If you post in Internet discussion groups or chat on IRC, you may recognize yourself in Mike Reed’s Flame Warriors. It has been suggested that I myself am Issues or Weenie. I hope that I bear no resemblence to Stone Deaf, but I find the profile hilarious.

Sidebar for Laura: I am thinking that Contristo is well described as Acne.

I would like to point out that not only is The Feminist Blog a rad weblog publishing feminist news content every day, but Katilinne also nicely linked to Geekery Today after I sent her some fan mail. And, hey, The Weblog Review gave it a 4 out of 5. Give it a read every now and then.

Read the rest of The Feminist Blog Rocks …

SelectSmart has often had fun little political ideology tests that place you somewhere within the good old domains of conservatism, liberalism, libertarianism, etc. But they never had one for assessing feminist ideologies. So, I decided to make one. The result: the nifty little What Type of Feminist Are You? selector. It currently does its best to rank your affinity for radical feminism, socialist feminism, anarcha-feminism, liberal feminism, eco-feminism, libertarian feminism, womanism, girly "femme-inism," Amazon feminism, and anti-feminism.

It has some problems. For one SelectSmart only lets you put in 24 questions, and as a result I don’t have enough questions to distinguish some of the kinds of feminism. Also, SelectSmart’s methods of scoring are kind of limited. For example, I have a question "A free market economy benefits both women and men," meant to distinguish between libertarian feminists and radical feminists, socialist feminists, and anarcha-feminists, and indifferent to liberal feminists, Amazon feminists, etc. But I can only say what a question scores in favor of, not what it scores against, so somebody who disagrees that "A free market economy benefits both women and men" is marked as being equally likely to be liberal, radical, socialist, womanist, etc. … even though they are actually much more likely to be radical or socialist. Because of the problems with SelectSmart, I may end up eventually creating another survey, either with CGI programming on eskimo or with another surveying service.

It just had to happen: weblogs have become trendy enough that they have gotten their own critical review, deftly titled The Weblog Review. I’ve been monkeying around with my site lately and I think I’ll get some more new stuff done before I work up the courage to submit Geekery Today for review. But we’ll see.

Steve Lohr highlights some interesting parallels between the emerging technological privacy movement and the early days of the environmental movement in the 1960s [NY Times]. A couple of brief notes:

• Who says that there has been no book on privacy with the impact of Silent Spring? After all, there are few political books as well known and as shattering as George Orwell’s 1984, a book which is in large part about the destruction of privacy through State technological surveillance and control.
• It’s worth noting that a deeper parallel between the two movements rests in their mutual fears of technology being turned into an instrument of exploitation and control: for the environmentalists, of nature; for the privacy advocates, of individual people. They both come out of a strong background of populism and autonomous self-government.
• For hands-on information on protecting your privacy online, check out Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Privacy Now! campaign, security.tao.ca — oriented towards leftist / anarchist activists doing political work online, and SafeWeb — an online anonymizer.