@ 51 Teresa:

Please don't call me a liar. (I never claimed I had translated that particular comment; perhaps I'm the only person in the world who finds the disemvowelled stuff nearly impossible to read. Obviously text missing a third of its characters is incomprehensible - isn't that the point?) Not trying to tell you how to argue, but jesus f. christ. Uncalled for.

@30 Sonny P. Fontaine
or you could just, you know, leave. maybe go fight for the rights of the homeless. when i read comments like yours i have to imagine that you comment on at least 25 boards a day.

I don't know what you mean by "comments like mine." In truth, I rarely comment on any of the boards I frequent. Not enough time. But when I click on your screen name, whoa! the resulting list of BoingBoing posts stretches a half-mile down the page.

Why did you take my comment (@25) as an attack? I took great care to stay on message and not be misunderstood. Guess it didn't do the trick in your case.

Oh, and by the way, bless you for your wonderful charitable work with the homeless.

The gratuitous disemvoweling of comments seems to be getting more and more common, or maybe I'm just noticing it more. Even if I vehemently disagree with a troll, it leaves a really bad taste.

Whenever I take the time to translate the offending comment, it often seems that merely disagreeing with the original poster is what triggered the nuclear option. Sometimes the entire comment is deleted, so you end up with long, confusing threads, people arguing with invisible voices.

If there's a greater logic to this draconian use of editorial punishment, I'm honestly not seeing it. Obviously, the administrators of this site have the right to interact with the readership as they please. But I think we can all agree that this kind of action oughtta be a last resort.

I think we can.

OM @ #69,
One thing I've learned from discussions involving police actions is that there is a certain segment of the population that will defend anything as long as it is perpetrated by an authority figure.

If this officer had shot the kid in the back of the head and then started a bonfire to consume the evidence, there would still be some bozos posting on every message board, attempting to minimize the cop's crimes. It's tribal.

I suppose it is human nature to imagine that unchecked power (no matter how idiotically wielded) will solve the problems of society, and to visualize a nice, dramatic, violent solution to the things we don't like.

@ #16 CRASH! BANG!:
Actually, Jake0748's nitpicky-ness was well founded. The typo in question did alter the meaning of the story in an important way... unlike the grammatical imperfections in Jake's comment. More to the point, he made his point without acting like an asshole.

"Comprende?" Jeez.

Ah yes - U.S. authorities, valiantly fighting the previous battle. Hey, we gotta save face after 9/11!

Of course, there's no chance that a terrorist organization might alter their tactics seven years down the road. It's like if, after the Trojan Horse incident, the defenders had pissed away all their money and manpower enforcing laws against the building of giant wooden animals.

@#40, I think you're misreading what Jinglefritz (@#35) wrote. It was clearly a response to the argument that obesity (or smoking) are a "burden on the healthcare system," not an economic argument in favor of unhealthy behavior. Your knee jerked up a little, there.

He says he doesn't expect the law to pass, but wrote the bill to make a statement.

I think this says it all. These people don't even understand what their job is, let alone the affect that ever-growing mountains of bad legislation and "message" pandering have on our justice system.

Spammers love to say "LOL."

According to the post, the guy's 37.

Sean Tejaratchi is a god.

Just don't ask him about his pet possum - he'll talk your ear off. I should have known better when I saw the fringe vest festooned with over 300 laminated badge pins that say "I [heart] My Opossum," "Mad 4 Marsupials" and "Possums Are Wow, Ask Me How."

Anyway, can't wait for the new Craphound!

I would argue that one of the major topics on BoingBoing is design and humanistic engineering. If you're going to write about wonderful design, it makes sense to write about bad, misanthropic, anti-human design as well.

For my tax money, the armrest/no-laying-down thing is much more egregious. It's everywhere here in the USA, a clear "fuck you" to the public. When some part of the system breaks down and people need to sleep, they're blocked from doing so by acres of rigid, useless furniture.

The Bee Gees are quite underrated. I like their sissified older material a lot.

Yazoo:

It costs almost nothing to create your own website.

Helpful hint!

Look, Janna has apparently done this kind of thing several times before. And lying is not a crime, so prosecution is off the table. Sociopaths are a class of people that even psychiatrists admit are basically impervious to treatment.

What are her victims supposed to do? This is a person who uses the anonymity of the Internet to spin false identities. Would those who sympathize with this "madwoman" want her to keep the tools of her trade, with future targets completely in the dark?

Of course we all want to understand the mind of the sociopath - whether they were once people like you and me; the all-too-human drives that compell them to destroy everything in their path. We can even identify with the immense feelings of power and superiority they must enjoy. But at a certain point, pathological liars cannot be permitted to infiltrate the weakest structures of civilization. As Frank Pentangeli once said, "This is a street thing."

I've used Rentafone Japan once before and had a good experience.

http://www.rentafonejapan.com

My Japanese friends scoffed at the "old" cell phone I was supplied with, however.

I find it pleasing to the eyeballs.