Posted on 02/09/2002 9:54:09 AM PST by Incorrigible
SEPTEMBER 11
A Plague of Hate Sites
Until recently, one of the biggest Internet-related worries for companies was employees who surfed the Web for cybersmut. Now, there's another concern: hate sites. The number of these venomous domains--which in the past featured gay-bashing, neo-Nazism, and misogynist rants--has doubled since September 11, to about 2,000, according to Websense, a San Diego software-monitoring company.
Growth is mainly due to a new niche: anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sites. Among them is crisis2001.com. Rich in racial epithets, it calls Islam "the scourge of the earth" and rallies to "nuke" them all. Another, you-got-mail.com, talks about "Satan's Muslims" and says it's "time to lock up the mosques and kick those dirty Muslims out." Others, such as nuke-kabul.com, are anti-Afghanistan and anti-Osama bin Laden in nature.
Employment lawyers say it's important for companies to remind workers of policies that bar viewing hate sites in the workplace. Warns Jennifer Kearns, a partner in San Francisco law firm Brobeck Phleger & Harrison: "Otherwise, you're kind of a sitting duck for a hostile- workplace suit."
By Michelle Conlin
Not for commercial use. For educational and discussion purposes only.
I love you,
You love me,
We're one happy family....
"Why can't we all just not get along?"
He has truly made insensitivity respectable again.
Thanks for clearing that up. I never really knew whether he was a "Dick" or a "Jane".
Nope...no more than if an employee were offended by what was in the N. Y. Times. The company did not pay the employee to go surfing "hate" sites....
Islam is one of the world's major religions. It has good people and bad. It has insightful and questionable theology both. Much the same can be said about any other major religion in the world including Christianity.
Nobody likes terrorists but themselves. Just for playing the old old game of using religion to justify murdering and destroying property is not justification for throwing all Muslims in the same grouping with them.
AS for homosexuals, they are consenting adults doing what they do in the privacy of their bedrooms. I have read the house of cards that is the hate based innuendo and slanted factoids that is contended to be "the great homosexual conspiracy and realize where I have seen similar efforts before; the Nazi claim Jews were stealing the reason out of good Christian's minds, engaged in conspiracies in the financial and art worlds, and they should be rubbed out for the good of humanity.
Homosexuality is judged after extensive and painstaking work to be a variation of normal human sexuality, with gays and lesbians being well balanced and contributing members of society. Their sexuality doesn't warp their worth as citizens; nor do they "recruit."
I know that as a kid in high school who looked young form my age, and was kept from dating my a deep shyness, it was a large kid slamming me unfairly with slams I was a "f*gg*t."
I experienced the indifferences of peers and school officials and teachers to my plight. They simply did not want to get involve in protecting me against this gut-wrenching ordeal of abuse by a bully.
I had to take care of it myself, which I did after realizing I was alone at this new school I had attended only some months after moving out to the West Coast.
The memories still haunt me, creating anger that can burn fierce to this day, decades later.
What I know now beyond any doubt is that homophobic people who victimize their peers because of a deep desire to belittle to puff themselves up have my deepest distain.
In recent years, I have learned to be on guard against their hate speech, and to hate them for their expressions of hate. I feel sorry for them, and locally will without hesitation help turn the city ordinance against hate crimes against gays and lesbians against them to help them realize their criminal and hateful behavior.
If anyone had ever wanted me to buy the flawed premise that homosexuals are "evil," they should have protected me against being a target of opportunity, using the broad brush of stigmatizing homosexuals against anyone not because of facts, but because it was a convenient tool to blast a target they perceived as vulnerable.
At the very least, the anti-gay people need to police and clean their own house before they set forth to attack someone else's.
Remarkably, that's not a defense. The legal problem for the company is the "hostile workplace" action, not the fact that surfing while being paid to do work is in effect stealing from the employer. No kidding, that's really the law. And just try to discipline or terminate the offending employee -- you gotta be ultra-careful about how you do that, too.
What I experience in that one year at a new high school was bizarre and brutal, and deeply uncalled for. And changed me forever into someone who does not like seeing peoples victimizing other humans with the disease of hatred and bigotry.
I love you,
You love me,
Let's hang Ahkmed from a tree...
The sum total of these trends do not spell good times for the future of Corporate America. As the best and the brightest increasingly strike out on their own, these corporations will find themselves hamstrung by lawsuits and regulations at the same time that they experience a loss of their best employees.
As a real world example, I know that I will never buy a rental property, because the laws as they currently exist give me almost no rights as a landlord, and they leave me open to massive losses simply for complying with the laws. Since the government wants to tell me who I can rent to, let the government provide all of the rental housing. The same thing for companies, I figured out long ago that I would never grow my company past one person, why should I? So that I can spend all of my time complying with miles of bureaucratic red tape?
From what I can see the trends are becoming obvious. The future belongs to the small enterprise. The overhead for maintaining a large corporation in the current regulatory and legal environment is becoming prohibitive, and will eventually lead to the failure of many firms. The ones who survive will survive mostly because of their lobbying skills rather than their business skills. Meanwhile the small enterprises that can operate mostly under the radar of the government will survive and prosper. This is natural result of all of this government meddling.
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