Hate Gays? Don’t Let Them Pay Taxes!

Constituents beware: your tax dollars mix with gay tax dollars to fund things you use every day.

The Importance Of Speaking Out

No, speaking out doesn’t mean tweeting.

The Power And Problems Of Internet Activism

The Article: From SOPA to Cispa: The Power And Problems Of Internet Activism by Ryan Nafziger in The Speckled Axe.

The Text: On January 18, 2012, an already declining piece of legislation under the name of House Bill 3261 was blown out of the sky. Opposition had gone viral. Social media sites were boiling with the same collective anger that Joseph Kony would incite just a few months later. Internet institutions like Wikipedia and Reddit as well as thousands of smaller sites shut down for the day. Google claimed to have collected seven million signatures in opposition. Several of SOPA’s Congressional sponsors quickly withdrew their support.

Just two days later, the bill’s original sponsor, Texas Republican Lamar Smith, pulled the bill from the house floor while acknowledging the concerns about SOPA’s potential impact on free speech and the discourse of information over the Internet. The Internet had won. An army comprised of tweets, profile pictures and status updates had defeated industry giants like the RIAA and MPAA.

Almost four months later, a similar bill sits before the House and I bet you haven’t seen many Facebook status updates about it. That bill is House Bill 3523, or the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (called CISPA). CISPA differs from SOPA in purported aim to stop online security threats instead of online piracy, but its danger is the same. In essence, CISPA places our private information in the hands of government and corporations without due process. If Facebook thinks you’re a security threat, it can take your private information and give it to the government without a search warrant. Thanks to the broad wording of the bill, theft of intellectual property constitutes a security threat. Any illegal music, movies you download – or even that Shepard Fairey Obama poster you were so excited about changing your profile picture back to after these four long years – are potential grounds for the seizure of your information and its sharing between government and corporate intelligence organizations.

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Aziz Ansari On Being Anti-Gay Marriage

The guy from Parks and Rec gets it, so why is there still so much opposition?

The Cognitive Dissonance Of A Social Conservative

Not sure how you’d ever grapple with so much hypocrisy.