Category Archives: politics

asymmetry

Virginia Postrel observes: So here’s the question: What happens when we find ourselves facing militant reactionaries who, for purely pragmatic reasons, are willing to use adaptable, decentralized organization and technologies against us? Unlike our Cold War adversaries, the militants who … Continue reading

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“No Sugar”

Greg Egan eloquently denounces pointless cruelty toward refugees.

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the cyberpunk age

We’re living in the future: I just got spammed by Hamas.

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can you say “backlash”?

Oh dear oh dear oh dear. School officials in California are warning parents that they cannot educate their children at home unless they obtain professional teaching credentials.

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till somebody we like can be elected

Over at Little Green Footballs, chins are pulled: For all the talk about bringing democracy to the Arab world, this problem seems nearly intractable. If the uneducated, highly propagandized people of the Arab world are given freedom of choice, many … Continue reading

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central control ≠ safety

Homeland Insecurity by Charles C. Mann in The Atlantic, September 2002: Indeed, Schneier says, Kerckhoffs’s principle applies beyond codes and ciphers to security systems in general: every secret creates a potential failure point. Secrecy, in other words, is a prime … Continue reading

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us and them

Insta observes that “the left looks for heretics and the right looks for converts”. Which made me think of a certain blowhard who likes to explain that we libertarians (real ones, anyway; most ‘libertarians’ are really crypto-totalitarians, you know) are … Continue reading

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