#68
2004-5-4, 13:50 PDT
I've just spamtrapped my email address on the index page and in post #61 here. I've been receiving tons of junkmail to the fastmail address lately, and this site is the only "bare" link to it apart from the comments on OSP and a few Blogspot blogs. What's interesting is that the same would apply to my hotmail address (terry34540), but in eight months I've received maybe two junk emails. Even in another hotmail address of mine, which has been a lodestone for junk, at worst I get, say, 15 junk emails a day, of which 1 makes it to the Inbox, the rest rotting for a week in the junk folder before being deleted to oblivion.

#67
2004-5-4, 11:42 PDT
Stacie Whitacre links to a site called "Stop the Terrorists" (www.stoptheterrorists.com), which belongs to the opponent of Russ Feingold in the Wisconsin Senate race. The idea in the site is to equate Feingold's opposition to the Fascist Patriot Act with support of terrorism.

Actually, the site's kind of right. It's right because the Patriot Act is exactly totalitarianism, with its effective revocation of freedom of association and the rights to legal counsel and privacy. It's easy to see that once a state is totalitarian, the chance that it will fall to another form of totalitarianism (which includes Muslim fundamentalism, of course) is virtually nil, definitely lower than the chance that a democracy will become totalitarian. In other words, the Patriot Act protects the people from terrorism, just like killing a gay person eliminates the chance that s/he'll be killed in a hate crime...

Gee, people like the Stop the Terrorists site make me glad that I'm using anonymous proxies...

#66
2004-5-4, 00:03 PDT
There's an election going on in India... the election is on *four* different dates because India's too large to have an election on one day (each state or part of a state votes on the same date) - so far two of the four dates have passed, and it seems like the Taliban BJP is going to lose some power, even though unfortunately it's still likely to stay in power :-(.
Now, if you thought that the American GOP was nepotistic, wait till you see the main opposition party in India, the Congress party (aka the INC - Indian National Congress). Its leaders when Indian got its independence were Gandhi and Nehru. Very soon, they formed a dynasty; in the 70s, for instance, India's prime minister was Indira Gandhi, Nehru's daughter (and I assume Gandhi's daughter-in-law, but don't take my word for it); then, in the late 80s, it was Rajiv Gandhi, her son. In the early 90s, when Congress still ruled, it was someone not from La Familia, but now the party's leader in Congress is Sonia Gandhi - AFAIK Rajiv's sister.
The INC is of course corrupt. But so is the BJP, to an even greater degree; and when the INC became more neo-liberal in the 90s, it helped India enormously, whereas the BJP could hardly care less about poverty, but rather concentrates on military spending and keeping an even higher military might than Pakistan than it would otherwise have (it's not as if Pakistan is a threat to India, considering that India's population is about 7 times as high as Pakistan's). Plus, the BJP are Hindu fundies who support various Hindu-nationalist myths, complain about the Muslim minority, and are as bad as the Christian Coalition or the Taliban.

#65
2004-5-3, 14:17 PDT
I got a book review written for OSP on this site, namely of Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, a fine piece combining beautiful attacks on the right-wing media (note: by that I mean specific right-wing outlets, such as Fox, rather than implying that the US media is as a whole right-wing) with demagogy worse than what comes out from politicians' mouths. If you haven't read it on OSP, please do read it here.

As an aside, I could get a lot more precise than I usually do, by scribbling notes on the margins, underlining suspicious stuff, and wiritng page numbers for reference on the inside cover; this is more than I've ever highlighted or underlined in my four years of college including many reading-intensive classes.

As a second aside, if you get any cookie from leftist.i8.com, delete it - it's used for the ads on the site. The hit counter cookie will come from gostats.com or c2.gostats.com - I don't remember which - and the only legitimate cookie coming from leftist.i8.com is the one I have, which allows me to edit this site.

#64
2004-5-1, 12:40 PDT
Check this site. I originally found it via a site concerned partly with lingustics that linked to it, but I just love its politics. Especially recommended are a list of US interventions in Latin America, a defense of progressive taxation, and a comparison of radical rightists with radical leftists.

#63
2004-5-1, 11:20 PDT
Happy Labor Day.

Yes, I know that Labor Day is in September in the United States. In the rest of the world, it is May 1st. Back in the 1880s, the Second International established 1886-5-1 as the day on which the eight-hour-day should come into effect; the Haymarket Riot of May 4th did not exactly perish May 1st from the memory of socialists and anarchists. The USA is one of the few countries in the world that celebrates Labor Day on a day other than May 1st, the reason being to separate American workers from the rest of the (developed) world's workers; evidence for this is the fact that in the US May 1st was chosen as Law Day in the late 19th century and became Loyalty Day in 1920, with the explicit purpose to counter socialism.
So, happy Labor Day to everybody, even if you're living in one of the few countries (the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) where labor day isn't May 1st.

#62
2004-4-29, 02:00 PDT
Link day... First item on the list is Volconvo - www.volconvo.com, a political forum, which lives up to its name (conversations are often volcanically heated); my username there is Jet, because Joe was taken when I registered. The forum looks promising, though, despite the fact that it has some libertarian bias (though fortunately I managed to just miss one of the libertarian fanatics).
Second item is The Vast Dairy State Conspiracy, a blog operated by Stacie Whitacre of Candidate's Wife. It's updated more frequently than CW ever was, and its quality is higher.

#61
2004-4-27, 20:57 PDT
Well, I'm using my real name on OSP, so I see no reason not to expose it here. Please do not send emails to my Hotmail address(es), as Hotmail has problems working with Mozilla. From now on, my email address is joe_taylor0x@fastmail.fm without the x (spamtrap added at 2004-5-4, 13:50 PDT).

#60
2004-4-27, 18:16 PDT
One case for Nader I heard a while ago from someone I talked to on ¥ahoo Messenger:
Nader is the most viable third-party candidate. People will not take non-Republicratic candidates seriously if the Republicrats continue to rack up 97%+ of the vote. Staying at home or voting one's conscience for, say, the Socialist Party, will be ignored; people either ignore voter turnout or consider low turnout as a sign that people are satisfied rather than as a sign that people loathe mainstream politics, and third-party candidates are rarely considered as part of the race. If Nader gets a large percentage of the vote - say, 8% - then it'll start integrating smaller parties into American political discourse. Therefore, even though Nader is a bad candidate and would be a bad president (his constant talk of civic duty and patriotism is enoguh to make me vomit), it may well make sense to vote for him.

#59
2004-4-26, 14:27 PDT
Well, now my site is completely HTML (apart from the hit counter), with the blogroll downgraded into a regular collection of links and the code stolen from Blogspot replaced with tables. I am ashamed to say that I used FrontPage to see how exactly to use tables in HTML, but the index page remains purely HTML, with the table tags manually copied-and-pasted from FrontPage as opposed to an HTML page being uploaded. The links look uglier than before, I know, but if they bother you then you can switch off the underline-links option in your browser, I guess... I'm still trying to find how to do so in Mozilla. Maybe reducing font size would help - I don't know. It still looks uglier than before.

Another flip side of the code change is that now the links load before the index; while this isn't a very big deal in a page of the size of my index (9.5 KB not including the Iraqi flag).

Of course, you're welcome to make any suggestions... *wink*.

P.S. One advantage of Mozilla here is its way of handling textboxes. I€ either has no text wrapping, as with 50Megs' page-editing textboxes (in which case the line continues forever till you press Enter; for those of you who have no clue about HTML, multiple spacebars and line breaks all reduce to a single space, unless you use a special line-break tag), or text-wraps normally. Mozilla's text-wrapping is in between the two; it wraps text, except in cases of long strings, which I€ breaks at the edge of the textbox if the second option is used. In forums, which use the second option in I€, Mozilla is a pain in the ass, but here, it's a salvation.

#58
2004-4-26, 13:24 PDT
Just thinking... there's one good thing that Bush has done - or, more precisely, that Bush has been doing for at least a year and a half. By flouting international law, the UN, and everybody in the world but him, he turned the USA into an international pariah, which meant that some countries, particularly those that were traditionally anti-American (e.g. France, as opposed to traditionally pro-American Australia), took measures to thwart the USA. Specifically, Bush caused France, which used to be one of the most Euro-skeptic countries in the EU, into an enthusiastic supporter of European unity.
OTOH, maybe this is actually bad because if France stopped coordinating agricultural policy with the rest of Europe, farm subsidies would fall, resulting in less hunger in the third world.

Speaking of the EU: am I the only one who's noticed the correlation between support of the current attempt at European unity (under the EU) and support of the former attempt (under Hitler and the Axis in WW2)? Britain is the most nationalistic of the major EU countries, and it was also the one that contributed the most to the Allied war effort in WW2 in Europe. France used to be anti-Europe, and used its effective veto rights in the 1960s and 70s, when many EU decisions had to be accepeted unanimously, to their full extent. Denmark is one of the three EU-15 countries that hasn't switched to the Euro. Norway isn't even in the EU. Belgium and the Netherlands, on the other hand, are the most Eurocratic EU countries, but they're exceptions. Finally, Poland is a big troublemaker - for instance, it vehemently objected to the EU constitution on the grounds that it did not mention god.
Now, look at axis countries: Germany and Italy are pretty pro-Europe, as is Spain, which was officially neutral but had a fascist leader thruout WW2 - till 1973, indeed. Hungary, Slovakia, and Finland may not be as vocal as Belgium, but they're still clearly pro-EU. Romania and Bulgaria both actively supported the Nazis and are expected to join the EU in 2007.

And now for something completely different. I switched from I€ (pardon the pun...) to Mozilla, only to see that the OSP blogroll doesn't work in it. This will be rectified later today, in order to avoid a) giving Mozilla users problems, and b) being a hypocrite for having a site that attacks M$, among other things, but craps up on non-I€ browsers.

#57
2004-4-25, 14:45 PDT
Some announcements:
1. Archive #5 has just been created, as you can see.
2. New article, this time about the possibility of reinstituting conscription: leftist.i8.com/draft.html. It was supposed to appear in OSP before it would appear here (my excuse is that I thought it'd be short enoguh for the main page, but it wasn't), but the person in charge of publishing articles in OSP's USA section hasn't published it yet for some reason.
3. While now I am concentrating not so much about Freedom is Slavery, the novel about unrestricted capitalism, but about a sci-fi novel I've been working on for almost two years now (my goal is to finish the latter's first part by 5/12, the second anniversary of my starting writing it, and I have something like 35,000 more words to write), I will nonetheless start with it soon. I thought of giving myself 5/1 as a deadline for delivering the first installment, if not the first chapter, but I knew I won't* be able to, so I decided on only talking generally without giving specific dates.
4. Please, please, please, if you have any thoughts on what I say, then send feedback; I check that address daily when I'm expecting mail and when I'm bored.
5. I dare the people who support the draft - e.g. Stentor Danielson (look for "debitage" on my blogroll) - to say directly to me what they really mean by supporting conscription: "I don't mind to see you killed if it'll further my Cause." Come on, guys, say it, even though you don't read this page...
* Yes, the future tense here is perfectly alright; it is possible to say in English something like, "I said I'll come in time X" if time X is in the future not only of the past but also of the present.

#56
2004-4-21, 13:31 PDT
I hate Microsoft. This is why. M$Word tracks who modified or even opened a document, as well as how the document looked in the past. Makes me glad that the only things on this site that are not pure HTML are the Javascript counter and the front page's layout and blogroll I stole from Blogger...
I hear that BusinessWeek requires subscription (it didn't require that from me, though), so for your enjoyment, I reproduce the article here on this site - makes me glad I'm low-profile now...

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