German Politics, quicklink

Go Gerhard! Go. Finally the

Finally the chancellor is doing what he was elected for: to explain the world to the loony left within his own party and to demonstrate that Germany does not need a Margaret Thatcher to rebrand the SPD. The loony left is not happy to face realiy, to say the least.

But making Germany’s economic more flexible is a struggle for social equality, not against it. Why don’t people see that? It is a class struggle only for those corporatist functionaries bound to loose power. And loose it they will. Spiegel Online tells us about the chancellor’s Labour Day speech.

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Economics, quicklink

Semi-daily discussion on Sen’s paradoxon

A neat little discussion occurring at Brad DeLong’s Semi Daily Journal, regarding the question whether Sen’s paradoxon – which basically says that it is possible to dream up utility functions which would allow liberalism and the pareto principle to be in conflict – is actually a paradoxon. And it is evolving into a real debate about the different meanings of liberalism/libertarianism. Be sure to check read the comments, at least flip through them if you don’t have two hours to spare…

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oddly enough, quicklink, US Politics

Bush vs. Masturbation

Following on Sen. Santorum’s recent intervention concerning the legal status of homosexuals’ privacy in the US,

“President Bush is proud to introduce an ambitious new phase in the fight to preserve all that is decent in America. Conceived and championed by the revered Republican think tank Americans for Purity, ‘Operation Infinite Purity‘ is dedicated to the complete eradication of masturbation from American soil by the year 2005.”

From the Whitehouse.org

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intellectual property rights, quicklink, USA

Digital timeshifting.

Update

Please note that the legal situation regarding file sharing in Germany has changed since and is likely to change again.

Now that , a US court has denied the forced closure of P2P services like KaZaa (from heise online), as they are also used for legitimate purposes, look forward to intensified attempts to target individual users, in the US (from Salon), as well as over here (from heise online). BUT: private downloads of songs are in all likelyhood not illegal in Germany (as even the European president of BMG accepted in 2002).

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Iraq, quicklink

Norman Mailer vs. US Feminists

Norman Mailer writes in the London Times that, in his opinion, the US went to war because of tv – but above all, because of women – American feminists, to be precise.

“We understood that our television was going to be terrific. And it was. Sanitised but terrific … There were, however, even better reasons for using our military skills, but these reasons return us to the ongoing malaise of the white American male. He had been taking a daily drubbing over the past 30 years. For better or worse, the women?s movement had had its breakthrough successes and the old, easy white male ego had withered in the glare.”

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quicklink, US Politics

US Senator Santorum’s fashistoid remarks

You have probably heard about US Senator Santorum’s fashistoid remarks about homosexuals having no right to privacy for their alleged attempt to destroy “healthy family values”. Himself being gay, Bruce Bawer, an American poet and literary critic living in Olso, does not exactly agree with the Senator here – but being a proud American he is nonetheless grateful for this wake-up call:

“Santorum’s remarks betray an utter indifference to the idea of American liberty. He has spit in the face of every coalition soldier who went to Iraq to fight for freedom, and at every Eastern European who reveres America as the symbolic antithesis of Soviet-era tyranny. And he has confirmed, to a depressing extent, the condescending cartoon version of America that has repeatedly been on display in the European media these past months — the America that is not about freedom at all but about power, pure and simple.”

Harsh, but true, words. Salon.com has got the rest of them.

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