Vivat Libertas

I love the internet. I really do. This draws quite a lot of opprobrium from the "popular" (who have always looked down on nerds and introverts) and from the fine, upstanding and rather technophobic pillars of society (who, like most people, fear what they don't understand, and I guess this newfangled internet thing is a bit much for them). Strangely for righteously angry little me, I don't really care. The fact that most of the people who look down on me for liking the internet couldn't live without their phones doesn't hurt either. I love the internet because it connects me to the people I wish I knew. It expands my knowledge and lets me reflect deeply on what I think I understand. I am far more honest with myself and others there, far more reflective; it brings out the best in me, which isn't what you'd expect but, for me at least, it's still true. I'm also a hell of a lot more sociable; part of that's because I get more of a choice ...

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with The Activists these days. Still, I can't resist going on their blog sometimes, and...well... ...Most of the articles are the usual left-wing stuff I've come to know. Some is good. Some is tolerable. Some is the illogical crap which made me quit in the first place. But I didn't want to write about that - it's ground I've covered before . What I wanted to write about today is the comments section - or rather, the lack of activity in it. I am of the opinion that a thriving comments section is a good thing. If your blog has 15,000 readers, as this tweet claims , it should have at least 1 comment on each article. I doubt whether there are 50 comments on all the articles combined. Those comments that are  published tend to be things like "yeah, I agree" and not much beyond that. Anything which is even slightly out of line is deleted during moderation. I know this from personal experience: I'm a...

So here I am, browsing through the Linkage Archives - great webpage, but prepare to get sucked into a black hole of articles - and I find this and this . It's a positively ancient argument from 1998 in two parts. The first is something which appears to be an academic article, spends a lot of time bullshitting and faffing around with long words, and has an interesting if flawed (for which read loopy) premise which touches on feudal Europe, libertarianism and left-libertarianism, Thomas Jefferson's slave-owning habits and the EU. All this in an essay about what appears to be attitudes to the internet... ...The article doesn't seem to be particularly rooted in reality. Fine. Too illogical for me to bother blogging about normally. However, I was quite taken aback by the tone of the rebuttal, which is the second part. Not because I'm not used to it - I don't actively seek out flames, although I'm quite aware of them - but because you'd expect that kind of sen...

Ah, Facebook. I won't call it the most pointless site on earth, because that would actually be a compliment. Instead, I'll try and describe it as it really is: a place where people baww about their lives, post crappy song lyrics, tell you pointless shit that nobody needs to know, make up passive-aggressive statuses to get desperately needed attention, and indulge themselves in clichés that were already pretty tired about 65 million years ago. It's also incredibly addictive and actually has useful shit mixed in with all the crap, which is what makes it so frustrating. I've just been on it and, as you can see, it's caused a severe drop in my IQ and a bad mood to match - hence the profanity. This was only caused by ONE thing (if it had been caused by more, I think my head would have exploded out of sheer rage - is that a good or a bad thing? Take my speculation as you will). I shall now analyse this one thing in detail and, hopefully, come up with an awesome rebu...