Jesse Stay, an online friend of mine, has weighed in on the controversy surrounding the release of copyright material owned by the LDS church by Wikileaks. He says,
As an author, and Social Media developer, and Mormon, I thought I’d pipe in on what I think of the WikiLeaks issues going on. It’s as simple as if J.K. Rowling were to have her content posted and shared on WikiLeaks - she’d be doing the same thing! This is a matter of copyright, not secrecy.
I encourage you to read his full blog post. Excellent.
The chancellor of the University of Colorado at Boulder plans to raise $9 million to create an endowed chair for a professor of conservative thought. But some on the liberal campus say his quest for intellectual diversity is too radical.
For those of you who follow my Shelfari list, you will know I have been engrossed in a book by Jonah Goldberg titled Liberal Fascism. This is one of the best political books I have read in years and a book I recommend to everyone–especially my liberal/progressive friends. The book helps to create a genealogical record of modern progressivism which to me was a very surprising history. I think many conservatives and progressives lack a good understanding of the historical underpinnings of their beliefs.
I have been very surprised by the visceral reaction this book evokes, especially amongst my friends on the left. Surely, the Hitler mustache superimposed over the smiley face is designed to grab attention and sell more books. I should make clear, that this book does not attempt to link modern progressives with Nazism or Hitler. Jonah goes out of his way, as the author, to make sure it is clear that is not his intention. His goal is to set the record straight about where fascism lies on the political spectrum. It was and is a phenomenon of the left not the right as is so commonly believed.
Here is the author Jonah Goldberg talking about it.
Because of the reaction to the book, I am adding another video clip where Jonah is talking to Will Wilkinson of the Cato Institute about the book and the reaction to it. You can see it here:
Well, here you are at your college graduation. And I know what you’re thinking: “Gimme the sheepskin and get me outta here!” But not so fast. First you have to listen to a commencement speech.
Don’t moan. I’m not going to “pass the wisdom of one generation down to the next.” I’m a member of the 1960s generation. We didn’t have any wisdom.
Jonathan Zittrain, the amiable but intimidatingly brainy 38-year-old professor of “cyberlaw” at both Oxford and Harvard universities, thinks we shouldn’t forget the Hush-A-Phone story: it shows that unimaginable future innovations depend on our present-day technologies being “generative”, or open to being fiddled with. (A personal computer is generative: it can be programmed to do things the manufacturer could never have predicted. A coffee-maker is not.)
But things are looking grim, Zittrain argues in his new book, The Future Of The internet And How To Stop It. While we rightly fret about censorship of the web, a cause with which Zittrain has been closely involved, we’re missing another serious problem, beneath our noses. To put it briefly: those gadgets you love so much — your iPod, your iPhone, your BlackBerry, your PlayStation, your Sky+ box — may be killing the internet.
