Category: Society & Citizenship

Can any of us imagine a time when we aren’t stripping down to our socks for travel, or sending security agents into mosques? Welcome to the age of perpetual conflict.

The president is anti-torture — which is to say he thinks the water-boarding of actual confirmed terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was wrong. He thinks it was wrong, no matter the goal — which is to say the president would not countenance the torture of an actual terrorist to foil a plot against the country he’s sworn to protect. But the president would countenance the collateral killing of innocent men, women and children by drone in pursuit of an actual terrorist. What is the morality that holds the body of a captured enemy inviolable, but not the body of those who happen to be in the way?

Source: The Art of Infinite War – The Atlantic

We’ve lost key features that we used to rely on, and worse, we’ve abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world. To the credit of today’s social networks, they’ve brought in hundreds of millions of new participants to these networks, and they’ve certainly made a small number of people rich.

But they haven’t shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves, as a medium which has enabled them to succeed. And they’ve now narrowed the possibilities of the web for an entire generation of users who don’t realize how much more innovative and meaningful their experience could be.

Source: The Web We Lost – Anil Dash

Source: Commuting in the United States: 2009 (PDF)

Ninety-five percent of those claiming they never use the cloud actually do so via online banking and shopping, social networking, and storing photos and music

Source: Most Americans Confused By Cloud Computing According to National Survey (NASDAQ:CTXS)

Who took out all those mortgages, again?

So a large proportion of actual middle class Americans don’t see how they might have played a role in some of their own misfortune. Without trying to demonize people who may have been victimized by shady lenders or bad circumstances, I don’t think that speaks well for the country’s understanding of what happened during the last decade.

Source: The Middle Class Blames Everyone but the Middle Class for Our Economy – The Atlantic