Kevin's Weblog

I picked up Paul Krugman’s The Great Unraveling today. Reading through the introduction, I just about stopped dead at the admonition:

Don’t assume that policy proposals make sense in terms of their stated goals.

I was taken aback by the fact that this was nearly identical to a point that Schneier hammers on in Beyond Fear. For the most part, Schneier is talking about security policy and Krugman is talking about economic policy, although they both make the point that proposed policies in their respective areas may really have more to do with broader goals.

I suppose that in some sense this convergence of ideas isn’t actually too shocking, since both authors actually have fairly similar agendas: to argue that the current administration, aided by the events of September 11th, is making very questionable decisions in order to forward questionable goals, and that this is all fairly obvious if you just think about it clearly.

At Barnes and Noble, they have a display of “banned books”. My first reaction was to note how many of the books on the table I’ve read. My second reaction was to realize just how much more interesting I would have found the display if they had some additional information on why each book was banned, and by whom.

If I ever do get around to taking some classes “for fun”, maybe I’ll have to remember to look for a lit. class on banned books. I imagine there are some interesting stories surrounding the stories.