From: Runar Bjarnason

To: Editor

Date: 3 Jun 2005

 

I'm writing to let you know how much I appreciate your work on the Database Debunkings site. For me, as a database practitioner, it has been an eye-opener. I have little formal education in database management, but I always thought there was something fundamentally wrong with SQL, and with present DBMS offerings. And now, thanks to your site, I know what it is. I also know that my suspicions that XML had some sort of smell were entirely correct. Thank you!

 

The industry needs people like you in the same way as the field of medicine needed Hippocrates.

 

My only complaint is the political agenda which I feel is wholly incompatible with the rest of the content on the site. For someone who advocates reason and certainty in science, you seem to buy into a considerable amount of unreason and misinformation in regard to ethics and politics. By this I mean no disrespect at all. I know you are database theorists and not political philosophers.

 

And so, in return for informing me about database management fallacies, I'd like to point you to what I regard as a political, ethical and economical debunking site, which I rank about as highly as dbdebunk.com: http://capmag.com.

 

I also notice that the sites linked from dbdebunk.com tend to draw parallels between the U.S. and Germany at the advent of nazi takeover. On that topic, I'd like to recommend Leonard Peikoff's book THE OMINOUS PARALLELS, which explores the implications thoroughly.

 

Keep up the debunking!

 

 

From: Fabian Pascal

To: Runar Bjarnason

 

Good for you.

 

Sure, but they don't know it, and don't care.

 

Actually, I am an economist and political scientist who spent 15 years in academia studying social systems and behavior. My political and economic positions are sound.

 

I very much doubt that anything with a $ sign as a logo has anything to do with ethics. Capitalism, which makes labor subservient to capital, cannot possibly be moral.

 

Anybody with a basic understanding of real, not voodoo, economics [and aware of knows that a society based on materialism, [and unchecked] greed and individualism is (a) a contradiction in terms (b) self-destructive and not sustainable in the long run. And that cannot possibly be moral.

 

The parallels are too obvious to require rigorous analysis.

 

 

Ed. Note: The US is, of course, not truly capitalist/free market system. Indeed, corporations and the rich class are well aware of the folly of uncontrolled competition and wouldn’t dream to subject themselves to a totally free market, they are the first to feed at the public trough, witness the explosion of lobbying machinery.

 

Rather, the US is a corporate welfare state, which socializes costs and privatizes profits, redistributing income from the middle class to the rich.

 

And it is descending quite rapidly into theocratic fascism, which spells the end.

 

 

Posted 7/15/05