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- Devil's Advocate Extraordinaire

::World AIDS Day

  Monday. 01 Dec, 2003

Today is December first, hence the winter theme which will last throughout the month. Today is also World Aids Day. Many people know the sad, sad, facts surrounding AIDS treatment in Africa, but here it comes again, nevertheless.

The US spends a lot of money to prevent AIDS from spreading in Africa. Unfortunately, the money isn't spent particularly well. What we've got is not a "War on AIDS", to use popular US-idioms, but rather a "War on Condoms"; the money is spent preaching abstinence instead of handing out condoms and teaching sex education.

Granted, "don't fuck" is the one and only 100% definitive solution to preventing AIDS from spreading, but you know, I know, everybody knows that's an advice which isn't going to be very well taken. And it isn't. The War on Condoms isn't stopping AIDS from spreading, it is actually accellerating it, since the funding of the effective methods have been cut off by the current US administration.

Not merely because nobody listens to the preaching of abstinence, but also because the US, or rather the Bush administration, are more interested in funding another war, the War on Abortion, rather than the War on AIDS.

The Bush administration does not fund any organisation which is pro-abortion, even if the funding is not directly funding work on abortion. This has already had a devastating effect on organisations working in family planning and HIV. International Planned Parenthood Federation has lost US$8 million, which is used mainly for contraceptive supplies. Christian Aid

Is this really the War on AIDS it's laid out to be? Or is it a proving ground for War on Condoms, War on Abortion and War of Ideology? If stopping AIDS really is important, why not do that? Why not stop AIDS now and fight the abortion and abstinence fight later?

The War on AIDS is not important. Far less important than the War on Condoms, at least. The Catholic Church is actually spreading lies and misinformation to not only stop aid organisations from handing out free condoms, but also the use of readily available ones, saying that "condoms have tiny holes in them through which the HIV virus can pass".

This propaganda has been so effective that in some regions of Africa the people there won't accept free condoms handed to them, some catholic priests have even been telling them that condoms are laced in the HIV virus.

Stopping the supply of condoms to organizations that counsel clients on all legal reproductive health options is leading inexorably to HIV's spread and a rise in unwanted pregnancies and abortions. Robyn E. Blumner, Times columnist

This brings us to the second part of the tragedy: intellectual property patents. There are really cheap and effective drugs available which reduces the risk of transmitting HIV/AIDS from an infected mother onto her child by a whopping 90 percent.

Bill Haddad works as a volunteer for a generic drug company based in India. His mission is to bring inexpensive medication to the third world. With him, he carries small bottles of a generic drug, called Neverapine, each bottle is worth 200 doses and costs less than forty cents to produce. He donates these to hospitals and physicians, but many countries won't let him.

"Because of alleged patent laws or other political barriers, I can't do it in most of the sub-Saharan countries and in half the Latin American countries," he says. "We produce the drugs legally, and the international law says we can do it. The companies have public statements that say, 'We won't prevent you.' But then, some piece of paper arrives and stops you. Third World Traveler

With so many wars at once; we have the War on Condoms, the War on Abortion, the War of Ideology and the War on Generic Drugs, the sad truth is that each of them takes precedence over the War on AIDS.

More information and links are available in this discussion on MetaFilter.

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::Banned

  Thursday. 27 Nov, 2003

Michael Jackson is a poor sob if there ever was one. Every week, day, or hour, someone makes allegations about Jackson which everyone seems to just assume to be true without any verification or proof there of, because "he is weird after all".

People cling to the theory of him "trying to change his race" like it was a bad rash, too tempting to leave it be. He's got vitiligo for fucks sake. Surgeons, whose stories about his facial surgery the same people think of as the embodiment of truth, have confirmed it.

Michael Jackson isn't given the benefit of even a fraction of doubt, instead he is assumed to be an awful child-molesting father because he's wearing a face mask, and worries about his children being recognized in public. So he's not like most folks, so what, that doesn't make him anti-christ. Heck, even Satan gets more respect than Jacko does.

It doesn't matter if Jackson is guilty or not, the point is that he is never given the benefit of doubt. What odds does he have against a jury of "peers", each of which are familiar with his hate of his own race, him being an awful father and him bying the elephant-man's corpse? Who would do that? A child molester, that's who.

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::Spam

  Wednesday. 26 Nov, 2003

I've been saying so for a while but today I finally got my act together and updated to Movable Type version 2.64, and installed the spam-thwarter plugin MT-Blacklist. No more comment spam. I'm happy.

Spammers have increasingly delighted themselves in spreading their comment spam excrement around my site, which I up until now have had to delete manually. Ironically enough, their primary spam-target is/was an old post about... weblog comment spam.

I went by Ryan's place earlier and ran into uncomfortable news which, well, are news to me anyway; spammers are exploiting a script, which comes with Movable Type by default, to send e-mail spam.

To avoid being used by spammers as a spam-sending droid, remove or rename mt-send-entry.cgi, you're probably not using it anyway so you could very well delete it. Read more about this in the MT forum.

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::Discrimination

  Wednesday. 26 Nov, 2003

As most of you have already heard, Los Angeles county has sent e-mail to local technology vendors, urging them to stop referring to harddrives as "master" and "slave", due to the racial diversity of LA.

This is, of course, a very serious problem, but I'm skeptical that using different terms is the right solution, it seems like an attempt to cure the symptoms, instead of the underlying disease. The problem is the fact that some harddrives are slaves, calling them by any other name isn't going to change that or give them the self-respect they deserve, because in the eyes of their master, they'll always be slaves, by any other name.

What the harddrives need is not new titles, but to be freed from their totalitarian rule. They need a democratic election process so they can feel like they've actually got some influence in the decision making process.

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::Winds of Change

  Monday. 24 Nov, 2003

Swedish bloggers Steffanie and Jenny have written a Bachelor's thesis (PDF in Swedish) on blogging and the Internet as a platform for discussions in the public sphere. They've examined the value of discussions on Swedish weblogs from a democratic standpoint and have come to the conclusion that the discussions held on this specific weblog, by you guys, are generally of high value, non-homogenous (diverse), valid, contributive, well-motivated and stimulates further debate. Wow!

Seriously, reading the thesis was extremely enlightening for me. Learning of how others have closely scrutinized my weblog and the associated discussions was a real eye-opener and has made me want to write more about topics related to society and democracy.

The thesis puts a lot of focus on my weblog and on The Skeptic's weblog (in Swedish), which I think has a larger focus on society and democracy than mine has. I want to write more about that, I do, but there's a slight problem; when it comes to topics regarding society and democracy, events that transpire on a local or national level have a tendency to be more prominent to me personally. However, the vast majority of my readers are non-Swedish, which makes subjects of local scope a bit contextually off.

Maybe if I address the topics more from a conceptual level... but then again, maybe that makes them boring and/or irrelevant... I don't know. Ideas?

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