HughBeaumont

HughBeaumont's Journal

December 1, 2015

Plain Dealer: Why we turned off comments on Tamir Rice news stories

Likely because inviting 1,000 more creative ways to say "I hate (insert racial slur here)s" kinda gets old after a while.

And, unironically, the comments ARE turned on for this article, in case you wanted to see just how many Klansmen and AB members exist here in Northeast Ohio.

So why, a lot of you have asked, have we chosen to turn off all comments on stories about Tamir Rice?

The simple answer is that we don't fancy our website as a place of hate, and the Tamir Rice story has been a magnet for haters.

We tried to maintain the conversation. The Tamir Rice case offers lessons for Greater Cleveland, and hashing out those lessons in an online community forum could be a healthy exercise. A lot of people firmly believe the police broke the law when they shot Tamir, but others feel just as strongly that the shooting was justified. Passions are strong, and because our comments section could provide a place for venting, we allowed comments on Tamir stories for months. We enlisted a small army on our staff to monitor the comments and delete any that violated our standards.

The trouble was that we couldn't keep up. Just about every piece we published about Tamir immediately became a cesspool of hateful, inflammatory or hostile comments. Rather than discuss the facts of the case, many commenters debased the conversation with racist invective. Or they made absurd statements about the clothing and appearance of people involved in the story. Or they attacked each other for having contrasting viewpoints. In many cases, well over half of the comments on Tamir stories broke our rules and had to be deleted.

We ultimately decided that the comments sections of Tamir stories, overrun as they were by wickedness, were not contributing to the needed conversation. In early October, we reluctantly and finally decided to close down the comments on any news story about Tamir.

Or, they persisted with the ridiculous narrative that Tamir pulled his pellet gun on the drive-by shooters with badges (even though the footage clearly proves he didn't).

Either way, a 12 year old is dead and his murderer was a drive-by shooter who happened to be wearing a badge.

November 30, 2015

Yeah, we'd better just forget about ever having Universal Health Care in America.

The War Machine, Inc. and Corporate Welfare NEED those blank checks.

The wealthy NEED higher salaries and corporations NEED infinitely larger profits.

Face it; there simply isn't enough money in this country that we can allocate to making the nation's health situation better. It just isn't possible without throwing the entire country into upheaval.

Your publicly-traded insurers, plain and simple, are the best people to determine and distribute your healthcare; at an exorbitant out-of-pocket cost, of course. After all, this is YOUR health we're talking about, right?

All you progressive la-di-dah pie-in-the-sky dreamers better just get this silly notion that we can provide a human right for our citizens while throwing our beloved productive job creatin' wealthy and War Machine, Inc. to the back burner OUT OF YOUR HEADS.

November 16, 2015

"If I was still president, ISIS would be WASWAS!!"

Uh, really?

If Reagan was President, ISIS would be given Missiles and the profits would be funnelled to Al Shabaab or something. Why do conservatives laud a guy whose administration essentially committed high treason?

Some conservatives hilariously attribute this meme to Bewsh, who essentially gave BIRTH to ISIS thanks to his folly wars. Now we're a mile past denialism and headlong into "Not Even Wrong".

Republicans aren't rootin-tootin shoot-em-up cowboys. They're traitors who take the shortcut to thinking and legality every time.

Profile Information

Member since: Fri Aug 13, 2004, 03:12 PM
Number of posts: 24,461

About HughBeaumont

If anyone's wondering why I haven't been here much lately, it's because I feel no one is learning anything from 2016. Neoliberalism is a thing and it doesn't win elections in the 21st Century. People want a candidate that's going to take strong, non-waffling stands on human rights the rest of the world enjoys. Enough living in the goddamned Reagan 1980s. Enough taking solar panels off the roof. Enough introducing more rightwingedness into American economics. Enough medical bankruptcies. Enough governing by mythology. Enough science denial. Enough of spitting on women, children, veterans and the LGBTQI community. Enough kicking the can. ENOUGH. America needs to move past it's "everything has to be about making a buck" bullshit. I'd prefer a candidate not born during the FDR/Truman administrations. No offense, but you had your time . . . and you got us Trump. Plus, I can't take another one of these still-Capitalist Boomer codgers yap on about "bootstraps" when college now costs a mortgage, necessity costs have been outpacing wage growth for 20 years and automation promises to kill more jobs than it creates. I don't want to hear what is or isn't "politically achievable". Kick-the-Can economics was never asked "How is it going to be paid for?". Tax Cuts for the rich were never given a spending limit. Folly wars were never asked "Why is this necessary?". Corporate Pork by the billions was and is always approved. America's safety net needs to be greatly expanded and retirement age needs to be drastically lowered. This country throws out far too many people that still have a decade or two of prime contribution left. If life doesn't get fairer for you or I pretty goddamned quickly, we aren't going to have much of one.