democracy - Root Privileges

Root Privileges

democracy

A collection of 12 posts

An ambigram in The Hindu

An ambigram in The Hindu

The Hindu has an unusual ad in today’s paper (at least in the Chennai edition, which I get) on the occasion of Republic Day. At the middle is an ambigram that reads “journalism” one way and “democracy” upside down. Below the way that reads “journalism”, there’s a statement

Free-speech as an instrument of repression

One of the more eye-opening discussions on Elon Musk’s attempt to take control of Twitter, and the Twitter board’s attempts to defend the company from the bid, have been playing out on Hacker News (here and, after Twitter’s response, here) – the popular discussion board for topics related

On the NBDSA opinion against Zee News

On April 5, JNU PhD student Shehla Rashid tweeted that the National Broadcasting and Digital Standards Agency (NBDSA) had ordered Zee News to remove links to a show it had broadcast in November 2020, alleging that Rashid was indulging in “anti-national activities” and that she was “funding terror”. The program

cooperative distrust

Cooperative distrust

Is there a doctrine or manifesto of cooperative distrust? Because I think that’s what we need today, in the face of reams of government data — almost all of it, in fact — that is untrustworthy, and the only way it can support our democracy is if the public response to

Central Drug Standards Control Organisation

Pandemic: Science > politics?

By Mukunth and Madhusudhan Raman Former Union health secretary K. Sujatha Rao had a great piece in The Indian Express on January 14, whose takeaway she summarised in the following line: Science, evidence and data analytics need to be the bedrock of the roll-out policy, not politics and scoring brownie

"Enough science."

Edit, 6.04 pm, December 15, 2020: A reader pointed out to me that The Guardian may in fact have been joking, and it has been known to be flippant on occasion. If this is really the case, I pronounce myself half-embarrassed for having been unable to spot a joke.

The ignoble president and the Nobel Prize

What is the collective noun for a group of Nobel laureates? I’m considering ballast. A ballast of Nobel laureates is appealing because these people, especially if they are all white and male, often tend to take themselves too seriously and are taken so by others as well. I’m

Retrospective: The Wire Science in 2019

At the start of 2019, The Wire Science decided to focus more on issues of science and society, and this is reflected in the year-end list of our best stories (in terms of traffic and engagement; listed below). Most of our hits don’t belong to this genre, but quite

authoritarianism

My country is burning. Why should I work?

A few days ago, I found asking myself the following question: My country is burning, why should I work? I ended up with some (admittedly inchoate) thoughts, delineated below. I’m trying to fight off this abject helplessness I’m feeling and edit some science articles, and failing. I’m

Charlottesville

False equivalency

Margaret Sullivan in the Washington Post on August 16: Does finding these powerful ways to frame the [Charlottesville] situation amount to abandoning journalistic impartiality? “The whole doctrine of objectivity in journalism has become part of the [media’s] problem,” Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, said this

Bitcoins and the landscape of internet commerce

In a previous post, I’d laid out the technical details of what goes into mining and transacting with bitcoins (BTC). My original idea was to talk about why they are an important invention, but also felt that the technology mattered enough to merit a post of its own. BTCs

Making money

An experimental “democratic” revenue model for news publications new to the internet (that are reluctant to change their delivery styles)