DuckSpeak BellyFeelWise

(Credit to http://river.styx.org)

Pop Quiz 2: "You Didn't Build That"

How about this filthy hippie?

"Personal property is the effect of society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society, as it is for him to make land originally.

"Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist, the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilisation, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came."

The whole thing is worth a read, so click away and go to it.

Pop Quiz

Which despicable commie wrote this:

“This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is often most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages.”

Guess who?

Balloon Juice Troll Filter

I'm a big fan of Balloon Juice, but not so much the trolls that stink up the joint.  Inspired by cleek's awesome Pie Filter script, I decided to take it a step further and make something a bit more aggressive to make sure the trolls shut their, uh, pie holes.  So I give you Balloon Juice Troll-B-Gone, a userscript for Firefox and Chrome.

Differences with cleek's filter include:

• You can block and unblock commenters with a link attached to each post
   
• No pie, just a very skinny "trolling by Trolly McTrollson" sort of header.
   
• Blocked posts can be revealed by clicking on the header
   
• Replies to trolls are completely filtered (not just quotes)
   

Update 2013-05-15: I've updated the script to work with BJ's new look. GreaseMonkey and TamperMonkey are supposed to auto-update, but that doesn't always seem to be the case, so click here or on the script link to get the latest version. And for more BJ action, the filter looks best with the Better Balloon Juice stylesheet applied.

Update 2013-05-19: The script is now hosted on userscripts.org, which among other things, has install instructions for making the script work on lots of different browsers (I've only tested it on Firefox and Chrome though). If you already have the script installed, I recommend removing it and reinstalling it from userscripts.org instead (the links in this post are updated, so just click on them).

Update 2014-07-17: Link changed to userscripts-mirror.org -- next time I get around to editing it, I'll host it on greasyfork.org, assuming they're still around then.