Post for the sake of posting...

LJ seems to be back, but for how long I don't know. Various people have pointed out that Russia has just had an election, for want of a better word, with the implication that LJ was shut down to prevent people in Russia talking about it and maybe advising each other on how to vote. I have various problems with this, one being that presumably they just rig elections the same way everybody else does, so why bother? To me it seems more like a test run for a complete shutdown, the final refutation of our glowy hippy romantic daydream that the Net was somehow free and For The People and beyond the control of the Man (man). With the American government busily trying to push through legislation which would give them similar powers to shut down any site they don't like, it all seems very much of a piece to my paranoid little mind.

Anyway. We are still here. Mostly hibernating, and prone to various bug-type nasties, but still here and still alive. Not doing science, though, which is probably for the best.

This, from Maisie Ward's biography of Chesterton, struck a chord with me:

"In his sociology, he did the same thing that his best critics blamed in his literary autobiographies. He would take some one fact and appear to build upon it an enormous superstructure and then, very often, ir would turn out that the fact itself was inaccurately set down; and the average reader, discovering the inaccuracy, felt that the entire superstructure was on a rotten foundation and had fallen with it to the ground. Yet the ordinary reader was wrong. The 'fact' had not been the foundation of his thought, but only the thing that had started him thinking. If the 'fact' had not been there at all, his thinking would have been neither more nor less valid. But most readers could not see the distinction."

Valid point or feeble excuse? You decide.