Me late again at reading this enteresting coverage of "social denial of service attacks". Yeah it's mainly geeky terminology for something Belgian media would call filibusteren or anti-poltics but when you take the time to read it (and are geeky enough to bite through) you can see how the formal terminology helps at recognising the issue and naturally proposing some solutions.

Most important lesson in my head: It's all right to complain, but it shouldn't keep you from doing your part of the work to make things better. Or put differently: if you're smart enough to complain, then you don't have the right to hide behind incompetence to actually help out.

Other synapses firing associations over here:

• I've been reading up lately on some writings of Etienne Vermeersch lately. In one of the paragraphs of this article (all dutch) he mentions the tension between the happiness of the (uncaught) vilain and the misery of the good
• This absolute claim pro personal rights (dutch again) that is so deceivingly smart written down that I'ld almost forget that it's completely missing out on my reaility-test. "To me, on a human-to-human level, not the theoretical rights (or the arguments to claim those) are of interest, but what you are going to do with them!"
• The new apparent fashion wave of no value added comment writers attracted by slight political statements on Flemish blogs...
• ... as well as the continued climate of possible national strikes over here in Belgium. I'ld really wish the unions could be creative enough to come up with some actual useful society-work their militants could be doing next time they mobilise them again. Not going to work would be a more valuable complaint to me if they could use the time gained to actually make a positive statement somewhere in stead.