The Null Device
2001/12/24
An interesting (if somewhat old) interview with Ken MacLeod where he talks about his books and the political/social systems speculated on therein:
I think a lot of people who are libertarians now are just libertarians because the stock market is going up, frankly. As long as the market is booming, they'll be pro-market. If there was another depression or something like that, they'd probably change their tune pretty damn quick.
(from the archives of a mailing list, from about a year ago.)
Making the best of a bad thing: Convicted perjurer, former Tory deputy chairman and best-selling pulp novelist Lord Jeffrey Archer is able to use his stay in prison as a unique opportunity for research. Archer says that prison has taught him more about drugs than life outside ever did. He has also been using his spare time in writing, but given his history, I doubt we can expect the next Ballad of Reading Gaol to emerge.
Ann "Kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity" Coulter has another screed out, and in it she wants to invade France for breeding anti-American sentiment, funding the Palestinian Authority and refusing to extradite terrorist suspects:
Having exhausted itself in a spirited fight with the Nazis in the last war, France cannot work up the energy to oppose terrorism. For decades now, France has nurtured, coddled and funded Islamic terrorists. (Moreover, the Great Satan is getting a little sick of our McDonald's franchises being attacked on behalf of notoriously inefficient French dairy farmers.)
This summer, Paris made Mumia Abu-Jamal an honorary citizen of Paris. In America's cowboy, bloodlust, rush-to-judgment approach to the death penalty, this convicted Philadelphia cop-killer has been sitting on death row -- and giving radio interviews and college commencement addresses -- for 20 years. Since "Mumia" sounds like a Muslim terrorist, Parisians can use the same bumper stickers for the war.