What Planet does Naomi Wolf Live On?

Naomi Wolf’s essay The Porn Myth strongly suggests that she lives on some other planet. It has been pretty well fisked over at Haight Speech and elsewhere. But so far, all of the people I’ve seen shredding it are women. Perhaps this is because it’s politically incorrect for us panting, grunting persons-of-testicle to trash-talk a… Continue reading What Planet does Naomi Wolf Live On?

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Stupid Like A Fox

For the kind of articulate extrovert who tends to go into politics or the media, it can be very difficult to believe that a stumble-tongued, inarticulate man can be other than an idiot. As an articulate extrovert myself, I’ve had to struggle with this. Like most of our media and chattering classes, my instinct too… Continue reading Stupid Like A Fox

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Attack of the Malaysian Moonbats

Today, a bunch of prominent warbloggers were hit by a denial-of-service attack apparently orchestrated by a bunch of comically incompetent al-Qaeda affiliates in Malaysia — and I wasn’t a target. I’d ask what I’ve been doing wrong with my life that I missed out on the honor of being personally targeted by Osama’s fuckwit brigade.… Continue reading Attack of the Malaysian Moonbats

Planets of Adventure

Bless Jim Baen, who at times seems determined to reprint the entire Golden Age midlist of SF. for he has given us a good thick anthology of some of the best stories of Murray Leinster — a writer once counted among science-fiction’s reliable best, but since unfairly forgotten. I come away from Planets of Adventure… Continue reading Planets of Adventure

Toxic Christianity, round two

In the October 15th Best of the Web, James Taranto asks: So let’s see if we have this straight: The head of the Anglican Church is telling us that the wanton murder of thousands of innocent people [by Palestinian terrorists] is a sign of “serious moral goals,” while the liberation of millions [of Iraqis] from… Continue reading Toxic Christianity, round two

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Mohammed was a Christian

In a recent blog entry I mentioned that Islam appears to have begun life as a mildly schismatic Christian sect. In the comments on that entry someone called for sources. Here is what I know about this: (First, a note on my general background: I am neither a Christian nor a Moslem, and in fact… Continue reading Mohammed was a Christian

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Nuke ’em for Christ

Pat Robertson, the same paragon of Christian virtue who has opined in the past that Wiccans like me should be burned alive the way they used to in the good old days, just created an interesting dilemma for me by suggesting that the State Department should be nuked. As a pagan anarchist, I’m completely uninterested… Continue reading Nuke ’em for Christ

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No Flies On The U.S.

In his recent article Flypaper: A Strategy Unfolds, Andrew Sullivan trots out some confirming evidence for the theory that the U.S. is pursuing a “flypaper strategy” in Iraq — encouraging the Islamist terror network to fight American soldiers there so they won’t be attacking American civilians here. Mr. Sullivan’s analysis is plausible. Plausible enough that… Continue reading No Flies On The U.S.

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Statism — Love It Or Leave It

For many years I’ve been seeing proposals for implementing libertarian reforms that look superficially appealing and plausible, but on closer examination run hard aground either on some pesky reality of politics as it is or the extreme difficulty of waging a successful revolution. Since I’m a libertarian, you may well imagine that I find this… Continue reading Statism — Love It Or Leave It

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One year later…

One year ago today, the World Trade Center fell in flames. And that very day, just a few hours after the event, I wrote the following: QUOTE BEGINS Some friends have asked me to step outside my normal role as a technology evangelist today, to point out in public that a political panic reaction to… Continue reading One year later…

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An Open Letter To Darl McBride

Mr. McBride: Late yesterday. I learned that you have charged that your company is the victim of an insidious conspiracy masterminded by IBM. You have urged the press and public to believe that the Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation and Red Hat and Novell and various Linux enthusiasts are up in arms… Continue reading An Open Letter To Darl McBride

Brother, Can you Paradigm?

I just read an interview with my friend Tim O’Reilly in which he approvingly cited Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. There are some books so bad, but so plausible and influential, that periodically trashing them in public is almost an obligation. The really classic stinkeroos of this kind, like Karl Marx’s Das Kapital,… Continue reading Brother, Can you Paradigm?

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The Myth of Man the Killer

(An updated version of this essay lives here.) One of the most dangerous errors of our time is the belief that human beings are uniquely violent animals, barely restrained from committing atrocities on each other by the constraints of ethics, religion, and the state. It may seem odd to some to dispute this, given the… Continue reading The Myth of Man the Killer

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Hacking and Refactoring

In 2001, there was a history-making conference of software-engineering thinkers in Snowbird, Colorado. The product of that meeting was a remarkable document called the Agile Manifesto, a call to overturn many of the assumptions of traditional software development. I was invited to be at Snowbird, but couldn’t make it. Ever since, though, I’ve been sensing… Continue reading Hacking and Refactoring

A Taxonomy of Cognitive Stress

I have been thinking about UI design lately. With some help from my friend Rob Landley, I’ve come up with a classification schema for the levels at which users are willing to invest effort to build competence. The base assumption is that for any given user there is a maximum cognitive load any given user… Continue reading A Taxonomy of Cognitive Stress

The Delusion of Expertise

I learned something this weekend about the high cost of the subtle delusion that creative technical problem-solving is the preserve of a priesthood of experts, using powers and perceptions beyond the ken of ordinary human beings. Terry Pratchett is the author of the Discworld series of satirical fantasies. He is — and I don’t say… Continue reading The Delusion of Expertise

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Fascism Is Not Dead

Fascism is not dead. The revelations now coming out of Iraq about Baathist atrocities lend this observation particular point; Saddam Hussein was able to successfully imitate Hitler for three decades. Baathists using similar methods still run Syria, and elsewhere in the Islamic world there are militarist/authoritarian tendencies that run uncomfortably close to fascism. Recent events… Continue reading Fascism Is Not Dead

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