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Aboriginal leaders look to future after historic apology

"Our peoples, our history and our present being are the essence of Canada," Assembly of First Nations National Chief Phil Fontaine told members of Parliament and hundreds of observers seated in the gallery. "The attempts to erase our identities hurt us deeply. But it also hurt all Canadians and impoverished the character of this nation. We must not falter in our duty now. Emboldened by this spectacle of history, it is possible to end our racial nightmare together."
CBC News

Next step? Making concrete plans to counter the underdevelopment of First Nations, Metis and Inuit communities, and signing the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

When Max Met Julie

MONTREAL–The restaurant where then-industry minister Maxime Bernier first met an enchanting brunette named Julie Couillard is a chic Italian eatery and bar frequented by movie stars, beautiful people and, on occasion, gangsters. Couillard was brought to a dinner gathering, held in Bernier's honour in April of last year, by a colleague from a property development firm with which she had recently become affiliated, sources say.

A La Presse investigation has revealed the man who accompanied Couillard to Ristorante Cavalli on the evening of April 26, 2007, was Philippe Morin, one of two owners of Groupe Kevlar, a large Montreal property developer. The investigation has confirmed Morin brought Couillard along to a weekly dinner held by a handful of young Montreal businesspeople, and that Bernier's acquaintances among the group intended to introduce the minister, a bachelor, to the one-time actress and model.

...

"There is the possibility that organized crime is trying to infiltrate the government," Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion told reporters. "I'm not saying it's what happened. But certainly all the experts of security who have spoken (say) ... this is the pattern that you need to check."
Sean Gordon
Toronto Star

The Hells Angels are trying to infiltrate the minority Conservative government through the Industry Minster? Okay! I'm not discounting the possibility but it does sound a little strange. There are easier ways to gain influence over members of Parliament.

I'm also starting to really get annoyed by the Sex! Scandal! aspect of the coverage. On a fundamental level, I don't care how awesome Julie Couillard's breasts are. Instead, let's get back to talking about those pesky potential threats to our national security. (Not that 'national security' is the way I'd choose to frame this issue - way to hit the panic button, guys!)

The Rise of the Low Cost Laptop

But in one respect the XO Laptop has undoubtedly made an impact: by helping to spawn a new market for low-cost laptops. Hardly any models costing $500 or less were available when the XO burst onto the scene, but now there is a wide selection of such machines, from familiar makers such as HP and Intel, and from relative newcomers such as Asus and Pioneer Computers. By raising the very possibility of a $100 laptop, the XO presented the industry with a challenge. Wayan Vota, founder of OLPCNews.com, an independent website that follows the project, calls the XO a “harbinger of an entirely new class of computers”.
The Economist

The piece points to how the One Laptop Per Child program has done more to revolutionize computing in developed countries, than developing. Many of the new cheap laptops are marketed to first world consumers, and aren't exactly intended to address the access gap. Still, cheap laptops may follow the same pattern as cheap cellphones, and we'll have a wired world before we know it.

Zarathustra Superhero

Holy shit! Lawrence Lessig is a member of the eljay advisory board? I love his work. *fangirls* OMG. Here he is on Democracy Now, talking about net neutrality.

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I'm working on my giant summer project of much doom, skimming through various thinkers for usable quotes, and I've been reminded of my idea of a comic strip about Zarathusta Superhero. His superpowers would include enhanced senses and communication with animals and dead people, but his real power would be Philosophy! (just as Science! is Reed Richards' real power). His sidekick would be a trusty philosorapter named Wise Man. They'd have travel the country side, preaching Enlightenment, dancing, reciting poetry, and kicking ass.

y/y?

Online Anonymity

Three posts in one day?! Yeah, I know.

I belong to the school of thought that considers online anonymity a precious, non-renewable resource that will very soon be gone forever. The anonymity that the internet currently affords plays a big part in the sheer fantastic dynamism of online culture. It's part of why we, as in fandom, are able to have nice things like fanfic, RPs, vids, banners, meta, stupid memes and all the rest.

Anonymity is one of the bedrocks of internet culture, and it pains me to say that governments and corporations all over the world are making steady inroads on one of the precious few spaces we, as in the people, have left to speak and think and act freely. The end of anonymity will be justified as part of a larger effort to 'clean up' the Wild West of the internet, thus making it 'family friendly.' It will be justified as necessary for national security, in an age of increasing dependence on networked defense technology. It will be justified as necessary for the smooth function of international commerce.

Increasingly, we are seeing a convergence of governmental and commercial interests, around reproducing real-world power structures online. The logic being that:

a) “Any market, virtual or real, requires societal infrastructure to function. It ‘…relies on a set of goods that it cannot itself provide: property rights, predictability, safety, nomenclature, and so on’."

b) "There cannot be two different sets of rules for the real and virtual worlds." *

What it's also about, though it's not usually framed this way, is reasserting social control - in essence, hegemonic culture maintenance. And because most users see the internet as an apolitical space (after all, what do You Porn and Amazon.com have to do with politics?) hegemonic ideology is reproduced online without question and notice. It's only normal and natural, right?

I firmly believe that every society needs a space for misfits, malcontents and jerks. We need to be able to misbehave, to test the limits of social control, to toy with the possibility of bad behaviour, for the sake of bad behaviour. We need the freedom to be morons, like we need air. It would be nice, if we all backed away from the edge of online idiocy, but none of us can say that we've managed to, without exception, play nice with others. It would be nice, but that's not humanity.

I also firmly believe that the existence of assholes on the internet, does not suggest a need to regulate their asshole behaviour out of existence. I can sit in my corner and disapprove to my heart's content, I can flame them right back, but what I will never do is suggest that anonymity is itself a problem. I will never try to manage or moderate their behaviour, outside of the online spaces which I, or others claim as our own. ( Read more... )

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I've been waiting for this! synecdochic has announced the creation of Dreamwidth Studios, a kind of alternative to eljay. Way back during Strikethrough, I said that we wouldn't see fandom as a whole leave eljay until something better came along. Is this, or OTW the something better?

Of the good:

We have a list of what we want to do that's enough to keep us busy for the next decade, but there are a few we think are important enough to put first. We're splitting the "friend" system into "reading people" and "trusting people to read me". We're integrating your OpenID identities and RSS feeds into your core account, to make it easy to manage your identity across the Internet. We're making it easy for you to use us to display all of your creative work. (We're fixing the memories system.)

We're updating the LJ code to run on modern versions of Apache, mod_perl, and MySQL, so you don't have to downgrade your system to install our version. We're working to document the process, so you don't have to be a technical genius to install and maintain the code. We're working to make it easy for you to install as much or as little of the code as you need, so you can run a version for just you, for you and your friends, or for thousands of people.

I'm excited to see how these projects turn out.