Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All
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Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All
"LOVE LOVE LOVE your futorological brickbats! Love them! You are in fine company with Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary with these." -- Paulina Borsook
"Devoted to highly rhetorical nitpicking, but it is fun to read." -- Chris Mooney
"Rather close but correct reading." -- Evgeny Morozov
"Mean, but true." -- Annalee Newitz
"Dale Carrico's skewering of the salvific pretensions of Silicon Valley's soi disant savior/founders never disappoints." -- Frank Pasquale
"Pretty breathless, but I guess it had to be said." -- Bruce Sterling
"An essential reality check for those who are too entranced by transhumanism to notice the sordid reality behind the curtain." -- Charlie Stross
2 comments:
Is the ACA really unconstitutional because the government can't impose any product on the people and they have a right to decline or some mumbo-jumbo?
The ACA is the law of the land and has been found tom be constitutional by the Supreme Court to boot, so the framing of the question is a bit of a non-starter. I suspect your actual point is the true one, however, namely that much of the resistance is nonsensical "mumbo-jumbo" -- at worst, a rationalization for race-based reactionary obstruction of anything Obama proposes, however moderate (it is well known that the tradeoff of regulation of the insurance marketplace compensated by a mandate is a corporate conservative version of public healthcare as against the manifestly more efficient and more equitable single payer systems preferred by the left), directed to however urgently recognized a problem (the ongoing personal catastrophe of inequitable healthcare access as well as the macroeconomic catastrophe of rising healthcare costs as a driver of long term deficits and ongoing source of pointless disruptions via bankruptcies and so on). States enforce laws and raise revenues through taxes -- justice is a "product" nobody has a right to decline, inasmuch as rights are rites that arise indispensably from our collaboration in the state-form in the first place. Again, some Republicans and other reactionaries may offer up anarcho rationalizations for their hostility to the ACA, but for the most part the resistance is pretty palpably irrationally racist and tribalist in substance -- still it is worth mentioning that the anarcho arguments also fail to pass muster on scrutiny for those few ACA critics who are earnestly devoted to them.
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