Thursday, 27th of February, 2003

I thought I'd blogged this ages ago, but it seems not. Since it's going round email-forward-land again, I thought I'd blog it with the correct URL so you can see where it comes from and stuff.
The straight left and right political divide is, as we know, too simplistic. At Political Compass, a UK-based site, they have a rather good personality-test type thing (usually I hate these things) for you to tell where you stand not just on economic left-right issues but also on the libertarian-authoritarian axis. They draw it up as a nice Cartesian plane, and it's very interesting to see where one ends up – not likely to surprise one, but interesting to compare with one's friends and with famous figures.

Since you asked, I came out as follows (remembering that the results are slightly different every time, depending how one's feeling *g*):

Economic Left/Right: -8.12
LibertarianAuthoritarian: -7.28

In other words: 8.12 to the left economically; 7.28 to the libertarian side.
It's interesting: I can identify a few questions which I'm never quite sure about – only vacillating between adjacent answers, but still – I've moved as much as 0.5 of a point in either direction. No more, so I'm still very much a left libertarian – big shock!

Tuesday, 25th of February, 2003

Here's an incomplete but very funny parody of the US Department of Homeland Security's Ready.gov terrorism-info site. A nice alternative to "returning to sender", as we all (hopefully) did (or tried to do) with Johnny Howard & the Australian Government's ridiculous terrorism-info-packs…

Saturday, 22nd of February, 2003

This Guardian article, from Feb 19th, outlines the contents of a leaked Pentagon document which shows that the Bush administration is planning a new generation of nuclear weapons… The world becomes more terrifying every minute.

Tuesday, 18th of February, 2003

As this Guardian story shows, justifying the war on Iraq with analogies with Hitler's Germany is odious in the extreme.

Monday, 17th of February, 2003

Well, it was huuuuuuuuuge. Something like 250,000 people crammed into the CBD. It wasn't "walking for peace" so much as "standing for peace". Ange, Dad and I stood on Elizabeth St, where the march "started" for over an hour and went about 20 metres before we decided to somehow get back into Hyde Park and hear some speeches. As we waited for some food we managed to hear Bob Brown and John Pilger, the last two speakers – they were certainly worth the wait. Many of the other speakers said nothing but the same old rhetoric you'd expect (the two Muslim speakers each spending about 1/3-1/2 their time talking about Israel/Palestine rather than about the war in question). But Bob Brown was his usual splendid self, and Pilger said some very worthy stuff which hadn't been mentioned previously.

I was proud to have been there, almost dropping from the heat and humidity. Around the world the turnouts have been enormous, and it's very gratifying – although to noone's surprise, BushBlairHoward won't be listening.

Mind you, Blair looked incredibly harried on the podium in last night's news as he had his say… He was talking about the torture and killing Saddam's regime has visited upon the Iraqi people. He forgot to mention, though, the terrible toll this war is going to take on those same people, and nor has any good argument been given that regime-change-through-war is the way to help those people. Blair also conveniently forgot the West's sanctions, which have had a considerably greater effect on the Iraqi people than they have on the ruling regime.
Weapons of mass destruction is another question entirely – a completely different reason for declaring war. Bush's line (pre-emptive strikes and so on) is clearly that Iraq poses a danger to the rest of the world – a patently absurd claim, in the face of the fact that (as ASIO tell us) Al-Qaeda will use the war to increase their influence – and not to mention the continued absence of evidence for "weapons of mass destruction".

Pre-emptive strike or mercy-mission for the Iraqi people, the war-mongers are either misguided or hypocritical.

Saturday, 15th of February, 2003

"Cannot find Weapons of Mass Destruction". Hilarious!

Tom Tomorrow's a very amusing fella. Here too: Outrage overload.

And here, US Democrat Senator Robert Byrd speaks out against Bush's misguided war. The US is on the brink of war – "the most horrible of human experiences":

Yet, this Chamber is, for the most part, silent — ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing.

In other news, over at Reason (home of libertarian free-market loonies who generally get my back up in a big way – but then turn out some really good stuff at the same time), Peter Bagge (comics writer, of Hate fame, who I'm generally fairly so-so about) writes an amusing 4-part comic about going to a peace rally.
I will of course be going to this Sunday's peace rally (here's a different link) in Sydney. Despite being anything but a libertarian, I suspect I'll be somewhat in two minds about being at the rally. I strongly oppose the war, and war in general, and I strongly oppose John Howard and George Bush's policies pretty much in general; however, I don't see myself as being of a crowd mentality. There will be opinions represented there which I don't agree with… There will be chanting of slogans (which inevitably simplift complex issues)… And dammit there'll be fuckloads of people. Scary. Still, I'll be there because I think it's damn important.

Friday, 14th of February, 2003

Charlie Stross's fantastic story Lobsters, the first in the Accelerando sequence of nine stories which he's continuing to publish in Asimov's (up to number six in April's Asimov's, can't wait!) has been shortlisted for this year's Nebula awards. Not sure why this year's, since it was first published in 2001, but that's ok. You can read the whole story via the link above.

Movable Type 2.6 came out today. I've upgraded, of course. Not many changes for me to care about, but one great thing is that comments for an entry can be closed. So any existing comments remain there, but no more can be added. They should have an option to close multiple entries at once – I'd like to close all except the last, say, few months…

One interesting thing is that I've now been able to license this weblog under a Creative Commons License (see bottom of page). Cool!

You'll also notice (no you won't! but go on, notice) that the index page and all archive pages now have .php rather than .html extensions. I've got a cute little php script in place that creates the ordinal numbers you now see in the dates – "13th", "2nd", etc. I was thinking of making the script come up with nonsensical but consistent ordinals, just for fun – "3nd"; "1th". Maybe later!
The php change has nothing to do with MT 2.6, mind you – just me learning more about web design.