Belmont Club

By Richard Fernandez

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A woman who goes by the alias “Happy Slip” provides some pointers on how not to make a jackasss of yourself on FaceBook. The provenance of the Happy Slip moniker is given on her YouTube channel main page. It’s bizarre, but entirely plausbile I think, in households where several languages coexist on a more or less equal basis. She writes:

While growing up, my mom was always quick to remind me to wear a half slip with my dresses or skirts. She would say “Be sure to wear your hap eslip!!”. So I grew up thinking the term was always “happy slip”, until I was corrected by classmates who asked me if I had a sad slip as well.

But the advice on Facebook is useful because the slips you make on it are not necessarily “happy slips”. A city in Montana, for example, requires all its employees to surrender their Facebook and other social networking site passwords in order to ensure that the proper online image of its staff is maintained at all times. “Before we offer people employment in a public trust position, we have a responsibility to do a thorough background check. This is just a component of a thorough background check.” A number of “reputation management” companies are out there in fact, with promises to clean up your online image for a fee. In due time the only reputation you will care about is your online reputation. Decarte’s famous axiom will be rewritten as, “I post, therefore I probably exist.”

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11 Comments, 11 Threads

  1. 1. PA Cat

    Now if only someone would post similar pointers about Craigslist.

  2. 2. Chiral

    Online nerds are strangely obsessed with image, while despising pop celebrities for the same basic crime. I say pop celebrities, because they have no issues worshiping “alternative” personalities owned by the same media giants.

    The city policy requiring passwords will probably be killed in court someday. The constitutional issues are obvious.

  3. 3. ledger

    I don’t use Facebook because I am suspicious of the “cookies” that could be dropped on my computer. And, my work requires that I toil in obscurity.

    On a related subject, Facebook and YouTube are good places for actors to get exposure.

    If you play “Happy Slip’s” or Christine’s (or what ever) it looks like she is actually practicing a monologue with herself as all actors must do.

    She looks like an older copy of the infamous “cutiemish” on Youtube – who also just happens to have a Facebook account.

    I believe both are actors or would be actors practicing with a camera. Now, there is probably nothing wrong with that.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlgHAeKhYN4&feature=related

  4. 4. Tcobb

    A city in Montana, for example, requires all its employees to surrender their Facebook and other social networking site passwords in order to ensure that the proper online image of its staff is maintained at all times. “Before we offer people employment in a public trust position, we have a responsibility to do a thorough background check. This is just a component of a thorough background check.”
    When you have options, you can tell such people to go and f**k themselves. But when the government in question is the only employer there is, what real options do you have? I fear that the future is not so much the thug with the boot in our face, but rather the retarded social worker who can and will freeze our bank account unless and until we go to the classes designed to help us fix what mandatory tests have determined to be our social flaws.

    I think that Franz Kafka had a more realistic version of the future than George Orwell.

    God save us all.

  5. Cities are starting to generate revenue from code enforcement. They set up boards that try cases like illegal building without permits, illegal second units etc. What is interesting is that the standard is that you are guilty until you prove you are innocent.

    It is up to you to prove a second unit, that existed on the lot long before you bought the property, was built prior to the requirement for permits, or zoning that limits the number of units to only one.

    When they find you guilty, and the commission is judge and jury, in addition to the fine, they charge you for the time the city spent on your case. So staff has an incentive to find people guilty, since they get money to pay their salaries. So Kafka is already at work.

  6. 6. James

    Bozeman backed down from asking for passwords more than a week ago.

  7. 7. wws

    presbypoet – welcome to administrative law. Government of the bureacracy, by the bureacracy, and for the bureacracy.

  8. 8. Marie Claude

    sorry but there is a typo, its Descartes :lol:

  9. 9. Utopia Parkway

    @ledger, she’s not practicing a monologue, exactly. That’s her shtick. See one of her early videos Mixed Nuts http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3y_hX0noR0
    Also, see Morning Meest, YouChoob, Some of her later videos have more actors in them than just her.

    @MC, any typos here?

    (Rene Descartes, that drunken f*rt) I drink therefore I am.
    Je Danse donc je suis. (I just thought that one up ;-)

  10. One of my buddies alerted me to Happy Slip. However, I did not buy the lot we are on based on internet connectivity. We do better than dial up but not as good as basic DSL. In our old location our connection was good enough I could watch streaming video w/o frustration but now I have to make two passes – one is the download and then I can hit play again and watch it.

    I am much more careful with Facebook now that I have developed a largish network. My reason for the initial join was to network with my political friends both those who are local to myself and those away.

    I have always periodically googled myself sometimes with that notion in mind, to see how my google portrait would look to others. This is the main reason I use a pseudonym.

    One day I was in the office and a colleage was tut-tutting what he saw about me on “Deja News”, he was kidding, it was harmless but it really gave me pause.

    I would not give up any passwords, but queries as to online identities may not be entirely unfair.

  11. 11. ledger

    @UtopiaP

    I don’t disagree. But, I have worked with actors. She might not be in the business now but she will be (or was). Noth’n wrong with it.