Keyvan Minoukadeh

Just learnt (via Schnews) about the OFOG network here in Sweden, and its Disarm campaign (Avrusta!). According to the site:

Sweden is one the world’s biggest weapons manufacturers. In spite of the small size of our country we are still ninth (2007) on the list of the biggest weapons exporters in the world. Sweden manufactures weapons that are used in Iraq among other countries. The Swedish government claims at the same time that they want to work for peace in the world. Not only does Sweden’s weapons export violate ethics but also its own guidelines for weapons export and international law. We as citizens and fellow human beings can not let companies and politicians contribute to an escalation of conflicts and an increasing militarization of the world.

On October 16, Avrusta members took direct action:

In the dead of Wednesday night / Thursday morning, activists from peace and disarmament group OFOG/Avrusta (roughly translated as ‘mischief’ / ‘disarm’) used bolt cutters to break into a BAE Systems facility in Karlskoga, about 150m west of Stockholm. Leaving behind a banner saying, “The door is open — you are free to start disarming,” - and they proceeded to do just that, damaging any components in sight, smashing parts destined for Howitzer 77s.

Meanwhile, around a 100km nearer the capital in Eskilstuna, other disarmament experts were breaking into a Saab owned weapons factory where they damaged twenty high explosive grenade launchers with hammers.

It’s great to see this kind of action being carried out here. I just wish my Swedish was a little better so I could read the rest of the site and find out more. Well done to Anna Andersson, Martin Smedjeback, Catherine Laska, Pelle Strindlund and Annika Spalde!

Bill Quigley, a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University New Orleans, has written more about it: Swedish Peace Activists Repeatedly Break Into Weapon Factories

Ideology is thought that justifies action, including routine day-to-day activity. It is your ideology that determines your gut reaction to something done… More importantly, your ideology justifies your own actions to yourself. Economics may bring you back to your employer day after day, but it is ideology that makes that activity feel like a reasonable or unreasonable way to spend your life.

Work in general is becoming more and more ideological, and so is the workforce that does it. As technology has made production easier, employment has shifted from factories to offices, where work revolves around inherently ideological activities, such as design, analysis, writing, accounting, marketing and other creative tasks. Of course, ideology has been a workplace issue all along: Employers have always scrutinized the attitudes and values of the people they hire, to protect themselves from unionists, radicals and others whose “bad attitude” would undermine workplace discipline. Today, however, for a relatively small but rapidly growing fraction of jobs, employers will carefully assess your attitude for an additional reason: its crucial role in the work itself. On these jobs, which are in every field, from journalism and architecture to education and commercial art, your view of the world threatens to affect not only the quantity and quality of what you produce, but also the very nature of the product. These jobs require strict adherence to an assigned point of view, and so a prerequisite for employment is the willingness and ability to exercise what I call ideological discipline.

- Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives

Requirements are systems of prescriptions and proscriptions intended solely to limit the physical and intellectual movements of students - to ‘keep them in line, in sequence, in order’, etc. They shift the focus of attention from the learner … to the course. In the process, requirements violate virtually everything we know about learning because they comprise the matrix of an elaborate system of punishments that, in turn, comprise a threatening atmosphere in which positive learning cannot occur. The requirements, indeed, force the teacher - and administrator - into the role of an authoritarian functionary whose primary task becomes that of enforcing the requirements rather than helping the learner to learn. The whole authority of the system is contingent upon the requirements.

- Neil Postman

It used to be difficult to combine Greasemonkey and jQuery (or any other javascript library). Looking into it again, I came across 3 methods and this comment from Stephan Sokolow:

For the record, the newest Greasemonkey versions should now provide a much better alternative to this.

See http://wiki.greasespot.net/Metadata_block#.40require for an example of how to efficiently load jQuery from the Google AJAX API … at userscript install time via the @require metadata key.

It really is very simple now—an example from the page linked aboved:

// ==UserScript==
// @name          Hello jQuery
// @namespace     http://wiki.greasepot.net/examples
// @description   jQuery test script
// @include       *
// @require       http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.2.6/jquery.js
// ==/UserScript==

$(document).ready(function() {
	$("a").click(function() {
		alert("Hello world!");
	});
});

And here’s a script I wrote which takes the top 100 movie torrents from The Pirate Bay and adjusts the size of each link based on its IMDB rating:

Install the Greasemonkey script and visit The Pirate Bay’s Top 100 Movies page to see it in action. You can also view the source.