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Topics - Universe Prince

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3DHS / double standards

« on: April 21, 2010, 06:36:39 PM »

So today, for the first time in something like 20 years, here in Columbia, SC, we have a new mayor. He's a Democrat, which isn't the problem (well, it is a problem, but not the one this post is about), and he is African-American, which is also not the problem. He ran a campaign about how he was going to unite us all into "One Columbia". Which almost made me gag, but that also isn't the problem. Part of the problem is the day of the election he ran an ad that basically said people should vote for him because he is black. The other part of the problem is that the ad contained an direct endorsement by a reverend.

I think we all know what would have happened if a white man had advertised that people should vote for him because he is white. Yes, that would have been wrong. Seems to me running an ad that suggests one should vote for an African-American because of his race is also wrong.

The reverend endorsing a political candidate is not something I think is wrong. I believe a person does not give up his First Amendment protection of free speech just because he preaches at a church or has a Doctorate of Divinity. But I am fairly certain that had a reverend or preacher directly endorsed a non-African-American candidate in a political campaign ad, there would have been an outcry.

I just don't get this sort of double standard. And I just felt like getting this off my chest.

3DHS / On Tea Party Racism

« on: April 19, 2010, 05:43:59 PM »

Tea Party Racism??

3DHS / wound care for $3

« on: April 16, 2010, 06:07:36 PM »

http://tinyurl.com/y6fx9e2
Headline: MIT Student Develops $3 Cutting-Edge Healing Device, Field Tested in Haiti

3DHS / Transparancy?

« on: April 14, 2010, 06:23:57 PM »

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0109/17786.html

“Let me say it as simply as I can, ‘Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency,’” Obama said during his first full day on the job.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/13/AR2010041303067.html

The only part of the summit, other than a post-meeting news conference, that was visible to the public was Obama's eight-minute opening statement, which ended with the words: "I'm going to ask that we take a few moments to allow the press to exit before our first session."

[...]

Lalit K. Jha of the Press Trust of India, at Obama's meeting with the Pakistani prime minister, reported, "In less than a minute, the pool was asked to leave." The Yomiuri Shimbun correspondent found that she was "ushered out about 30 seconds" after arriving for Obama's meeting with the Malaysian prime minister. Emel Bayrak of Turkey's TRT-Turk went to Obama's meeting with the president of Armenia but "we had to leave the room again after less than 40 seconds."

"When you only see the president for 15 or 20 seconds without him asking if you have any questions, it's very frustrating," said Laura Haim of France's Canal+, which persuaded the White House to include foreign outlets in the press pool. "It's very important for this president, who wants to restore the image of the United States, to have more access."

[...]

The restrictions have become a common practice for the Obama White House. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to the White House a couple of weeks ago, reporters were kept away. Soon after that, Obama signed an executive order on abortion, again without any coverage.

[...]

Finally, Obama walked over to a group of reporters Monday afternoon. Would he give them an account of his meetings? "I'll let somebody else do it," he said with a smile.

Obama is a liar. I guess I have finally decided. He is not just an man blinded by his intentions to the consequences of his ideas. He is a liar. He is deliberate. I have tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I cannot do so any more. He knows what he is doing, and he is doing it deliberately.

3DHS / "still bogged down with backwater racial passions"

« on: April 09, 2010, 04:14:22 AM »

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23843

Gerald Boyd was a classic specimen of the self-made man. Born poor, he worked and studied his way up out of poverty under the guidance of his widowed grandmother. Childhood was work and study, study and work, and though they do not always guarantee success, for Gerald Boyd they did just what movies, books, and professional moralizers said they would do, probably because his widowed grandmother contributed a lot of wisdom, love, and iron to the self-making; and in his early fifties Gerald Boyd became managing editor of The New York Times. This was the second most important job in the newsroom of one of the world's better newspapers. He was the first black ever to reach such a dazzling position in the Times hierarchy, and the gaudiest job of all—the executive editorship—seemed within his reach almost until the very moment he was fired.

[...]

It is mildly surprising, to be sure, to find that the Times, so famous as a bulwark of liberalism, was still bogged down with backwater racial passions. These made Boyd a central figure in the uprising since one cause of the newsroom's epic discontent was the muted displeasure some white employees felt toward the paper's "diversity" program. As a black giving orders in the newsroom, Boyd was the human manifestation of "diversity," hence a vulnerable figure once rebellion required a few executions.

[...]

Boyd was recruited for a management position in the 1980s by Max Frankel, then executive editor. By that time, Boyd had already established himself as a top-of-the-line reporter during an exemplary career with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Times's Washington bureau. Frankel told him that the Times "severely lacked minorities to promote to management," that it was hard to find "suitable candidates," that increased "diversity" was not just one of his own priorities but one of Sulzberger's too, and that Boyd's "help toward the effort would mean a lot."

The message did not require a decoder: thanks to the paper's "diversity" policy, Boyd was being offered a chance to climb the executive ladder. He did not need much persuasion to abandon the reporter's life and join the executive chase for glory. He acknowledges that his race gave him an advantage in the incessant bureaucratic struggles for advancement that afflict the Times newsroom, but declines to display any bogus humility about it. He is obviously aware that a generation earlier his race would have made it hard to get any Times job more elegant than slicing salami in the cafeteria.

[...]

The newsroom Boyd inherited was, he judged, a fair sample of white upper-middle-class America, mostly liberal on social issues and quick to endorse racial equality in principle. In practice, however, he found many slow to abandon the uptown white's view that affirmative action was an unjust imposition on the innocent progeny of an older generation's oppressing classes. Though the newsroom discreetly supported the publisher's "diversity" program, he was quickly made to realize that many privately detested it. They seemed angry because it "not only opened a door for me but also gave me an unfair edge over the competition in climbing higher," and he adds, "Perhaps they had a point."

Moving to the New York office as a junior executive after eight years of reporting in Washington, Boyd was startled to discover a "blatant racial tension" in the newsroom. He sensed a hostility expressed in the form of passive aggression. "No one ever challenged my authority outright, but I had to repeat my orders frequently and then double back to make sure they were followed."

He found "ignorance, indifference, and arrogance, which played out on every level." There was an atmosphere that left blacks feeling they had to demonstrate that they were good enough to work there. There seemed to be an abiding conviction that whatever a black did could always be done even better by a white. High in the management Boyd found a white executive astonished that a black could write competently. On the day the Times hired him, the newsroom's administrative officer greeted him with praise for samples he had submitted of his work at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

"I really enjoyed your clips—they're so well written," he said as I sat there smiling, pleased with myself. Then he added: "Did you write them yourself, or did someone write them for you?"...It was my first exposure to the racial culture of the paper, the ugly underside of life at the Times.

Who knew The New York Times was staffed almost entirely by Southern members of the Tea Party movement? (he said with a sarcastic shrug of his shoulders.)

3DHS / shampoo, "Avatar", racism and sexism

« on: April 06, 2010, 04:55:30 AM »

Just to stir the pot, and to see if some of the women lurking about out there (you know you're there) will comment, I present again comments from the self-described "Female Misogynist".

http://malechauvinist.blogspot.com/2010/04/oh-good-grief.html

But what I need to vent about was her post about shampoo. Yes, shampoo. She has this one post about how she was in a good mood until she went to the drugstore and saw how sexist the packaging for shampoo is. You know, all the women's shampoos were in pastel colors and had swirly things and the men's were in red and black and had sharp angles on the labels. And oh the oppression of it just overwhelmed her! How can we ever be free when those monstrous companies put our shampoo in pink bottles? Teh horror!

I dunno, I just can't feel it. Yeah, my shampoo is in this cream colored bottle with swirly things on it, but I can't say I feel particularly oppressed. I used to use Brut shampoo, years ago, because I liked the scent, so I guess I broke free of all that patriarchal packaging or something. Before writing this I glanced over the various products I use, and she's full of it. A lot of them have gender-neutral packaging - deodorant, for example. I mean, there's Secret and Axe, but a lot of them aren't marketed to any particular gender, they're just there. How about Sure? It's for everyone, even the Statue of Liberty!

[...]

Actually, her syndrome is not unique. Liberals, in order to get into power, have trained people to see oppression everywhere. We MRA's are constantly bombarded with bullshit about how women are equal to men, but liberals manage not to notice this and instead will find, even in the most misandrist message, some little thing they can interpret as sexist. The same with race; the fight against racism has long since dispensed with demanding that everyone be judged by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin and instead has become basically reverse racism, with white people always presented as evil and greedy and so on with black people always being warm-hearted, wholesome, honest, etc. But even though TV shows and movies present most criminals as white even though that's not how it is in reality and constantly gives us black or Latino people in brainy professions which are currently dominated by whites and Asians - there's even a burglar alarm commercial which shows a white burglar trying to break into a black family's home - still nonwhites who feel like being sensitive can always find racism somewhere in the most anti-white propaganda bullshit. Example: the movie Avatar, which was about how white people are so greedy and sadistic that they'll kill lots of sentient beings just to make a profit. (This is of course what liberals literally believe.) The only way to atone for being white is to get yourself up in blueface and betray your own race for nonwhite critters voiced by nonwhite actors. This is completely unambiguous anti-white progaganda, yet the reaction I saw from numerous nonwhite bloggers was how racist it was that the blue kittycats needed a white guy to lead them.

My point being, liberals can find imaginary oppression anywhere. There is literally nothing you white men can do which they will not find a way to interpret as racist and sexist. There is no way you can win this game.

[...]

This kind of claim of sexism just confirms that women are too silly to be taken seriously.

3DHS / Female Misogynist

« on: March 25, 2010, 11:40:42 PM »

The other day I stumbled across one of the most interesting blogs I've ever seen. I will introduce it to you via some quotes from the blog post at the top of the list of the lesbian blogger's "Most Important Posts" list.

http://malechauvinist.blogspot.com/2008/03/why-i-am-male-chauvinist.html

No one has been able to remain unaware that our schools, which are run almost entirely by women, have become hotbeds of violence and sexual assault in which little if any "learning" takes place, so I don't need to recount my personal saga of spending my childhood being beaten up and groped by boys while the teachers watched happily, giggling girlishly when one of the boys glanced her way. Just last night I came across this: Girls Accepting Sexual Assault At School As Fact Of Life. Consider this carefully: this is a realm where the authority figures are almost all female, and girls are completely unsafe from boys in it. This is precisely the opposite of what feminists keep claiming will happen if they're in charge. (Also take into account that many of these boys who terrorized me were denied a male authority figure at home by divorce. The overwhelming majority of violent criminals, welfare recipients, and substance abusers come from fatherless homes.)

Then there's the many female friends who turned on me for the most incredibly superficial reasons. No amount of generosity on my part could forestall this: gifts, shelter, financial support, a sympathetic ear, favors, hopping on a plane at a moment's notice (in October of 2001, no less) because I was needed, everything I could give did me no good when I had served my purpose and the female in question was bored with me. This is why divorce is so hard to get in civilized countries; women, by nature, will drop people when they're no longer amusing or useful. When they're in a chimpanzee troop or a primitive tribe, this is only sensible for keeping the species going, but for a civilization, it pretty much sucks. Women with a sense of loyalty exist, but they are very rare. But everyone who has entrusted a woman with affection has experienced this.

[...]

The real question is, why aren't more people misogynists and/or male chauvinists? We all go through the same stuff. The reason, I believe, is that we've been conditioned to think that modern loneliness and untrustworthiness are normal, even though in living memory things were very different. Also, there is the massive propaganda blaming all the horrible problems which have come into existence during the decades of feminism, all of which were virtually nonexistent before feminism, on "the patriarchy" - you know, that thing we put an end to four decades ago.

[...]

To be a misogynist and a male chauvinist is simply to acknowledge the facts of reality. I wish that none of this was true, but the evidence is overwhelming and conclusive. There is not one speck of evidence that feminism is a good thing. If governments do not resurrect "sexist" policies of the past, the granddaughters of the women who burned their bras will be wearing burquas.

And before you start with the comments about how she owes something to feminism I suggest you read down in the comments on the post.

3DHS / "Instead of being reactive, we took a proactive approach."

« on: March 16, 2010, 06:59:51 PM »

http://reason.com/archives/2010/03/16/pre-crime-policing/singlepage

To hear them tell it, the five police agencies who apprehended 39-year-old Oregonian David Pyles early on the morning of March 8 thwarted another lone wolf mass murderer. The police "were able to successfully take a potentially volatile male subject into protective custody for a mental evaluation," announced a press release put out by the Medford, Oregon, police department. The subject had recently been placed on administrative leave from his job, was "very disgruntled," and had recently purchased several firearms. "Local Law Enforcement agencies were extremely concerned that the subject was planning retaliation against his employers," the release said. Fortunately, Pyles "voluntarily" turned himself over to police custody, and the legally purchased firearms "were seized for safekeeping."

This voluntary exchange involved two SWAT teams, police officers from Medford and nearby Roseburg, sheriff's deputies from Jackson and Douglas counties, and the Oregon State Police. Oregon State Police Sgt. Jeff Proulx explained to South Oregon's Mail Tribune why the operation was such a success: "Instead of being reactive, we took a proactive approach."

Consider that for a moment. Even if we accept that the police version is true, they "proactively" arrested a man, confiscated his legally owned property, and forced him to submit to a mental health evaluation even though he had not committed a crime, and beyond a notion that he was "very disgruntled" there was no evidence he was planning to commit a crime. And the police were pleased with themselves for having done a good job. Do you think they did a good job? Did they do the right thing?

There's just one problem: David Pyles hadn't committed any crime, nor was he suspected of having committed one. The police never obtained a warrant for either search or arrest. They never consulted with a judge or mental health professional before sending out the military-style tactical teams to take Pyle in.

"They woke me up with a phone call at about 5:50 in the morning," Pyles told me in a phone interview Friday. "I looked out the window and saw the SWAT team pointing their guns at my house. The officer on the phone told me to turn myself in. I told them I would, on three conditions: I would not be handcuffed. I would not be taken off my property. And I would not be forced to get a mental health evaluation. He agreed. The second I stepped outside, they jumped me. Then they handcuffed me, took me off my property, and took me to get a mental health evaluation."

By noon the same day, Pyles had already been released from the Rogue Valley Medical Center with a clean bill of mental health. Four days later the Medford Police Department returned Pyle’s guns, despite telling him earlier in the week—falsely—that he'd need to undergo a second background check before he could get them back. On Friday the Medford Police Department put out a second press release, this time announcing that the agency had returned the "disgruntled" worker's guns, and "now considers this matter closed.

[...]

For a potential mass murderer, Pyles is remarkably placid and big-picture about what happened to him. "I've been looking for a new job for months," he says. "But given the economy, I'm pretty lucky to be getting a paycheck, even given all of this. For me, this is about civil rights. This seems like something the NRA and the ACLU can agree on. South Oregon is big gun country. If something like this can happen here, where just about everyone owns a gun, it can happen anywhere."

And yet people wonder why I say while I respect law enforcement I do not trust law enforcement. The reasons seem pretty obvious to me.

3DHS / African land grab

« on: March 13, 2010, 02:03:13 AM »

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/07/food-water-africa-land-grab

Just go read it. It's an excellent example of what happens when property rights of individuals are not protected.

3DHS / The whole federal government gets behind stopping "predatory" lending

« on: March 09, 2010, 11:35:26 PM »

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/34101.html

Pentagon brass want a new consumer watchdog agency to regulate auto dealers so they don’t rip off troops with predatory sales and shady financing deals. Democrats are hoping it’ll be hard for Republicans to oppose something Pentagon leaders want, at a time when troops are in harm’s way.

And there’s more: Payday lenders, check-cashing outfits and rent-to-own stores operate, for all practical purposes, free from federal regulation — and President Barack Obama wants to change that with a consumer agency that spans the world of finance from high to low.

[...]

The Pentagon’s concerns were raised in a Feb. 26 letter from Clifford Stanley, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. He said that “unscrupulous” lending by auto dealers has hurt troops — and has even prevented them from being deployed, as some groups have documented. That may blunt the sympathy the National Automobile Dealers Association members received during the House debate.

“Predatory lending affects our military preparedness. That’s how outrageous it is to not include these guys” in the consumer entity’s oversight, Mierzwinski said. “It explains that this is not just some liberal position.”

The auto dealers aren’t taking it lying down.

“It is no surprise that Obama’s Department of Defense is endorsing the creation of an agency proposed by Obama’s Department of Treasury,” said Bailey Wood, a spokesman for the NADA.

“The practices enumerated in the DoD letter — ‘bait and switch’ financing, falsification of loan applications, loan ‘packing,’ etc. — are already illegal under both federal and state laws. The CFPA will not make these practices any more illegal. Creating new regulatory mandates on top of existing federal and state statutes will likely drive up costs, limit vehicle financing options and, for many consumers including service members, effectively eliminate their ability to obtain financing to meet their vehicle needs,” Wood said.

Mr. Wood is correct. The net effect will be to make buying a motor vehicle both more difficult and expensive.

3DHS / Non-environmental inconvenient truth

« on: March 09, 2010, 05:13:14 PM »

This story may be surprising to Richard Read, who wrote the article, and to folks who rant indignantly (and often ignorantly) about sweatshops, but it was not surprising news to me. This is exactly what I knew would happen.

http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2010/03/chinese_factory_workers_cash_i.html

WUHU, China -- Years after activists accused Nike and other Western brands of running Third World sweatshops, the issue has taken a surprising turn.

The path of discovery winds from coastal factory floors far into China's interior, past women knee-deep in streams pounding laundry. It continues down a dusty village lane to a startling sight: arrays of gleaming three-story houses with balconies, balustrades and even Greek columns rising from rice paddies.

It turns out that factory workers -- not the activists labeled "preachy" by one expert, and not the Nike executives so wounded by criticism -- get the last laugh. Villagers who "went out," as Chinese say, for what critics described as dead-end manufacturing jobs are sending money back and returning with savings, building houses and starting businesses.

Workers who stitched shoes for Nike Inc. and apparel for Columbia Sportswear Co., both based near Beaverton, are fueling a wave of prosperity in rural China. The boom has a solid feel, with villagers paying cash for houses.

"No one would take out a mortgage to build a house," said Wang Jianguo, 37, who returned after a factory injury in a distant province to the area near Wuhu, west of Shanghai. "You wouldn't feel secure living in a house you didn't own."

In the end, market forces and ambition, not activism or corporate initiatives, pushed up wages and improved working conditions. The forces originally unleashed by the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping still drive China's economy, producing a manufacturing labor shortage and giving villagers viable choices beyond factory work.

[...]

U.S. journalist Leslie Chang followed young Chinese assembly-line workers for her recently published book, "Factory Girls." Chang says money sent home, and migrants moving back, are changing rural China.

Line workers, she says, can earn several times the average $200 annual income of a farm family.

"They're sleeping 12 in a dorm, and it looks like a pretty crappy life," Chang said. "But you don't hear workers say, 'Oh, I have no hope, I'm a slave.' They say, 'I want to save some money. My dream is to be Bill Gates or to own a restaurant.'"

Chang views sweatshop critics as condescending. She notes that the 19th-century U.S. industrial economy developed in a similar way, as Vermont and New Hampshire farm girls migrated to work in Massachusetts textile plants, sending savings home. She says savvy Chinese workers, not preachy activists, are securing better conditions and wages in China's fast-developing economy.

[...]

That formula is working -- after two decades -- for Chen Laixiang, a 40-year-old villager from Anhui province, long one of China's poorest inland areas. Chen's face is weathered and his hands callused from working outside for 20 years, pouring concrete in cities ranging from Nanjing to Beijing.

Now Chen and his brother, a woodworker, are back -- starting a business in Zhi Chang, their native village. They won permission to lease land and enlarge a pond.

The brothers are stocking the pond with fish. As 50-50 partners, they took a small-business class and invested $22,000 to build a fishing resort.

[...]

Anhui has attracted factories. Workers in the plants have dreams. Like almost all the young women in her village, Zhang Yuan went out to work in a garment factory.

"Living in the countryside, you feel like a bird in a cage, not knowing the world outside," said Zhang, a petite 19-year-old who sews garments in Shanghai Silk Group's plant in Xuan Cheng, Anhui.

Zhang lives in a factory dorm during the week. She spends weekends at home, 40 minutes away by bus. Her parents, a driver and a housewife, have used money she earned during the last year to buy a fridge, a color television and a motorbike.

"If we go outside, we may encounter a lot of difficulties," said Zhang, who aims to open a clothing shop someday. "But even if we try and fail, we will never feel regret."

Capitalism works. Even in China.

3DHS / GOP's small government sham says Glenn Greenwald

« on: February 23, 2010, 11:43:44 PM »

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/02/21/libertarianism/index.html

There's a major political fraud underway: the GOP is once again donning their libertarian, limited-government masks in order to re-invent itself and, more important, to co-opt the energy and passion of the Ron-Paul-faction that spawned and sustains the "tea party" movement. The Party that spat contempt at Paul during the Bush years and was diametrically opposed to most of his platform now pretends to share his views. Standard-issue Republicans and Ron Paul libertarians are as incompatible as two factions can be -- recall that the most celebrated right-wing moment of the 2008 presidential campaign was when Rudy Giuliani all but accused Paul of being an America-hating Terrorist-lover for daring to suggest that America's conduct might contribute to Islamic radicalism -- yet the Republicans, aided by the media, are pretending that this is one unified, harmonious, "small government" political movement.

[...]

This is what Republicans always do. When in power, they massively expand the power of the state in every realm. Deficit spending and the national debt skyrocket. The National Security State is bloated beyond description through wars and occupations, while no limits are tolerated on the Surveillance State. Then, when out of power, they suddenly pretend to re-discover their "small government principles." The very same Republicans who spent the 1990s vehemently opposing Bill Clinton's Terrorism-justified attempts to expand government surveillance and executive authority then, once in power, presided over the largest expansion in history of those very same powers. The last eight years of Republican rule was characterized by nothing other than endlessly expanded government power, even as they insisted -- both before they were empowered and again now -- that they are the standard-bearers of government restraint.

[...]

... Right-wing mavens like Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin and National Review are suddenly feigning great respect for Ron Paul and like-minded activists because they're eager that the sham will be maintained: the blatant sham that the modern GOP and its movement conservatives are a coherent vehicle for those who believe in small government principles. ...

[...]

But that GOP limited government rhetoric is simply never matched by that Party's conduct, especially when they wield power. The very idea that a political party dominated by neocons, warmongers, surveillance fetishists, and privacy-hating social conservatives will be a party of "limited government" is absurd on its face. There literally is no myth more transparent than the Republican Party's claim to believe in restrained government power. For that reason, it's only a matter of time before the fundamental incompatibility of the "tea party movement" and the political party cynically exploiting it is exposed.

Seems to me, Greenwald has pretty well pegged the hypocrisy of the Republican Party on its supposed limited government principles. I'm starting to believe that all those folks who say George W. Bush and John McCain are not real conservatives are wrong. Maybe George W. Bush and John McCain are real conservatives, and the ones claiming otherwise are the folks who are not real conservatives. Then what are they? I don't know. Maybe they're libertarians and don't realize it.

You may scoff, but that is kind of how I came to describe myself as libertarian. I was raised by conservative/Republican parents to believe in things like liberty and smaller government and the importance of the individual. Over the years, however, I saw the conservatives/Republicans in general consistently supporting larger government, more regulations, interference in the lives of individuals. My change from identifying as a conservative to identifying as a libertarian came not because I changed my core values, but because I held to my core values and realized conservatism and the Republican Party were not in alignment with those core values. And what Greenwald describes is exactly the sort of thing that influenced my thinking. Republican Party politicians talking about smaller government, limited government, liberty, and yet almost never following through with those ideas once in power. As the saying goes, actions speak louder than words. Conservatives and the Republican Party consistently prove they are not interested in limiting government, shrinking government, or protecting liberty. The few of their number who do consistently try are disdained when the Republicans are in power, imitated when the Republicans are not in power, but almost never actually supported.

Greenwald is right to suspect the Republican politicians and talking heads of doing the same thing now. My one main fear for the tea party movement is that it will be taken over by Republicans and used for votes and then either forgotten or corrupted when the Republican politicians get back in power. "Tea Party Republicans" are like "liberaltarian Democrats" and jackalopes. I don't believe they exist.

3DHS / Modern Prohibitions coming to an end?

« on: February 22, 2010, 06:39:32 PM »

http://www.slate.com/id/2234017

Our forms of prohibition are more sins of omission than commission. Rather than trying to take away longstanding rights, they're instances of conservative laws failing to keep pace with a liberalizing society. But like Prohibition in the '20s, these restrictions have become indefensible as well as impractical, and as a result are fading fast. Within 10 years, it seems a reasonable guess that Americans will travel freely to Cuba, that all states will recognize gay unions, and that few will retain criminal penalties for marijuana use by individuals. Whether or not Democrats retain control of Congress, whether or not Obama is re-elected, and whether they happen sooner or later than expected, these reforms are inevitable—not because politics has changed but because society has.

[...]

The chief reason these prohibitions are falling away is the evolving definition of the pursuit of happiness. What's driving the legalization of gay marriage is not so much the moral argument but the pressures from couples who want to sanctify their relationships, obtain legal benefits, and raise children in a stable environment. What's advancing the decriminalization of marijuana is not just the demand for pot as medicine but the number of adults—more than 23 million in the past year, according to the most recent government survey—who use it and don't believe they should face legal jeopardy. What's bringing the change on Cuba is not just the epic failure of the 48-year-old U.S. embargo, but the demand on the part of Americans who want to go there—whether to visit their relatives, prospect for post-Castro business opportunities, or sip rum drinks at the beach.

[...]

... More broadly, the freest communications medium the world has ever known has raised expectations of personal liberty. In a world where everyone has his own printing press, restrictions on private behavior become increasingly untenable.

Comments?

3DHS / there is still wonder

« on: February 19, 2010, 03:04:00 AM »

http://scopeblog.stanford.edu/archives/2010/02/fighting-cancer-1.html

This is... just awesome.

3DHS / information overload

« on: February 17, 2010, 11:31:35 PM »

http://www.slate.com/id/2244198/pagenum/all

A respected Swiss scientist, Conrad Gessner, might have been the first to raise the alarm about the effects of information overload. In a landmark book, he described how the modern world overwhelmed people with data and that this overabundance was both "confusing and harmful" to the mind. The media now echo his concerns with reports on the unprecedented risks of living in an "always on" digital environment. It's worth noting that Gessner, for his part, never once used e-mail and was completely ignorant about computers. That's not because he was a technophobe but because he died in 1565. His warnings referred to the seemingly unmanageable flood of information unleashed by the printing press.

[...]

Gessner's anxieties over psychological strain arose when he set about the task of compiling an index of every available book in the 16th century, eventually published as the Bibliotheca universalis. Similar concerns arose in the 18th century, when newspapers became more common. The French statesman Malesherbes railed against the fashion for getting news from the printed page, arguing that it socially isolated readers and detracted from the spiritually uplifting group practice of getting news from the pulpit. A hundred years later, as literacy became essential and schools were widely introduced, the curmudgeons turned against education for being unnatural and a risk to mental health. An 1883 article in the weekly medical journal the Sanitarian argued that schools "exhaust the children's brains and nervous systems with complex and multiple studies, and ruin their bodies by protracted imprisonment." Meanwhile, excessive study was considered a leading cause of madness by the medical community.

[...]

By the end of the 20th century, personal computers had entered our homes, the Internet was a global phenomenon, and almost identical worries were widely broadcast through chilling headlines: CNN reported that "Email 'hurts IQ more than pot'," the Telegraph that "Twitter and Facebook could harm moral values" and the "Facebook and MySpace generation 'cannot form relationships'," and the Daily Mail ran a piece on "How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer." Not a single shred of evidence underlies these stories, but they make headlines across the world because they echo our recurrent fears about new technology.