I can't believe people trust elections to a machine which uses the Windows operating system.

'Nuff said.

Whytwolf's diary on DailyKost, Piss a Liberal Off: Right-Wing Bullies, hit fairly close to home.

I don't think "Pissing off a liberal" is really about my views, or even the clinic cowboy's views. I think it goes deeper than that. Those who have grown up believing that aggression and/or violence is the best way to solve a problem have ultimately found themselves cut off from the empathetic side of their social dealings. This breeds contempt for those who have more empathy, and can interact in a calm manner with others--those of us who have embraced the ideologies of the left.

For those who don't know, this web site runs CivicSpace, an open source content management system (CMS) based on Drupal.

This is some seriously cool stuff - a web site for the Ann Arbor public library built on Drupal:

http://www.blyberg.net/2005/12/04/lessons-learned-aadlorg-30/

These are also interesting but more specific:
http://www.blyberg.net/2005/12/01/aadl-rss-feeds-extended-to-all-catalog-searches/

Habla espanol? Not in one Kansas school, you don't. This will look awfully familiar to anyone who is knowledgable about Native American history. Native American students were forced to speak English in school and often punished very harshly any time they reverted to their native languages (how ironic that we were saved by those languages in World War II).

Zach Rubio is the son of a Mexican American immigrant who is now a naturalized United States Citizen. Both father and son are fluent in both English and Spanish.

"It was, like, totally not in the classroom," the high school junior said, recalling the infraction. "We were in the, like, hall or whatever, on restroom break. This kid I know, he's like, 'Me prestas un dolar?' ['Will you lend me a dollar?'] Well, he asked in Spanish; it just seemed natural to answer that way. So I'm like, 'No problema.'"

I hope. ;-) While sitting at a bar last night drinking a martini (whose flavor I'd be helpless to describe but which was superb!), I had a sudden flash of inspiration:

Camera shows wide view of Iraqi desert, with evidence of destruction in various places.

Camera zooms in to show a pipeline, keeps zooming until we see that it's leaking.

Zoom in on the steady dripping leak, we see that the liquid is blood, not oil.

Screen fades out, text fades in, flickering a bit (preferably in some kind of grunge font) "No more blood for oil." Narrator says "Do you part to reduce America's dependence on oil. Visit [website] today."

I just finished reading a book yesterday by David Gerrold called Leaping to the Stars. It's mostly just a great action-adventure story, but like nearly all science fiction, it does hit upon some rather weighty issues including the relationship betwen man and technology and the nature of good and evil. In the context of a political science class, he described how the United States had collapsed after three hundred years. It was almost as if he was channeling both Howard Dean and Barack Obama when this book was written in 2001/2002 (first edition was printed in 2002, well before Dean exploded onto the national scene).

I am, above all else, a firm believer in the rights of individuals. I believe such rights are sacred and must be protected at all costs, even when it means decreased security. The right to believe as you wish and act on your beliefs in a way not harmful to others is as sacred a right as any other. What you do not have a right to do, however, is impose your beliefs on others. That is what the Federal Marriage Amendment is. It is a gross imposition on the beliefs and rights of at least thirty million Americans, and likely a lot closer to one hundred fifty million, when you take into account all of the straight people who approve of gay marriage. One of the core principles of our system of government is to prevent the will of the majority from trampling on the rights of the minority. That is at least one of the reasons for the seperation of church and state. The FMA flies in the face of every principle this country was founded on.

I think we're on the verge of a very interesting and revealing point in our history. One of the reasons I got interested in the internet in the first place was that I believed it had the power to change things for the better by providing nearly immediate access to information - I wrote in a high school English paper eight years ago that the internet had the potential to be the greatest tool for freedom that we've ever known.

The Dean campaign showed that I was only half right - I had never even considered the interconnectedness and the organizing ability it would bring until I started hearing about how they were using the web to build inter-linked local organizations. When the Dean campaign took off, I thought we were finally at a point of critical mass, so to speak - where there were enough people online and interested that the first person to take advantage of it would be all but unstoppable. Unfortunately we're obviously not there yet, even though I think we should be from a purely statistical standpoint (with fully half of the country online now). The worst part, though, is that I'm now not even sure it is possible, not because of the limitations of the tools but because of the limitations of the people we're trying to sway with them.

Finally, thanks to 'activist' judges, America will have the opportunity to learn the true nature of gay marriage, and perhaps learn a little about heterosexual marriage along the way. The honest truth, it will likely be revealed, is that same-sex marriage simply isn't relevant to all those protesting it. Perhaps then, some of our esteemed leaders in Richmond will finally get a clue and do what is right instead of trying to compete for Pat Robertson's blessings.

First, it is worth looking at the basis for the argument that gay marriage would somehow impinge upon the sanctity of the institution of marriage. Frankly, we would do well to look at whether there's any sanctity of the sort so often alluded to in church left in the first place. Given the divorce rate, the constant news of self-righteous individuals caught in compromising positions, and the steady stream of married guests airing all kinds of filthy laundry on talk shows, it is arguable that heterosexuals have done a dandy job eroding away at the institution on their own without any help from us.

Our constitutionaly gauranteed rights exist for just this reason. The whole purpose of the Bill of Rights is to pretect the minority from the whims of the majority. Just because a group is greater in numbers does not mean it is right, or has the right to push a belief on others. Those who would tell atheists to sit down and shut up are no more right than the majority of Romans or the money changers in the jewish temples who thought Jesus should sit down and shut up. This nation does not exist under one true God. Millions of Americans are pagans, hindus, buddhists, shintos, atheists, or any of hundreds of other belief systems. No one of those systems is any more right than any other - all religions are equally valid and to argue anything to the contrary de,onstrates the kind of incredible arrogance that has started far too many wars and left to the xrucifiction, stonging, drowning, and burning at the stake of far too many innocent victimes. I suggest people consider the consequences and history of such absolute beliefs before forcing them on others.