“ Half of the American citizenry is now explicitly pro-torture (and the question even specified that the torture would be used not against Terrorists, but “terrorist suspects”). Just think about what that says about how coarsened and barbaric our populace is and what types of abuses that entrenched mentality is certain to spawn in the future, particularly in the event of another terrorist attack. But even more meaningful is the question itself — it’s now normal and standard for pollsters to include among the various questions about garden-variety political controversies (health care, tax and spending policies, clean energy approaches) a question about whether one believes the U.S. Government should torture people (are you for or against government torture?) That’s how normalized torture has become, how completely eroded the taboo is in the United States.
Pseudolectual
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I work for Vimeo.com
as Community Director.
email: my first name @ vimeo.com
Assume this is a work of fiction.
June 24, 2009
2020:
Thanks to its photovoltaic fabric, the tent is solar-powered, and it also sports a heated groundsheet, magnetic induction charging pouch and wireless hub.
Ride out the economic collapse in style.
1 week ago
Our Brains Are Not Us
1 week agoMany neuroscientists have claimed that our minds are just a function of and thus reducible to our brains. I challenge neuroreductionism by arguing that the mind emerges from and is shaped by interaction among the brain, body, and environment. The mind is not located in the brain but is distributed among these three entities. I then explore the implications of the distributed mind for neuroethics.
“ Hurrah for UK public. BBC report says they don’t mind being offended and would prefer to see taste boundaries pushed. Gawd bless you!
This is good news for those of us who love to import hilariously inappropriate Britcoms.
1 week ago
“ Just received word from my friends at EcoCN that Gmail and Google are now blocked in China, as of 30 minutes ago.
- friend: being an artist is retarded
- friend: i should have gone to nursing school
- friend: that way i could just 'accidentally' kill all the people who were dicks to me
- friend: or at least jab them with needles
US drone kills 45 people attending a funeral for relatives killed by US drone
At least 45 people have died in a missile strike by a US drone aircraft in a Taliban stronghold area of Pakistan, officials there have said.
The people killed in South Waziristan had been attending a funeral for others killed in a US drone strike earlier.
Intelligence officials said at least 45 people had been killed and dozens more injured in the later strike, when two missiles were fired, but a local official told BBC News the death toll was more than 50.
Ugh.
1 week ago
Chris Anderson’s Free Contains Apparent Plagiarism
In the course of reading Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Hyperion, $26.99), for a review in an upcoming issue of VQR, we have discovered almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources. These instances were identified after a cursory investigation, after I checked by hand several dozen suspect passages in the whole of the 274-page book. This was not an exhaustive search, since I don’t have access to an electronic version of the book. Most of the passages, but not all, come from Wikipedia. Anderson is the author of the best-selling 2006 book The Long Tail and is the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine. The official publication date for Free is July 7.
YOWCH! I’ll be looking for the follow-up to this.
1 week ago
June 23, 2009
“ Set my Twitter account to Tehran’s local timezone to make it tougher on Iran’s security that is searching tweets from that timezone.
“ Perez Hilton is such an attention-seeker, he should be called PARIS Hilton.
