If there’s one thing that Republican and Democrats can agree on, even today, it’s that gerrymandering electoral district boundaries is a gross perversion of democracy. If it doesn’t benefit them, that is. If it benefits them, of course, they’ll say…
Archive: An Immodest DNS Proposal
This was the first story I submitted to K5, and was the essay that resulted in a group of us creating The OpenNIC. An old post of mine from Kuro5hin.Org, dated “Thu Jun 1st, 2000 at 10:45:30 PM EST”. We…
Dissenting From Judge Dredd: The Law Is The State
I’m gonna start with something that may not be popular with Democrats and Democrat-supporters. The federal government should be deporting anyone who’s here illegally. That’s what the law says it should be doing. And a State that ignores the laws…
Leviathan Search: You Can Make The World You Want To Live In
If the organizations and systems in the world don’t do what you want or do it the way you want, you don’t have to convince them to change; you can replace them instead. Even if only for yourself. This is…
You Should Read This: What Would You Do?
Today In Tabs is the odd and idiosyncratic blog of Rusty Foster, and if it has any single theme it’s probably a critique of modern journalism. And it’s good at that. But it’s also full of his personal ruminations on…
Democracy: It’s A Goal, Not A Destination
One of the big problems with democracy is that it’s reeeaallly sloooow at any significant scale. It takes a long time for millions of votes to be collected and counted. This limits how many questions can effectively be dealt with…
Build Back Smaller: The United States Was Too Big
Well, ok. It wasn’t too big to occasionally be useful, or too big to kinda function. At least for a while. But the U.S. was too big to stay unified. 350 million people, with the level of communication technology we…
The C-Word: Getting All Dramatic For The 4th Of July
I’ve been using the C-word a lot since January. For good reason. As I said at that link: “Taking direct control over the functions of the State without legal authority is a coup.” That was in reference to Musk and…
Enabling Fascism: The Supreme Court Targets Judicial Review
I mentioned this earlier, but hadn’t done a whole post about it yet because, well, we apparently live in a world where the Supreme Court ordering the end of meaningful judicial review by any lower courts isn’t the main story?…
Version Control: Every Word Of Every Law Should Be Tracked
I’ve brought this up before. Proposed legislation should be tracked with version control. As I said in that earlier piece: See, as it stands now it’s not uncommon for a law to be passed with no one able to say…