Well of course. You’re in America now, so get a proper American name, dagnabit.
Time to dust off this old classic.
What makes this even funnier is that after getting into problems with G+ not accepting my real name as real, I just made a blatantly bogus name for Facebook… and I’ve not had any problems since!
Fuck “acceptable sounding” name policies, and the fuck the people who institute them or think they’re a good idea.
FaceBook? People still use that…
I shared this with a coworker when he related issues moving to the US. He was born in the US to an American father and a Turkish mother and given an American first name and his father’s last name. Then he moved to Turkey with his mother and the Turkish government wouldn’t allow either his first or last name on official documents, so he was known by a Turkish first name and his mother’s maiden name. Then when he was older he moved back to the US.
Try explaining why you have two completely different names on your official documents when speaking to customs officials in the US who think your country of origin is too close to terrorist countries. You must be trying to sneak in under an alias!
I also think this whole thing is really annoying and have done ever since I started experiencing it with Google Plus. How dare these faceless bureaucrats dictate terms to people? Who the fuck do they think they are?! I don’t know where they get the gall.
When I got myself a new device a few months ago I discovered, coming late to it, that Windows 8 seemed to have introduced this “put all your different email addresses under one name” thing which I also found invasive and bordering on personal information gathering surveillance bullshit.
It also seemed to have hidden a lot of the features whereby you can customize and control your own computer that I am familiar with from using earlier OS’s - the Control Panel - behind a veneer of fancy animated opening screen bullshit that is all front and image and no substance.
It’s encouraging people not to know how the device they are using works - and this to me is a back door way of slowly taking those kind of controls and understanding of what they are using away from the user. Sneakily retracting the user’s autonomy with each so-called upgrade.
I hate these people. I hate Facebook and I hate Google Plus. They seem to be run by creeps to me.
Are they using humans to determine what looks “real?!” An algorithm would be bad enough, if it led to bad effects. But if it’s people, it seems like they’re just begging for a discrimination lawsuit, and/or all the attendant bad press.
Among my Facebook friends and/or friends-of-friends are Nunya Bidness, Ragid Andy (the fakeness of which becomes apparent when you see that his profile picture is Raggedy Andy), Frie Ndlyjoe (aka Friendly Joe, his default online handle but not his real name) and Jonathan Karate (of Parks and Recreation fame). The first three have been on FB for years.
If FB is zooming past them to disproportionately pick on people of a given race, creed or color (and that’s something that could be effortlessly quantified and turned into media-friendly bar graphs), then whole divisions need to be fired. And that’s assuming the best-case scenario, which is that there’s no actual racist intent at FB.
EDIT: per the linked article, apparently most of the suspensions come when other users report them, sometimes in organized name-challenging gangs. So, not even just humans, but unaccountable humans of unknowable motives enabled by FB policy. It sounds like the recipe for a big stinky lawsuit/PR campaign to me.
Erm, hate to be the one to break it to ya, but they’ve ALWAYS been in :America’ - you’re the intruders (via us 350 years ago or some such).
Reminds me of one of my dad’s favourite jokes when I was a nipper. Native American boy asks his father, “is it true that we’re named after the first thing you saw after we were born? So when my brother was born, the first thing you saw was an eagle, so that’s why he’s called Great Eagle. And when my sister was born, the first thing you saw was a baby deer, so that’s why she’s called Red Fawn…?”
“That’s right - but why do you ask, Moose Turd?”
Look, it was hilarious when I was 5, 'kay…?!
Methinks you need to turn up your Snark Meter…
So you were able to recognize a joke at some point in your life. When did that change?
Ironically, I’ve read several countries in Europe actually make it illegal to name your kid certain things… or rather they have to be on an approved list.
I wonder if Marijuana Pepsi Jackson (now Sawyer) had to put up with this shit?
She is on facebook…
I’m sorry Ms Jackson. I am for real.
And here we have an object lesson in Facebook’s value to the government: they write software that defines a semiotics of American mainstream inclusion. Like the meatspace mainstream, Native Americans are among the last to be invited, but FB is on it to increase their value by taking on the project to be able to distinguish Native Americans in code; they are to far down this road to just go, “OK, here’s a text field, put whatever you want to be called.”
…which is the underlying tension in these news items, the passive desire not to be second-guessed on one’s names, and the reality that (one of) Facebook’s value proposition(s) is in automated guessing.
What milliefink said. Probably more recognizable as a joke by people living in the U.S.
Yeah a French co-worker (here in Australia) was surprised that I was allowed to give my son a Chinese middle name. He told me that it wouldn’t be allowed in France. But I have heard from other sources that the policy there has since changed.
I am surprised to learn this is still a thing. I guess somebody else repealed a real names policy - was it gmail?
EDIT: Having clicked through, I am surprised the article consistently uses the term, “drag queens.” I’m not the edgiest guy in the world, but was under the impression that’s a subset of trans people. Are the terms interchangeable?
