Lorem Ipsum

I'm catching up on Bruce Sterling's blog at The Infinite Matrix; one of the most interesting things he's pointed to lately imo is a BBC News article about Iranian bloggers, particularly women. "For the first time in the contemporary history of Iran, women can express themselves freely, even if it is not in their real name."

(I've lost track of whether anyone distinguishes any more between an online journal and a blog. To me, blog (from weblog, of course) implies a focus on pointers to cool pages and sites (often with multiple people contributing entries), while a journal is more personal and/or philosophical; this journal/blog thing of mine is a mix, but it seems like most of the ones I see focus more on one or more on the other. But I think most people these days who use the term blog mean it to refer to any sort of online journaling activity.)

Another of the most interesting things in Sterling's blog lately was a pointer to the Federation of American Scientists' list of para-state entities. The "Scope Note" at the top of that list starts out with these definitions:

States are entities that possess a legitimate monopoly on the use of violence within a specified geographical territory. Para-states are entities that contest this monopoly through various forms of direct action.

I'm gonna have to think about those two sentences a lot more before I read the rest of the site.

(I ran a roleplaying game once in which aliens showed up on Earth. It went quite well, and I thought at one time that it would work even better as a novel. But one of the most handwavy parts of the background was that the aliens offered to provide their advanced tech to any nation that agreed to certain policies. When I described this in SWAPA (the APA I've been in for the past fifteen-plus years), Kir (I think) pointed out that it's often difficult to decide who the legitimate government of a given nation is, or what constitutes a nation. One of the many reasons I tabled the novel is that the more I thought about this, the less willing I was to just ignore it, as I'd done during the game. Particularly because the more I thought about it, the policy of dealing only with legitimate national governments was pretty contrary to the aliens' ways of thinking. I still haven't come up with a solution that makes any sense, and this para-states list is a good reminder of just how complex these questions can be.)