Senator Wendy Davis is fucking awesome. One rarely ever gets to say that about a senator. Texas should be proud.

Completely unrelated, but I finally found a quote by Margaret Cho that has been on my mind for awhile but I never remembered to Google it when in front of a computer.

I grew up hard and am still hard and I don't care. I did not choose this face or this body and I have learned to live with it and love it and celebrate it and adorn it with tremendous drawings from the greatest artists in the world and I feel good and powerful like a nation that has never been free and now after many hard won victories is finally fucking free. I am beautiful and I am finally fucking free.

I fly my flag of self-esteem for all those who have been told they were ugly and fat and hurt and shamed and violated and abused for the way they look and told time and time again that they were "different" and therefore unlovable. Come to me and I will tell you and show you how beautiful and loved you are and you will see it and feel it and know it and then look in the mirror and truly believe it. If you are offended by my anger and my might at defending my borders and my people you do not deserve entry into my beloved and magnificent country.

That right there is why I will always love Margaret Cho, even though our sense of humor don't always mesh.


You know what? Who cares whether it's official or not. Happy Rocking Ladies Day, everybody.

And that's just comparing Americans against Americans. If we broadened the scope of comparison...

Kind of horrifying to contemplate.

Watching this video from the TED Conference on why SOPA/PIPA are such terrible ideas, I realized something that's been bothering me about the anti-SOPA/PIPA side of this issue.

This bill will kill the internet. That's...not true. I don't think, at least. Yes, it would compromise the security by making DNSSEC impossible to implement, but I don't think that would be enough to kill it. Technology is incredibly resilient and able to outsmart those who don't understand it (and most people who do). The internet is Pandora's box - we can never go back to a pre-internet society again, no matter what we become. And if the internet isn't broken by Chinese censorship, I think it's a little silly to claim that American censorship would strike the final blow. There are other countries in the world who could take over as global innovators.

The real danger of this bill, in my view, is the block it strikes to the American character - a character that has already weakened and grown ill over the past few decades. It's a blow to free speech - the tools within could too easily be used against unpopular but legal speech, and even if those tools aren't abused, it punishes law-abiding users for other people's crimes.

And as Clay Shirky points out, it upends the principle of "innocent until proven guilty." It transforms the web into a police state, with websites being forced to monitor all user behavior to make sure there is no illegal activity. It assumes we are criminals until we prove otherwise. It criminalizes several generations of American citizens, as Larry Lessig pointed out in 2007.

And yes, the international impact would be terrible as well. I don't mean to imply that these bills are only problems for the United States, because they do have international ramifications. I just think it's a little arrogant to presume that America alone has the sole power to make or break the internet. (If I'm mistaken, please do correct me.)

The internet is strong, and so is its culture. As a collective entity, we will always find a way around draconian restrictions. They can't kill us, but they can drive us underground. They can foster an internet culture that distrusts legal authority and that wants to divorce itself from geo-political governments.

XKCD put as the hover text over one of their comics:

I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone "I'm from the internet," instead of laughing they just ask "Oh, what part?"

More and more, this feels like home to me.



And this does not.



I can't be the only one.