To Wit, Socialism

Long ago I posted and subscribed to a blog thread entitled "When is it Time for Revolution?" I still get emails when people post comments to that thread and they have not ceased to add commentary in the thirteen months it has existed. The most recent comment that showed up in my inbox went something like this:

"[...]we're about to elect the most left-leaning,liberal senator, to combine him with a congress that has the lowest approval rating of ALL TIME,and with a very left-leaning liberal senate to have all 3 phases of the US Gov't run by democrats, as they begin their push to move the USA as far left as they can get us, as liberal as they can make us, and another step closer to socialism and eventually communism.
time to wake up, electing Obama is going to be a very,very bad thing for this country..Mccain isn't great either, but at least then we'll have a system of checks and balances in place to thwart off Nancy Pelosi and the liberals..
otherwise, we're in serious trouble."

My reply follows:

I couldn't help responding to Rob's anti-socialist statements. I discover, when I check my pockets, that I am, at end, a full-blown socialist. So I take offense to this forgone conclusion we've been spoon-fed since kindergarten; That socialism = bad.

Capitalism cannot survive indefinitely. Well, that's actually incorrect; Capitalism can survive, but if it does everyone else has to go. Technology and automation have made running a 12 acre farm a one man job. One guy gets on the tractor and the tractor does the work; work it used to take a dozen or more farm hands days and weeks to complete. Technology and automation have taken millions of laborers off the assembly lines and out of the factories, and replaced them with robotics. Shop floors that used to bustle with hundreds of 401k holding, vacation time-accruing, sweat and blood of the American economy, full-time employees are now the industrial equivalent of ghost towns. The warm flesh of their erstwhile work force replaced by cold machinery. The only human ambassadors to the, otherwise vacant, mill and forge are there for 'Quality Control.' A lone, underpaid, under valued, under-represented worker sits at the mouth of a mechanized monstrosity - the marvel of modern science - staring at products rolling off the end of the line. He alone is still necessary, so he alone collects a paycheck.

How - I have to ask - do you propose capitalism will carry us forward, when all it has done since the invention of the cotton gin, is over-produce, centralize power, and put people out of work? How will capitalism not push your precious middle class into my precious lower class, and then push both of those classes into poverty; and then push the hundreds of millions of newly poor and homeless into Thunderdome?

This thread is called "When is it time for Revolution?" and a growing majority of the respondents agree: it is long-since-passed the time for revolution. Still, here we are, unable even to entertain a revolutionary thought; Unable to pull ourselves from the safe, embracing status quos which serve the very evils we seek to escape. We find ourselves rehashing the same capitalist dogma that empowers the cultural dehumanization which has led us to this point; which has led some of you to consider destruction, death, and civil war as a means of political and economic change. How blind are we? How ignorant to cradle and defend these dying institutions even as they poison and destroy us?

Socialism does not have to be the absolutely uniform redistribution of wealth. It doesn't have to be the government mandated homogeny you think of when you hear the word. It doesn't have to be soup-lines and food-tickets. It doesn't have to be any of the things that scare you. We are not slaves to the ideas of other men and so we can make American socialism whatever we want… whatever we need it to be. The only rule we must conform to in order to be called a socialist state, is to put human life above the dollar; to put the good of people before the good of institutions. All else will fall into place.

That's the only ticket I can vote for: http://www.pslweb.org/...

Qot[SLoT] 'Widget' - Custom Quotes in Blogger

I've been building a collection of random, off-beat quotations ever since I first sold my soul to Rupert Murdoch and begrudgingly erected a MySpace page. So when I started toying around with Blogger, of course I just had to create a 'widget' (or at least a widget-ish, widgety, widget-like, javascript dealio) that would display my quote collection, one at a time, in the side panel.

First I went searching for pre-existing 'Quote of the Day'-style blogger widgets, but quickly found they were all javascript implementations that demanded either an off-site text file containing the list of quotes, or a hard-coded, in-line version of the same. Neither of these fit my fancy. The first one, after all, would require the author to have a web account somewhere where they could host the file containing the quotes. The second meant hand-coding every quote into a javascript array which - if, like me, you mean to keep adding to your quote collection over time - certainly seems an ugly implementation and a hassle on all fronts. Finally, neither of these solutions provided a reasonable means of displaying the whole collection of quotes at any one time; A feature I felt was sorely lacking.

So I present to you my horrific creation, born of hubris gone awry:

Qot[SLoT]
Quote(s) of the [Some Length of Time]

<div id="QOTSLOT">
<script type="text/javascript">
/* 
Qot[SLoT] - 'Quote(s) of the [Some Length of Time]'
This code scraped together by Roy Tousignant.
Origin: Tuesday, October 21st, 2008.
Last Update: Wednesday, October 28th, 2008.
Stole some code from: www.w3schools.org

I HATE JAVASCRIPT.
*/

// -------------USER CONFIGURED VARIABLES-------------
var quotesPage = 
"http://sortbyz.blogspot.com/2008/10/quotes-of-some-length-of-time.html";
var numBreaks = 2;
// ---------------------------------------------------


var xmlhttp;
function loadXMLDoc(url) {
xmlhttp=null;
if (window.XMLHttpRequest) {
// code for Firefox, Opera, IE7, etc.
xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest();
}
else if (window.ActiveXObject) {
// code for IE6, IE5
xmlhttp=new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
}
if (xmlhttp!=null) {
xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=state_Change;
xmlhttp.open("GET",url,true);
xmlhttp.send(null);
}
else {
document.getElementById('QOTSLOT').innerHTML="Your browser does not support 
XMLHTTP.<br>This application cannot run.";
}
}

function state_Change() {
if (xmlhttp.readyState==4) { // 4 = "loaded"
if (xmlhttp.status==200) { // 200 = "OK"
var quotes = parseData(xmlhttp.responseText);
var ran = Math.floor(Math.random() * quotes.length);

document.getElementById('QOTSLOT').innerHTML=quotes[ran];
}
else {
document.getElementById('QOTSLOT').innerHTML="Problem retrieving data:" + 
xmlhttp.statusText;
}
}
}

function parseData(dataIn) {
var listStart = String.fromCharCode(60)+"div class='post-body entry-content'>";
var listEnd = String.fromCharCode(60)+"div style='clear: both;'>";
var quoteSeperator = String.fromCharCode(60)+"br />";

for(i=1; i!=numBreaks; i++) {
quoteSeperator+=quoteSeperator;
}

var startPos = dataIn.lastIndexOf(listStart) + listStart.length;
var endPos = dataIn.lastIndexOf(listEnd);
var content = dataIn.slice(startPos, endPos);
var quotesArray = content.split(quoteSeperator);
return(quotesArray);
}

loadXMLDoc(quotesPage);

</script>

<i>
Qot[SLoT] is either loading the quote or being viewed in preview mode.
</i>

</div>

<div id="QOTSLOT-footer" style="text-align:right;">
<script type="text/javascript">
var str = "view all"
document.write(str.link(quotesPage));
</script>
</div>

Okay, honestly the name Qot[SLoT] is slightly misleading since, in its unaltered state, the widget just randomly selects a quote to display on each page request. So, in that regard it's more of a 'Quote of the Page Request' widget. But, you know what, it's my widget and I'll name it as I please, damn you!

Instead of pulling its list of quotes from a server-side text file or an in-line javascript array, the QotSlot looks to a post on your Blogger site to generate the content. The idea is: You create a new post on blogger containing all the quotations you want displayed. Once the QotSlot widget is in place and properly configured, each time someone visits your page, QotSlot will fetch the content of that new post you made, parse the data into an array of individual quotations, select one at random, and write it to the page.

Instructions

1.) Create a New Post on your Blogger account and copy and paste your list of quotes into the 'Compose' field. How you layout your quotes in the post is important to how QotSlot will determine where one quote ends and the next one begins. In the default configuration, QotSLoT looks for all quotes to be seperated by two line breaks. For example:

"This is my first quote. If I hit enter twice..."

"That produces two line breaks, resulting in one empty line between quotes."

For another example, you can look at the page containing my list of quotes posted here.

2.) Once the source page is setup you'll need to add the gadget to your site's layout. To add the Qot[SLoT] widget, go to Layout -> Page Elements and click 'Add a Gadget.' From the gadget list, select and add an 'HTML \ Javascript' gadget. Copy and paste the QotSlot code into the 'Content' section of the gadget.

3.) Now locate the 'USER CONFIGURED VARIABLES' section of the code you just pasted and change the 'quotesPage' variable to the address of the blog entry containing your quotes.

4.) The other variable here is the 'numBreaks' variable. 'numBreaks' tells QotSlot how many xml line breaks(<br />) to expect between quotes. If your quotes, themselves, contain grouped line breaks, then you may need to increase the numBreaks value so QotSlot doesn't cut them in half. Bear in mind, of course, that if you tell QotSlot to expect more line breaks - for example three line breaks - between quotes, then your list of quotes will have to reflect that, and each quote will need to be seperated from the next by three breaks (two empty lines) in the body of the post.

5.) Johnny Five is alive.

Things to know

QotSlot will not display quotes when you are viewing your page through one of Blogger's preview windows. Instead it will display the text, "Qot[SLoT] is either loading the quote or being viewed in preview mode." This is by design.

If, at any time, you think the Qot[SLoT] isn't working, the most likely culprit is simply that you came to your page from a part of the Blogger editing console. When you are viewing the live version of your site the 'preview text' should only display momentarily while QotSlot retreives the data from your list of quotes.

That's all I've got for now. Leave me a comment if you're using it, if you encounter an error, or if you update the code.

Quotes of the [Some length of Time]

The page you are looking for has moved to

http://tvopiate.blogspot.com/2010/10/quotations-anonymous.html