The Substantially Similar Weblog

I run my own little “rightwatch” organization by subscribing to the mailing lists of several right wing organizations. Although on occasion I find myself agreeing with the more economic/libertarian groups (e.g., the Cato Institute·), I always find the social right pretty funny. Here’s the latest press release from the Christian Coalition·:

Washington D.C. — Today’s decision by 4 out-of-control left-wing judges on the Massachusetts Supreme Court to force homosexual “marriage” on the citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the rest of America should be thoroughly ignored by the Massachusetts State Legislature. The American people who overwhelmingly oppose homosexual marriages (only 24% support such an abomination) — through their elected officials —- must make these important decisions, not a tiny minority of judicial tyrants.

This excerpt is striking because they admit that 24% of the population supports gay marriage. It’s astonishing that that’s the lowest number the Christian Coalition can reasonably claim. What might that number have been ten years ago? Twenty? The Christian Coalition is on pretty thin ice if one-quarter of the population supports an “abomination.” I’m not sure that can really be counted as “overwhelming.” Assuming the trend towards acceptance continues at anywhere near the current rate, it’s going to be pretty hard for them to continue to claim that these judges are way out in left field.

They also (unsurprisingly) neglect to mention that constitutional rights are almost always countermajoritarian: if the only issue were the will of the masses, then the only purpose of the constitution would be to insure proper (representative) functioning of the legislative branch. But that’s clearly not the case, and one only need to look to the school desegregation cases to see why courts must act against the will of the majority when the constitution so commands.

I’m sure the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (holding same sex marriage rights required under the Massachusetts Constitution in Goodridge·) and the United States Supreme Court (in holding sodomy prohibitions unconstitutional in Lawrence v. Texas·) have seen the writing on the wall: people will some day look back at this time and wonder how people could ever have harbored such homophobic views. By setting out bold precedent breaking with past practice, authors of these opinions must be hoping to establish themselves as visionaries in the eyes of future legal historians, just as we now see the Holmes and Brandeis dissents in the free speech cases of the late 1910’s·, or Holmes’ dissent in Lochner v. New York· in 1905. We realize now that Holmes and Brandeis understood what is now obvious, at a time when the rest of the court was stuck in an untenable (or unjust) conceptual framework.

I’m looking forward to the time when we can look back on all of this and laugh at the small-mindedness of the Christian Coalition. In any case, I feel better about getting married this May knowing that I live in a state where the right to marry isn’t predicated on the gender of the person one loves.

I’ve written about my tribulations with “Paris Hilton” related referrer spam before. Since my weblog tracks “inbound links” on the right side, spammers create spurious inbound links into my site so that their site will be linked from mine and thus have greater visibility and a higher Google PageRank. My solution has been to ban anything with the words “paris,” “hilton,” and a host of other porn-related terms from the list.

Starting today, I’m starting to get a new breed of referrer spam: Janet Jackson superbowl video referrers. Maybe it’s a bad idea to track inbound links at all. Or maybe the solution is to have my referrer tracker actually look at the supposed inbound link and make sure that it does, in fact, link to my site. In any case, I’ve now added a bunch of Janet Jackson related terms to my banned list.

How will this arms race end?

While I’m talking about scourges of the Internet, what’s the deal with autoreply virus/worm detectors? A huge number of corporate and educational mailservers scan incoming email for worms and viruses, and if they detect a worm or virus send a message to the sender telling them the message was subscribed and that they are infected. Usually, the autoreply also includes a plug for the email scanner software itself.

So how is it that the developers of this software are smart enough to include the distinctive signatures of all these email worms, but not smart enough to realize that those same worms always forge the “from:” part of the header. That means if the apparent sender actually is infected, it’s at best a total coincidence. There is no connection, with most worms, between the “sender” of an email and the person who is actually infected with the worm. (other than some third person who is infected might have the apparent sender in their address book). Presumably these software developers are smart people and spend some time trying to understand email worms and viruses, and send out frequent updates of the distinctive signatures of worms and viruses.

Does anyone have a rational explanation? Even better, can someone educate these software developers and the people who purchase their software to end this scourge of false “virus detected” emails?