Law & Society Blog

Bruce Schneier recently led a discussion about privacy and security at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy as part of a speaker series organized by Cory Doctorow. Here is the podcast, which doesn’t disappoint.

Michael Huemer offers a selection of quotes from the Bible. Some of them are indeed scary:When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations .

With the third season opener for Battlestar Galactica, Ron Moore firmly lays claim to the best series on TV since the West Wing.

“Manufacturing Consent” is a document written by Prof. Chomsky which tries to show that the institution of newsmedia is, and has historically been, beholden to the powers that be. The cornerstone of the book is a “Propaganda Model”, which explains the political slant of mass media according to five filters, all of them fairly sinister: […]

There are One Million Ways to Die (probably a conservative estimate), but terrorism is not one of the more likely causes, at least not in the US. Ryan Singel of Wired News has compiled this handy chart (HT: BoingBoing):Last week at Logan airport, the TSA guy who confiscated my toothpaste in pursuit of the War on Moisture said:Of course I know that this is BS. We all know.

The Dada exhibition at the MoMa is eerily timely.

Sex sells alright, but fear is the real deal. It is oamazing how afraid people are.

More parts of government could in fact be much better, and to significant human benefit and yes that includes more human liberty in the libertarian sense of the word…. Then they retreat to a mental model where the quality of government is fixed and we compare government to market.This is clearly correct.

Human Events, a right-wing online publication that features Ann Coulter pop-up windows and ads for conservative dating services (I kid you not), has this list of the top 10 most harmful books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. (HT: Doing Justice).

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
Mao Zedong, Quotations from Chairman […]

Mark Garber has an interesting post entitled Privileged Victims about a recent Pew survey, in which:Researchers found that core Republican voters can be divided into three groups, Enterprisers, Social Conservatives and Pro-Government Conservatives…. Second, Enterprisers are far more committed to limited government and Bush administration policies during the war against terror than any other group of voters.What?