An Open Letter To Senator John Kyl...
From the original Analog Industries archive. Some links and images from that era no longer resolve.
Dear Senator Kyl:
I’d just like to let you know, as an Arizona resident, and the owner of a small business that creates and sells software, that your support of COICA is completely and utterly misguided. Not only will it do absolutely nothing at all to stop piracy (the bane of my industry, without question), but it flies in the face of your many references to “freedom” in various speeches you’ve given. The list of countries that do this is very short; we’re in excellent company with North Korea, Myanmar, and China, a trio of freedom-loving forward-thinking nations if ever there were.
I’m a pragmatic person, and I understand the depth of the piracy problem, as I live with it every day, and it directly takes money out of my pocket. I also understand that cutting off our noses to spite our face is absolutely not the answer. You lead from the front, not from behind, and this is a ridiculous bill that will only serve to make us look foolish in the eyes of the world.
I realize that, as a US Senator, your job is to look inward, but as a business owner that relies on the internet to do business, I bring a not-inconsiderable amount of money in to the state of Arizona every year, and 90% of it comes from beyond this nation’s borders. Our state already looks xenophobic enough because of the ridiculous (yet ultimately toothless) wedge issue of SB1070. Why do we want to take this further in to actual harm?
6 comments
>will only serve to make us look foolish in the eyes of the world<
By "us" I'm not sure if you mean AZ, but as someone who grew up there and has family there, AZ doesn't need any more help looking foolish. Please make them stop. I've always entertained thoughts of moving back one day, but I'm having trouble with it lately. I have to listen to people in Georgia and Tennessee talk shit about how backwards and redneck AZ is.
bb
Working on it...
-CR
Send to one of them newspapers, wait do they still have those in AZ?
I had a guy from AZ argue with me recently because I said he was from the South. He said I couldn't say that, because Arizona wasn't part of the Confederacy. I died a little inside.
From what I can tell after living here a year, Arizonans kind of think of this as a region unto itself. Arizona and New Mexico share a lot of topography and similar weather and people. When people here say "the Southwest," they generally mean Arizona and New Mexico.
Sort of like when Texans say "America," they mean "Texas and a bunch of other places full of retards."
I find this interesting inasmuch as Nevada, Utah, and most of California are strikingly similar to Arizona and New Mexico, and California is considerably more "southwest," geographically, than any of those states. Go figure.
But yeah, there are some racist motherfuckers here, no joke.
-CR
Heretic_D, all jokes aside, the AZ guy you were speaking to was correct:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_South
Arizona is not considered part of the American South by most widely accepted definitions. The most popular definition of "the south" is based on the historical confederate states.
I don't see why his comment would be inherently racist. This definition is even recognized by the US census bureau. He was just stating a fact, and you jumped to conclusions.
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