Two things in the past week have irked me and I want to speak about them
1) The rumour about Tommy Hilfiger
Ever get this mail or it’s variant ?
” am sure many of you watched the recent taping of the Oprah Winfrey show in Chicago where her guest was Tommy Hilfiger. On the show, she asked him if the statements about race he was accused of saying were true. Statements like “if I’d known African-Americans, Hispanics, Jewish and Asians would buy my clothes, I WOULD NOT have made them so nice. I wish these people would *NOT* buy my clothes, as they (my clothes) aremade for upper-class white people.
.
.
“
The mail goes on to claim that Tommy not only accepts that these statements were true, but says some more racist remarks. As usual, this mail ends with a moral – Stop buying Tommy Hilfiger clothing… and forward this to everyone you know
How long does it take one to verify the facts ? Even on a dial-up connection it would take less than 30 seconds. Go type in ‘Tommy Hilfiger racist” on a google search page and see how many references to this hoax/rumour you will find. As if the prices on those Hilifger tags weren’t deterrents enough, we have to stop buying their clothing because of some weird racist rumour.
Urbanlegends.com, Truthorfiction.com are two great sites to cross check.
2) Indian Government bashing after Blogspot went off the network
True, our Indian Government has been stupid a lot of times in the recent past. But this is no reason to lose our heads and be impulsively outraged. Once again, it takes very less time to verify the facts. Within 5 minutes from the time I heard this news last week, I got to read an article where it was quite clearly stated that the government had banned a handful of blogs in particular and it was the ISPs who were over-cautious and banned the whole site.
To this day, people are still screaming murder about the indian government and our intolerance, and about the death of democracy.
Instinct plays an integral part of our being, but there’s a reason we have a mind in our skulls. And that is to suppress these instincts till they are justified by logic. I myself have terribly succumbed to my instinct at many times in life, and I think it’s fair to say that we all need to do a better job at it.
Realm Of Randomness 
good post!
and, imo, its also laziness (to verify the facts), that contributes to such reactions along with impulsiveness
Comment by Om — July 25, 2006 @ 6:45 pm |
perfectly agree aswin..
one of those things top of my list of pissing offy kinda stuff…
http://www.breakthechain.org/ is another such
i just dont believe people can be so stupid… and selfish !
blogged about this twice before..
http://sharathrao.blogspot.com/2006/05/orkut-hoax.html
http://thebroadcaster.blogspot.com/2006/02/down-with-chain-mails.html
Comment by Sharath Rao — July 30, 2006 @ 4:51 am |
Professor Landsburg, an economist at the University of Rochester, has calculated the relative value to society of executing murderers and hackers. By using studies estimating the deterrent value of capital punishment, he figures that executing one murderer yields at most $100 million in social benefits.
The benefits of executing a hacker would be greater, he argues, because the social costs of hacking are estimated to be so much higher: $50 billion per year. Deterring a mere one-fifth of 1 percent of those crimes — one in 500 hackers — would save society $100 million. And Professor Landsburg believes that a lot more than one in 500 hackers would be deterred by the sight of a colleague on death row.
from a nytimes website…check the link i mentioned above…
Comment by Sharath Rao — July 30, 2006 @ 4:52 am |
ofcourse, that was abt hacking and not spamming…but that damage due to hacking may be a lower bound :)
Comment by Sharath Rao — July 30, 2006 @ 4:53 am |
best regards, nice info video editing programs
Comment by Anonymous — March 17, 2007 @ 5:17 pm |