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February 25th, 2005
01:22 pm - Picture time
An oldie but a goodie. On a beach somewhere in South Wales:
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03:55 pm - So where did that week go?
It's Friday, and not a day too soon. This week just disappeared down the drain. We were up against a deadline of Monday to have some stuff done for work, so I busted a gut on that today to get it finished. It's done for now, thankfully. The weekend is free, and next week is another trip to Oxford.
I had a really good meeting with my PhD supervisor and examiner today. We had been struggling for a while to figure out what the true structure of my thesis should look like, but today it became clear and to my surprise actually sounds quite interesting and fresh. It might even be that I can drum up some enthusiasm to work on it again.
Oh, and I decided to switch back to Safari from OmniWeb. Two specific incompatibilities were becoming too problematic to live with: Firstly, using Flickr with a browser which doesn't quite support XMLHttpRequest is really really painful. Secondly, a lot of the websites I use for work authenticate users with X509 certificates and OmniWeb just doesn't support that (Omni support told me they had no plan to do so either). I know a lot of people switch between multiple browsers, but I like as far as possible to commit to one app for any given purpose.
Oh, and the Saft plugin brings many features of OmniWeb across to Safari. It's really handy.
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07:07 pm - The culture of opposition
I want to write about something that I've observed a lot but haven't really been able to put my finger on. This may not even be a properly-formed idea yet. It's essentially the nature of modern social protest and it seems to me that we've lost an essential element of balance in the practice of protesting. Assuming we ever had it.
What we seem to have come around to is what one might call a protest of pure opposition. From anti-vivisectionists to anti-foxhunting groups to anti-nuclear campaigners to people protesting the erection of new buildings on my University's campus, to people protesting the erection of cellphone masts or the construction of airport runways.
Modern protest groups are very adept at getting out the message of what they're against, but far less vocal about what they're actually in favour of. It seems that all they want is something not to happen, with no possibility of compromise or acknowledgement that their adversary is acting out of anything other than purely evil motives.
You might say that these groups do have positive agendas, but my point is not about their position as much as about how it is expressed. When the focus of activism is more on the "anti" than on campaigning for something positive to happen, I just find it a total turn off.
I also find such a position rather intellectually dissatisfactory. Pure opposition for its own sake has no real solid ground to stand on, so you will hear such groups over-reach for incontestable hook-phrases to prepend to their argument:
- "In this day and age, surely we shouldn't be....."
- "In a democracy there is no place for....."
- "In the 21st century, why are we still....."
- "The government should not be wasting taxpayers money on....."
Which is - usually - all just so much Motherhood and Apple Pie. I say usually because there certainly are things that "there is no place for in a democracy". Armed insurrection would be a good example. However, I'm concerned more with the case where such appeals are used disingenuously.
What I want to hear from activists is not how much they hate Starbucks, or how evil wind farms are, but what their positive ideas are to make the world a better place. Even campaigns whose aims I might sympathise with turn me off when they're conducted as a two-fingers-to-the-police jamboree for anarchist students on holiday from their Media Studies course.
Let the excellence of your work be your protest. If you don't like animal testing, study Biology and invent an alternative so good that it will obsolete animal testing. If you don't like wind farms, invest in companies working on wave power. If you hate Starbucks, open a chain of Fairtrade coffee shops. If you hate Microsoft write good software for another platform.
I wish the protesters of the world would put their energies into positive ideas instead of just knocking down what other people are trying to do.
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10:14 pm - Appcasting part 2
I set up a web page for Appcasting with an initial description of the idea. It's at http://www.speirs.org/appcasting. FlickrExport now has an Appcast Feed too.
So feel free to link away and talk about this. Maybe I can get Adam Curry to pimp it on his Podcast......
Current Music: Jeremiah - Sara Groves (from: The Other Side Of Something, rated 5)
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