I just sent the following letter to the Boston Globe
after reading Elaine Scarry’s excellent piece Failsafe!:

Congratulations on having the bravery to publish Elaine
Scarry’s “Failsafe”. She is right to point out that distributed
threats require distributed countermeasures. She is right to point out
that centralized defense of the U.S. massively failed us. She is
right to point [...]

The aftermath of 9/11 is a hard time to be an anarchist.
For many years before the WTC came down I believed that America
could be better defended by have no government than by the system we
have now, I imagined a nation of heavily armed militias, without
the power-projection capabilities of a conventional military but
with the capability [...]

Steven den Beste wrote a long, intelligent and insightful essay on who the enemy is. I think he is right to see Afghanistan, Iraq, and the suppression of Al-Qaeda as phases of longer, wider war — a clash of civilizations driven by the failure of Islamic/Arab culture (though I would stress the problem [...]

The NYT ran a
pro-Linux editorial today.
That’s good. They had to slip their “communitarian” spin in there, though, as if Linux hackers are all a bunch of PBS-worshiping Mother Jones readers and natural suckers for the fuzzy-sweater cause of the week.
Hah. If they only knew. I’m not going to say my gun-toting
red-meat [...]

In today’s episode of the Microsoft follies, we learned that
Media Player 9
is un-uninstallable. Deliberately.
A A Microsoft spokesthing confirmed that Media Player 9 is so deeply
integrated into the operating system that it cannot be removed without
doing a `system restore’. Which, incidentally, will wipe out your
Office installation.
It’s at times like this that, contemplating Microsoft users, [...]

I’m just, barely, old enough to remember the anti-war Leftists of
the 1960s and 1970s. I disagreed with them over Vietnam then, and
I disagree with the anti-war Left’s agitation against a war on Iraq
today. But as I read what comes out of minds of people like Robert
Fisk and Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag these [...]