Politics

I've written a moderate amount which I'd classify as political.

• quite a lot concerning Intellectual Property.
• concerning (other) monopolies
• citizenship
• the inequities to which capitalism is prone
• the proper nature of investment
• my take on Karl Marx's famous line property is theft
• an allegory on the information industry
• fragments from On Liberty, an essay by John Stuart Mill.
• the folly of prohibition
• bored of the net's perennial arguments about guns yet ?
• a call to action for Britain's liberals
• some thoughts on (spam, …) privacy and surveys
• A modest proposal concerning constitutions.
• sibboleth
• and my ramblings about being human aren't entirely unrelated to politics.

See Also (or instead)

• The War Prayer – Mark Twain, 1905.
• Adam Smith wasn't as laissez-faire as has sometimes been claimed.
• A visit to Roberto di Cosmo's web site will give some interesting insights into Micro$oft's antics. Those who can't read French might benefit from buying one of his books, CyberSnare or The Planetary Hold-Up instead.
• Bruce Schneier on the common falacy that alleges a conflict between privacy and security.
• Jacob Levich's article Bush's Orwellian address makes for poignant reading.
• Amita Guha's account, Fingered by the movie cops, of how the DMCA can cause someone to be punished for being falsely accused. This article is a perfect illustration of the common fallacy that law-abiding folks have nothing to fear from being snooped on: when the snoop makes a mistake, law-abiding folks can get punished for things they didn't do; and, in this case, there is no means either for them to obtain compensation or even to oblige their accuser (and the ISP who punished them) to acknowledge their innocence.
• John Perry Barlow's declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 1996/Feb/9th.
• Climate Change Questions Answered, in The Seattle Post Intelligencer.
• Peter Leeson describes situations in which anarchy has worked better than government.
• Catch shares motivate fishermen to be ecologically responsible.
• All hail the Eviscerati.
• Nick Davies on how PR hacks get over-worked journalists to pass of propaganda as news.
• Brian W. Vaszily's assorted articles discussing some scary truths about marketing.
• Advertising, social engineering and the new world order, a fine diatribe against the culture of distraction our media peddles; 'though the author associates all morality and virtue with religion, and I have some disagreement on what constitute morality and virtue, the general thrust is sound. If you want to find the cause of moral decline in our culture, look to the corporate media, not your political opponents.
• Yoram Bauman's book on Quantum Microeconomics.
• Robert Rich on the tension between capitalism and democracy.
• Joseph Stiglitz: on the limitations of deregulated markets.
• A brief (and fascinating) history of the neutron bomb and its creator – sheds some scary light on political processes.
• The Doonesbury comic strip is full of insightful satires on politics; unfortunately, it's now on a site which only gives you the latest month without a premium subscription, so I can no longer offer you a link to their page for the 1993/Nov/29th strip which begins Trudeau's excellent take on the conspiracy theorists … but (oh, irony) I can link to the images: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12.
• Lawrence of Arabia foreshadowed the modern Iraqi situation. He was an expert on guerrilla insurgency – having fomented one, among the arab peoples of roughly what is now Iraq.
• John Whiting's scathing account of the FBI's counterproductiveness and his review of Ronald Wright's A short history of progress.

Written by Eddy.