...actual distinct voices speaking in my mind? Or is it just the weblog of James Lindenschmidt? Here you can see me wrestle with this and other questions, while spewing forth my writings, opinions, and hallucinations.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

 

A reason for optimism? or: Further evidence that one be an optimist and an activist at the same time

I had an insight tonight. It is related to the problem I've now had for quite some time, in that I have found it challenging to reconcile activism--or even political awareness--with optimism. The insight runs thusly: let's take the sum total of Bad Things That Are Happening Now, and simplify/condense it. Generalize it into one coherent entity that can be talked about, similarly to the way it is possible to discuss a "class" which is actually a highly complex web of mostly sovereign individuals. Now, let's consider the set of individuals who are orchestrating these Bad Things. There are a certain set of people who are profiting from them, and who want them to come to be. Call this theoretical construct whatever you like; for now, I'll call it The Conspiracy (he said satirically).

There is another set of individuals who are directly fighting The Conspiracy. Here I include many Iraqis, Afghanis, people who are dying in the wars of neoliberalism, people whose oppression is so severe that their very survival is in question.

Both of these sets of people have a limited population, though I suspect the latter are already much more numerous than the former. Several hundred million total, I would guesstimate. Perhaps a billion.

The rest of the world is largely indifferent. These are the vast majority of people today.

That said, my insight is this: when this set of people, by far the most numerous in the world, begin to care about the deeds of The Conspiracy, the compassionate, ethical, rational, logical, just, and good thing to do is so obvious, that these untold masses will come in "on our side." That is, The Conspiracy is now at its maximum population, while our numbers are always and steadily increasing. This increase is exponential and will one day reach critical mass. At that time, from a metaphysical perspective, the tide will turn. The Conspiracy will be undone.

So as far as I'm concerned, the only remaining question is how much damage will be inflicted between now and then. We will need healers.

^ posted at 9:24 PM

 

The best analysis yet of the SCO lawsuit

For those of you following the Intellectual Property story, a good understanding of the SCO lawsuit is essential. Basically, SCO is one of the old Unix companies, and they are pretty much obsolete with the onset of Linux, which improves upon and replaces Unix. Their response to these conditions has been to sue IBM for contributing "intellectual property" source code to the Linux kernel. In short, they are claiming that Linux contains some of SCO's IP, and that IBM is responsible for it being there.

By most accounts, the suit is quite bogus. But one of my favorite IP lawyers, Lawrence Lessig, has finally written an analysis of the situation. It's a great summary. Go read it, if you find such things interesting.

^ posted at 12:23 AM

 

9/11 Victim's widow sues George W. Bush

I wish her well. She seems to actually have a case. I hope the courts take it seriously.

^ posted at 12:06 AM

 

Review of StarOffice/OpenOffice

There is a really complimentary review of StarOffice and OpenOffice up. StarOffice is basically Sun's version of OpenOffice with some extra proprietary goodies added (spellchecker, templates, etc.) and tech support. But essentially they are the same codebase.

I've been saying it in this space for a while now, but anyone needing basic office functionality should check out OpenOffice. It does everything I need, and many of those better than MS Office. At this point, I really hate working with MS Word.

^ posted at 12:02 AM