Category Archives: Uncategorized

Tidbits for the week

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I have a job. I’m starting as soon as I can get my classes in order (or earlier than that).

Also, I’m publishing my more long-winded pieces to NowPublic. I’ll continue using this LJ for mostly personal stuff.

And finally, should there be a seat limit for political parties in legislatures to protect from outright majoritarianism? Or would a seat limit simply drive activists to form decoy parties in order to secure an ideological (or, worse, an executive-biased) majority? How can the perfectionists of electoral democracy, particularly those who are biased to multiple-winner systems such as party-list PR or STV, avoid outcomes such as the last few which have happened in South Africa and Namibia (both being party-list PR domains) since independence, in which big tents such as SWAPO and ANC manage to secure a majority in every election?

I think that party-list PR may be the best way to channel the energies of a number of our most partisan of extralegislative activists away from the precedent of fighting with each other for control of town hall events, among other notable acts and antics which have taken place since Obama was inaugurated. Why should we have to fear civil war – an oft-cited threat or fear which pops up when a number of related politically-motivated acts of violence or expressions of rage take place within close proximity of time – from various constituencies – yes, even those which are well-monied – who feel ostracized from the political process and, thus, must react through the wildest of organized, emotional expressions outside the political process?

Because, goodness knows, the anti-Obama crowd, in their various shades of philosophical thought, are despairing of their ostracization, their fragmentation and their (somewhat well-anticipated) demonization in various circles of thought. Alot of them do not want to share the same tent with others with whom they often collide in closed-door debate, but they still want to gain seats at the table of the House. So if they want to be able to represent their own particular political beliefs in more disparate tight-knit cliques of ideological cohesion (as Neoconservatives, as Libertarians, etc.) at the primary legislative organs of the U.S., then I’m fairly certain that organizations like Club for Growth (which has infamously advanced the "Republican In Name Only" meme) and OpenLeft (which targeted "Blue Dog Democrats" as "Bush Dogs" in 2008) should be most favorable towards an ensurer of strong party-ideology links like a party-list PR system in both the House and state legislatures.

Heading back to Albuquerque; or, Third time’s a charm

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My oldest sister (Wanda), her ex-husband and her youngest daughter have just moved out of Warner Robins back to Albuquerque as of 1:00 am this morning; her older daughter had already left some three weeks prior on a jet, as they had planned a few months ago. I teared up a bit after they pulled out of our driveway for the last time. From the onset, I kinda figured when they first moved here that my sister would move out of the area after a short stay (yes, for her, two years is for her a short stay compared to previous residences in Macon, Columbus, Great Falls, etc.), but I thought long and hard about what – or who – I would be missing now that they’re gone back to her ex-husband’s hometown. She did her washing at our house, she (and her kids) used our desktop when her Internet was out, she came to my college graduation, she moved stuff in and out of our shed, she brought food from Wal-Mart, she dropped me off or picked me up from school when our car was out, etc.; we gave her and her kids shelter when they moved down here, we shuttled her (and an acquaintance from church) to and from work in or near Centerville at night and in the early morning, we hosted two of her other three biological daughters (adopted by a couple in Montana in the 90s) when they came to visit in 2007, we often let her use our car until she was able to get her own used Saturn sedan, we rolled our eyes at every man she dated every week or two, and so on.

But we talked, and we talked often; we got in each others’ faces as well, but we made sure to air quite a bit of laundry when she and I were at our mother’s home. Depending on the subject, I talked more honestly and openly with her than with Mom, and vice-versa; I was more open with Wanda on sexuality (in which she has more experience), religion (in which she is more laissez-faire), and drugs (in which she’s a bit more divided, but not as utterly disdainful to the topic as Mom), while she talked to me most about my future (including whether I’d ever get a job, and in which field or industry). Ultimately, I don’t know how I’ll handle the fact that she and her family are no longer living within walking distance of the house, or that I’ll never be able to ask Wanda about Mom’s whereabouts, or that I’ll have to look outside Mom’s church and our family for….friendship and openness.

Of course, I’m trying, but I know that any further cultivation of ties with the outside world (and any effort on my part to make myself look less "using" of other acquaintances) would require me to reduce my time in Mom’s house, learn programming (and/or graphic design), find a job, get a car, get a phone, and plan to get on the highway to who-knows-where. But at 22, I’m stuck in school, and I fear moving to another area without first getting what I need out of college; programming is what I want to get under my belt before I entertain any serious thought of transferring my credits to another college or university out of state (yes, maybe UNM in Albuquerque).

So right now, I’m depressed about both what will be missing now that Wanda’s gone back and that we’ll be the only close familial kin in this part of Georgia (other than Connie and her two sons in Columbus), but I’m more depressed about not having the get-up-and-go that Wanda manages to assume when she sets her mind to moving to a completely-detached part of the continent. I’m depressed about not having taken earlier initiatives to prop myself up interdependently (if not independently) of Mom. I’m depressed about not getting to my most immediate goals earlier. I’m depressed about my own lack of maturity and my own overbearing sense of settledness.

But now, my mother is sick of her own condition, and of how she’s being treated by the various powers who govern her disability payments, and now I can no longer pine for domestic and financial stability and tranquility as a result. Things must be sold or given away, things must go up in smoke, things must be repaired, things must be paid off, things must be bought, things must be rearranged or moved.

I, or we, must be restless.

Universal reconciliation and universal ordination: intersecting the UUA and ULC

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The Unitarian Universalists believe in universal reconciliation (the belief that all beings will return to their Creator, no matter their differences in belief), while the Universal Life Church practices universal ordination (the belief that all are naturally ordained or entitled to preach their beliefs, whatever they may be); the two doctrines are meant by their progenitors to both maximize religious liberty and diversity and run counter to the more predominant religious inclination to take a doctrinally, physically or psychically authoritarian/coercive approach to other doctrinal idiosyncracies both within and without the congregation. 

I find the two doctrines to be very interesting in their approaches toward maximizing liberty and diversity; they both move beyond the paradigm of mere "religious tolerance" (since "tolerance" is something that you can do with your nose pinched shut) to proactively compromising the solidity of one own religion’s demographic strength and cultural solidity (or monopoly, in some cases), which is good if you’re looking for an action of spiritual antitrust and demonopolization. 

But my qualm is that the two approaches, by themselves, don’t make room for ensuring that those who benefit from and utilize free, doctrineless ordination (say, from the ULC) provide the same free, doctrineless service to others upon request when they themselves are able to issue such ordinations (thus continuing the perpetration, propagation and maximization of religious liberty and diversity), and provide such a service without any hangups regarding ANY doctrinal differences. Thus, I think that intersecting universal reconciliation with universal ordination should result in a hybrid that calls upon the ordained minister to ordain others upon request, without any inner psychological or spiritual reservations regarding doctrinal differences between the ordained and the ordination candidate, a sort of "viral" transmission of liberties and privileges akin to the GPL’s assurance that all who bear a copy of a GPLed software application may use it, modify it and redistribute it, provided that the license and its stipulations remain intact when redistributed. 

Being able to say "you are equally eligible, as I am, to bear the title of ‘Minister’ no matter our religious or spiritual differences and inclinations, as you are equally eligible to return to your Maker as I am" is, IMO, most ideal towards the maximization of religious liberty and diversity, whether its in the big cathedral or the little coven.

Be Kind, Reseed: Web-based BitTorrent video sharing

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I think initiatives like BitLet.org are interesting, at least in their attempt to take BitTorrent-in-the-browser to the most logical conclusion: BitTorrent-on-the-web. The ironic thing about BT-on-the-web (which, I think, is not the same as BitTorrent DNA) is that it practically relies more on external embedding of the player (and applet, unless your browser is HTML 5-capable) to further propogate its download speed in the browser, as opposed to the well-known bottleneck that such external embedding on third-party sites tends to exact upon server-based web video streams.

Of course, if P2P-distributed web video embeds do take off, then it seems like the new way to "be kind" (in the video rental sense) to other users is to leave our tabs and windows open for as long as possible to make other users’ viewing experiences a bit easier through seeding. But the prospect of such a method may make it quite a bit easier to distribute video over the web (and to lose less money on server bandwidth, which is a constant problem for any video sharing site); in fact, it somewhat democratizes video sharing by merely relegating a video sharing site to a glorified social networking service which links to torrents like any normal tracker or search engine (the user commentary, video responses, social bookmarking and annotations would remain a server-side feature to draw the users), and the resulting, P2P-enabled ubiquity of file availability and visibility (hence the moniker "viral video") would necessitate more liberal or copyleftist licensing schemes to maintain the IP safety of such content.

So I would embed one of BitLet,org’s videos into this post (which would cause an applet to load), but I can’t find an embed code. So in the meantime, here’s Mr. Cropperfield: the applet version and here’s the friendlier HTML5 appletless version (if you’re using Firefox 3.6 or a Chromium nightly build).

The silly, fickle morals of the (ex)pro-Pirate Bay populists

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Ever since TPB announced that buyout deal with GGF, the populists who exclaimed "ra ra ra!" for the TPB owners at the infamous trial in Stockholm are now seething with either anger or dismissiveness for the "new" TPB. They’re exclaiming "How could you do this to us, your loyal users?! Fuck you, I’m going to Demonoid!" because the prospect of TPB becoming a user-paid site (alot like Metafilter) rubs their offended ex-userbase as "going legit" or "kowtowing to the MAFIAA".

I rarely use TPB: I tend to use BT for downloading anime series and the occasional film, so I know that I’ll find far more of what I want on isoHunt and AnimeSuki than on TPB, which seems to be much more used for software (for which, since using Ubuntu and mostly free-software, I’ve hardly lacked) and film/documentary distribution. So it hardly affects me that TPB will go legit and user-paid to any length, but I know that they have legitimate reasons (both financial and political) for doing such, and I find much of the fury that is being directed in its way from commenters on Digg and TorrentFreak to be self-righteous and misdirected.

But as a user-driven site, TPB, like Digg and YouTube, is finding itself in the crosshairs of many active Internet users who have an active disdain for anything that is corporately-driven or monetarily-supported, including web advertisements or making user accounts dependent upon monetary subscriptions. True, money is always a hurdle for any site to cross, and corporations tend to have an arguably-heightened sense of entitlement to monetary payments for many of the most minute perks and features that they distribute, but the behavior of corporations doesn’t excuse the user from playing a role in the sustenance of a site for its services. That’s why the Pirate Bay had banner and text ads on every page of the website.

The sites which display the content, or at least links to the content, need money to drive revenue for their survival as autonomous units; otherwise, they will fall to the wayside, no matter how popular they may be to their userbases.

The most disturbing mentality of TPB’s proponents-turned-detractors ("I’m deleting you from my bookmarks. Good day, sir!"), however, shows when they comment on how TPB will be replaced by another new head of the BitTorrent hydra, followed by a "good riddance" to another old, expendable head. It’s like they expect to be perpetually able to switch out hydra heads (i.e., trackers and search engines) every 6-12 months like shoes or toothbrushes, every time that a hydra head either gets taken to the judicial abattoir to be bled and culled or gets a bit "uppity" and starts to consider more sophisticated, machiavellian methods of financial sustenance.

So I ask myself….how do you reserve any respect for these fickle, thin-skinned "pirates" who can’t even be counted on to dig into their own pockets to support their own captains and fix the severe damage to their own sinking ships BEFORE it comes to the captains forcing those pockets inside-out as a last-ditch effort? They’re hilarious in their churlish textual expressions of "Fuck the RIAA!" e-rage and claims of support to the "cause", but they’re truly impotent and unstable in the bladder and couldn’t be counted upon to support any single one of the many public torrent sites.

So I don’t think the Pirate Bay is in the wrong for going ahead with paid user subscriptions; actually, its been a long time coming for any major previously-non-corporate tracker of the TPB’s size or popularity, and that people didn’t see this coming as a feature is laughable. DRM on files may be a stretch, and may be signs of overreaching desperation to recoup legal costs (as DRM is seen as a "big no-no" for the free culture movement), but it’s not surprising that TPB went this route after the trial.

And as it has been said in the media, this may be the symbolic end of the "Pirate" era of the free culture movement (and of this decade), but the contributions made by the unaffiliated trifecta of TPB, the Pirate Party and the Swedish Piratbyran will make part of a sociopolitical foundation for the pro-copyreform movement in the European Union, and will also open new questions for the Western copyreform and copyleft movements to answer.

Finally, I think that this decade has shown the advance of what I call the "wikileft", or the current movement towards making the production of media more open, publicly-persistent, collaborative and human-readable (as in the case of wikis for encyclopedic articles, or even in Mozilla’s Bespin project for a web-based collaborative IDE). It is copyleftist by necessity (hence naturally allowing for P2P distribution), but it brings a greater focus upon the production of content, a focus which was never fully considered or exploited by the copyreform movement which cast its lot behind TPB and other distribution hubs. The wikileft, IMO, gives a far greater window of user involvement and responsibility than the copyleft or copyreformism ever did; users not only contribute their works to the wiki whiteboard, but take a role in the nurturing and development of the information contained on the whiteboard (including information posted by others) and ultimately "own" the responsibility and recognition for their own contributions.

If the wikileft can comprehensively outsource the production of prime, expert-level media to the lay public within the next decade, what would be the need for the statically-produced media that the copyreform movement fights for the right to non-commercially distribute under the protection of fair use? Who would care about the Encarta Encyclopedia client software being distributed on BitTorrent when one can point to any one of the nearly 3 million English Wikipedia articles created and edited by millions of users?

The copyleft, for its own sake, must morph into the wikileft to make user-generated, user-supported content more ubiquitous and prevalent throughout the Internet, thus squeezing out the demand for the proprietarily-licensed, statically-produced media which the TPB, isoHunt, LokiTorrent, OiNK and others past and present  fight for the right to distribute. The latter type must be dumped in the shortest order in order to render irrelevant the companies which claim intellectual monopolies over their distribution, and bring the nightmare of the MAFIAA to a blessed end.

Worker co-ops, consumer co-ops and labor/trade unions

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I wonder about how labor unions have increasingly come out in favor of mutualization of larger megacorporations, particularly in their favoring of worker cooperatives as a model for such mutualization.

I wonder about it because I’m a bit lost on whether worker co-ops are in philosophical conflict with consumer co-ops: both are mutualized institutions meant to at least provide a more transparent product and more democratic governance, but worker-owned co-ops are more limited in their demographic and democratic spread than consumer co-ops, and they are more bound by necessity to ensure job security for all worker-owners.

Job security, of course, is good: it not only fits within the labor unions’ ultimate goal of protection of jobs and worker welfare (by mutual assurance, if need be), but it also guarantees that any owning member will have a means of generating income for both oneself and for the other members of the co-op, giving worker co-ops a philosophical and financial advantage over consumer co-ops, which are larger in membership but provide seemingly basic, threadbare benefits in comparison.

Of course, even if the worker co-ops assimilate into each other to create a megacooperative conglomerate, it may only make a fraction of consumers into worker-owners. Its not like the labor unions will be able to announce "Hey, everyone aged 18+ in the country is hired, so come clock in on Monday! We’ll send everyone – including you – to a day job, get you educated, and get you settled into an apartment at the same time!" It would be nice to dole out job positions like nation-states dole out citizenship, but I doubt that worker cooperative federations or conglomerates will be able to ensure jobs and income for all adults in that way….at least, not with the way that worker cooperative federations are structured.

ICANN and the U.S. fear of foreign censorship

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Once again, the debate over governorship of ICANN, the semi-private body which doles out new top-level domains (like .com, .eu, .org) every so-often, has resurfaced, this time over the European Union’s demand for the end of the collaboration agreement between ICANN and the U.S. Department of Commerce. Neither side – the EU nor the US – wants to budge over ICANN’s governorship, but fears expressed in the United States primarily center over whether a globally-restructured de-governmentalization of ICANN would lead to the body taking a more activist, less impartial approach towards its governorship of domain allocation. The more extreme fears are that an internationalization of ICANN may result in it kowtowing to the demands of governments – directly or by corporate proxy – for the deposition or censorship of certain media from the Internet, an affront to the long tradition of U.S. constitutional upholding of free speech; such a fear stems from the practices of governments such as those of the People’s Republic of China, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, and Iran towards their own domestic media.

Ironically, such was the fear inside the United States in the last decade regarding the demands of domestic religious organizations for the creation of the .xxx domain as a place of outer, censored darkness to cast and imprison all "mature/adult" media; this move was ultimately defeated by ICANN for free speech motivations, but it ultimately showed that the danger of affronting free speech and free thought on the Internet was as much domestic as it was international, and as much religious as it was political. 

In my opinion, the fear of foreign censorship of international media and the demand for a non-governmental restructuring of such an important international body should compliment each other rather than rule each other out. Why not incorporate international organizations which act both as effective checks on the power of ICANN and its actions as well as watchdogs for freedom of speech on an international, Internet-wide level?

No, its not just a global democratization of ICANN that is necessary (although proportional representation is a good way to gauge the fuller breadth of international opinion and interest), but also an introduction of constitutionalism, judicial review (and restraint), and other features that those U.S. free speech advocates who would feel more at ease with U.S. governance or influence would wish to be copied and enhanced to an internationalized governance. 

But of course, one person on Digg has highlighted the political nature of the debate over ICANN, which may not be the necessitating factor for such a move; ultimately, money and heightened economic factors have to be involved with the lack of any shift of ICANN governance before there is a stronger change of the status quo.

Follow-up to previous post: the “Seven-Point Manifesto”

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The Seven-Point Manifesto is a document that has circulated on a number of English blogs and first appeared in the conservative Pajamas Media blog; it supposedly was distributed among Iranian protestors in the hundreds of copies before being translated from Farsi into English for an international audience.

However, despite being linked from Commentary Magazine and the Guardian, the comments in the original PajamasMedia post raise doubts about the document’s extense of internal usage within the reformist movement, let alone the authenticity or verifiability of the document. Plus, its demand for Grand Ayatollah Montazeri (rather than Rafsanjani, as I initially posited) to replace Khamenei as transitional Supreme Leader seems rather far-fetched at the moment, given that Montazeri, a more liberally-oriented cleric and veteran of the Iranian Revolution, has been in internal exile and under house arrest until fairly recently.

So at best, this manifesto can only stand recognized as an expression of a minority of the protest movement’s less influential rungs, far from a guiding internal document that is being used by the movement as the sort of basic, direct articulation for which I requested in the last post.

After Neda, what does the Iranian opposition want? And does the U.S. really want to help?

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The newest cause celebre from the Iranian crisis, Neda Agha-Soltan’s bloody, 40-second expiration on camera, has made the rounds on both television and Internet within the last two or three days. There’s outrage, there’s sadness, there’s the arms-length solidarity from overseas, and all such emotional capital is being translated into……nothing.

I mean, there’s not much that Obama can, could or should do, despite the incessant Republican haranguing: the current reasoning is that anything which he says (let alone does) regarding the crisis is a blind foreign policy gamble, one which could end up like previous electoral disputes under the previous administration into which the U.S. chipped with words of encouragement for the ill-fated opposition.

Furthermore, there’s no remotely-transparent way to measure the desires or strengths of the opposition. The reformists currently figuring in the opposition’s leadership are only being depicted as wanting a limited, timid change of guard, with Mousavi replacing Ahmadinejad (no indication on whether it extends to replacing Khamenei with Rafsanjani, as you’re not hearing anything advocating such a drastic change from the protesters); its only among the ostracized rebel militant organizations in the more hinterlands of Iran and in the diaspora, including the Tudeh party and the People’s Mujahideen (currently based in Iran), who are calling for a change of regime, for a total overthrow of the clerical-military apparatus, and no ones paying attention or giving coverage to such voices from the latter camp. The reformists have also been stereotyped as urban, educated, middle-class types who have not connected with the poorer, rural majority of Iranians, the latter of which may or may not want a continuance of the current status quo under Khamenei-Ahmadinejad and who are less accessible from the Western press due to media restrictions.

Finally, as I was telling a friend in Atlanta earlier last week, we aren’t seeing any vocal endorsements or spearheadings for the reformist opposition from the local governments of the country, including the mayors and governors. Swinging them from one side to another may make for a better clarification, expansion and articulation of demands (especially those of an economic nature which could appeal to the larger masses) from the opposition. Such may have been key in Madagascar earlier this year, when the Mayor of Antananarivo managed to rally a no-name party’s support from masses of protesters and elicit enough sympathy from the military to force the then-president from office and into exile.

Right now, no such swing is happening. The military and paramilitaries are arresting and shooting protesters and bystanders, such as Neda and the family members of Rafsanjani (Mousavi’s backer and the head of the Assembly of Experts which elects the Supreme Leader who authorized the military, paramilitary and police out onto the street to arrest such individuals as Rafsanjani’s family members…..WTF?).

So….comparisons are already being drawn between this series of events and other events which ended in tragedy due to the opposing side not being able to win over key members of the military apparatus: Tiananmen, Saffron Revolution, the whole Zimbabwe debacle, and so on. And all that the West can do is reach, emotionally and frightfully, into the dark.