There's rarely any kind of evidence; you kind of have to read between the lines of the rhetoric. Here's the original Boing Boing post covering it.
Par for the course for these kind of sites is to put up something that looks basically innocent (besides being really freaking weird), that nobody can directly connect to any kind of political agenda, and seems to be advocating something that nobody in their right mind would oppose. Keeping kids safe on the internet? Why, you'd have to be some kind of pervert to not like that! Problem is, with most anti-pedophile sites, you can kind of tell why the folks are doing it--sometimes they've been molested themselves, or had a sibling or a friend or a child molested, but regardless, you can tell when they, personally, are very angry. WfI, by contrast, only plagiarizes news reports to talk about specific sex offenders, without so much as a "this f**ker got what he deserved". There's something deeply wrong when discussions of abstract principles are filled with rage, but everything is completely calm when they give real-life examples. (It's a classic propaganda technique going back decades.) With legit sites, it's the other way around. WfI gives the impression of being run by people who think they're living in a fantasy novel as they slip into the role of Heroic Protector--or expects that their audience is.
Another thing to look out for is who has heard of them, who links to them approvingly, who picks up their torch and carries it, who argues that everyone ought to be supporting them. Is it evenly spread between random people who just happened across the site, or is it concentrated primarily among self-described patriots, America-lovers, flag-wavers, citizens with a preoccupation with national, religious and/or racial purity? WfI fails the smell test; it seems like too many national-purity folks have heard of it in such a short amount of time for it to be just one random group's personal crusade. It usually takes months or longer to get hard evidence, though, and that's almost always done by people more persistent than me.
Anyway, pretty sure Six Apart wouldn't care even if WfI were run by Daleks. I see the biggest problem here not with WfI or whoever the hell is making these demands, as it is with Six Apart who, in their idiocy, decides to roll over for some random, previously unheard of group, over against their paying customers who aren't even given a chance to defend themselves and their work. Hopefully they'll come around. I don't know what's likely to help that, but I think working toward making sure people have a voice who might not otherwise have one--as opposed to WfI, which apparently hopes to shadow all LJ's discourse under a cloud of fear of being silenced--is a noble cause, regardless of the intentions behind it. Maybe even better than a nice MLT.
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Date: 2007-05-31 06:12 am (UTC)Par for the course for these kind of sites is to put up something that looks basically innocent (besides being really freaking weird), that nobody can directly connect to any kind of political agenda, and seems to be advocating something that nobody in their right mind would oppose. Keeping kids safe on the internet? Why, you'd have to be some kind of pervert to not like that! Problem is, with most anti-pedophile sites, you can kind of tell why the folks are doing it--sometimes they've been molested themselves, or had a sibling or a friend or a child molested, but regardless, you can tell when they, personally, are very angry. WfI, by contrast, only plagiarizes news reports to talk about specific sex offenders, without so much as a "this f**ker got what he deserved". There's something deeply wrong when discussions of abstract principles are filled with rage, but everything is completely calm when they give real-life examples. (It's a classic propaganda technique going back decades.) With legit sites, it's the other way around. WfI gives the impression of being run by people who think they're living in a fantasy novel as they slip into the role of Heroic Protector--or expects that their audience is.
Another thing to look out for is who has heard of them, who links to them approvingly, who picks up their torch and carries it, who argues that everyone ought to be supporting them. Is it evenly spread between random people who just happened across the site, or is it concentrated primarily among self-described patriots, America-lovers, flag-wavers, citizens with a preoccupation with national, religious and/or racial purity? WfI fails the smell test; it seems like too many national-purity folks have heard of it in such a short amount of time for it to be just one random group's personal crusade. It usually takes months or longer to get hard evidence, though, and that's almost always done by people more persistent than me.
Anyway, pretty sure Six Apart wouldn't care even if WfI were run by Daleks. I see the biggest problem here not with WfI or whoever the hell is making these demands, as it is with Six Apart who, in their idiocy, decides to roll over for some random, previously unheard of group, over against their paying customers who aren't even given a chance to defend themselves and their work. Hopefully they'll come around. I don't know what's likely to help that, but I think working toward making sure people have a voice who might not otherwise have one--as opposed to WfI, which apparently hopes to shadow all LJ's discourse under a cloud of fear of being silenced--is a noble cause, regardless of the intentions behind it. Maybe even better than a nice MLT.