My Quiet Life

In this book, Exoo addresses the failure of the modern mass media as a public institution, and as a viable avenue for the education of a people and for the advancement of our culture. Drawing heavily from the work of Antonio Gramsci, he dispels the myths of a "liberal media" and, to a lesser extent, a "conservative media", and instead details the evolution of a mass media that is "centrist" at best. To explain this evolution, Exoo consistently offers the differing viewpoints of three schools of thought: cultural democracy, cultural hegemony, and neoconservatism. He makes no attempts to hide his preference, however, providing a very clear case for the evolution of the modern media as shaped by powerful hegemonic forces. Neoconservative theories on the "liberal media" are presented, as well, obligatorily, but only in passing, as the lunatic rantings of the hegemonic forces themselves.
(more...)

Jim was asking how I sync'ed my LJ website with this one. (Why did I do this? Well, I only got the LJ account to post comments on friends' LJ webpages, so I figured I'd just sync the content of my page from here). So, I decided to try to remember, and then post how I did it, just for him! Disclaimer: there are probably more elegant ways to do this than I did.

(more...)

Bill BL20031354, which proposed adding sexual orientation to the list of prohibited forms of discrimination in the metro code, was voted down by the Nashville Metro Council on April 1st. Old news, I know, but I decided to watch the metro council proceedings, because I've been wanting to get more involved in local politics and I was intrigued and dismayed at this latest bit of news.

I was shocked and ashamed, quite frankly, by some of the ignorance and bigotry present in the debate prior to the vote regarding this bill. Here are some tasty nuggets of "wisdom" our Metro Council is putting forth:
(more...)

Some of you that use Phoenix often as your browser, like me (Okay I admit it, I still use Opera), have probably been wondering what the hell happened to all the development. Phoenix 0.6 has been months in waiting.

Well, it turns out it was for good reason. Mozilla has announced a very exciting new roadmap that details their plans to ditch the XPFE based navigator in favor of the Phoenix codebase.

This is great news. Mozilla has always seemed to me to be a reference implementation. Solid and packed with features, but bloated and dog-slow. Phoenix, on the other hand, seemed like a great implementation of what could be done with that development framework and how powerful, fast and modular it could be.

Here's hoping that soon maybe Phoenix can beat out Opera as my browser of choice. As it stands right now, Opera is just too friggin fast. But, I find myself wondering if Opera plans on ever releasing another version for GNU/Linux, so maybe Phoenix will be the de facto victor.