This may be an unfounded opinion, but I think a major reason for why Prop 8 was affirmed by a slim majority of the California population is because you don't have that equal of a distribution of local/municipal LGBT community centers within the state. Most of the county-by-county losses took place within the proximity of the Bay Area and the Central-to-Northern coastline. Within this area, you possess a high conglomeration of LGBT community centers within a similar geographic.






Of course, this hypothesis may not account for why there was a surprising majority of Prop 8 victories in the counties of southernmost California, where you can also see a large number of existing LGBT community centers in the above map. Between the two highest concentrations of LGBT community centers in the state, however, you have a large gap on both maps within the San Joaquin Valley area: all the counties in this area are pro-Prop 8, all the counties are lacking any sort of standing LGBT community center (including the biggest cities of this region, such as Fresno and Bakersfield).

Perhaps the time of reflection for the California marriage equality movement should also direct the attentions of its advocates to this particular area. Engagement of the San Joaquin area should include outreach, the building of local LGBT community centers, and challenging the current preference of the local power structure for marriage - or perhaps basic sexual and gender - inequality.

This process may take years, should probably not be tied to the prospect of a counter-proposition, and it may also require the creation of LGBT community centers which explicitly appeal to the ethnoreligious and ethnolinguistic groups, but it may break up the monopoly that heterosexists possess on the definition of "normality" within these regions by raising the consciousness, profile and prospect for empowerment of the LGBT communities of inland California in the coming decade. It would also help in deregionalizing the California LGBT experience by spreading newer centers of LGBT community initiative away from the coastline (and, consequently, away from the largest and most opulent cities in the state) into the diverse terrain of the interior.

Reading Lewis Lofkin's writings on American Deism, I thought over the night about how English (or "Regular") Freemasonry maintains a ban on religious or spiritual discussion - save for (upon initiation) whether an initiate believes in any Supreme Being - inside a lodge. I think that this ban on religious elaboration places a mask on possible religious expressions, intrigues and possible bigotry.

Maybe it is a good idea, and perhaps this is comparable to how the furry fandom has placed such a heavy and long-standing emphasis on disguising one's own ethnocultural or ethnoracial identity under a fursona (be it manifested on a furry media archive via an avatar or in the average real-life furry meetup/convention via a fursuit). By hiding such distinctions under the furry equivalents of tribal initiation masks and nomens mysticums, the more divisive flareups around race and ethnicity are, theoretically, avoided or subsided.

In light of both

• the Swiss referendum-based ban on further building of minarets on mosque edifices in Switzerland
• the European Human Rights Court's ban on displays of the crucifix in Italian public schools

I think that it is time to highlight the growth of an strong pan-European movement of anti-triumphalism and laicite, one that doesn't ignore any religious or spiritual belief system in its wake. Furthermore, I would also recommend to the Europeans (and even the Turkish people, if Kemal's legacy is to be continued in that country) a further logical expansion of a further pervasive regulation of religious triumphalist displays in public:

• church bells and bell towers
• stripping explicit references to unique churches or religions from constitutions and other public documentations

But ultimately, the argument in the Global North over the clash between the religions of Christianity and Islam (and Islam vs. Judaism) and secular Humanism is cultural, as the ideas of law and custom which are embedded within the cultures whose members also subscribe to the religions tend to widely differ on their views (or their capability to modernize their views) regarding concepts of rights and liberties.

I've come to the conclusion that multiculturalism - a well-intentioned idea - is very much pinned, in its current implementations, between the rock of social progression and the hard place of cultural integrity/sovereignty. Multiculturalism, as it stands, has not been engaged in a significant attempt at demonolithization that let's at least one school of multiculturalist ideology try to remove itself from attempting to actively embrace claims to cultural integrity or sovereignty.

I think it would be better to say that multiculturalism respects the rights of multiple cultures to exist, but does not respect the right of a culture to make claims or moves for "integrity" or "sovereignty" against those - within or outside the culture's main grouping - who syncretize with other cultures or interpretations. Instead, those who do syncretize should also receive the same support and standards of judgement as any other culture if they so apply for such treatment.

Hence, I agree more with Anne Phillips' book Multiculturalism without Culture, particularly in its feminist angle (since feminist and LGBT organizations have had the hardest time with current multiculturalist models).

Being in the furry thing for a bit, I think that the idea of the gay werewolf is a perfect androcentric counterpart to the lesbian vampire, which is why I'm surprised that the gay werewolf hasn't been as fully utilized as an exploitation trope as the lesbian vampire in the 20th century.

I can say that Summer Wars, Mamoru Hosoda's 2009 film, was decent. I can't say that it presented anything startlingly new (other than the family angle and the consistently-amazing animation style that I can expect from few other directors besides Mr. Hosoda) because, after finishing the film, I (and a few others: here, here and here) realized that the plot for this film was a latter day revisitation (not necessarily a rehash, but a timely revision) of his 2000 Digimon Adventure film, Children's War Game.

I can name a few differences in the technological/industrial aspect between Children's War Game and Summer Wars:

• Children's is much more replete with A.I. vs. A.I. (in the form of the Digimon characters), while a form of A.I. is mostly posited as a world-eating antagonist vs. the whole of humanity.
• Unlike the less-likely scenario presented in Children's at the time of its release, Summer was more reflective of the very-likely integration of pervasive Internet-based social network accounts with more superfluous user avatars and persistent virtual environments (like, say, integrating Facebook or Myspace with IMVU or Second Life)
• Because of the lack of a large A.I. population in Summer's virtual world (known as "OZ"), the story line is driven more by the contributions, conflicts, hopes and fears of the human participants than in Children's.

But if Summer Wars is a more timely revision of Children's War Game, then it is (IMO) logical that a sequel to Summer would be a more timely revision of his last Digimon Adventure film, Diaboromon Strikes Back. This time, the fight (and whatever such a fight would be over) would take place in the real world and after a few years post-Summer Wars, just as in Diaboromon; the key ingredient of such a sequel would be augmented reality (and AR/VR glasses), just as in the 2006 series Dennou Coil.

I just hope that the plot for Summer Wars II isn't as lightweight terribly composed as Diaboromon. It might need more A.I. than Summer Wars, but I hope that it doesn't rely as much on its predecessor in order to wow and entrance theater-goers.

See underneath "back up on Ning if Tribe fails again was recommended for:".

I watched Ken Russell's 1980 film Altered States tonight, and I was astounded by all that occurred in it.

But I was surprised about the lead character's (played by William Hurt) temporary transformation into an earlier ancestor of homo sapiens that then goes romping through the city for a night. I was surprised because this clearly reminded me of Whitley Strieber's 1990 novel The Wild, which follows alot of the same path of plotline as Altered States up to very close to the last scenes of the film. The "hallucinatory" degeneration of the lead character's sense of reality, the physically-manifested changes of his own body, the near-breakdown of his (ex-)wife's sanity at the sight of his situation, the involvement and intervention of his closest colleagues, all of these elements are present in both Russell's film and Strieber's book, both with equally-vivid description and elaboration.

Either way, I love both works.

 Well, it came uninvited, and it continues to come inside uninvited, but a brown rat has frequented the house (both beneath and inside our living space) for the last two or three weeks. It scurries away when it detects movement or is frightened (and I can be similarly startled in return), but it has already aroused Mom's ire after it did a number on a pack of soy sauce in the pantry. 

So we've battened down the hatches in the kitchen over the week, and we haven't seen it (him?) inside that particular area since, but now it comes inside through an unenclosed space in the bathroom closet behind the shower. I've swept up its pellets from that area, but I'm still reluctant to have Mom sic a peanut-buttery trap on him. It seems inhumane, IMO, even if he is an undesired guest.

I'm going for a live trap, or even this DIY idea, instead.

EDIT: This is a rather dandy website (in Russian). 

 I think it is unfortunate that advocates of the Grand Lodge of England's positions on regularity generally take an attitude on atheism and irreligion which, in various ways, smells of unnecessary condescension.

While the GLOE has been in a long-running dispute with the Grand Orient of France (the flagship advocacy organization for Liberal/Continental Freemasonry) for the last century and a half over the discussion of members' religions and the status of women, those derivations of Freemasonry which do include the participation of women and the irreligious are scorned with heated fervor as displayed here. Atheism, in particular, is scorned by dedicated Freemasons as "immature" and lacking in "morality".

I'm not going to dispute their points of contention with atheists (or the validity thereof), but I also don't want to fall into the trap of stereotyping Freemasonry's approach to irreligion as an Enlightenment-era prejudice that arose out of a general lay fear of godless moral degradation during the period; at least Freemasons (both Regular and Liberal) have extensively contributed to the various separations of church and state (i.e., United States s.c.s. vs. France's laicite). I just don't think that the condescension towards irreligion is necessary in such volumes as are used by Freemasonry's advocates on the Internet.

 Wow.........just WOW.

Right now, I'm finishing watching Part 3 of Wim Wenders' film trilogy Until the End of the World (Bis ans Ende der Welt), and I can honestly say that all three parts are just phenomenal. The acting, the multilingual proficiency, the plot, the sci-fi, the music, the drama, the comedy, the pathos.....EVERYTHING. JUST PERFECT.

( Read more... )

 I think that Haredi autonomy or self-governance in Israel is a likely event, be it in a one-state or two-state solution. To that end, I propose a "Haredi Autonomous Area" or "Haredi Province" that will govern South and Jerusalem Districts under a stricter interpretation of Halakhah. In this way,

• the Haredi sector of the Israeli population will tend to their own affairs with their own regional Knesset (and Sanhedrin, if they prefer), letting the secular, atheist and liberal population remain in the Gush Dan under their own laws.
• the Haredim will become the face (and, if necessary, force) of the Israeli Hebrew side of the dispute over Jerusalem and Judea (southern bulge of the West Bank), letting secular nationalists (Hilonim Leumim) in Israel concentrate more upon their own affairs and less upon defending face for erstwhile theocrats (ranging from Hasidics to Kahanists) who could care less for "liberals" and the "left fifth column".

This idea is not intended to bring stability to the state, but rather to concentrate the fight between Hebrew-speaking Jews and Arabic-speaking Muslims in the southern portion of the country, while letting the dispute over Samaria/Shomron (northern West Bank) be settled between Gush Dan migrants and Arab residents without as much of the religiously-motivated bitterness.

Maine repealed state recognition of same-sex marriage equality by popular vote yesterday, becoming the 31st state in the union to legally prohibit marriage equality.

But at this point, as the pro-LGBT equality groups wonder about how to turn this situation around - perhaps through more lobbying, more speeches, more marches, perhaps the most (or least) seasoned veterans in this struggle are realizing what their compatriots in California have observed since Proposition 8 last year: it's the religious congregations which are at the very heart of ideological opposition to marriage equality in any part of the country, any part of the world.

So why can't the churches be integrated?

( Read more... )

 "Democratic peace theory" is a political science theory which holds that true democracies rarely go to war with each other, or will make appropriate initiatives and decisions which will effectively prevent such democracies from ever going to war with each other. It is a controversial topic, given that there is also a list of wars between states which, at the time of belligerency, also possessed democratic governance to various extents (among those extents being whether the civilian democratic government held sufficient control over the country's military institutions).

It's a nice idea, I'll admit. Bush, Clinton, Blair (OK, those first three are not good endorsements), and former British governor of Hong Kong Chris Patten have all endorsed the idea that democratic governments don't battle each other; others have endorsed such alternative ideas as the "economic peace theory", which is used in such scenarios as China/Taiwan and Israel/West Bank.

But after reading about how the Mennonite Central Committee's members attended a dinner with Ahmadinejad from 2006-2008, the reaction against the MCC by those who were slighted by his outrageous ethnoreligious comments regarding Israel and Jewish people, and how the MCC defended its position by saying that they weren't coddling the guy, I think that merely being a peace church (as is the case with the Mennonites, Amish, Dukhobors and other small religious groups within the Christian and post-Christian continuum) simply isn't enough of a guarantor for ensuring that the environment around the church, congregation, temple, synagogue, mosque, etc., will be free, democratic and understanding enough of their varying levels of introversion. Peace churches, as pacifist entities, cannot function for long in societies which are actively belligerent against both their own citizens and their foreign national guests.

Therefore, I think it makes sense for there to be a practice of "democratic pacifism" among and within non-state agencies such as religious congregations, as well as a promotion of both peace and democracy - hand in hand - both at home and abroad. Perhaps this may entail a preference for federal/confederal/supranational governance, perhaps this may entail some degree of proportional representation at the local or regional level, or perhaps this stance may incorporate a long number of other internal features which can turn the religious organization and its congregations into tangible, everyday model institutions for its members.

In the greater scheme of things, I think that a heightening of the idea of democracy as a necessary component for the function of peace must begin in the mind, at home, and at the most frequently-visited institutions which appeal to individual attendees.

 I have an idea for future referenda, at least on the state level:

If a state has a referendum/initiative and at least 30-40% of the registered voting residents of the state vote in favor of the losing opinion, then the areas in which the losing opinion is strongest should be guaranteed the right to secede from the state and not be subjected to the majority opinion.

I think that such a referendum would work best to settle acrimonious debates which split an entire population without resulting in bloodshed or violent disenfranchisement at the local level, as has happened in a large portion of referenda which have been held in the U.S. and other countries. I also think that it is a more procedural, cleaner process by which minorities's opinions are protected from outright dismissal by a tyranny of the popular vote or tyranny of the court; we wouldn't have to bring up such movements as that of KnowThyNeighbor.org and its anti-LGBT counterparts, and we wouldn't have to hear the whinging of the other side over potential petitioner intimidation.

I agree that the Jewish Israelis getting Jerusalem at long last may be a breath of fresh air for the entire ethnoreligious conflict that has gone on for a full century or more.

My supposition, however, is that, by the time Israel does get Jerusalem, the strongly-growing Hardal (Orthodox Nationalist) demographic will have gotten closer to control of the government, or at least be able to withstand stuff like disengagement from settlements. At that point, I'm sure that they will gravitate towards making Israel a halakhic state (halakha being the Jewish version of Muslim sharia in the latter's most generic sense), or at least make explicit the state's preferential relationship with Judaism in a similar explanation as that used in most predominately-Muslim countries.

I think it would be natural for that to happen, though. Judaism shares much more in common with *classic* Islam than it does with any shade of Christianity, particularly in dietary laws and strength of religious self-identification. Furthermore, before the destruction of Judah, historical Judaism had enjoyed a strong kinship with the state, and future self-governments also were heavily involved with Jewish institutions, and vice versa. Of course, I'm a secular humanist, but I can understand why Israel is heading down that path. As Israel/Judah/Iudaea and Judaism had a strong relationship, the frequent, sudden depositions of the state left the surviving people stranded of any cohesive ethnic identification save with Judaism; and as they moved to Europe and settled in ancient Germany, those who practiced Judaism were ethnically identified with (and violently targeted for) their religion by non-Jewish Germans, and then other Europeans, and they imported the ethnoreligious consciousness back to Israel, where it is slowly reverting to its true form as a state-preferred religion.

In both predominately Muslim and predominately Jewish countries, anyway, it is hard to define such a thing as laicite or separation of church and state in a way that is culturally parsible. Other than the communists, national-socialists, labor socialists and anarchists in these countries, there's hardly any true identification of home-grown, indigenous secular anti-clericalism like - or unlike - whatever that has been tried in the Western world (secularism in Israel seems to be more of a holdover from the Jewish ethnic experience with the Enlightenment and subsequent movements in Europe, and not something that could seriously retain a governing role in a country that is ultimately, steadily gravitating towards a religiously-grounded governance and state character).

That's not to say that it is a "bad thing" for Israel to gravitate towards theocracy - unfortunate, yes, but not the sort of threat that Judeophobic conspiracy theorists make it out to be. Israel was particularly deprived of its history by past events, and trying to rebuild and make connections with its last existence as a contiguous ethnic homeland - even if its by making that connection with its last time as a homeland of the Jewish religion (A.D. 70) - is a very hard thing to do, but something that will allow them to mature as a nation.

Furthermore, I think that an indigenous, time-tested secularism will arise in Israel after a long period of Haredi theocratic rule under halakha; at best, since populist pro-theocracy movements arise out of, or in reaction to, similar circumstances that result in the production of populist nationalist or populist republicanist movements in other countries, theocracy seems to be a logical, therapeutic system of governance for Israel, one that will produce a homegrown, reactive secularism far into the future. Iran is having a similar experience, and it is possible that other predominately Muslim countries will gravitate towards more native implementations of state secularism akin to Kemalist Turkey.

But Israel, like any other sovereign nation-state, should be able to take its time in consideration of such a future secularism, and should not be stamped upon by the European Union members with some non-native secularism that hardly addresses the most keen distresses which have formed part of the Jewish nationalist dialogue for a century and a half. It would be as presumptuous and ill-thought for the EU, UN or US to compel Israel against its movement toward theocracy as it would be to pressure Iran against a strongly similar movement.

If I've learned anything from Israel as a Jewish state, it's to not enmesh my ethnicity or nationality into my religion, or vice versa. Doing so in order to keep my cultural affinity intact may seem like a good idea while in diaspora without a homeland, but when I or my descendants come back to that country, they will not only clash with those of other religious persuasions for political ascension, but they will also struggle to reclaim their secular ethnic consciousness away from the predominant religion (upon which their ancestors relied in times past)...perhaps for the next few centuries*. It would just seem like a huge cultural mess.

* - which is odd since Bosniaks are also routinely called "Bosnian Muslims" or merely "Muslims", as if "Muslim" is their ethnicity.

I come across stuff like this alot:


I think that a Jerusalem at peace would be impossible. The Jews and Muslims increasingly hanker for a piece of this rock, and the politics of settlement and anti-settler violence in Jerusalem and other areas of the West Bank/JudeaSamaria are destined to amplify the din for generations to come. This will continue unabated in any non-Jewish-majority-favoring demarcative status quo - one-state, two-state, three-state, four-state.

Plus, if Christians (who have no dog in the Temple Mount fight) can fight again and again - for over a millenia - over denominational control of sections of the same church, then I can imagine Sunnis and National-Haredi bloodily fighting in the streets of Jerusalem surrounding the Temple Mount for years on end.

It is ultimately a "heart-and-mind" issue, one which is distributed among almost all Abrahamic monotheists. Those who attach an immense emotional weight to a particular place or thing will fight to the death with rivals over the control of such entities. Prior to 1948, religion hardly played a role in the Arab-Hebrew rivalry over the strip of land which consisted the Jewish portion of the partition; around 1967, it became a conflict with extremely-heightened religious implications. 

So to appeal to such human rights principles as freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, and observance of the laws of war when those who engage in bloody rivalries are not state agents, but are still belligerent ideological actors in the conflict is, ultimately, a futile exercise. Even those who say that the "good Jews" are "righteously" combating with the "bad Jews" are showing their ignorance of the ongoing schism between Judaism in the diaspora - one which celebrates being in a semi-assimilated minority - and Judaism in Israel - one which celebrates being in the majority; they are ignorant of why the increasingly-native religious Jews in Israel are gradually, angrily tuning out a naturally-implacable diaspora and turning their eyes and ears to Jerusalem and the hinterland with every passing generation. I don't think that those who praise anti-war protesters and anti-settler activists - even those who do identify as Jewish - understand how different of a mentality that a religious-majority status can imbue upon those who gain from, and wish to advance, the state privilege of (Orthodox) Judaism.

Being Orthodox in Israel, I assume, makes it easier to say "fuck the West and fuck Christianity" without receiving an extensive amount of criticism, just as it is in Muslim majority countries. When Jews who have lived for generations in the Western world and its plethora of cultures encounter reports of sectarian violence in Jerusalem involving Haredim or residential violence in Hebron involving angry, edgy settler families, I don't think they realize, or are prepared to realize, that those who count themselves among the Haredim and settlers are not like the Jewish minorities in the United States and Europe. Being in a land of your preferred religious majority, you can be much more religiously bigoted and belligerent, and much more publicly outspoken for the advancement of such sentiments. One can't fault religious Jews for such attitudes and expressions, of course, without criticizing similar outbursts and outrages from Muslims and Christians in both the past and present; it is ultimately up to those who do not have vested interests in the advancement or destruction of either religion to work out a long-term process for ending religious hostilities - and no, it won't be through the seeking of immediate peace, which is never a lasting or suitable peace.

But at least the person who wrote the above comment also noted the occurrence of Temple Denial among Arabic-speaking residents:

P.S.: I don't think that reintegration of the Palestinian diaspora into Israel should be brought up until at least after 2067, 100 years after the Six-Day War. By that time, I'm fairly certain that the Jewish population in the West Bank will have increased to over 1M, and a more numerically-equitable agreement or status quo can proceed between the two sides of the conflict. 

Of course, the 2060s are the period which would be most acceptable for an apocalypse, according to Sir Isaac Newton.

It's rather unfortunate that those who take a pro-Palestinian/Arab side in the Arab-Israeli (or Arab-Hebrew) conflict have to equate Zionism to racism (or, more evidently, only anti-Arab culturism); ultimately, as with most other facets of the conflict, there is (and has almost always been) a risk of inflaming and tangiblizing religious passions even further, and at least most peaceniks hold off from directly criticizing or touching upon the role of religion in the conflict. As soon as one decides to utter the words "Khazaria" in one of their screeds, of when one becomes textually obsessed with the role of Maimonides and the Talmud in Jewish religion, I pretty much stop and desist from further reading.

However, I honestly don't think that peaceniks who aren't obsessed with the discrediting of the Jewish religion's origins have fully addressed the issue of religious fundamentalism and its ties - on both sides - with a reductionist or eliminationist revanchism (that is, to vengefully regain the true width of the religious territory from the others - the infidels). (Semi-theocratic) Religious Zionism and (secular) Revisionist Zionism were both about getting the full breadth of the Land of Israel back from the Ottomans, British and Arabs, and both wings have played a prominent role in the history of hinterland settlement in or near areas of archaeologically-Jewish importance; the area of Jerusalem and Judea, in this case, is and has been at the forefront of revanchist politics since the earliest period of Zionism's evolution as a diaspora, and later state and religious, ideology.

If peaceniks understood or saw the element of outwardly-lashing Jabotinskian and Kahanist revenge and rage within the settlement movement, I honestly could predict that they would see it in a different, more realistic light, albeit one that could still exhibit balance between the two sides of the conflict (and address the third, more ancient and rooted side: the Euro-Christian side).

For the record, I no longer hold the opinions of this earlier post, nor will I defend (or attempt to clarify, unless one asks) those words in any public or private discussion. It was written in the heat of the moment, and it now looks ignorant.

Anyway, I think that Israel is heading towards a binational architecture of government, or at least that's what will happen with the further increase of Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria/West Bank. I also think that the Israeli government knows the inevitability of a binational architecture, which is why it is widely reputed in its own press scene for its encouragement of larger orthodox and Ultra-orthodox families (including Haredi and Religious Zionist) and higher orthodox birth rates; in short, Jewish religious fundamentalism (and all that is entailed, including "natural growth") is the government's insurance against the Jewish/Hebrew culture being swamped by Arab/Muslim culture in the scenario of a binational Israel.

And who can blame them? A binational state seems to frighten those who fear the end and assimilation of the Jewish character of the state and its culture more so than those who move into the hinterland for religious (and apolitical) reasons. It would not be surprising to see a Gaza-West Bank-like split between the religious and non-religious Hebrew-speaking populations, with the Jerusalem-centric, hinterland-dwelling religious population remaining more dependent upon natural growth and the Tel Aviv-centric, coastal plain-dwelling non-religious population remaining dependent upon Aliyah from other countries.

For the Arabs who dwell within this new binational or federal state, the experience of delegated self-governance would remain centered in Samaria (where Ramallah is located), while the Arab experience in North District. They would have to deal and cooperate with a Hebrew-speaking resident minority in Samaria - one which is a naturally-growing mix of both religious and non-religious settlers - and would have to work out a suitable solution to access to ancient remains of Jewish civilization in Samaria while retaining or gaining equitable empowerment for the non-religious and orthodox Muslim Arab residents.

Jerusalem and Judea, on the other hand, is probably the most visibly and acerbically contentious portion of the entire conflict. Religious settlement in the Judean portion surrounding Jerusalem, and Haredization of the Jewish-majority portions of inner city Jerusalem, is obviously meant to tilt the demographic majority in the favor of Jewish fundamentalism and orthodoxy, neither of which have had as much of a historical dominance in Tel Aviv. This, of course, brings Israel and Judaism into direct conflict with the Islamic world and orthodox Islam, a demographically-skewed conflict for which Israel has long felt - at least since the Six Day War - woefully unprepared.

So perhaps Israel is delaying the binational solution until a solid Hebrew, Jewish fundamentalist majority is stacked into all sides and corners of Jerusalem and surrounding Judea. I doubt that such a majority will hold for long in the region after a full annexation and binationalization is instituted, since Judea is right next door to Jordan, but Israel has a shot at sowing the seed of the majority through Orthodox natural growth and religious immigration from the coastal plain region.

I surmise that it'll take another two decades before the government finally annexes the West Bank and institutes binationalism as state policy.

Reposted from original article on NowPublic.

A few days ago, Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation published an op-ed to the GNU project's website, in which he criticized the copyright views of the Swedish Pirate Party, which had recently succeeded in its endeavor to get a seat in Brussels' European Parliament a few months back. His main consternation with the PP's goal of shortening the shelf life of copyright to just 5 years was that no exception has been vocally made by the party for the large body of free, libre and/or open source software (FLOSS) for which Stallman has served as a longtime ideological advocate; such software, which are licensed to allow for unencumbered, unfettered redistribution, modification and even commercialization (provided that the license granting such freedoms remains attached and intact when redistributed), have become increasingly popular in many sectors, including homes, schools and businesses due to their effective turning of the more familiar proprietary model of intellectual property law upon its head. 

However, this ideological split between a leading advocate of the spread of such freedoms, also known as "copyleft", and a rather small, young, populist outfit from Sweden reveals a much deeper rupture of ideological idiosyncracies that harkens back to the roots of the related, but separate struggles which are pursued by the two groups.

Richard Stallman (or "rms"), a Massachusetts-based software programmer, found his initial bearings within the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's "hacker" subculture in the 1970's; contrary to our modern concept of a hacker as an antisocial trespasser who breaks into computer networks for any purpose, the hacker of the 1970s was a programmer who modified and functionally extended previously-published software for his or her own use and pleasure (akin to another modern concept, the "hack", which shows a lack of inelegance or originality, but instead uses the "shoulders" of others to create a modification that was not previously available but is otherwise very useful to a wider number of users). The subculture, which thrived in the wake of the 60's hippie subculture, promoted a do-it-yourself/learn-from-your-neighbor attitude amongst its denizens, in which the knowledge to modify and extend the functionality of usually-proprietary computer software was publicly and mutually disseminated. However, Stallman also witnessed and protested the decline of MIT's hacker subculture in the late 1970s as software publishers became more proactive in preventing the capability of third parties to redistribute and modify copies of their stringently-licensed software and their closely-guarded source code (the software programming concept of recipes in the culinary arts). After a momentous falling out with an MIT-based software startup, Stallman resigned from the institute in 1984, around the time when he announced his GNU project to mailing lists on ARPANET (the predecessor of the modern-day Internet); by 1985, Stallman had outlined his motivations for creating an operating system from scratch, one that would be both compatible with AT&T's Unix operating system and licensed under "copyleft" stipulations that ensured that such-licensed software could be freely redistributed, modified and commercialized on a perpetually mutual basis. The same year, Stallman launched the Free Software Foundation, a non-profit advocacy group and think tank for his increasingly-popular definition of software freedom, but his GNU ("GNU's Not Unix") operating system would languish in usage until 1991, when a Finnish computer science engineer by the name of Linus Torvalds began a project to create a kernel, or the very heart of an operating system. Following the combination of GNU with the Linux kernel, the free software movement was in full swing, amassing greater mindshare and greater ideological diversity throughout the 1990s and 2000s and resulting in the proliferation of free/open source software applications such as Firefox, Linux, Blender, Apache, Drupal and OpenOffice.org, but Richard Stallman has remained a stalwart advocate of the FSF's "software freedom" and computer privacy, drawing strength from the semi-libertarian traditions of his hacker roots.

The Pirate Party of Sweden, however, arises out of more recent, more media-related circumstances. In 2003, Rasmus Fleischer, a Halmsted-born historian and musician, took part in the foundation of Piratbyrån ("Pirate Bureau"), a think tank that sought to improve the image of the controversial but popular and proliferating peer-to-peer file sharing networks and applications which had launched in the wake of the 2001 Napster trial in the United States; the same year, The Pirate Bay, a web-based index of hyperlinks to torrents, or files which download other, larger files through a decentralized network known as BitTorrent, was launched by members of the Piratbyrån. The Pirate Bay, which enjoyed immense popularity among both downloaders and uploaders of films, television series, books and software, became increasingly tangled with legal threats from a large number of corporations, most of whom accused The Pirate Bay of copyright infringement and depriving the corporations of the distribution monopoly to which they were entitled by intellectual property law; in early 2006, IT entrepreneur and former Microsoft employee Richard Falkvinge decided to harness the increasing public consciousness of file sharing by launching the amusingly-named Pirate Party, which advocates copyright reform through parliamentary legislation. While the Pirate Party is not associated with The Pirate Bay or Piratbyrån (and is, thus, not a political wing of the latter entities), all three organizations happened to share the same Internet servers; this one common tie between the three organizations was a key factor in the May 31, 2006 police raid on those servers (targeting the Pirate Bay's operations), resulting in the shutdown of all three websites and leading to public demonstrations by members of the party's youth wing, Young Pirate, at the server seizures and the arrests of Pirate Bay administrators. This preceded the 2006 parliamentary elections, in which the party participated, and it did not result in the party gaining the necessary 4% of the vote to send a member to the Riksdag, the Swedish parliament, but it did result in the larger parliamentary parties (the Green Party, the Moderate Party and the Liberal People's Party) shifting their stances on copyright reform to incorporate many of the Pirate Party's stances, primarily the ability to non-commercially share files without the looming threat of litigation over copyright infringement. Three years later, a full-fledged copyright infringement enablement court case was launched by the IFPI against the Pirate Bay administrators, resulting in a heavy loss for the Pirate Bay but resulting in a both a huge boost to the Pirate Party's numbers, the winning of a seat in the European Parliament and the possibility of a more successful campaign in the 2010 Riksdag election. 

Thus, a proper appraisal of the two histories, the resulting ideologies, and the semi-coincidental intersections of interests is in order. Stallman, the FSF, and most FLOSS projects come from the perspective of the hacker, which places greater emphasis upon transparency and modifiability of source code (hence the idea of "open source") over the mere ability to redistribute various media over the Internet and other networks; Falkvinge, MEP Christian Engstrom, other PP and Piratbyrån members, and most BitTorrent tracker and search engine administrators are more concerned over the reform and liberalization of intellectual property law and practice in Sweden (and the European Union, if need be), and have not yet addressed the issue of source code availability for those who love to hack and modify in their spare time. Both groups want an end to the more litigious and tyrannical aspects of copyright law in the age of the Internet, where information of all sorts in all formats is more likely to be copied, shared and even remixed despite the agitations and ill will of corporations, but the two collectives, Stallman's and Falkvinge's, are heading in separate ideological directions which may mutually undercut each other's best-intentioned efforts.

Ultimately, one group which may stand to benefit, or stand to suffer, from both collectives' efforts is the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent organization of Wikipedia encyclopedia and the MediaWiki software distribution, which also runs the Wikimedia Commons, a freely-licensed media repository. The Commons database contains millions of images, video, and sounds, and receives contributions of media from private individuals, corporations and governments on a regular basis. However, it - and Wikipedia - most recently ran into trouble with the United Kingdom's National Portrait Gallery over the high-resolution scanning and uploading of some 3,300 portraits from the gallery; such portraits are considered public domain in that their copyrights have expired in the United Kingdom, but English copyright law protects the museum's right to prevent the distribution of high-resolution copies, even if the works in question are in public domain. As Wikipedia has itself become an ideological bastion of information and media freedom advocacy, such kerfuffles over copyright may make or break the free online encyclopedia, or at least its assumptions of fair use vs. free use; in such a monumental legal struggle, the Pirate Party and the Free Software Foundation possess a shared and mutually-vested interest.

Per this thread, Apple/WebKit's SVG Transforms are NOT competing or in the same area of interest as O3D. Instead, SVG Transforms (which incorporates WebKit's CSS 2D and 3D Transforms, CSS Transitions and CSS Animations) is meant to display and interact with flat pieces of web content (in this case, the traditionally-2D SVG) in 2.5D/3D space, while O3D and WebGL are meant to display fully 2.5D/3D *scene graphs* and *models* separately from any web content (even though both efforts are aiming for an in-browser user experience).

Interestingly, Maciej mentions that it would be possible to codify a means to join arbitrary (2D/3D) web content and arbitrary 3D models together, but that it may be "a bigger challenge than anything that anyone has done so far".

So if this same argument could also be applied to other related initiatives in both fields, from canvas(3D) to X3D, then I'm assuming that the next frontier for the 3D Web initiatives to cross is how to bridge the divide of perception between 3D and 2D in the same network-centric application. Certainly, the fact that most of us do not have 3D-ready navigation hardware (like the SpaceNavigator) is a core part of that dialogue over why the 3D Web initiatives are not scaling to better expectations of ease of use and accessibility (not to mention hardware acceleration of graphics).

So O3D or WebGL may have a future in the web browser (or at least a better one than VRML and X3D), but its not like we're that much closer to bridging the gap between 3D web content and 3D scene content.