Freedom Is Slavery

Robert Birgenau on violence against protesters:
It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not nonviolent civil disobedience.
Robert Birgenau on violence against himself:
[A]s a long time civil rights activist and firm supporter of non-violence, I do not respond to violent, untruthful verbal attacks.
I cannot imagine a definition of "violence" under which being held responsible for an assault that you ordered is more violent than pepper spray and nightsticks.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rhetorical Bestiary: The Perfect Number of Teeth

Image
If you do not accept the theory of evolution, I will probably not change your mind. However, I hope I can convince you not to offer this as an anti-evolution argument: We have the perfect number of teeth to fit in our mouths. While creationism perfectly accounts for that result, evolutionism predicts a contrary result: As our faces evolved from chimpanzee-like faces to human faces, the shortening of the muzzle would have caused the teeth to become badly overcrowded in the front of the mouth.
Read more

Discipline is not the Issue Here

In 2004, Hillary Adams used Kazaa to download some music. Her father, an Aransas County judge, sat Hillary down to have a calm discussion about P2P networks, why much content on them is illegal, and how file sharing undercuts to earnings of struggling artists. Hillary recorded this video: My primary aim is not to condemn William Adams, though of course some judgments will creep in. Instead, I should like to talk about a wrong-headed narrative that has grown around this story. One article I read speculated that this video would set off a national dialogue about child discipline. Such a dialogue would surely be beneficial. But parental discipline is not what we see in this video, even if an unrepentant Adams couched his actions in those very terms. [I]n my mind I haven’t done anything wrong other than discipline my child after she was caught stealing, and I did lose my temper but I’ve since apologized. It looks worse than it is. (Some of you, desensitized to
Read more

XML can suck as a data format

There's a lot of hype about XML as a data format these days. Everything is supposed to be XML. This isn't such a bad idea. Any time you decide to use XML you don't need to invent your own syntax. (Side note: I think many people are confused about what XML actually is . I like to think of it as a syntax, rather than a language. When you make your own XML format, your basically inventing the semantics that go with the syntax.) Now, I think XML is great as a format for documents. I think that the combination of XML and XSLT could do a lot for achieving the kind of awesome flexibility of LaTeX while providing a stronger separation of semantics and presentation. The trouble is that XML often falls down when it comes to dealing with data (as opposed to a document). The bread and butter data structures of any programming language are sequences (variously called lists, vectors, arrays) and maps (variously called hashes, dictionaries, and associative arrays). For seria
Read more