SOPA, PIPA Internet censorship and other crappy things.

http://sopastrike.com/

Tomorrow, Wednesday, January 18th, my site, along with thousands of others will be going dark in protest of the legislation the US is attempting to pass. They claim it’s to stop copyright infringement. The reality is, it’s just censorship. Of all the times I’ve seen screaming about censorship on the internet over the years, this is the time to scream, kids. Private companies can censor you on their playground if they want. THIS is the U.S. Federal government censoring you… THIS is the one that is illegal!

As an American Citizen, I am furious at this attempt, and rock solid in my belief that this legislation is not only unnecessary, but ineffectual, unconstitutional, and based on the false premise that internet “piracy” is harmful to the U.S. and world economies.

As a citizen of the Internet for more than fifteen years, I am furious. The Internet cannot be under the jurisdiction of any one nation and remain the free marketplace of ideas, art, information and social interaction it wants to be. For years, we have tut-tutted at China and other nations for censoring the internet… and now the US wants to do the same, with the major difference being that vast numbers of services that are now part of the infrastructure of the internet itself are based in US Jurisdictions.

This is the problem. We need to get the Internet out of the jurisdiction of any one nation.

Perhaps Google should consider moving its corporate headquarters to Antarctica? Or maybe buy a small island in the Pacific?  Queen Elizabeth, will you sell St. Barts to the Internet if we put enough money in your paypal account? Or maybe we could buy out Haiti and the Dominican Republic together, or Nigeria… free the web, stop hunger and bring peace to a nation, in a single blow!

I don’t know.

But what I do know is that nobody should have the right to decide for everybody. Go dark.

http://sopastrike.com/ 

 

Happy Fucking Holidays

OK, Im going to try to say this again, as clearly as I can, since I lost my temper and apparently started a flamewar on Facebook.

What I am trying to express is that not all of us celebrate the christian holiday. Not all of us want to celebrate the christian holiday. Thus it is insulting to some nonchristians for christians to insist this is not a season of many holidays, but “christmas” and christmas alone when it is demonstrably true that many nonchristian holidays exist in December. Whatever the intent, the result of insisting that “it’s Christmastime, not “the holidays” is that you dismiss all nonchristians as unimportant.
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I miss blogging.

I dont write here much anymore. Well done, Dawn, you win today’s Captain Obvious badge.

Part of it is work. I used to be able to blog from the old office. Commenting on my life, the world and the people around me… An almost constant stream of consciousness log of whatever caught my fancy.

I cant do that at my current job… probably wouldn’t be able to even if I had access. The pace is all wrong for it. Before I had hours of slow time, now it’s a heavy enough that I doubt I’d be able to string more than a few sentences together. Then, when I get home, im tired of talking, tired of thinking, just looking for a little quiet, if only in the recesses of my own mind.

Add to that this… disconnectedness.

Like today. I loaded onto my trusty iPod one of my oddball music play lists. An old one, I used to keep burned to cd before, for listening to on the way to work. It’s a crazy mix of old upbeat pop tunes. In the mix is this old tune most folks would only remember as ‘that song, from that Melanie Griffith movie”. Used to be, that listening to that, while weaving through the city streets, I’d feel connected. A tiny cog in the huge machine that I lived and worked and played in, but yes, a cog that helped, in some small way, to make that machine run. I dont get that feeling here.

Even after all these years, my heart beats to a different rhythm than the one that surrounds me here. Sometimes I still feel it pulling at me.

There was hope in it too, because there was always the chance that one could break through the ceiling into managment. Get out of the grind. Make some real money. Make a difference. Not here. Not in this job, maybe not in this city.

Back home, folks rooted for the underdog, not to win the lottery, but to make it to the executive suite by working your ass off. It feels like in this town, you’re expected to work your ass off and just STAY in the rank and file. Never have ambition to get further, never want to. Maybe it’s just the mentality at this particular company, but part of me wants to think that this is how Canadians think, if only because i’m surrounded by it. Maybe that’s not fair, but it feels like that, a lot. I dont mind being dispensible, I mind being wasted. Right now, I dont know if I’m being wasted, I just feel like this is some kind of treadmill that I’m never going to get off of. No way to get up.

I dont mind giving my time and energy and nervous system to a job, but I need to feel like I could possibly get somewhere. I dont feel that here, I just feel like im being punished for going at my work in the spirit intended, rather than the letter. Dead End, despite the recruiting hype.