You Can't Handle the Knuth

As an unabashedly liberal computer geek, I've grown accustomed to feeling outnumbered politically among the "cognitive elite," Eric S. Raymond's onanistic term for our tribe, since BBSing in the early '80s. You could find more libertarians among that crowd than liberals; I'm not surprised that the Libertarian Party presidential nominee this year is a programmer.

For this reason, it's unpleasant but not unexpected to discover that a technologist I admire, most recently Jeremy Bowers, believes that my kind would be happier in Europe, are invested in losing the Iraq War, and consider Republicans to be our subhuman enemies. (Jeremy: You left off the part where we want to sell your guns to Iraqi insurgents to fund partial-birth abortions for evangelical teens.)

A page discovered this morning balances the scales. We may have lost Bowers, but we've got Donald Knuth:

Fundamentally I don't see how the government of my country has done anything whatsoever to address and correct the root causes of international terrorism. Quite the contrary; every action I can see seems almost designed to have the opposite effect --- as if orchestrated to maximize the finances of those who make armaments, by maximizing the number of people who now hate me personally for actions that I do not personally condone. How can I be a proud citizen of a country that unilaterally pulls out of widely accepted treaties, that refuses to accept a world court, that flouts fair trade with shameful policies regarding steel and agriculture, and that almost blindly supports Israel's increasingly unjustifiable occupation?

Publishing · Politics · 2004/12/06 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Comments

Knuth and Tannenbaum both.

#1 · Joshua Allen · 2004/12/06

i want to tell about web security. it must be more harder.

#2 · Diego · 2006/07/10