So two weeks ago, I applied to join the German Piratenpartei (Pirate Party).

This political party, whose inspirational origin lies in the Swedish Piratpartiet, has been around for just over three years now and has declared its goals as the safeguarding of civil rights on the internet, the transparency and technical competency of the government, the reform of patent and copyright law and the furthering of free education.

I sort of knew they were around for a long time, but didn't think they would have a realistic chance. It's true that Germany favors small parties more than the two-party United States do (the Greens, Socialists and Economic Libertarians actually have a lot of influence by aligning with the big two), but the political landscape is littered with tiny issue parties, including the Marxists, Christian fundamentalists, Animal Rights activists, not to mention the Nationalists (ew). The party just didn't look promising, nor did online privacy look particularly urgent. Stuff to blog angrily about, but not requiring immediate action.

It was in Summer during the whole Iran election affair that I grew more aware of the urgent importance of online rights - not just over there, but here in the supposedly democratic west. The German government has just signed a net censorship law sponsored by self-avowed technophobe Ursula von der Leyen (somewhat less than affectionately known as Zensursula), and is now trying to outlaw computer games altogether. The media lobbyists are attempting to get support for a three-strikes rule imitating the atrocity just passed in France. We have politicians who are as ignorant of technology as they are eager to legislate it, and competency or common sense of any sort is viewed with suspicion.

So during this year's federal election campaign, I paid some attention to what the Pirate party was doing, read their points, even discussed them with acqaintances, and finally decided to actually join. Yeah, I'm now in a political party for the first time in my life. Yay.

19.4.1981 - 16.3.2003

Yes, I post this every year.

I'm in the process of updating the blogroll of the Progressive Blogger Alliance, which begins with checking the status of each site and grouping them into categories like "active", "dead", "moved" etc. Thanks to the magic of PHP, this post will show my exact progress with this, as I am entering the status of each site in a neat MySQL table. Here's the breakdown: The total number of blogs is 227. This is the breakdown over status:

Status	Sites
	159
active	23
unreciprocating	11
gone	10
moved	7
dead	6
slow	6
temp_gone	4
titlechange	1

[break] And this is the list of sites, ordered by status:

Status	Site
pending check	OneWomanWreckingCrew
pending check	Mad Kane
pending check	Lucky White Girl
pending check	LOSLI
pending check	Logical Voice
pending check	Life in the Third Layer
pending check	anonyMoses
pending check	Another Liberal Blog
pending check	Anti-Zionist Notes
pending check	anti-[everything]
pending check	Antitheton
pending check	Apostate Windbag
pending check	Arancaytar's Little Corner
pending check	Arran's Alley
pending check	at ease
pending check	Atavistic Endeavor
pending check	Bait and Switch President
pending check	Banality Fair
pending check	Madison County Young Democrats
pending check	Maitri's VatulBlog
pending check	Majikthise
pending check	Ohio Liberal
pending check	Off-The-Record, Off-The-Wall
pending check	Odessa Street
pending check	Now Then
pending check	No Religion Now
pending check	NJ Spoken Word
pending check	Nick Lewis
pending check	NewsHog
pending check	Never Knew I was living in the

In summary, Drupal rocks.

The BBC article on Mugabe extending his reign - sorry, presidency - until 2010 has given me the opportunity for a little chuckle. So here's your World Politics Quote Of The Week:

Mugabe himself has decided to come clean about his succession. He basically has decided to succeed himself. (Johnathan Moyo, former Minister of Information, to the BBC

In other words, I suppose Dubya could be a lot worse than he is. But that remains to be seen in 2008...

I was looking for the quote from George Orwell's novel 1984 that begins "War is Peace." So I plugged it into Google, and noticed something funny in the suggestions (I use search auto-completion).

After entering "war is" Google already came up with a ton of suggestions that start that way. Suggestions are ranked by the number of results they return, so these quotes are ranked by their popularity.

These are the top 10:

• war is hell
• war is peace
• war is kind
• war is a force that gives us... [cut off]
• war is a racket
• war is not the answer
• war is peace freedom is... [cut off]
• war is good
• war is over
• war is peace 1984

This might be food for thought, but alas I don't have the time to comment on it because I need to get some work on my Nano done.

Edit: But I did enter "war is good", and notice that all suggestions were variations of "war is good for the economy".

The US think-tank ISIS has apparently published the full text of Iran's response to a negotiation offer by the United Nations. The paper was previously classified, but was available for public download - for a while.

The full URL to the download was:

http://www.isis-online.org/publications/iran/responsetext.pdf

However, this URL now returns a 404 error. Apparently someone got cold feet (or into hot water) and pulled the file.

The link to it (second from top) is still on the index page however.

This is a scaled screenshot of the page. The text is just about legible:

Unfortunately, Google's cache didn't snatch it yet, or this bit of news would be a lot more interesting.

The last few weeks over at The Progressive Blogger Alliance have been filled with people asking to be put on the Blogroll. The Blogroll - actually one of the first efforts that the PBA grew from, before the network even used a central node based on Drupal software - was discontinued a while back. A mixture of administrative trouble, technical glitches and a rumor that the Google bot may interpret Blogrolls as link farms (and punish the sites' rankings).

The last one I don't know about. If it is true, it might be best to leave it be. But the other two are fairly easily solved.

One problem with the present PBA blogroll is that it uses an external service, Blogrolling.com, whose free accounts are limited and which is not easy to administrate. It is for all purposes impossible to administrate in a group (with shared access and multiple permission levels), which is the philosophy the PBA and Drupal works on.

The solution is obvious: A Drupal module for a blogroll. The links will be fed to it by members - perhaps this could even be meshed with a custom profile field or the Homepage profile field - and the output page will be a Javascript application that prints the links.

--

Some extra convenient settings for fine-tuning this blogroll (multiple links, RSS feeds, blocking certain links from certain sites, subgroups that only link amongst themselves to keep the length down, etc) could be added as well.

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Following this rough pipedream of a spec, the next step, naturally, is to see if this has been made before. If it hasn't, well... let's get going! ^_^

At a messageboard I frequently visit, the following poll was posted recently.

If your country was under occupation from foreign invaders, what would you do?

Now, mind you, most people there (as everywhere in the English-speaking web) are Americans. Also, you had to be blind not to spot the analogy here. The assumption was that there would be an armed resistance group battling the invaders.

71.16% voted that they would support the resistance: 54.81% would actually fight the invaders, while the rest would give anything from weapons and supplies (10.58%) to moral support (5.77%).

17.27% preferred not to take sides and either flee the country (11.54%), continue with their normal life as far as possible (5.77%), or support both (0.96%).

0.96% would take the invaders' side and fight for them.

(The remaining 9.62% chose the 'Other' option.)

It is an interesting idea, is it not? More than half would risk their lives in a fight against the invading power, mostly without hesitation, and nearly another quarter would lend their support in other ways. These, incidentally, are the same people who yell about evil terrorists in the other threads. Either they really haven't gotten the analogy (hey, never assume anything), or perhaps the right wing didn't get to the poll yet.

Patriotism is a tricky thing. You turn the situation around, and suddenly it commands you to do the very thing you condemned in your enemy earlier on...

[migrated and backdated from blogspot on 2007-01-04]