If you have any faith in democracy, just remember - Larry Darby (that nutjob I wrote about last week) got 44% of the vote in the primary. Yes, 44% of Alabama democrats voted for a white nationalist atheist. That's good in one sense, but fucking horrible in another. Of course, the good is the atheist bit, the horrible is the white nationalist bit - although I'm sure there'll be plenty of other nutcases out there who'll flip that around. Still, it's good that he lost, but it's sad that he got so much support. I'm still waiting for the organisations I discussed in my previous entry to put out a public statement disaffiliating themselves from Darby. I don't think they are culpable in any moral or legal sense, but they should make it clear that they are unaffiliated lest anyone doubt their status. 
OMG, the "World Cup" sporties just got thoroughly pwned for their bad behaviour. 
Vinny got some bad treatment when he cancelled his AOL account. Reminds me of my dust-up a few months back with those bastards at PlusNet.
Nick Robinson has a good round-up of the story about John Reid's letter to the Attorney-General. There is a great comment on there (no.2 by John Brewer): "I wish the media would mug up on some of the basic principles of our constitution (like the fact we do have one) and stop indulging the government's game of bash the judges."
Lurch at gunculture.net on the UK knife amnesty bullshit: "Must dash to my kitchen where a number of these terrible weapons are even now plotting to murder and strike fear into my local community, only by dumping them in a red wheelie bin can the public be saved. I won't be able to chop veg or cut up hunks of meat but if it saves just one innocent child then surely it will be worth it."
The advert from my first sponsor, the Free State Project, expires today. They are promoting the Porcupine Freedom Festival (PorcFest), an annual gathering of libertarians at Roger's Campground in Lancaster, New Hampshire. I would love to go and thank them personally, but I haven't got the money for another trip to New England. Based on last year's photos, it looks like the people going will have fun. I'd come and join you folks in NH/MA, were it not for your country's darn immigration laws.
Rachel points out an oddity - the BBC covering Scoble's move to Podtech. That's really rather odd.
My OPML stylesheets functionality isn't working. It's not a big deal, since I prefer to use CSS inclusion rather than putting it on every page, but it means I have a non-functioning widget in my Blog menu. I can't update, though. Here's what happens.
Look what I just found - Squib, a Radio UserLand clone written for Ruby on Rails. That's cool.
Rusbridger: Oxford, we have a problem 
Jeff Jarvis has a tremendous post about Alan Rusbridger's recent talk in Oxford, where he discusses some of the issues with Comment is Free (something I have described as a place without anything unique to offer, just the same tiring old opinions stated in as barely coherent a manner as possible).
Jarvis remarks on Rusbridger: "He is conflating the blogosphere - that is, posts written by bloggers - with comments on forums and blogs. I don't mean to split hairs, but there is a difference: One is influenced by the pride of authorship, the other by the cloak of anonymity." As I've said, comments aren't particularly great.
One of the problems with many people in the media is they believe that blogs and comments are synonymous. They're not. Blogs have value in the choice of links, that value is accrued over time. I'm interested in what the people I'm subscribed to say, because they are people, not just "Joe from London" or whatever. Comments have value, but you have to hunt so much harder to find it than with blogs.
Also, it's a shame that you have to register for the Media Guardian site. Why can't Rusbridger's blog magic work it's way through to the Media division?
Under attack... from Batwoman!
Check this out for victim mentality. WorldNutDaily, everyone's favourite windbag Tory-Yanks, claim that Christian conservatives are under attack. From a comic book. Holy bejeezus, quickly don your gaudy televangelist outfit and run, run, run for the hills!
Of course, what all this talk about "diversity," "inclusion" and "pluralism" really means is that Bible-believing Christians and traditional conservatives are excluded and discriminated against. In fact, Bible-believing Christians and strict conservatives are increasingly being demonized, even by some of our alleged "friends."
Hold on, buddy. You've got it all wrong. We've got nothing against you Bible-believing Christians. We think you're nutty, but, hey, we're nutty too. I'm more offended by your gross use of "scare quotes". I mean, come on, we know that if you were to educate Baptists they cease to be Baptists and all that, but didn't they teach you anything at J-school? Oh, wait, you're writing for World...Net...Daily. Well, there's that and the whole little problem of knowing absolutely fuck all:
This is the meaning of the phrase "e pluribus unum" on which the United States of America was founded out of many, one nation, under God.
E pluribus unum means out of many, one nation, under God? How so? My Latin is pretty ropey, but shouldn't it be something along the lines of e pluribus, unum populus, sub dei? Nice how history is being crumpled up and shoved up the arsehole of irrationality. It was in fact the first half of that beautiful message which was snapped off in the 1950s in order to make way for the far less imaginative "One Nation Under God" slogan, to remove any doubt that America was a God-fearing, anti-communist nation (you know, because the whole Cold War, nuclear missiles pointed at Moscow thing was a little bit too subtle).
But what-o? I thought this was about bloody Batwoman? "Multicultural fascism is a neo-Marxist form of Christophobic bigotry and hatred." And, just so you know, Spiderman isn't real.
I'm sure that the keen minds at the WND order these articles on-spec and then just writing the opening paragraph. They've just got a big box of random essays railing against the ACLU and multicultural fascism sitting under their desk, then when something really dramatic happens, like a lesbian comic book character is announced they pull out this random, ranting crazy essay and merge the two together. I think my suggestion is more realistic than Ed Brayton's, because mine doesn't require the use of complex technology, something which most of the WND writers have yet to get their heads around.
Perhaps, and it's Latin-mangling time again, it's time for "e deus, rabidus et excuso malum".
Big-c Conservatives (sort of) get tech
I don't agree with the statement about intellectual property, but George Osborne is picking up the message that everyone I talk to seems to be clear about - that there are no British tech startups. We should attempt to recreate the entrepreneurship of Silicon Valley, but we don't want to try to recreate the US Patent and Trademark Office. We don't want the British system handing out patents for peanut and jelly sandwiches or the free energy machines which the Americans tend to have.
As well as the lack of capital, we don't have people who dream technology, we don't have a real cyberculture, our broadband services are still too expensive (BT is still a monopoly on the things that matter, we're all still waiting for some real competition in the DSL market, or some alternative - because cable or fibre isn't).
British people still have a "meh" attitude to the Internet and technology, a "meh" attitudes to the things which we all think matter - partly, I think, because of our frankly terrible education system on the matter of technology. It's delivered in a passionless grey that wouldn't be accepted if it was literature. Imagine a teacher in a literature class chucking out Shakespeare and Keats and replacing it with the most dull, functional writing you could find - perhaps a tax form. This is how technology is taught - completely free of passion.
But if you go online and talk about technology, you'll find more than enough passion. You've got people engaging in religious wars about operating systems, people spending hours and hours playing MMORPGs and launching blogs and podcasts which talk about technology in great detail.
If people see Outlook and Excel and think "this is technology", no wonder we've got a problem. It's like people seeing dull tower blocks covered in graffiti and thinking "this is architecture".
