Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Continue reading "Pluralistic: Incomplete vs. overshoot (26 Feb 2024)"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: What Americans want (18 Oct 2023)"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: We should ban TikTok('s surveillance) (30 Mar 2023)"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: 27 Oct 2022 Substituting economics for politics is a failure"
I first learned about Dr. Thomas Radecki in the mid-1980s, when my grandmother became concerned that my Dungeons and Dragons hobby was going to unmoor me from reality and send me spiraling into delusion and misery, ending in murder.
Radecki was the psychiatrist who testified that the teenager Darren Molitor had murdered another teenager, Mary C. Towey, because he had been driven mad by D&D. Though the court rejected his testimony, Radecki built a career on his willingness to give expert testimony to the effect that young people were being driven to ghastly crimes by D&D.
I forgot about Radecki for decades, and then, last week, I learned that he had lost his medical license following revelations that he had enticed his patients — young people seeking treatment for addiction — into trading drugs for sex. He impregnated one of them. He is now serving an 11–22 year prison sentence.
Radecki attained fame by falsely accusing others of victimizing vulnerable young people for profit. He went on to victimize vulnerable young people for profit.
Takes one to know one.
I’ve been an activist all my life — literally, I attended my first demonstrations in a stroller — and that’s reflected in my work, from the essays and blog posts I’ve published for 20 years to the dozens of books I’ve written, both fiction and nonfiction.
To be an activist is to want to change the world. To change the world, you need two things: first, an understanding of what’s wrong with it, and second, a theory of how to make it better.
Much of my work focuses on the former: documenting, analyzing, and tracking injustices, dysfunctions, and emergencies — my essays are a form of public note-taking that helps me break down and understand complex phenomena.
