Users are fleeing LiveJournal over Russian owners' hidden anti-LGBTQ terms

Users are fleeing LiveJournal over Russian owners' hidden anti-LGBTQ terms

From Gay Rights, a Flipboard topic

Remember LiveJournal, the online blogging service popular with fanfiction users during the early 2000s? Well, LiveJournal…

Read it on Flipboard

Read it on dailydot.com

Wow, I didn't even think about it like that…

I'd logged into the mobile LiveJournal app a few days ago and the new Terms of Service translation popped up. They'd made sure to note it was not legally binding (only the original Russian would be). I'd read it, because it now being fully Russian, I wondered if there would be anything overtly talking about gay things... Naturally, not, because who says things like that in legal documents most of the time?

Actually some, yes, but only when they don't want to be completely obscure about it.

So, I'd not really thought about it until I'd seen this article, and I suppose they might have a point. I want to justify it somewhat, saying I'm safe because I have a Friends-Only journal, but that isn't the point. People can't express themselves as they'd like.

Every website has its rules. Tumblr has a no pornographic video rule, and I think it's partly because people were/are using it as a giant, free file sharing service for, among other things, "copyrighted" "amateur" gay pornography.

Yes, I use scare quotes. I have a certain opinion about that too.

Back to my first-thought sort-of-defending-them. I'm not sure what I really want to do. That LiveJournal has been there through some of my most tumultuous life moments, and it's been a repository for a lot of my stories, even if I'm the only one of my friends who's still be regularly contributing to it.

Literally, the only people on my feed are Keith R.A. DeCandido, and me. A Japanese learners' community had a post a couple days ago, and that had surprised me. I'll have to see what comes.

Seriously, #DumpStoli? WHY?!

It wasn't until I was on my Twitter feed today that I'd noticed Dan Savage (@fakedansavage) had changed his avatar to behold his latest - and might I say very misguided - crusade, one called #DmupStoli.

Searching that hashtag, I came upon his original blog posting, which explained his rationale.

And I disagree with most of it, because the nature of it is simply, at least with the Stoli part of the crusade, that all bars and people should drop it purely on that because Stoli is Russian one should drop it.

WTF? I mean, the #DumpSochi part, I can understand. Russia, having agreed to be internationally welcoming by virtue of agreeing to host another Olympics has made an implicit communication with the world that it would accept all people in the spirit of harmony and international union. Recently legalizing effective discrimination against any amount of people, GLBT members included, goes against that spirit.

Going against any number of private companies just because they come from a country which decided to enact certain legislation makes about as much sense in my eyes as Boston as a whole effectively refusing to allow Tamerlan Tsarnaev a burial within Massachusetts. That was another bit of ire at the backhanded twofaceness the United States can have.

Imagine if there were somewhere in the United States that still refused to bury someone in a specific place just because that person were, say, Jewish, Black, or Japanese? That was what happened to Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and what's now happening because Stolichnaya happens to be a Russian company. Not a Russian government company. A Russian company.

Don't refuse something based on its proximity to something "society" seems to dislike or that someone says shouldn't be.

I say one questions separately Russia the country and Tamerlan Tsarnaev's actions as what are reprehensible, and treat Russian vodka the private, unaffiliated company product and Tamerlan Tsarnaev the human being as private, unaffiliated company products undeserving of prosecution and a human being deserving a proper burial like any human being should.

I've thus decided - not that he would give two shits because he's so high on himself and his ego that he doesn't care what a person thinks anyway - to unsubscribe to Dan Savage's podcast. His decision to discriminate against a series of products just because they happen to be of a country - and not for a country - that discriminates is as unjust and backward as the people who thought Jewish people, Black people, and Japanese people were not human beings and thus exploitable and worthy of abuse.

I say #DropDanSavage, if that's how he's going to be.