Various Linux News; Japanese Socialism, Religious Fascism, West Papua

[tcpip]

Last Tuesday night was the Linux Users of Victoria meeting which looked at two ends of development; Martin Paulo gave another excellent talk on the OpenStack free software cloud project, this time in a more tutorial framework, followed by Aryan Ameri (G+) on Ubuntu phones - more on how they don't quite work yet, but do show a roadmap of where they're going. The meeting also formally announed our Librarything, for our Library of LUV (LoL). Next Saturday I'll be presenting at the Beginners Workshop, An Introduction to Supercomputing. Further, as I've been working on another training manual I've had the opportunity to develop a few interesting scripts and posts over the past week; Backups and Synchronisations, Deleting Many Files, and Searching for Emails.

Earlier this week started writing about the decline of the socialist left in Japan. I am hoping that knowledgable people (e.g., aske) might suggest a few reasons. A pleasant surprise was the discovery that Matt Bush and I had been published in the latest issue of The Freethinker for our article on Islamofascism: A Real Term for A Real Problem, which argues that Islamic fascism really does exist and that the principles of secularism must be universalised. Finally, next Saturday the Isocracy Network is hosting a meeting (FB events) with Louis Byrne from West Papua Melbourne speaking. It remains an interesting question why West Papuan solidarity has never reached the mass appeal to that of East Timor, when both are of equal importance.

Comments

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

And the structure of the United Nations ensures a balance of powers rather than principled decision making

A fair reservation. It's not fool-proof, I'll grant that. One might not be able to tap into the UN's mystical aura of legitimacy when needed, and you'd be right to point out that just about any other international forum we might care to set up on a sufficiently wide-ranging, multilateral basis would act similarly. It's a... given constraint on action on the international playing field. How broad a coalition can be created and psychologically maintained with the UN so paralysed would have to be decided on a case-to-case basis, and that will in itself generally throw us into the world of strategic calculation.

The principle of humanitarian intervention seems sound enough.

Well, I won't specifically dispute that -- I can't possibly comment on matters of the spirit world.