If you had asked me a week ago what I thought of this book, I’d have answered — “It’s much more readable than Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.
That’s not what I think now.
Writing books debunking religion is a good thing, and there are many of them. But I was hoping for a more powerful and effective book by Hitchens, who certainly knows how to write well.
For some time now I have been a student of the decades long secret war between Russian revolutionaries and the tsarist police. (Attentive readers of this website will be aware that my research culminated a decade ago in a book about the possibility that Stalin had been a tsarist polie agent.) From time to time, new books come out about the Okhrana, though these are usually aimed at academic audiences. Not so Richard Pipes’ 2003 volume, The Degaev Affair: Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia.
That’s what you get when you send an unencrypted email. It’s like sending all your messages by postcard, without an envelope. Of course if you don’t mind governments, employers, corporations, and ISPs reading your emails along the way, feel free. But, if you want to send me encrypted email, use the PGP public key below.
A decade ago, South Korean workers used the Internet to produce live reports (including video) about their general strikes. At the time, they were way ahead of the rest of the world in maximizing the use of the new communications technology. They still are.