Man arrested for writing book on pedophilia

Another day, another outrageous attack on free speech. Colorado resident Phillip Greaves was arrested a week ago by Florida cops on obscenity charges. His crime? Writing a book on pedophilia called: The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-Lover’s Code of Conduct. The cops, posing as buyers on the internet, got him to mail [...]

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How to deal with police : Four videos

Flex your rights has four videos up on Youtube. You should definitely watch these if you live or have plans to live in America. The intro and the music at the beginning is a bit jarring, and the acting could have been more professional, but overall these videos are well-made. They are an excellent primer [...]

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Binayak Sen sentenced to imprisonment for life

Outrages against liberty by various arms of the Indian state are neither rare nor mild, yet, even by those standards, the sentencing of Binayak sen is a shocking event. When a good doctor and an internationally acclaimed humanitarian is convicted by a court in a democratic(!) country and sentenced to life imprisonment: for violating arcane [...]

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Changing priors

One question that  is pertinent to politics as well as psychology is the nature of moral progress. When I say moral progress, I mean the process by which individuals end up updating or modifying their basic moral beliefs (or priors). This process usually is a slow one, and at the micro level involves one’s reaction [...]

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Glenn Greenwald, one man army

Here is his latest article, illustrating how NY Times and other papers routinely divulge information — and rightly so! — that is far more secret and consequential than Wikileaks is accused of doing. I have admired some of Greenwald’s writings in the past. But on Wikileaks and related First Amendment issues, he has been nothing [...]

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Ron Paul’s passionate defence of Wikileaks

I forgot to post this earlier. Ron Paul on the floor of the US Congress:

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The co-conspirator angle

I noted yesterday that the apparent government strategy to indict Assange as co-conspirator rather than disseminator of the leaked cables would be still be highly problematic, and the danger to the First Amendment no less grave. Since then, there have appeared articles by several well known writers and legal experts who have come to the same [...]

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Good, evil and conspiracy

The New York Times reports: Federal prosecutors, seeking to build a case against the WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange for his role in a huge dissemination of classified government documents, are looking for evidence of any collusion in his early contacts with an Army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking the information. [...]If Mr. Assange encouraged or [...]

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Wikileaks and the First Amendment

I am a great fan of Wikileaks. I think they are playing an extremely valuable role in “promoting the climate of transparency and accountability necessary for an authentically liberal democracy” *. As Clay Shirky puts it, Citizens of a functioning democracy must be able to know what the state is saying and doing in our name, to engage [...]

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On Wikileaks

Here are some recent articles on Wikileaks that are worth reading. Glenn Greenwald: The WikiLeaks disclosure has revealed not only numerous government secrets, but also the driving mentality of major factions in our political and media class.  Simply put, there are few countries in the world with citizenries and especially media outlets more devoted to [...]

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