one good criticism in the thread!

For me this is a blind spot because I took this kind of framework for granted for a long time and am still working out what I actually think, generally. But I have noticed that Doctorow adopts this kind of prejuduce and I’m not sure how well thought-out it is. I wonder if he just got some kinds of ideas growing up and maybe never challenged them. Found a 2016 interview where he talks about circumstances of leaving the USSR.

my father’s parents are from Eastern Europe. My grandmother was born in Leningrad. My grandfather was born in a country that is now Poland, but was then Belarus, a territory rather, that is now Polish but was then Belarusian. My father was born while his parents were in a displaced persons camp in Azerbaijan and his first language was Yiddish. My mother’s family are first and second generation Ukrainian-Russian Romanians. Her first language was English, but her mother’s first language was French and was raised in Quebec. I was born in Canada. My first language is English. And I attended Yiddish school at a radical socialist Yiddish program run by the Workman’s Circle until I was 13.

My grandfather and grandmother were Red Army deserters, and they destroyed their papers after leaving Azerbaijan in order to qualify as displaced people and not be ingested back into the Soviet population. Maintaining that ruse, they were able to board a DP boat from Hamburg to Halifax, and that was how they migrated to Canada. If they had been truthful in their immigration process, they would have almost certainly ended up in the former Soviet Union and likely faced reprisals for deserting from the army as well.

Just in terms of his tech, legal analysis I think he would only be improved if he would be willing to have a less reactionary POV.