The Null Device
2003/4/15
Fun activities for post-ironic hipsters: pretending to be student journalists and infiltrating Scientology offices. (via The Antic Muse) Maybe the Hipster Scouts should have a "winding up Scientologists" badge.
These people claim that former RIAA lobbyist Hilary Rosen is now writing intellectual-property laws for the new government of Free Iraq. If this is true, I wonder what bold experiments (abolition of public domain? criminalisation of non-DRM file formats/P2P filesharing? copyright as perpetual property title?) Rosen will have a free hand to try out without the legacy baggage of preexisting laws. Of course, it could be a hoax. (Maybe if the Democrats were in the Whitehouse...) (via bOING bOING)
I know; maybe they can fund the reparation of Iraqi heritage damaged by museum looters by giving the copyrights to Disney or someone and allowing them to invest in rebuilding Mesopotamia, in return for a guarantee that the profits will go swiftly back to head office.
Camgirl saved from armed robbers by her webcam, and a friend who called the police. Of course, it could be a publicity stunt. (via Techdirt)
His deputy's badge shining in the glow of victory (or even "victory"), Australia's Prime Minister has called for France to resign from the security council, to be replaced by a permanent member "more representative of the modern world" At the moment, the French would have to voluntarily surrender their seat on the Security Council, and with typical Gallic arrogance, they refuse to acknowledge their own irrelevance in the New American Century and fall on their sword. Hey, maybe if enough media pundits, bloggers and talk radio hosts make sarcastic remarks about cheese-eating surrender monkeys, they'll be shamed into getting with the program and the hell out of dodge. Failing that, we could always drop a few high-tech precision bombs on the UN headquarters, claim the UN is broken and rebuild it, better than before, and more compliant with the New World Order.
If you were a neo-Trotskyist libertarian, you would probably have to be a Scottish science-fiction author. And now you'd have a blog here. And his commentary is as sharp as his novels.
America: a country where ridiculous proportions of the population believe they were created by god, abducted by aliens, and attacked by Iraq. Also where some people believe that someone who burns a paper drawing of a US flag is as good as asking to be crushed under a bulldozer. It's not just the Right. Every political persuasion in the US contains many more stupid people than it or its equivalent does in Europe. On the Left Bank of the Seine you see poststructuralists smoking, flirting, and eating veal. Poststructuralism in America gave us La-La Land liberal toytown totalitarianism. French Maoism gave us Sartre and Althusser. American Maoism gave us Klonsky and Avakian. (I could go on.)