Despite the Internet 's origin in the late 1960s as a government sponsored means of communication between the Department of Defense, private industry, and academia, it has been at its best and generated the greatest economic, social, and technological benefits since it was 'liberated' by the hordes of 'geeks' who were originally hired to run it by employers who were not themselves conversant with computers, and couldn't tell when their employees were exchanging official traffic or trading dirty jokes and recipes for marijuana brownies.
L. Neil SmithGun control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and strangled with her panty hose, is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound.
L. Neil SmithAmerica didn't have a drug problem before it passed drug laws. While drugs were consumed by large numbers of people โ the number of women habituated to the opium found in laudanum was, no pun intended, staggering โ they were, for the most part, easily able to live their lives, do their jobs, and raise their families pretty much the way we do today.
L. Neil SmithThe first and most important thing to understand about politics is this: forget Right, Left, Center, socialism, fascism, or democracy. Every government that exists - or ever existed, or ever will exist - is a kleptocracy, meaning "rule by thieves." Competing ideologies merely provide different excuses to separate the Productive Class from what they produce.
L. Neil SmithWe live in times of wonderful technology and crappy politics. The task before us now is not to let the latter destroy the former.
L. Neil SmithSocialism, whether it's the 'soft tyranny' of the EuroAmerican management state or the murderously repressive forms taken by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot, is all about disindividuation, a steady, relentless erasure of the individual differences among us, everything that makes us who we are. 'Everybody in, nobody out!' is the marching mantra of militant collectivized medicine, but it accurately describes all other aspects of collectivism as well. No alternatives allowed, no choices, no individualism, no individuality, and ultimately, no individuation.
L. Neil Smith