Sad and unpleasant
June 2nd 2002 -
Sometimes it’s better not to know. I noticed that Eric Raymond, open-source legend/guru had started a blog, called “Armed and Dangerous”. It’s rather depressing reading, because until then I’d rather admired him. Now I’ll have to stick with admiring the subset of his efforts that directly relate to open-source and gnu software, and try to ignore his unpleasant ramblings on the subject of gun control. For example, his most recent blog entry talks about how much better the world would be if we just allowed all passengers in aircraft to be armed. You see, that way, the terrorists would be shot down by the other passengers and there would be no crashing into buildings.
The logic is odd. I think this would make it far easier for terrorists to take over an aeroplane. As far as I can tell, the best and simplest way to make aeroplanes safer is to have a solid barrier between the pilots and the passengers, and a button on the passenger side that, when pressed, lights up a light saying “land ASAP”, which is the only way of communicating with the pilots.
Anyway. Not impressed. I was similarly unimpressed with James Morrow’s Blog until I realised that it wasn’t the same James Morrow who writes those wonderful satires, “Only Begotten Daughter”, “City of Truth”, “Towing Jehovah”, and some of my favorite SF stories, “Daughter Earth” and “Continent of Lies”.