The right to be rude

The historian Robert Conquest once wrote: “The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.” Today I learned that the Open Source Initiative has reached that point of bureaucratization. I – OSI’s co-founder and its president for its first six years… Continue reading The right to be rude

The Great Inversion

There’s a political trend I have been privately thinking of as “the Great Inversion”. It has been visible since about the end of World War II in the U.S., Great Britain, and much of Western Europe, gradually gaining steam and going into high gear in the late 1970s. The Great Inversion reached a kind of… Continue reading The Great Inversion

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Some places I won’t go

A few minutes ago I received a request by email from a conference organizer who wants me to speak at an event in a foreign country. Unfortunately, the particular country has become a place I won’t go. Having decided that I want my policy and my reasoning to be publicly known, I reproduce here the… Continue reading Some places I won’t go

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Grasping Bloomberg’s nettle

Michael Bloomberg, the former Mayor of New York perhaps best known for taking fizzy drinks, and now a Democratic presidential aspirant, has just caused a bit of a kerfuffle by suggesting that minorities be disarmed to keep them alive. I think the real problem with Bloomberg’s remark is not that it reads as shockingly racist,… Continue reading Grasping Bloomberg’s nettle

Gratitude for Beto

Beto O’Rourke is a pretty risible character even among the clown show that is the 2020 cycle’s Democratic candidate-aspirants. A faux-populist with a history of burglary and DUI, he married the heiress of a billionaire and money-bombed his way to a seat in the House of Representatives, only to fail when he ran for the… Continue reading Gratitude for Beto

Be the America Hong Kong thinks you are

I think this is my favorite Internet meme ever. Yeah, Hong Kong, we actually have a problem with Communist oppression here, too. Notably in our universities, but metastasizing through pop culture and social media censorship too. They haven’t totally captured the machinery of state yet, but they’re working on that Long March all too effectively.… Continue reading Be the America Hong Kong thinks you are

How the D candidates would introduce themselves at the next debate if they were honest

Hi, I’m Joe Biden. I’m the perfect apparatchik – no principles, no convictions, and no plan. I’m senile, and I have a problem with groping children. But vote for me anyway because orange man bad. Hi, I’m Kamala Harris. My white ancestors owned slaves, but I use the melanin I got from my Indian ancestors… Continue reading How the D candidates would introduce themselves at the next debate if they were honest

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The Rectification of Names

The sage Confucius was once asked what he would do if he was a governor. He said he would “rectify the names” to make words correspond to reality. He understood what General Semantics teaches; if your linguistic map is sufficiently confused, you will misunderstand the territory. And be readily outmaneuvered by those who are less… Continue reading The Rectification of Names

A libertarian rethinks immigration

Instapundit recently linked to an article at the libertarian Reason magazine with a premise I found – considering the authors and the magazine – surprisingly dimwitted. No, a border wall is not necessarily morally equivalent to the Berlin Wall, or anywhere near it. Consider Hadrian’s Wall, or the Great Wall of China. Sometimes there are… Continue reading A libertarian rethinks immigration

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Spotting the wild Fascist

The term “fascist” gets thrown around a lot by people who have no actual clue what Fascism was about. I know what it was about because when I was about 11 or 12 I read Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of of the Third Reich and became fascinated by the question which has driven my… Continue reading Spotting the wild Fascist

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Gun voodoo and intentionality

There’s a recent article about gun violence in Haiti that features the following quotes: But the anthropological lesson from Haiti is that the truth is more complex. It isn’t just the technological lethality of guns that makes them dangerous: They also exert a power on human agency. They change us. It is both the technology… Continue reading Gun voodoo and intentionality

Hacker culture and the politics of process defense

In my last two blog posts, on the attempted hijack of the Lerna license and speech suppression in the Python documentation, I have both urged the hacker culture to stay out of political issues and urged what some people will interpret as “political” stance with regard to political correctness and “diversity”-driven speech demands. The expected… Continue reading Hacker culture and the politics of process defense

Slaves to speech suppression are masters of nothing

Comes the news that the Python project has merged a request to partially eliminate the terms “master” and “slave” from its documentation on “diversity” grounds. Sensibly, Guido van Rossum at least refused to sever the project from uses of those terms in documentation of the underlying Unix APIs. I wish Guido had gone further and… Continue reading Slaves to speech suppression are masters of nothing

Non-discrimination is a core value of open source

Today I learned that something called the Lerna project has added a codicil to its MIT license denying the use of its software to a long list of organizations because it disagrees with a political choice those organizations have made. Speaking as one of the original co-authors of the

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The return of the servant problem

I think we all better hope we get germ-line genetic engineering and really effective nootropics real soon now. Because I think I have seen what the future looks like without these technologies, and it sucks.

The critical fraction

I’ve seen analyses of the long odds the U.S. government would face if it ever attempted to confiscate civilian firearms before. The Mathematics of Countering Tyranny seems like a particularly well done example. The authors compute that under very generous assumptions there are about 83000 door-knockers available to perform confiscation raids. Dividing that into the… Continue reading The critical fraction