My friend Guerillero has a great post about why he’s happy that the Boy Scouts of America are going to not kick gay kids out.

Vive la France! Une victoire pour l’égalité sur l’homophobie. Fabuleux!

The impending closure of Upcoming is sad. What I don’t understand is why Yahoo! just don’t work with the Internet Archive. The Upcoming database will be about 3TB in all. You can buy a 3TB hard drive for about $120. Add on another $40 to courier it over to the Internet Archive. Plan this cost into the operation of the service when you buy it or build it.

For less than $200, Yahoo! could save just a bit of good will and reduce the severity of history’s judgments for their frequent deposits to the memory hole.

The Economist says doing a Ph.D “is often a waste of time”.

Terence Eden is trying to go mouse-free. Which is sensible. Mice are a wonderful way of interacting with computers except for the whole nagging pain in the wrist from overuse thing. Which keyboards help me avoid pretty well.

My dislike for the painful consequences of mouse usage have tempted me close to reactivating Pentadactyl, but I have thus far resisted…

One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Photo Op is a Tumblr blog that shows a Geocities screenshot every day from now until 2027. That is, unless Tumblr gets shut down… which would never happen, right?

The other day I was reading an excellent post on homophobia turning up in places where you least expect it. It seems to have been removed but I’ve popped up a copy from Instapaper here. Go read it.

Things Reddit taught me: male feminists are only being feminists so they can sleep with feminist women. They are also all gay. And there is a hypothetical alternate universe somewhere that this actually makes sense.

Would anyone be interested in having a web history Wikipedia editathon in London? Since big companies seem intent on wiping away large swathes of web history, we should probably be documenting it while we can. I’ve just been updating the Fire Eagle entry.

I’m sad to see that Upcoming.org will be shut down in ten days time. I started the ‘London Geeks’ group on there which had 708 members and was used by a lot of people to keep track of all the many thousands of geek events going on in London. ArchiveTeam are trying to back up Upcoming.org, so if you want to help, fire up their ‘Warrior’ application and let it burn a bit of your bandwidth downloading old events.

In the US, CISPA was passed in the House of Representatives. Which is bad says the EFF and allies.

John Corvino recently linked to this beautiful essay about being out to his grandfather.

Academia’s indentured servants: reading this is yet another reason I’m very glad to have escaped from my Ph.D.

Photos of BlobbyLand, the now abandoned home of Mr Blobby, the mascot of Noel Edmonds’ 90s entertainment show Noel’s House Party, and star of a music video that got to number one. Via LinkMachineGo.

BarCamp Berkshire tickets still available. 15–16 June 2013. Be there, even if it is in Slough.

Yesterday, I spotted on an iPad someone typing the word “sossidges”. Which is one way of spelling “sausages”.

New Zealand is on the brink of making same-sex marriage legal. Go Kiwis!

I’ve found something more annoying than small children screaming in my ears on the train: drunken “blokey” lads having some “banter”. It’s all “proper geezers” and “slags” and girls they’ve “bonked”.

Nobody actually speaks like that in reality, right? It’s basically idiots impersonating some media-created mockney twat gestalt.

I’ve been watching the back-and-forth regarding Thatcher’s legacy on the social media silo sites. And friends of mine have made a few really bad arguments to try and defend Margaret Thatcher from the charges laid against her.

It’s the economy.

The first argument people say is something along the lines of: Yes, Thatcher was a nasty piece of work. But what she did was essential because the economy was up shit creek and she needed to fix it otherwise Britain would have collapsed economically.

I hate to sound like a broken record but… Section 28. No economic circumstance can justify the phrase “homosexuality as pretended family relationship”. Plenty of the things Thatcher did which her critics hate her for most have nothing to do with the economy. Her opposition to the anti-apartheid movement: what great moral leadership there.

Ah, but she was elected fair and square, repeatedly. She must have been doing something right.

Sorry, that’s not a valid argument. There are people out there who undoubtedly think The Cheeky Girls have made more of a contribution to Western culture than Mozart. Just because a bunch of people agree with something doesn’t mean it is right. An appeal to popular opinion ignores the actual point under discussion, namely whether people are justified in holding the opinions they do, whether they are morally right or not, whether the opinions are in the best interests of the country (etc.).

It is perfectly legitimate to criticise a politician because they do things you don’t like. The democratic process isn’t a magic wand: sometimes we elect people who do bad things. That doesn’t mean the bad things are somehow good. Hitler won an election at one point. That the country voted for a politician who gave us Section 28 doesn’t mean that Section 28 was somehow acceptable. (Feel free to fill in your least favourite Thatcher policy in place.)

The “well, she was democratically elected, therefore you can’t say anything bad about her” argument sets a pretty low bar. No, she wasn’t a dictator. She’s an improvement on Kim Jong-Il. That’s a fairly low bar to meet. Saying Thatcher was alright because she was a democratically elected leader rather than a dictator is a bit like going to a dinner party and saying “well, the meal wasn’t too bad, it wasn’t a bloody turd on a plate”. I have slightly higher expectations of prime ministers of democracies (which, you know, we all take irrational pride in being for some reason) than “slightly better than a totalitarian dictator”.