Politics on Michael Doornbos

Defiance

Tue, 28 Jan 2014 19:13:19 +0000

I don’t know why this never occurred to me before, but “the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night, that the flag was still there” is about defiance. The kind of defiance you need when liberty is paid for with blood. The kind of defiance you need when what you believe is not what the people in charge believe. And then I remembered that the song was originally called “The Defiance of Fort McHenry”.

Philip Zimmerman on why he wrote PGP

Sun, 01 Dec 2013 16:54:22 +0000

This is actually from 1999 (updated from 1991), but I love this part:

The right to privacy is spread implicitly throughout the Bill of Rights. But when the United States Constitution was framed, the Founding Fathers saw no need to explicitly spell out the right to a private conversation. That would have been silly. Two hundred years ago, all conversations were private. If someone else was within earshot, you could just go out behind the barn and have your conversation there. No one could listen in without your knowledge. The right to a private conversation was a natural right, not just in a philosophical sense, but in a law-of-physics sense, given the technology of the time.

That's a violation of my privacy

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 00:07:46 +0000

via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Freedom

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 09:14:48 +0000

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free. Ronald Reagan