I just sent the following letter to the Boston Globe after reading Elaine Scarry’s excellent piece Failsafe!: Congratulations on having the bravery to publish Elaine Scarry’s “Failsafe”. She is right to point out that distributed threats require distributed countermeasures. She is right to point out that centralized defense of the U.S. massively failed us. She… Continue reading Failsafe
Month: September 2002
Defeating Hussein Without Government
The aftermath of 9/11 is a hard time to be an anarchist. For many years before the WTC came down I believed that America could be better defended by have no government than by the system we have now, I imagined a nation of heavily armed militias, without the power-projection capabilities of a conventional military… Continue reading Defeating Hussein Without Government
Imperialists by necessity?
Steven den Beste wrote a long, intelligent and insightful essay on who the enemy is. I think he is right to see Afghanistan, Iraq, and the suppression of Al-Qaeda as phases of longer, wider war — a clash of civilizations driven by the failure of Islamic/Arab culture (though I would stress the problem of the… Continue reading Imperialists by necessity?
So, Howell Raines isn’t a complete waste of air
The NYT ran a pro-Linux editorial today. That’s good. They had to slip their “communitarian” spin in there, though, as if Linux hackers are all a bunch of PBS-worshiping Mother Jones readers and natural suckers for the fuzzy-sweater cause of the week. Hah. If they only knew. I’m not going to say my gun-toting red-meat… Continue reading So, Howell Raines isn’t a complete waste of air
Living With Microsoft
In today’s episode of the Microsoft follies, we learned that Media Player 9 is un-uninstallable. Deliberately. A A Microsoft spokesthing confirmed that Media Player 9 is so deeply integrated into the operating system that it cannot be removed without doing a `system restore’. Which, incidentally, will wipe out your Office installation. It’s at times like… Continue reading Living With Microsoft
When there’s nothing left to say, self-parody is the way
I’m just, barely, old enough to remember the anti-war Leftists of the 1960s and 1970s. I disagreed with them over Vietnam then, and I disagree with the anti-war Left’s agitation against a war on Iraq today. But as I read what comes out of minds of people like Robert Fisk and Noam Chomsky and Susan… Continue reading When there’s nothing left to say, self-parody is the way