Iiiiiinteresting

[hummingwolf]

While waiting for the house to heat up enough for me to go to sleep (don't ask), I saw a post by mynn saying that here on LJ, it is no longer possible to do a search on the term "genocide." "So far it is not the only 'unavailable' interest." With a bit of link-hopping, found elfwreck's post on the issue, which lists a few more of the unsearchables.

A Google blogsearch for the phrase "Sorry, we're unable to help you find users matching the interests you've provided" showed that there were a few Russian users--or at least LJers posting in the Cyrillic alphabet--who noticed this issue as early as November 11.

Now, I can understand why you wouldn't want fans of "white power" finding each other. Really, I get it. It seems to me, though, that an organization with a decent amount of brainpower would recognize that allowing people to talk about "genocide" for, say, historical research purposes is not a bad thing. "Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it" and all that.

And here's the fun part: you can't search for Spice Girls. And you're out of luck if you like spicy food. What are little girls made of? You can't do a search on that either. The innocent spicebush is forbidden. And you're going to have to find a substitute for allspice. As of right now, quarter-after-one in the morning EST on December 7, 2007, LiveJournal thinks you should be living a spice-free lifestyle.

Makes me want to pour habanero sauce on the lot of 'em.

Comments

[dcjensen.livejournal.com]

Yes, but search for "fucking" and you get 345 matches.

http://www.livejournal.com/interests.bml?int=fucking

[slyfoot.livejournal.com]

Perspective is such a spicy word!

I can't put 'alleluia' in my interest list either.

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

Did you ever put in a Support request about that one? I'm really curious about the reasoning there.

[slyfoot.livejournal.com]

Nah, I didn't think it was worth the effort. I put "*alleluia*" in the interest list.

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

They seem to be trying to block terms related to hate speech. I would like to point out all the ways in which the way they're going about it is stupid, but the mind boggles.

[dcjensen.livejournal.com]

they'd probably block you...

[daisydumont.livejournal.com]

that's weird about 'spice.' i wonder why? sure hope we don't continue to run across instances like this, but i have a bad feeling.

[mmsword.livejournal.com]

The reason why Spice is banned is that it contains the letters "spic" , which is a racial slur.

[daisydumont.livejournal.com]

oh! do you know why 'genocide' is banned? do they have some list of word roots and/or topics that are just taboo? i had no idea about this.

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

People have been doing searches for other terms too. Mostly of the ones discovered so far are related to either hate speech or child sex.

[daisydumont.livejournal.com]

i see. hmmm. (the poster misspelled 'bestiality.' not something i'd ever search for, though...)

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

Sounds like poorly written software. It's easy enough to write something that would block "spic" but not "spice"! I can do it right now for the Unix command line:

grep -e "\bspic\b"

That will match "spic" but not "spice", and not "aspic". It only matches the whole word.

Someone needs to tell LJINC to do a better job of coding.

[mmsword.livejournal.com]

Man, Frank Herbert's Dune fanclub must be bummed.

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

Seriously.

Somebody at LJ really didn't think about the ramifications of this.

Thanks for following up on this

[mynn.insanejournal.com (from livejournal.com)]

I didn't have the energy or heart, frankly. I'll just find it and get madder and madder and then just be sound and fury doing nothing. NOTHING.

So I walk away, and leave breadcrumbs for my friends to find me.

Re: Thanks for following up on this

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

I put in a support request. May not be much, but it's something.

[helen99.livejournal.com]

At first I was happily surprised that the Russians were actually that much more retarded than the Americans. Then I remembered this developmentally delayed course of action was probably put into effect prior to the sale.

Oh well. I can dream.

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

Based on admittedly scanty evidence, I think this was put into effect on the Russian side before the sale. I don't care who put it into effect, though; I want to be able to search for "cheese crackers" or "hospice care" whenever I want to--and even to search for "rwandan genocide" although the results may disturb me. I am an adult. Taking care of myself is my own responsibility, not that of LiveJournal, Inc.

[szeretni.livejournal.com]

I'm wondering what the deal is with the holocaust... Does that mean that we can't discuss Hitler, the holocaust and the second world war at all because it's wrong to discuss it?
And genocide, surely, is something we SHOULD be able to discuss, no??

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

Well, we can discuss all those things all we want (and holocaust is still searchable even though genocide isn't). We just can't search for other people or communities who list those things as interests. Which is, of course, stupid.

But some people think that LJ wasn't just trying to keep racists from finding other racists, but that they were trying to keep racists from finding targets of their hate. Apparently a while back some communities of survivors were being targeted by people who hated their ethnic group or thought they all should have died or something. This may have been LJ's misguided way of trying to protect those communities as well.