Cars with faces and teeth probably wouldn’t be nearly as cute as Lightning McQueen.

Hm. Not a very exciting Monday. One of the proposed upgrades to most of our boxes looks like it’ll work well, modulo problems like “the NFS server didn’t have /data/path_to_files in its /etc/exports.” That error was easy to fix, at least. If it all works out, we’ll save a few thousand bucks in support and licensing fees.

Still reading the free speech book. The fourth chapter is about incidents at Harvard and Yale where people with unpopular views were invited to lecture and/or debate. Did they engage in productive debate where people learned stuff? Yeah right. The university admins tried to prevent the lectures and debates from happening. When the speakers showed up anyway, many students showed up and disrupted the debates through being noisy and rude, and then threatening violence.

This isn’t exactly an isolated occurrence. It seems that in modern politics, if you don’t agree with what a speaker has to say, you should call him an anti-American Communist Nazi Socialist Corporate Pawn. Forget dismantling an opponent’s words and thoughts with logic. Logic takes too long and nobody understands it. Just call them names—that resonates with people and makes for entertaining TV.