{"id":106,"date":"2002-09-18T22:44:00","date_gmt":"2002-09-19T03:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=106"},"modified":"2002-09-18T22:44:00","modified_gmt":"2002-09-19T03:44:00","slug":"so-howell-raines-isnt-a-complete-waste-of-air","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=106","title":{"rendered":"So, Howell Raines isn&#8217;t a complete waste of air"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The NYT ran a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2002\/09\/18\/opinion\/18WED2.html\"><br \/>\npro-Linux editorial<\/a> today.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s good.  They had to slip their &#8220;communitarian&#8221; spin in there, though, as if Linux hackers are all a bunch of PBS-worshiping <cite>Mother Jones<\/cite> readers and natural suckers for the fuzzy-sweater cause of the week.<\/p>\n<p>Hah.  If they only knew.  I&#8217;m not going to say my gun-toting<br \/>\nred-meat libertarianism is typical, because it isn&#8217;t.  Actually<br \/>\nthe mass centroid of hackers&#8217; politics is a lot like the<br \/>\nblogosphere&#8217;s, a sort of soft-libertarianism-leaning-towards-conservatism or vice-versa<br \/>\n(the centroid used to be further left but a lot has changed in the last decade).<br \/>\nMuch less radical than me, but still enough to give the likes<br \/>\nof Raines a bad case of the vapors.<\/p>\n<p>But let&#8217;s keep that our little secret, OK?  If Raines wants to believe that open-source people are some kind of cross between Greenpeace and the Ethical Culture Society, that&#8217;s just fine.  We&#8217;ll<br \/>\ntake the Gray Lady&#8217;s backing.  It&#8217;s another small step on the road to world domination.<\/p>\n<p>The day will come when we will be the guys running the<br \/>\nworld&#8217;s entire digital infrastructure (not such a stretch; we<br \/>\nalready run the Internet).  Our example will teach Howell&#8217;s<br \/>\nkids  stuff about the power of decentralization and voluntary cooperation, all the things leftists pay lip-service to until the<br \/>\nlast second before they&#8217;d have to actually apply them.  And<br \/>\nthe world will change out from under him.  Subtly. Powerfully.<br \/>\nAnd in ways he can&#8217;t guess at yet.<\/p>\n<p>It should be a fun ride.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The NYT ran a pro-Linux editorial today. That&#8217;s good. They had to slip their &#8220;communitarian&#8221; 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&#8217;m not going to say my gun-toting red-meat&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=106\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">So, Howell Raines isn&#8217;t a complete waste of air<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}