Salon.com > Donna Ladd

“Don't link to hate sites!”

Fri, 14 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000

Film critic Roger Ebert gave a thumbs down to online efforts to expose bigotry on the Web Wednesday in a debate with the founder of Hatewatch. Hate-monitoring sites, which link to racist, anti-semitic and homophobic sites, give bigots a "virtual supermarket" of online hate tools, Ebert said at this week's Conference on World Affairs, an annual intellectual talkfest at the University of Colorado in Boulder. "If I were somebody looking for hate on the Web, this would be a good place to start," Ebert said of Hatewatch.

During Wednesday's debate with Hatewatch founder David Goldman, Ebert said he doesn't believe violence directly results from either film or Internet images: "Lee Harvey Oswald didn't have a Web site," he said. Yet it is ill-advised, he argued, to provide hate-seekers an online roadmap to the sites. "It's very easy to find it on the Web, but I don't know that we should make it any easier."

StopDrLaura.com

Wed, 01 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Are you fat? Queer? Black? Happy? Are you a biological error? Dr. Laura wants to know -- but it's not the Dr. Laura you're thinking of. The questions jump out from the home page of StopDrLaura.com, and DrLaura.org. The sister sites, scheduled to go live Wednesday, are designed to build "a coalition against hate" and to keep the Paramount Television Group from going ahead with its plan to give the moralistic radio talk-show host a TV program.

A preview of StopDrLaura posted on Tuesday quoted Dr. Laura calling gays "products of a biological disorder"; telling the New York Post, "I call homosexual practices deviant"; and musing in a recent issue of Variety, "How many letters have I read on the air from gay men who acknowledge that a huge portion of the male homosexual populace is predatory on young boys?"

The anti-Dr. Laura site, in turn, will ask visitors to "flood Paramount with calls to stop Dr. Laura," and provide a phone number for chairman Kerry McCluggage.

Texas' death-row peep show

Fri, 04 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

While Illinois Gov. George Ryan announced a death-penalty moratorium this week, Gov. George W. Bush's home team is publishing nearly every grisly detail of its execution records online. Like a macabre, taxpayer-funded "FBI's Most Wanted" for the Internet crowd, the site catalogs the last meals and final statements of 206 men and women executed in Texas since 1982, 119 since Bush took office in 1995.

Larry Todd, spokesman of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, says the department's site helps quench the public's insatiable interest in prisoners on death row. Texas leads the nation in executions -- and has given lethal injections to six men already in 2000. "There is a fascination, as morbid as that might be, about executions in Texas ... They ask us how tall, how long it took him to die ... As soon as we lay down the phone, it rings again," he says.

What happened to the exclusive Club Mac?

Fri, 21 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

The purchase of my first Mac back in the '80s was a de facto pledge of allegiance to the anti-PC club. I loved being inside Apple's velvet ropes, while lots of clueless PC geeks stood around outside. But with Apple's recent success, the Mac club is becoming like a New York hot spot that welcomes the bridge-and-tunnel crowd. When anybody with $999 for an iMac can get in, who will be left for us to "Think Different" from?

This month's Macworld Expo in San Francisco really brought it home: Steve Jobs is grafting little stoplights onto our operating system (stay tuned for OS X). Apple now has an "Internet strategy," for Chrissake. Its Web site has been transformed into a portal, at least to everything Apple wants you to find. You can have your own Mac.com e-mail address, send iCards, build a boilerplate home page and store documents on Apple's server, as part of Apple's new iTools Internet services. Apple will even pre-screen your kids' Web travels and provide you with site reviews to help you answer the question -- no! -- where do you want to go today?

A no-crash guarantee

Wed, 12 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Think an economy yinning out of control must come yanging down to Earth? Convinced there is a limit to prosperity? Ready to bring your economic pessimism out of the closet and throw it at dot-com maniacs?

You and your bah-humbug attitude may just find your very own e-haven in TheGreatCrash.com, a site unabashedly hoping to make money off anti-prosperity nuts. The latest work of Zack Exley, an online provocateur of George W. Bush, TheGreatCrash.com appeared Jan. 1, just as the feared Y2K bug crawled quietly away without wreaking havoc and wrecking markets.

"You thought Y2K would be your moment of glory. Surely an 'I told you so!' was just around the corner," the site whines. But, no disaster, no glory. Still, you can hold out hope for a stock market crash that will make 1929 look like a trip to bountiful. If your mother disowned you after you convinced her to sell her portfolio and buy bonds in 1998, you might go for Exley's latest investment instrument: "The Great Crash Will Burst Your Bubble in 2000" T-shirt. It sells for $35.