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”.

Wondering what the anarchist would do if I nicked their iPhone…

I’m on the train with some of the anti-Thatcher protesters. Idealistic young anarchists discussing the failure of standing in the rain drinking cans of beer as an activism technique, and the failure of other anarchists to give a shit about feminism and minorities.

Saw one guy being dragged off in handcuffs in the station.

Lots of Transport Police at Charing Cross. Not sure if it is for run-of-the-mill pissheads and Saturday night revellers or something more.

There’s a talk about “geeks and professionalism” at a conference called ‘Devs Love Bacon’. (Except us vegetarians, obvs.)

“Everyone in this room is now a gender-queer panda” (@mia_out)

At GLAM-WIKI, @mia_out just lumped Wikipedians in with the government and the Daily Mail… oh god, we’ve become The Man.

Am somewhat amused that the discussions about #glamwiki are happening almost exclusively on Twitter’s silo. Because we love open… right?

CV tip: if you claim to have “attention to detail”, check to make sure there are no grammar issues in the sentence where you proclaim your attention to detail. True story.

What concerns me far more than whether Thatcher has a state funeral is that government’s have discretion over whether to provide one or not. We could do something radical like pass a law that says whether or not ex-prime-ministers get a state funeral or not. Then it wouldn’t be up to fate, fortune and partisan political hacks to decide.

You know, equal and consistent treatment under the law. What a radical idea.