The power of CI

Or how some bloggers and an internet forum managed to unravel a rather bizzare conspiracy to make George W. Bush look bad.

The Killian documents - wikipedia entry

It's a bit of a long read, but it's relevant in that the collective intelligence of the parties mentioned above actually challenged a claim made on 60 Minutes, normally an unimpeachably accurate newsmagazine TV segment, and from there were instrumental in having the claims examined a little closer, and later overturned.

The evils of the internet?

Just saw this on CNN.com...

MySpace sued after sick bastards sexually abuse teens

It's an interesting double edge to what Kevin talks about in class, isn't it? For all the good the Internet and blogging and MySpace has done (and that's a lot), all it takes is one evil bastard to abuse it. Or in this case, 4 evil bastards. And I'm pretty sure it's not the first time this has happened. Nor will it be the last. Unfortunately, as with any advance in technology, there'll always be a bunch of whackjobs who'll find ways to pervert it. Always remember, kids... Tech in and of itself isn't evil. It's the people who use it. Guns don't kill people, people kill people and all that.

Comparative morality 101

Had an interesting conversation with Mahfudz and Jonathan over lunch today (yesterday, now)... We were sitting in the canteen, just kinda loafing around between classes... Mahfudz brought the paper, so we were all flipping through the various sections, when I happened across this

rather large picture (it was a lot bigger in the papers) of Saddam Hussein during his trial, arm and finger raised, yelling at somebody. Jonathan asked, "Do you think he's really evil?"

Well, I said yeah, he's evil, some of the things he's done are really too inhumane... Yet on the other hand, he did what he had to do in order to maintain some semblance of order in Iraq. I can't lay my hands on it right now, but I read a little blurb in a recent Newsweek, something along the lines of some U.S. government official saying (anonymously) that "...we feel like apologising and saying 'sorry, we didn't know you did what you did because you had to'." Or something like that, memory fails at the moment.

So now for the comparative morality... Was booting Saddam out of his palace really the right thing to do? For all the blood (and worse) he has on his hands, Saddam was able to maintain order of a sort. Of a sort. Yes, he was a cruel, tyrannical dictator. But here's the rub. Is that the only type of person who can keep Iraq from self-destructing? We've already seen that the Iraqis aren't likely to blossom into full-blown Jeffersonian democracy any time soon... Maybe the only type of diplomacy that works in Iraq is the kind that comes out the barrel of a gun.

I'm not in anyway supporting or endorsing Saddam or his practices, mind... Just wondering. What do the rest of you think?