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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.