The End of Hypocrisy with Martha Finnemore

The U.S. government seems outraged that people are leaking classified materials about its less attractive behavior. It certainly acts that way: three years ago, after Chelsea Manning, an army private then known as Bradley Manning, turned over hundreds of thousands of classified cables to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, U.S. authorities imprisoned the soldier under conditions that the UN special rapporteur on torture deemed cruel and inhumane. The Senate’s top Republican, Mitch McConnell, appearing on Meet the Press shortly thereafter, called WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, “a high-tech terrorist.”

More recently, following the disclosures about U.S. spying programs

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Other Writing:

Chapter in an Edited Volume

“Socialist Surrealism: China Miéville’s New Crobuzon Novels,” in New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction – eds. Donald Hassler and Clyde Wilcox

How do politics and the science fiction and fantasy genres inform each other? Science fiction has always had a strong undercurrent of utopianism – writers as different in their ideological predilections as Robert Heinlein, Ursula Le Guin and Frederick Pohl have used it as a means to reimagine political and social arrangements better to their ...
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Essay

Google and the Dread Pirate Roberts Strategy

Using The Princess Bride to explain Google’s corporate policies: A blogpost that I wrote elsewhere, complaining about Google, has led to a disagreement between Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias. Drum Just out of curiosity, did anyone ever really believe that “don’t be evil” stuff? I mean, Google’s a big corporation. They’ve been a big public ...
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