Þetta kann að hljóma undarlega, en gefið þessari pælingu séns. Ég áttaði mig á þessu þegar ég sá póst frá Daða Ingólfssyni á Facebook: Á að vera ákvæði um trúarbrögð í stjórnarskránni að frátöldu því að hverjum og einum sé frjálst að stunda þau trúarbrögð sem honum / henni hugnast? Það var eitthvað við orðalagið á þessu sem fékk mig til að hugsa aðeins út fyrir þann kassa sem við erum vön í þessum efnum.

Ég kom heim í gær frá Budapest, þar sem ég var á ráðstefnunni Internet at Liberty 2010. (Hér er liveblog frá Jillian C. York af umræðum sem ég tók þátt í um verndun þjóðaröryggis í samhengi við tjáningarfrelsi á netinu; hér er upptaka af því). Þar kynntist ég svo mörgu góðu fólki að ég hef ekki enn getað áttað mig almennilega á því – ég þakka Google og Central European University fyrir að hafa haldið ráðstefnuna og boðið mér að vera með.

Þegar lagt er upp með að skrifa nýja stjórnarskrá verðum við að velta fyrir okkur hvað markmiðin eru. Margir hafa sagt núgildandi stjórnarskrá vera ágæta, sem ég er nokkuð ósammála, en þó er ég á því að ef breyta eigi stjórnarskránni þá verðum við að vita til hvers. Ísland hefur ekki haft margar stjórnarskrár, en sú sem nú gildir er sú eina sem við höfum haft á lýðveldistímanum þrátt fyrir ætlanir um að breyta henni frá upphafi.

Ný stjórnarskrá hefur verið samþykkt í Kenya með 67% stuðningi landsmanna (mbl, Kenyan Broadcasting Corporation). Þetta er ágætis stjórnarskrá að ýmsu leyti, og ég hef óskað vinum mínum í Kenya til hamingju með hana, en þó eftir að hafa kynnt mér hana fyrir nokkrum vikum verð ég að viðurkenna að ég er pínu hræddur við eina þróun sem er í henni. Þannig er að þetta er fyrsta stjórnarskráin í heiminum sem gerir hugverkarétti sérstaklega hátt undir höfði.

I received this morning a press release from Dr. Bill Wilson, Member of the Scottish Parliament. For lack of any better place to repost it, I decided to share it here, as it is great news: Dr Bill Wilson MSP has congratulated the Icelandic Parliament for voting to bring in the “strongest media freedom laws in the world”. In a Scottish Parliamentary motion to that effect, he also suggested that such legislation might encourage whistle-blowing and therefore help prevent corruption “as has been practised by BAE Systems”, and he called on the UK Government to consider bringing in similar legislation here, to implement the Bribery Act 2010 without “watering it down” and to modify libel law.

Every now and then people I know, mostly nontechnical folks, prod fun at the fact that I spend a lot of my time typing obscure sequences of letters into a black and white terminal. “Why,” they ask, “don’t you just use the mouse?” These people spend similar amounts of time clicking on various buttons, equally obscure if slightly more aesthetically pleasing, reveling in the fact that they can solve a lot of their problems by way of moving their mouse to and fro, clicking on graphical artifacts and enjoying the feedback.

These past few months I’ve been interviewed by virtually every news agency I can think of, and many that, until recently, I couldn’t. It’s been fun, but a lot of work has gone into getting the right information out, and despite everybody’s best effort sometimes minor errors and misquotes slip through. Sam Knight, who I met when he was in Iceland last autumn, interviewed me the other day for a post in Truth Out.

I rarely feel a strong urge to take an entire article and pick it apart piece by piece. Butcher it, more like. Today Vinay Gupta pointed out this article by Neil Reynolds, with the comment “awful, Italy, etc.” The article is called “the disintegration of the welfare state,” and upon reading it I felt a strong urge to thwack whoever absolutely failed to teach this man any history, economic theory or sociology at all.

The Shadow Parliament Project is now almost two years old. The software is still under heavy development and the user interface is still not great, overly cluttered and a bit tricky to start using, but it’s certainly getting there. About a week ago The Shadow City was launched – skuggaborg.is – a instance of the Shadow Parliament software specifically for Reykjavík’s governance. At the time of writing it has 3410 registered users and 479 active issues with 1037 arguments either for or against the issues.

I had never heard the term “post-irony” until about two months ago, but the explanation I got was along the lines of “people taking a serious subject, making fun of the subject, but in a serious way” – a shorter version of this could be “ha ha only serious.” Wikipedia more deeply defines post-irony as “a technique that uses the juxtaposition of empty symbolism and loaded evocations to create humor whose roots lie not so much in the mocking of any one ideology proper so much as in mocking the stupidity that lies at the roots of the propagation of modern ideologies.