Class Notes for Wednesday, 16 January 2008

Looking at the text, "we called the manufacturers, asked them what security mechanism protects the remote interventions in your pacemakers. Everyone of them refused to discuss. Everyone has, essentially, a bad story. Turns out they’re death machines. Hacking them is deadly."

I can't deny, this idea is terrifying. Don't think I'm challenging the human threat. Instead I quibble, because if you look at AndrewGradmanIntro, I view life as a sequence of word games. And so I have to say: inferring that "they have essentially a bad story" is unfair to draw from a refusal to comment. I'm sure Eben did not MEAN that inference but it came across that way.

I was reminded in that moment of the day that Helen Caldicott spoke to my high school. She has all sorts of theories to explain the nuclear weapons conspiracy, my favorite is that our generals are stockpiling arms because all these men are compensating for their private inadequacies. She refers to the rhetoric -- "penetration" is the only one I remember -- and the phallic shape of the weapon, etc.

Okay, she adduces evidence, and that's great. But then she said, "And I know I'm right, because none of the agencies and officers I've criticized have ever responded to me." And that little fallacy infected the rest of her credibility.

Okay, there are huge qualitative differences between the two primary arguments, but it was just the connection that leaped into my head at the moment, and ... I like to quibble.

Also, Eben points out that 86% of counties don't have access to abortion services. I can't find a statistic online stating what percent of WOMEN don't have access to abortion services, but it is doubtless much smaller, and of course much more informative.

The fact that the statistic is so hard to find on the whole internet, of course, illustrates (1) the laziness of people like me to crunch data, (2) my poor search skills, or (3) the ideological hazard of statistics.

-- AndrewGradman - 18 Jan 2008