I didn't know this was a thing, but since I've seen two posts about it on my flist today I'm guessing that it is. Which gives me an excuse to mention that Ta-Nehisi Coates is launching a Leviathan reading group, in case anyone else is interested.

I've never read Leviathan (the embarrassing truth is that philosophy in general tends to make me ( Read more... )

I am too unhappy, and too angry, to have much to say about last night's news. (By which I mean that I have altogether too much to say, but suspect that those who had the privilege of actually knowing him are busy saying all of it better than I could ( Read more... )

Some of you may be interested in this catch by a dKos diarist: evidently the Republican Study Committee released a fairly radical report on flaws in current copyright law and the desirability of correcting those flaws this past Friday, only to have it pulled almost immediately in response to pressure from the RIAA and MPAA. The diarist did manage ( Read more... )

. . . yes, it's another boring post about something I didn't particularly want to be talking about. In this case, online security and hacking issues, brought to you by a combination of yesterday's high-profile and harrowing story by Matt Honan of how his Apple account was hacked, with disastrous and instantaneous consequences (read it if you haven ( Read more... )

As one of the people who was critical of the Board's decision, I think it's only fair for me to make a point of thanking the Readercon committee for doing the difficult (and I'm sure painful) work of fixing it. I speak only for myself, of course, and I'm far from being the person most affected by all that has happened; but as a woman and a member ( Read more... )

For anyone who is following this situation, and for any reason hasn't seen these yet:

1. Genevieve Valentine's situation report, as of this morning.

2. Referenced in that post: Farah Mendelson's brief announcement of the likely (long-ish, but internet standards) timeline for results from the full Readercon committee's ongoing reconsideration of ( Read more... )

The concom has handed down a decision, more or less, but is apparently refusing to explain its reasoning ( Read more... )

I was going to call this "Today's Must Read," but it may actually be the season's must-read: Cole's new front-pager at Balloon Juice talks about what precisely it is that Bain Capital does to make all that money, why this is not the "creative destruction" so beloved of the theory of capitalism and efficient markets, and why and how our current ( Read more... )

It had to happen, sooner or later, and I did know that. Eventually, I was going to find software I was interested in using that won't run under my old but stable and efficient OS 10.5.8. And now it has happened: if I even want to try the demo for Tinderbox, I need to upgrade to 10.6.1I should probably think about doing this anyway, or at least ( Read more... )

Fallows is an establishment figure, albeit a liberal-leaning one: not a man one thinks of as a wild-eyed conspiracy-theory-prone partisan given to overheated rhetoric about the state of the nation and the world. As of today, he is calling what has been happening in the United States over the past twelve years a slow-motion coup d'etat. I wish I ( Read more... )