And I don’t want no pussyfooting. You can’t succeed in tech by playing it safe, by taking baby steps. If you could, Sony and Microsoft would rule digital music. But they don’t, because they were so worried about rights holders, they forgot about users. And it’s all about users.
The users used to be excited about music.
Now they’re thrilled with offers on Groupon.
Shopping has become exciting!
Music is boring.
Quotations
Quote of the Day
Now the Republic’s enemies must be asking themselves: where is the bottom to these people’s incompetence? Can they do anything at all? How safe is it to rush ahead? Why don’t we try?
And if they do, what tools will President Obama have left? Diplomacy? Economic incentives or sanctions? Moral authority? Maybe the military. Yes that’s it. But his competence at war is predicted by his incompetence in peace. One would hope he’d have the sense to stay away from truly dangerous tools and that probably means he doesn’t know better.
The Return of the Militants: Violent Dissident Republicanism
That’s the title of a report just issued by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR) — but it may not be about what you might think it’s about — depending which side of the Atlantic you’re from.
It’s about “dissident republican groups in Northern Ireland such as the Continuity IRA and the Real IRA, who continued to oppose the peace process”. And the phrasing of the title makes a neat illustration of Bernard Shaw’s aphorism about “two countries divided by a common language”.
I’m “divided by a common language” myself, as a Brit who has been here in the US more than half my life. And yes, I know, technically “Republicanism” should mean the sentiment that led to the War of Independence — but I checked with some American friends, and they reassured me that there’s “usage” of the phrase to refer to GoP philosophy…
Myself, FWIW, I’m a monarchist. Which I suppose makes me “conservative” — another divided word in our deliciously divided common language.
“Blogging Through Georgia”
Communism, it seemed to me then and still seems to me now, is not the opposite of fascism: it is fascism’s blood-brother, its complementary twin. The two live together in a vicious symbiotic relationship; scratch a Red and you’ll find a Brown. Better yet, scratch either one deeply enough and you will find a Black: someone so caught up in the will to power that crimes and atrocities don’t even count anymore.
– Walter Russell Mead (via Instapundit)
Hayek Quote Bleg
For years and years I have been quoting Hayek as saying:
Capitalism depends upon values which it did not create and cannot replace.
I am sure I read something by him that was very close to this at some point. I thought it was from The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, but when I looked in there, I found the concept but not the pithy summary.
The sentence comes pretty close to summing up my whole political philosophy, and I did not originate it.
Does anyone know where I got it?