Reaganite conservatism axiomatically disdains government, and that creates a perverse incentive for conservative politicians to run government badly (or at least not to run it well), since the failure of government confirms conservative prejudices and (in theory) provides the movement with additional evidence in favor of its ideology. We just saw a particularly vivid example of this pathologically self-destructive dynamic at work in Bobby Jindal’s otherwise inexplicable attempt to turn the Bush administration’s utter ineptitude after Hurricane Katrina into a GOP talking point.
I generally try to keep politics out of my blog, because political discussion on the internet isn’t productive. But I think there is a good lesson in this bit of history, and it’s very applicable to software development.
. The graphics topics are dated, and there is no discussion about newfangled topics in computing, like the internet. But the meat of the book are timeless computer science fundamentals. It still has the best explanation of what “NP-Complete” means (page 276) that I’ve run across.
. It’s an excellent and fun introduction to the essential theory behind computer science.