Random Variable

Over the next few months, I hope to reveal my thoughts on what I see as a new Anglo-American subculture that I will, for the time being, christen with the neologism of Netizen-Libertarianism. In the meantime, Ars.Technica reports on Ron Paul’s NL fans taking to the streets of…World of Warcraft:

Ron Paul, who has gone from being Internet meme to a serious contender for third place, had a rally held in his honor on the Whisperwind WoW server, and if the video is any indication, there was a very nice turnout. The instructions for what to expect and where to go where posted on the organizer’s website. “Meet in Ironforge, form a single file line and marcharound the city. The group will then take the tram from IronForgeto StormWind where supporters will congregate at the fountain in front of the bank,” the instructions stated. “Then, players will go to Westfall and swim to Booty Bay to take aboat to Rachet. Finally, once in the Barrens, the group will head to the Crossroads, surround the area and dance.”

Kenya entered into 2008 in a poor state. I don’t want to say anymore as a Western observer—I am slightly concerned about framing issues. Global Voices Online has a roundup of coverage from on-the-ground with additional news that Ugandan troops have crossed borders in an attempt to stop spillover effects. This is not good.

Via Matthew Nisbett at Framing Science comes news of a ten part series on “How To Think About Science“, including Simon Schaffer, Ian Hacking, James Lovelock, and my current two favourite thinkers Bruno Latour and Ulrich Beck. Podcast/iTunes link here.

I have to do a short presentation on Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern in a month or two in sociology class. As it’ll be the last lecture, I decided to make a video using clips from Adam Curtis’ The Trap and Charlie Brooker’s Screen Wipe interspersed with Bruno Latour’s Berkeley talks. It ended up being 25 minutes long. Here it is in full:

From Judeosphere (via Jeff Weintraub):

Ron Paul Supporters: You can count on three things uniting the far-left and the far-right: (1) Paranoid distrust of the U.S. government (2) Hatred of Israel (3) Ron Paul. While I personally have no strong feelings about Ron Paul, his campaign has engendered a weird-bedfellows coalition that includes 9/11 truthers, white supremacists [like these guys--JW], opponents of “world government,” and advocates for a return to the gold standard. I salute you Ron Paul: You’re a uniter, not a divider.

Seems Wordpress was down since December 8 and I didn’t even notice. Anyway, it’s fixed now.  Must read/write more this year. Maybe there’ll be more frequent posting. I even have a video being uploaded on Google Video right now. How exciting!

Happy new year!