90

-The “Freeplay” area, though we only used it for like 40 minutes, was really pretty great. Just check out a game and some controllers, take it to a console in set up in another room, and hang out with friends. It was pretty fun to wind down there after they closed the main expo floor.

-There’s a charity that passes out cookies for donations. That was awesome.

-There was a stage for Dance Central, a game designed to test the limits of your shame, which was pretty entertaining to walk by.

-The one presentation we all went to, the Deus Ex panel, was pretty excellent.

-Brink. Brink Brink Brink Brink. I never actually stood in line to play because the Hangers On were pretty insistent that waiting an hour for a game they didn’t care about was somehow rude but it looked completely sweet.

-The Enforcers, a sort of ad-hoc community policing/organizing group were all pretty nice and helpful!

-We figured out that so long as we got at least 3 free shirts, the con paid for itself (assuming $15 per shirt)!

-Other people in attendance were generally very amiable, if shy!

-Getting to see shit earlier and in more detail than normal people makes you feel like a wizard!

Cons:

-Lines were insane, like Disney World. I got to play exactly a single game for actuals, because a group of four people isn’t going to just stop for an hour because one of us saw something interesting

-The panels on Saturday just weren’t really interesting. I mean, seeing a demo of Deus Ex was pretty neat because well shit that’s the game that powered my tiny heart for like 2 years when I was 12, but a lot of the ones I looked at seemed to be some form of “we show you something you saw already on Gametrailers”. I wouldn’t have minded more panels not promoting something. I was disappointed I missed the “You’re not a game designer” one.

-There was a lot of wasted space, and a ton of crowding. The Portal line snaked around the booth twice.

-There was way too little signposting, making it hard to find places. And I mean the entrance from the T and the actual main entrance queue were on opposite ends of the building. Also, it was tough to tell where shit was/what shit was on the expo floor. The space on the expo floor was very cluttered, and there wasn’t a clear design to the layout. Some booths were unclear about whether or not there was anything playable at them (*cough* Portal. The free shirt made up for it)

-Lots of events are really long and mutually exclusive. My friends and I could have played one game of D&D for funsies, but it would have meant missing absolutely all other content at the expo.

-Everything needed more space/consoles/computers/whatever. Because literally the entire crowd basically wanted a go at all the things there, there wasn’t ever a lull in any of the lines.

-The lack of a cookie brigade in my everyday life, now that it is apparent, is heart-wrenching.

Overall, it was a pretty positive experience. Fun times, good crowd, lots to see, and no one went home with any bruises. It was uniquely congenial, feeling like something put together more as a party than a trade show. I highly recommend that if you’re into anything remotely like a game, you check it out next March.

I’ll post in detail about a couple of things over the week! In the meantime, you won’t see those posts because I will not have made them yet.

Etsy Publishes Names of Sex-Toy Purchasers

Okay, so what is Etsy? It’s a site that basically lets people who make interesting works of art sell them to other people. It’s a convenient method of making a bit of cash with your art-based hobby without actually needing to like, open your own jewelry store. As the site has grown, so has the selection. Up to and including a truly startling variety of adult stuff. What the market is exactly for elaborately crafted glass dildos, I don’t know. But it’s there!

You into some freaky stuff? Yeaaah I know the type. It’s weird to go into a shop, though, right? I mean like half the people there are giggling about how waaacky it is. Going in alone feels like you need to explain that no no no you have to understand our relationship….

Thank god for the internet! Sweet, sweet anonymity. You can just buy, ship, and stay completely out of eyesight range of any person anywhere ever!

Oh wait not if you ordered them on Etsy. Etsy has a searchable list with your username, and your real name, right there on it. Man you are stone-cold odd. Artisan Cthulu dildo made of glass recovered from burnt-down orphanages? What the hell, man. I thought I knew you.

See, Etsy recently decided apropos of absolutely nothing to make the user history of absolutely all buyers and sellers on the site searchable. That means that if you put your real name in the “First Name” and “Last Name” fields when you signed up for the site, now when you search for John Smith, “Liked the dildo sampler on Etsy” will come up on Google. They have refused to notify anyone of this change directly in any way. They allow you to change your username/realname after a two-day waiting period. And it’s not like that erases the history, it just means you can buy new things without people linking it to your real name. Here‘s a great forum post where they ignore basically all privacy concerns and focus on how great it is to be able to find people on a site that you want to fucking buy products from.

As I said with the Blizzard RealID program: stop trying to be Facebook everyone on the entire fucking internet. I don’t need Facebook to be Facebook, quite frankly. There is absolutely nothing appealing to me, and god I hope to the majority of people, about having our every purchase, like, dislike, movement, and comment trackable by every single person who knows our name. I mean I know some real fucking horrible people! I don’t want them to find out about my I mean your Cthulu dildo!

So anyways yeah might want to not buy shit from Etsy, and/or shut down your account. It’s the internet, someone else will come up with the same thing but less terrible in like a month.

Student Finds FBI Tracking Device on His Car, “Don’t worry, you’re boring.”

So this is a kind of insane story. Via Wired:

Some kid in California went to a mechanic, and the mechanic noticed a weird out of place wire sticking out of the undercarriage. Looking into it, he found this thing attached to the bottom of the car with magnets:

After his two stoner roommates claimed they could hear some sort of ticking or something, he decided he might as well post a picture to Reddit asking if it was a pipe bomb.

You know, like you do.

Anyways, they told him it was actually a GPS tracker sold exclusively to law enforcement!

He was subsequently visited by the FBI and told not to bother contacting a lawyer or anything, because he’s boring and they totally don’t care about him.

“We have all the information we needed,” they told him. “You don’t need to call your lawyer. Don’t worry, you’re boring. “

No worries about the whole massive invasion of privacy and violation of basic civil rights! We cool, dog!

Anyways, he spoke to the ACLU, and hopefully they’ll be able to use this as a bit of a club to force warrantless everything to stop being accepted SOP for law enforcement when they get lazy.

Apparently, this came about because he’s the son of an Egyptian community organizer combined with a recent Supreme Court ruling that it was legal to place a tracking device on a suspect’s car even if it was parked privately. Why being the son of a community organizer is suspect, who knows?
No word yet on how this will affect Spider-Man, whom we have on good authority is a menace, and his nefarious Spider-Tracers.

So The President and Attorney General Did A Pretty Cool Thing.

So the Defense of Marriage Act has been kind of an embarrassment ever since it was created in 1996.  Basically, it makes a special little exemption in federal law to hurt gay people by having the federal government refuse to recognize gay marriages on a federal level the way it does straight marriage. While gay marriage is legal in some states, the DOMA made it so that getting married in Massachusetts wouldn’t necessarily mean that your marriage was recognized in Kansas. So instead of something that could be found constitutional and generalized to the rest of the states, it became a slog through each and every one of the 50 state legislative and judicial bodies.

It kinda sucked. And it’s why gay marriage has been an issue for goddamn forever. There was also, really, absolutely no defense for the law. The reasoning boiled down to “Tradition?” and “Eeew”. It was designed from the get-go as a way of preventing the country from having to face up to the fact that it could not discriminate against a group of people simply because it had grown comfortable doing so.

Which is why it’s nice to hear that after 2 years of defending it, Eric Holder has decided that he’s tired of bullshitting. From the NYT:

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced the decision in a letter to members of Congress. In it, he said the administration was taking the extraordinary step of refusing to defend the law, despite having done so during Mr. Obama’s first two years in the White House.

“The president and I have concluded that classifications based on sexual orientation” should be subjected to a strict legal test intended to block unfair discrimination, Mr. Holder wrote. As a result, he said, a crucial provision of the Defense of Marriage Act “is unconstitutional.”

DOMA was created to discriminate against US citizens for no good goddamn reason. Now, it’s likely dead in the water. Soon, more people who love each other will probably be able to get married without it being such a big fucking deal.

Slacktivist also has some choice words on the subject:

And so yesterday the attorney general and President Barack Obama let it be known that since the Defense of Marriage Act was indefensible, they would no longer try to defend it.

That’s big news. What’s most telling here is that this forward-moving reversal arose from the Justice Department, which had been tasked with the unenviable job of providing valid and compelling legal arguments for inequality under the law. Like everyone else who has tried, they found that impossible. And unlike many others who are still trying, they decided to stop faking it and just admit that the Constitution and particularly the 14th Amendment really don’t allow for that sort of unequal treatment.

Bravo.

Ed Whelan, president of the cleverly named Ethics and Public Policy Center, spoke for opponents of marriage equality everywhere yesterday on NPR’s All Things Considered, saying: “There are lots of reasonable arguments to be offered in defense of the Defense of Marriage Act.”

This is what we’ve come to expect from the incredibly shrinking opposition to marriage equality: 1) the assertion that there are “lots” of excellent, terribly important arguments in support of a legal ban against same-sex couples getting married, and 2) the failure to mention what all those “lots” of excellent, terribly important arguments might actually be.

This is a pretty good thing that just happened, good on President Obama for delivering some sensible governance.

On the Value of Humanity

I’ve spent most of the day working on and off on an article about what makes up personal taste in art, through the lens of discovering or rediscovering music by artists I had previously written off as not to my liking. I’m excited about the material, but I just can’t get the essay to work the way I want to, so I’ve decided to shelve it for the time being. That’s alright; it works out like that sometimes. Hopefully I can clean it up and make use of it soon. Fortunately, I’ve found something else to write about.

As you can probably guess from the fact that I used the phrase “through the lens of” up there, I have a BA in English Literature. It can get tiring defending my field of study, and those like it, as “not useless,” especially in the face of stories like this: SUNY Albany, in an effort to save money, is cutting five of its humanities programs.

Now, I could write a lengthy, cutting editorial on why this is a misguided decision, but fortunately Gregory Petsko, a Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry from Brandeis University, has already done so—and far, far more effectively than I could have ever dreamed. If you have any opinion whatsoever regarding the continued teaching of humanities at the collegiate level, you need to read this. Not only is it a striking, well composed defense of the humanities from a scientist’s perspective, it is also the academic equivalent of a sick burn. An excerpt, for your elucidation:

“You could fix the enrollment problem tomorrow by instituting a mandatory core curriculum that included a wide range of courses.

Young people haven’t, for the most part, yet attained the wisdom to have that kind of freedom without making poor decisions. In fact, without wisdom, it’s hard for most people. That idea is thrashed out better than anywhere else, I think, in Dostoyevsky’s parable of the Grand Inquisitor, which is told in Chapter Five of his great novel, The Brothers Karamazov. In the parable, Christ comes back to earth in Seville at the time of the Spanish Inquisition. He performs several miracles but is arrested by Inquisition leaders and sentenced to be burned at the stake. The Grand Inquisitor visits Him in his cell to tell Him that the Church no longer needs Him. The main portion of the text is the Inquisitor explaining why. The Inquisitor says that Jesus rejected the three temptations of Satan in the desert in favor of freedom, but he believes that Jesus has misjudged human nature. The Inquisitor says that the vast majority of humanity cannot handle freedom. In giving humans the freedom to choose, Christ has doomed humanity to a life of suffering.

That single chapter in a much longer book is one of the great works of modern literature. You would find a lot in it to think about. I’m sure your Russian faculty would love to talk with you about it – if only you had a Russian department, which now, of course, you don’t.”

Hell yes. That’s just a taste. Read the rest. It’s good for you.

Thanksgiving!

Man, it is Thank-you times, get off the computer. Jeez.

 

Okay okay, here’s a thing um

 

 

Man, those poor little Spider-Man wranglers. Their costumes aren’t even a thing, they’re just red and blue.

 

Also! Don’t forget to try deep-frying a frozen turkey. It looks awesome, particularly on a wooden deck. Happy Thanksgiving!

Child’s Play

Child’s Play is a charity that brings entertainment to sick little kids. And not the shitty Patch Adams kind. They give the real shit: videogames.

You really shouldn’t need any further inducement to click that and give some poor cancer-ridden kid Super Mario. It’s an absolutely unarguable good.

It’s a very simple process, too! You just click whatever hospital you like on their map, then you buy things from an Amazon wish list and they get sent to the hospital. The list covers everything vaguely entertaining for children from 0-18, so you get to pick out an assortment of toys/games/consoles/books/etc. Each item has a wanted/ordered number attached, so you know what’s in high demand. Last year I got some of my favorite books from when I was a child and a couple of the Pokemon games. I think what makes it resonate with me is a very selfish personal understanding of how awesome it would have been to get a DS when I was 10.

From the site:

Q: What is Child’s Play?
A: Child’s Play is a Seattle based, gamer-run organization that holds an annual toy drive for childrens’ hospitals. Many of the gifts donated by gamers are, as you might imagine, age appropriate videogames and gaming systems – but they are by no means the only things donated. We received eager donations of coloring books, art supplies, crafts, movies, cartoons, virtually anything a young person could ask for. We asked the world-wide community of gamers, and they gave so much we had to move to larger storage facilities three separate times.

Our 2008 drive raised over 1.4 million dollars in toys and cash for 60 children’s hospitals around the US and the world, putting the community’s total contribution level since our inception at the five million dollar mark.

Q: Who is behind Child’s Play?
A: Child’s Play was started by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins of the online comic strip Penny Arcade, which concerns itself with videogames and gamer culture.

Q: Why did Penny-Arcade create Child’s Play?
A: Giving hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of toys to children in long-term care is its own reward. Past that, it’s a way to show a different side of people who play videogames as a hobby.

Q: How does Child’s Play work?
A: We have partnered with Amazon.com, which hosts a series of “Wish Lists” stocked with toys the hospitals have requested, as well as age appropriate videogames and game systems selected by Child’s Play. Simply choose the hospital nearest you from our interactive map at http://www.childsplaycharity.org and the toys you purchase will be delivered directly. We also accept cash donations via Paypal to childsplaycharity@childsplaycharity.org, which will be used to buy additional equipment and split amongst the hospitals in this year’s drive.

Q: Where can I find more information about Child’s Play and its creators?
A: We welcome you to visit our online hub at http://www.childsplaycharity.org. Take advantage of the interactive map, choose the town nearest you and give a gift.

The charity runs with incredibly low administrative fees, too. That’s a really nice guarantee that your dollar is actually going to help someone instead of the salary of someone running the charity. So click on one of these links and buy some kid stuck in a hospital for Christmas whatever thing made your tiny little brain light up when you were seven.

 

British Libel Reform: BAM ZIP POW!

So, this has just come to my attention: In Great Britain, libel law is really really expensive to contest, and requires the person being accused to prove it wasn’t libel. So that’s pretty awful. But what makes it actually relevant to my own interests is that apparently you can be sued in British courts no matter where or how you published your possibly libelous work.

For those of you who don’t know what “libel” is, it is basically “shit-talking”. Now, if I were to shit-talk a public figure, generally that’s protected speech in the US. After all, a public figure is known to millions and probably has more than the capacity to defend themselves from a statement of ill intent by some random person from Podunkville. It only becomes an issue when said shit-talkery actually negatively impacts the other person or business interest. So for instance, I can say “Coke tastes bad” in practically any form I wish. But saying “Coca-Cola definitely actually contains rat poison in every tenth bottle” and then printing it in every newspaper in the US would probably cross the line.

 

Or maybe not

 

The British go a bit farther. Like, they go basically to the place on the map where things like “here be monsters” and “what the fuck are you thinking” are scribbled in the margins. There’s the whole aformentioned “Guilty until proven innocent” thing, which is a big red flag to start with. But it gets pretty steadily worse. Cases are brought to court in Britain on the flimsiest of causes. If literally a single copy of your book/article/paper has been sold anywhere in Britain, it is likely that whatever rich person you pissed off will be suing you there. And you’ll probably be confused as to why these funny-accented people in wigs aren’t responding to your Jack McCoy voice. There is no Jack McCoy in Britain, man. That’s why British Law & Order is so weird. The great part is, even if you have your day in court and win, you might have to leverage yourself deep into debt. The average libel case takes years to resolve, as well as millions of dollars.

It’s been used to great effect by a variety of con-men who realized that you can’t really prove that Deep Tissue Chiropractic Aqua-Massage doesn’t do anything, and you need to pay for that accusation.

Now why this has a bit of personal relevance to me is that this spectacular wonderland of horrifically unfair legal process is now open not just to people who have published works that might once have flown over Britain. See, the law hasn’t really changed since before the internet. Say, for instance, I write an article called “The Queen Isn’t Very Great At All”. Now, if I press “publish” to the right of me here, and this is readable in Britain… does that count as publishing a work in Britain? Well, yeah. According to the batshit legal process currently in place, it does. In fact, writing any comment on the internet counts. And you might be thinking “oh but, that’s insane. If yankeefan56 posts ‘Wal-mart is a tool of our lizard overseers, death to the machine!’ it is pretty obviously not libelous. No one listens to him!” Well, first of all apologize to yankeefan56. We appreciate all of our commenters here at Trouble Thinking and that crossed the line. Second of all, remember that part about “guilty until proven innocent”. If someone with money wants to make your life hell, you can be dragged into court over the most inane forum post, and be required to mount a defense and pay legal fees.

I am honestly not joking, from the site libelreform.org:

Lawyers for the football club and seven of its directors launched legal action against the proprietors of an independent Sheffield Wednesday Football Club supporters website, Owlstalk.co.uk, over 11 messages about the club’s board and management, which had been posted on the site’s discussion board. The site is freely accessible, but those who post on it have to register their details, and give themselves a pseudonym by which they are then known.

In a separate case, supporter Nigel Short received warning letters from the club over comments he made on Owlstalk.co.uk in February 2006. The club rejected Short’s offer of an apology, and pursued him for damages. Short was able to recruit George Davies Solicitors to fight his case, and eventually the club backed down, paying his legal costs. However, Short suffered two years of legal wrangling, during which time he lived in fear of bankruptcy.

You read that right. A couple of fans shit-talking about the losing streak their favorite team was on got sued by the management because that is how you solve a PR problem, dammit. People’s lives were upended because they had posted the equivalent of “Haha, man do the pats blow this year.” on a public site under a pseudonym.

Basically what I am saying is: if you are in Britain and can do anything at all to help reform your completely insane local practices, do it. If you are not currently a major player in the British legal system, then go to libelreform.org and put your name on the list. Yes, internet petitioning is probably useless, but it also can’t hurt. At the least read up on the facts of the matter so that you can complain about the issue to any person with a funny accent you meet.