Last week, I stuck my toe into a little debate on Twitter about the word weaponize, when Professor Cathay Y. N. Smith[1] defended her use of the expression “Weaponizing Copyright.” Smith was citing the title and subject of her own draft paper, and because I still hate Twitter for discussing complex issues, I read the 73-page draft over the weekend. ...
Image by nicholashan This week, the Wall Street Journal reports that Google has been funding academic research papers worldwide and, unsurprisingly, the conclusions in these papers tend to support Google’s policy interests. This is familiar territory of course. Most obviously, we remember that Big Tobacco funded all manner of “research” that produced alternative facts about the health hazards of smoking. This ...
Because there are laws against certain expressions of neo-Nazism in Germany, and because my history-buff son and I are slightly amused by the satire inherent in that otherwise understandable fact, we will jokingly conjure the image of some official kicking a would-be fascist and screaming, “You vill be tolerant!” But if you really like your irony served thick and over-salted, consider ...
