The hero

Raymond Chandler’s essay on detective fiction, realism and the character of a hero. If one is in the right mood, one could read the final four paragraphs multiple times and feel the tragedy that is the real world, every time.

Censorship, limited liability etc

The censorship-as-trade-barrier argument is a consequentialist one, a very slippery slope, and an insult to the idea of freedom. Unfortunately, Google plans to paint China into a corner by joining hands with people who have no great respect for freedom—the governments of the USA and those of many European countries—and who think this is a [...]

Kettle, again

This is an addendum to my previous post on the subject, and I will simply quote from three different Ars articles from the past three months. The first is on Australia’s Great Firewall and Google’s reaction to the same- One day after Google announced its decision to stop censoring its search results in China, the [...]

Australia and Google == Pot and kettle

I am outraged at the fact that nation-states that regularly trample upon the privacy rights of their citizens were outraged when Google made some revelations related to “unintended” breach of privacy last month. Australia runs its own version of the Great Firewall and blocks “illegal” content, wants visitors to the country to declare their “porn [...]

“Romantic” revolutions and “humanitarian” missions

Arundhati Roy says- “I love it when people accuse me of romanticising the Maoists. I believe in the romance of revolution.” I never thought that someone could describe a revolution riding on bullets and bayonets as being romantic. And- “Naxalism had to be an armed movement. It’s not that they (Naxals) took to violence all [...]