Many took Alan Greenspan’s comments about the role of law in shaping markets as a caution against overextending intellectual property rights.
I’m promoting a “Calculation Debate” for the Information Age. Greenspan’s cautious endorsement can only help.
World of Ends got a lot of links a few weeks ago but today I was reminided how foundational the idea of “centrality” is to our world view. We all want to avoid being “marginalized”– relagated to the periphery. Disconnected. Irrelevant.
Bloggers have words to describe this quest for status:
Weblogs don’t change power laws. Everyone has a voice, but don’t expect to be heard right away. I can imagine the Dave Winer’s frustration writing about weblogs for years before he got much attention. On the scale of history, 5 or 10 years is a revolution, but to the individual, revolutions can still feel like an eternity.
One of the advantages weblogs have in promoting a cause is the ability to archive fragments of vision. These fragements may go unnoticed for a while, but eventually they’ll start to pile up. Some of them will be too abstract or unactionable, but by constantly refering back to these fragements, you could can build something large, one day at a time.
Human Rights Watch published an article a few weeks ago about suspicions that the US government is using torture in its war against terrorism, even as it condemns it in Iraq. They quote an “unnamed American Official”:
“If you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the time, you probably aren’t doing your job”
-Washington Post [12-26-2002]
Previously, Bush didn’t make distinctions:
We will make no distinction between the terrorists and those who support them. #
But when it comes to torture, the US is willing to employ torture subcontractors in Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco:
“We don’t kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them.”
-Washington Post [12-26-2002]
The Bush Doctrine reminds me of the political philosophy class I took a few years ago: Wolfowitz (liberally paraphrased):
The challenge of the 21st century is the proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction, which make it possible for small groups of people to threaten countries. To prevent this, one nation is needed, whose power is beyond contest. The United States of America must be this Leviathan. #
“Nature has made men so equal in the faculties of body, and mind; as that though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind that another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest hath strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himself.” #
– Leviathan Chapter 13
The US’s former allies do not support the “US as Leviathan” System and accuse it of violating Law 9:
“If nature therefore have made men equal, that equality is to be acknowledged: or if nature have made men unequal, yet because men that think themselves equal will not enter into conditions of peace, but upon equal terms, such equality must be admitted. And therefore for the ninth law of nature, I put this: that every man acknowledge another for his equal by nature. The breach of this precept is pride.” #
-Leviathan Chapter 15