{"id":2803,"date":"2011-02-03T08:47:48","date_gmt":"2011-02-03T16:47:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/?p=2803"},"modified":"2012-03-20T09:42:01","modified_gmt":"2012-03-20T17:42:01","slug":"try-this-analogy-on-for-size","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/?p=2803","title":{"rendered":"try this analogy on for size"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An anarchist who uses the Internet is as hypocritical as a Protestant who uses the Latin alphabet. <!--more--><\/p>\n<p><strong>Later:<\/strong> Too obscure?  That&#8217;s never happened before.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;re sometimes taunted with &#8220;and yet you use the Internet, which came from a <em>government<\/em> research project, nyah nyah.&#8221;  We can reply that the private\/voluntary sector would inevitably have developed something of the sort, if not for active discouragement by states (communications was a state monopoly in many places, and largely a regulatory monopoly here until 198x).  Statists say, &#8220;Phooey, anyone can play what-if with no evidence.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>So, let&#8217;s consider the Latin alphabet, which remained standard for speakers of Romance, Germanic, Celtic, Hungarian and West Slavic over a thousand years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire &#8212; thanks to the Roman Church.  That there would be no inter-network protocol without DARPA is about as credible as to suppose that Europe would be illiterate without the Papacy.<\/p>\n<p>(More likely, Europe would have a dozen incompatible alphabets, like India, rather than three.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An anarchist who uses the Internet is as hypocritical as a Protestant who uses the Latin alphabet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,3,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-politics","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2803"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2803\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3050,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2803\/revisions\/3050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bendwavy.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}