The ideal of democracy is relevant to countries, not to groups

Recently I had a discussion with someone, who bemoaned the loss of the principles of equality and democracy in Wikipedia, after cases of disputes and vandalism. I did not feel easy with the principles which he expounded. While democracy and personal liberty are usually related, there are some cases, in which they conflict. The Nazis came to power in Germany through democratic means. The Palestinians elected Hamas in certifiably democratic elections, as evidenced by the fact that Hamas got much less than 97% of the votes.

I was also involved with a nonprofit, which was formed to pursue certain goals. The nonprofit had a member, who used to troll the nonprofit’s mailing lists, and to advocate goals different from the nonprofit’s goals. Eventually he resigned from membership in the nonprofit, but his actions and claims need to be dealt with on a philosophical basis.

One day, I read A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy and now I can better express the premises behind the apparent loss of equality and democracy in groups of people formed to achieve a certain objective.

In Wikipedia, once upon a time, everyone was equal. Now, some people are more equal than others. My friend was not happy with this state of affairs. Personally I had no problems with this, because opinions, which oppose those of the “equal-more” people in Wikipedia, can be voiced in the wide Internet – only not necessarily in Wikipedia’s own Web pages.

When setting up a regime in a country, it should respect individual freedoms, and be as democratic as possible as long as it does not conflict individual freedoms. However, inside that country (and even across its borders), one of the freedoms is the freedom of association. It is the freedom of people to form a group to achieve a goal desirable by them (as long as it does not violate individual freedoms).

However! Once a group has been formed, if it has more than few tens of people, it needs some sort of government. It needs to be able to keep out people, who are opposed to the goal of the group’s organizers. It needs a mechanism for dispute resolution, to resolve disputes among people who agree about the ends but argue about the appropriate means for attaining those ends. It needs a mechanism for delegating certain tasks and responsibilities from all group’s members to some members, so that other members can concentrate upon other tasks (delegated to them).

All those mechanisms together conspire to discriminate among insiders and outsiders. Those people, who support the group’s goal, are insiders. People, who oppose the group’s goal or are ambivalent about it, are outsiders. All serious groups discriminate among them.

The dispute resolution and delegation mechanisms have the result of stratifying the group. Some people become leaders and make decisions in behalf of the entire group. Then equality among the group’s members gets lost.

BUT! If the group was properly formed, is properly managed, and its members understand the philosophy and the goals – the group achieves its goal. The group’s major purpose was not to practice democracy and equality. The group’s purpose was to achieve the goal, for whose attainment it was formed.

While acting inside the group, the personal freedoms of the group’s members are subordinated to the group’s goal. On the other hand, if they ever feel uncomfortable with the group, they are free to leave it any time (a group, which does not allow its members to leave it, is or should be illegal). Therefore this is not a real loss of freedom.

Accessibility problem from which even mighty Google suffers

In several forms – both paper and Web-based ones – you are expected to enter a phone number.
The phone number presumably needs to be a valid one.
Some Web based forms enforce this. They validate the phone number and do not allow you to proceed unless you enter a valid phone number.

However, in my case, no matter what phone number I enter, it is not a valid phone number. At least according to the criteria that if anyone makes a phone call to that number, he/she’ll get a reply from me. I am deaf and never use the phone for talking.

In order to be true to the spirit of the forms, I need to enter a FAX number, and indicate that it is a FAX number rather than a phone number.

The snag is that by entering “FAX +972-x-xxxxxxx” or something similar (972 is the international prefix of Israel), I run afoul of the validating software behind some Web sites. Especially Web sites running Google programs, such as Google Analytics.

So in order to proceed, I am forced to enter a nonsense phone number, lie or skip when this is possible.

There may be also people, who do not have their own phone number at all, not even for FAX messages. Yet they surf the Internet. How would they cope with such bossy forms, which require something which looks like a phone number?

Turkey (the kind which is eaten and is called "Indian hen" in Israel) Trivia

In yet another trivia expedition, I came upon a Google Answers thread about turkeys. Turns out that the American businesses dealing with turkey meat (farmers and processing plants) have a Web site about their favorite topic, which serves to promote eating turkey meat.

It was casually mentioned that even though turkey is a traditional American food, the per capita consumption of this meat is actually higher in Israel than in USA. But the reference to this trivia is in another Web site Per capita Turkey meat consumption in selected countries.

I have voted. How about you?

There is a ballot across the street from my home.
But I was not to vote there. I was to vote in another ballot, about 3 minutes walk from my home.
I knew about this fact beforehand, so I wasted time on the near ballot area only to admire the posters put there by some of the political parties.
As I approached “my” ballot location, I saw posters there as well and tried to guess which parties are better organized.

There was no queue at entrance to the room where I was to vote. Ordinarily I am happy when there are no queues. But in this case, it was alarming – indicative of low turnout.

When voting, I had grave dilemma. There is one party, which should have representation in the Knesset. Its representation is rather essential, in fact. But if it gets too many MPs, it is liable to go berserk like Raful’s Tzomet or last Knesset’s Shinui.
On the other hand, there is another party, which will probably do reasonably good work governing the country. It does not have the important platform the first party has. But it is a party which populated its list of candidates with seasoned politicians, who held all kinds of positions where they needed to have real responsibility. It is a party, which the more seats it gets in the Knesset (up to limit of 60, of course), the better it will be in the next few years.

At least none of those two parties made it to the black list of parties, which send spam to the electorate.

Eventually I made my decision and voted.

A Swedish hard of hearing pilot is circumnavigating the earth

Johan Hammarström is a Swedish hard of hearing pilot. His life dream was to be an airplane pilot. His initial attempts to apply for pilot license were thwarted because his hearing loss is about 65dB. Regulations in effect at the time allowed maximum hearing loss of 45dB.
He fought the authorities, and was successful in getting permission to have pilot license after an audiologist tested him and proved that he can clearly understand instructions from control towers under the circumstances in effect in airplanes.

(In USA, there are deaf airplane pilots. But they are restricted to flying in areas without radio contact.)

Now, Johan Hammarström is flying around the world and is trying to raise consciousness of the world to the hard of hearing, and to raise the aspirations of hard of hearing youths.

Today Johan Hammarström is in Israel, about two weeks after starting his journey.

This evening (27 March 2006) he gave a presentation about his project and his struggles in Bekol’s Wolf Chagle’s center of accessibility for the hearing impairment. The room was packed full with attendants. Two people from the Swedish embassy came as well. One of them told us of her childhood experience with fingerspelling signs and how the hearing schoolchildren learned them in order to communicate without the teacher noticing.

Hammarström’s presentation was made accessible by assistive listening devices (for those hard of hearing, who understand English) and by a notetaker who listened to the English lecture and typed in Hebrew (for the deaf and/or those who do not know English).

Addition from April 4, 2006: an article in Haaretz’s Web site about Johan Hammarström.

The best ten Seinfeld episodes

Several years ago, there was this series “Seinfeld”. I did not watch it from the beginning, but near the end I got more and more drawn to it.
One day it was going to be over. I saw the final program where they had a trial and were convicted due to all their sins.

There was a contest where people chose the best ten episodes, and they were aired one after another one evening when I did not going to have time to view them. I asked a friend to record the episodes in a VCR, and the friend recorded them.

The episodes were aired in reverse order of their rankings, so the best episode was the last one to be aired.
The video recording was cut off in middle of 9th episode (the 2nd best one). So I missed the best two episodes.

Few years later the best episode was broadcasted, and I enjoyed the story of how Elaine caused the Nazi soup establishment to be closed. It remained to view the missing part of the 2nd best one – The Contest. Today I decided I must at least read its transcript. Quickly I located it in Seinfeld Lists – The Contest.

Ohh-Uhh, now I can have a good night’s sleep [sic].

The accessibility problem of the deaf due to lecture recordings

One of the Free Software clubs in Israel (there are several such clubs, some of them organize Linux related lectures, others speak about Perl, and yet others do Python) wants to start making available from its Web site the audio recordings of lectures organized by it.

Of course, I am screaming murder about this. Before the new service is made available, my ability to access lecture contents after the fact was equivalent to that of hearing people. I could read presentations as well as they could. Now, that the lecture recordings would be available, they would be available only to hearing people. I would be left out in the cold.

This problem currently exists with Larry Wall’s lecture in Present Continous, Future Perfect, at least until all volunteers finish transcribing it (so far, 37:53 minutes out of 72:39 have been transcribed).

Now the search for technical, attitude and organizational problems is being conducted. One of my grave sorrows is that I am the only champion of the interests of the deaf in this discussion. Other Israeli deaf software developers (both oral and signing) are still hiding in the shadows.