Cough, gag.

I've been pretty sick with a chest cold that I caught from Jo. Laid me low over the weekend although I've been walking wounded at work all week. I was on the road to Des Moines all day Monday and have had a steady stream of project management and Great Places-related meetings through this morning. The last thing my throat needs. I thought I was going to lose my voice completely about 4 PM yesterday. So, all that plus a pretty crushing work schedule have prevented much in the way of any writing of my own.

I will point you to a couple of pretty interesting and entertaining reads. The first is a post from Charlie Stross' blog. Stross is one of the up and coming giants of the science fiction world. But don't let that fool you. He has a very strong technology and science background and is incredibly well read on history as well. Anyway, he spins a fascinating little conspiracy theory here with more than a dab of truth in it.

While on the subject of SF authors thinking Deep Thoughts, everyone should read David Brin's ongoing series The Political Battle over Modernity which takes some of George Lakoff's work and threads it together with a theory that our current political debate isn't one of right vs. left but of Despotism vs. Age of Enlightenment Modern values. Which is also what Stross is trying to get at.

Overall I think that there is quite a bit of wisdom in both of these guys' arguments that the entire "left" vs. "right" also defined as the socialism vs. free market meta definition of political conflict in the 20th Century was really a very recent and transient development that has pretty much lost all relevance since 1989. What both Stross and Brin are trying to tell us is that the left-right/socialism-capitalism paradigm only temporarily masked the centuries-old core struggle between authoritarianism and liberalism.