{"id":524,"date":"2002-07-14T12:46:14","date_gmt":"2002-07-14T19:46:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2002\/07\/14\/524.html"},"modified":"2002-07-14T12:46:14","modified_gmt":"2002-07-14T19:46:14","slug":"female-iranian-bloggers-plus-p","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2002\/07\/14\/female-iranian-bloggers-plus-p\/","title":{"rendered":"Female Iranian bloggers plus para-state organizations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I'm catching up on Bruce Sterling's blog at The Infinite Matrix<\/a>; one of the most interesting things he's pointed to lately imo is a BBC News article about Iranian bloggers<\/a>, 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.\"<\/p>\n

(I've lost track of whether anyone distinguishes any more between an online journal and a blog. To me, blog<\/i> (from weblog,<\/i> 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<\/i> mean it to refer to any sort of online journaling activity.)<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. The \"Scope Note\" at the top of that list starts out with these definitions:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I'm gonna have to think about those two sentences a lot more before I read the rest of the site.<\/p>\n

(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.)<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m catching up on Bruce Sterling’s blog at The Infinite Matrix; one of the most interesting things he’s pointed to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=524"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}