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

[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.