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josephdunphy

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Joseph is a guy from Chicago, Illinois, USA

Politically Moderate, Underemployed Jewish Applied Mathematician / Electrical Engineer tutoring all knowing freshmen in Mathematics. This profile, like most of the Web, is optimized for a screen resolution of 1024 x 768, and must be viewed in Internet Explorer. A more complete listing of posts, including archived ones, can be found on the introduction page for this site, and is backed up on this page at Googlegroups, with occasional commentary found on Stumbling into the Void on Tribe.

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  • josephdunphys blog - StumbleUpon

    Rated Dec 14 2008 • 7 reviews • stumblers • stumbleupon.com






    Hi, again. I'm in the process of turning this profile into something that will be more of a blog. A recurring theme will be my attempts to build on what I've seen on some of the sites I've reviewed; what did I learn from visiting them, what subjects did they touch on, etc. You might have noticed the continued post format I was playing around with on the Draka and Steak Porn Video reviews; expect to see more of that, with some of the short, one-liner reviews moved into the spaces between the essays. What I'm trying to get away from is the idea of Stumbleupon as a bookmarking site, as I move toward making this into a site that one can simply sit down and feel comfortable reading; more like a magazine and less like a phonebook, or something like that.

    Comments about Stumbleupon related drama, past and present, can be found elsewhere, if you really want to read about that for some reason.




    Browser selection - Please pardon the imperious tone in my comments above, but Stumbleupon surprised us by changing the background color on our pages. In IE, my blog has a black background, and you can see the links. In Firefox and Chrome, the background is white, so you can't, unless you have logged into Stumbleupon, in which case you might see a black background even after you log out, again. Very silly. I can't imagine what they were thinking about, when they did this. It definitely damages the functionality of our pages, and causes a needless headache for visitors to SU.

    I regret any inconvenience, but would point out that this wasn't my idea or doing, and that unlike the SU staff, I have no say in it. If you'd like to know when this will be fixed, they're the ones to ask. I wouldn't have the faintest idea, myself.


  • Center For Individual Freedom - Browser Upgrade

    Rated Dec 14 2008 • 25 reviews • cfif.org








    I came across this semi-memorable rant about the senate, supposedly, getting in the way of the Bush administration's refusal of the right of due process to the accused terrorists being held indefinitely and without charge in Guantanamo and its fondness for the use of torture as a tool of interrogation. To post something like this on a site calling itself the "Center for Individual Freedom" is so wonderfully Orwellian that I'd have to laugh with delight - if our friend's dementia were rare in the United States or, far better, if this was satire. Regrettably, it's getting close to being the norm, and he's deadly serious.









    This is what a real war looks like, boys and girls ...









    Consider the fact that the supposed opposition needed seven years to make even a token gesture in the direction of insisting that the United States accept that one need not be a national of a country to have a legitimate right to expect that said country recognize the existence of one's legal rights - a failure that literally took political thinking in the US back to the pre-Roman era - and that one can't legitimately attempt to wriggle out of one's obligation to do so merely by keeping the victims of one's misconduct from placing their feet on one's soil.










    ... and here are a few boys and girls who could tell you more about that. Links back to source.










    The question that never gets a reasonable answer is "what if the accused happens to be innocent", and pardon me if I'm blunt, but it was two buildings that the US lost, SEVEN YEARS AGO. Let's compare this to the destruction and loss of life endured in London during the blitz; note that respect for the concept of due process did survive in England, raising the question of why the very suggestion that it ought to survive here as well produces so many howls of rage, not just on the site under review, but from so many other quarters as well; one can hardly argue that the national trauma was so great that reasonability shouldn't have been able to endure - or at least return at some point. Hysteria has been granted a far more than reasonable time to subside, and yet, if anything, the insanity seems to be mounting, leaving some of us very, very tired of hearing about 911, and seeing it used as an all purpose excuse for any overtly stupid or barbaric thing that somebody in a position of power at the time feels like doing (eg. the Star Simpson fiasco).







    So, from this one blogger on StumbleUpon (and maybe a few other people in this country who've become tired of being expected to pretend that Bushism has anything whatsoever to do with traditional American values) to the author of this site (cfif.org), the fans of the Fox network and their ilk - please sit down, shut up and get over it. Oh, and do have a nice day.



    (Posted July 8, 2008 at 3:50 pm)