A friend of mine, Martin, has a blog called No Double Standards that he started on Wednesday. Read it and subscribe to the feed - it's rather good. 
Semantic Humanities has a list of podcasts that have discussed the Semantic Web.
Loïc Le Meur has responded to a lot of our criticisms. I can't say I'm totally satisfied with the response, but I am almost beyond caring. The likelihood that I am going to get a refund is pretty low and almost not worth bothering with. In kicking this merry conversation off, I hope that conferences are run better in the future (most of them will be run better by setting them up as unconferences rather than Le Web-style conferences).
Stowe Boyd: "I don't understand the weird form of support that Loic Lemeur and SixApart are getting for the mess that leWeb became. One theme I see over and over is something like "Don't people understand how hard it is to put on a conference, even a small one? Loic and SixApart tired really, really hard!"... A lot of people are conflicted since they personally like Loic or Mena, or have had such a great time in Paris at the previous Les Blog events (I enjoyed my time at the first). But nonetheless, if the movie sucks, its best if you just say "that movie is low-grade dog food" and get on with your life."
Opus Dei 
If the last week has taught me anything, it has been the importance of telling the truth about the world around me. Sometimes you have to shout the truth in order for anyone to pay any attention, but it sometimes works.
On the same basis, I think it is time to link to some other truth-tellers.
This story over at ODAN is pretty damn heart-wrenching. It is of the life of a former Numerary Assistant to Opus Dei:
My life was controlled and suppressed and I had little access to the outside world. Our newspapers were censored and our television was often switched off if it was deemed unsuitable by one of the fanatic numeraries... I lived a life of conformity and indoctrination. I began to ask questions about some of the contradictions that I saw, but was quickly quieted by being told I would go to hell for even thinking such things.
At the other end of the spectrum, John Roche writes of his time in Opus Dei:
The supervision of our lives was almost total. To leave the house one had to get permission from the director. Members were not permitted to go to the cinema, theatre or public sports, or to sleep in their parents' house. One even had to get permission to read any book. Innumerable other rules from the Father concerned deportment, dress, relations with other members, how to write letters, how to make the best use of soap and how to close doors.
They maintain control by disabling the judgment of many members and their ability to assess objectively or criticise Opus Dei... This is mainly achieved by undermining the semantics of ordinary language in a remarkably Orwellian manner. So extraordinarily successful are these techniques that lay members will claim to be completely free. It's thought-control raised to a fine art.
Whenever I hear a claim that someone has reached "total freedom", that's usually a way of sensing that they are in a cult - hence Scientology advertises itself as "The Route to Total Freedom".
The root of this is obvious - it's Nietzschean. Nietzsche considered humanity as a bridge - a bridge, something to be crossed and overcome - "What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal" (Zarathustra I Prologue 3-4). The Superman concept is the end result of crossing away from humanity, and creating something new.
These religious cults like Opus Dei and Scientology are offering what Nietzsche promised - but they are doing it in such a way that so that it is never actually possible to find the end, the total freedom, but only the illusion of it. In the search, someone is profiting, that's for sure...
Tags: opusdei, nietzsche, scientology
Crazy church
I seriously did not read this before writing the above (there's comments about it too).
It's a newspaper report about "irritable clergy syndrome", which is the new trendy disease that vicars are suffering from when faced with troublesome, neurotic or psychotic parishoners who "church hop" while engaging in "status seeking, fawning, bullying, passivity, blaming others and gossiping".
You can't make this stuff up. The church and the blogosphere aren't so far apart, it seems. 
