News Chunks
Jun. 3rd, 2009 08:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tangaroa posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
liberalAn abortion provider was assassinated in Kansas while attending church services. I wonder if there will be any apologies from the right for mocking or condemning the Department of Homeland Security's report on the threat of right wing violence. Also, violence and threats against abortion providers have been ongoing for decades -- read through the archives at Orcinus for more information on that -- but it has not gotten into the news. I think the only reason this incident got national coverage was because the victim has been in the news before.
MSNBC's Keith Olbermann blamed Fox News for inciting Tiller's murderer to violence. I have not seen the video, but it would not surprise me if Fox did use eliminationist rhetoric.
One of my friends on That Other Journal Site™ takes the opportunity of a high-profile murder in the news to note that a lot of people get murdered and it's not in the news, and we should be concerned about that as well. This raises some philosophical questions. Is one life worth any more than another? Does the fact that one man's life touched more people make them more valuable than the other man? Is it normal to think of one man as more valued than another, should it be? What does it mean to a society if the answer is "yes" or "no"? And in asking these questions, what does it mean to value a man's life? There is no one correct answer here, but there are a few wrong ones.
California's Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8, the amendment to the state Constitution which restricts marriage to a man and a woman. This follows legislative attempts to do the same which were all thrown out of court because the state Constitution had, until now, forbidden such restrictions as discriminatory against homosexuals. The Orange County Register has a history of California marriage law.
The judges found a middle ground to please nobody. The public is allowed to change the law, but to say the system works is no consolation to those whom it works against. The judges also allowed existing homosexual marriages to stand, which is clearly against the intent of the 52% of the voters who voted to ban such marriages. Also, the fact that the state Constitution can be amended by a mere 52%-48% vote is a weakness in the state's system of government given the tendency of social manias to fool most of the people some of the time.
A bad example of how not to react is given by the ironically named Californias Against Hate which posted advertisements warning "The Mormons Are Coming!" If you don't see the problem with that, imagine the ads said "The Muslims Are Coming!" or "The Tutsis Are Coming!". This is a good place to recall what might be Frederick Nietzsche's most famous quote: "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster, and when you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you."
U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter, a centrist Republican, is retiring. President Obama has announced his intention that Souter's replacement be Second Circuit judge Sonia Sotomayor, a person who by all accounts I have read was respected by both parties until the moment that Obama appointed her.
The Republicans are so caught up in the politics of winning for winning's own sake that instead of critically analyzing the judge's record in her application of the law, they are searching her for any possible flaws, real or imagined, and intentionally exaggerating whatever they find so as to make it sound like sufficient reason for rejecting her nomination. The Republican Party is opposing her because she was not selected by the Republican Party. Their opposition is a petty power game for obstruction's own sake.
Until the Republican Party puts the country's interests in mind and acts based on whether a proposed law or appointment is a good idea or not, regardless of which party came up with it, they will not be deserving of the power they have.
As a side note to a feature about the Vermont legislature passing a bill to allow homosexual marriage, the New York Times's blog By the Numbers had a graph showing the jump in the past 20 years in the proportion of "Born Again" Evangelicals within the Protestant movement.
I used an advanced mathematic technique called "subtraction" to split off the Evangelicals from the Protestants and treat them as separate religions because, when you think about it, they are. The differences in theology and underlying belief between the two larger groups tend to be greater than the differences between the sects in each set.
After running these numbers I found that Evangelicals are the most popular religion in the U.S. at around 38% of the population, Catholics are second at around 27%, traditional Protestants are third at around 18%, and the nonreligious account for around 12%. While the Times notes the rise in the nonreligious, I find the most noteworthy part of the chart to be the dominant, near-majority place of a modern and quite un-liberal belief system.
It is not only American religion that is getting more extreme. A French author named Alexandre del Valle, whose reputation I am unfamiliar with, has claimed that at least half of the mosques in Italy are run by the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist organization devoted to conquering the world and converting everyone to an extreme right-wing form of Islam. Imagine a bunch of Muslim Ann Coulters who have already started to "invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to [insert your religion here]". However accurate del Valle's numbers are, the Brotherhood has spread quickly since its founding in the 1930s and has had a similar level of success in claiming the name of Islam for themselves as America's Evangelicals have had in claiming the name of Christianity for themselves.
Back to the NYT's chart of U.S. religions, the dip in Evangelicals during the mid-1980s coincides with several high-profile televangelist scandals. Two or three of the most popular preachers in the country were caught with prostitutes or cheating on their wives or both, and another had infamously demanded his viewers give him several million dollars or else God would call him home. Given that the numbers go up afterwards as if the dip never happened, the dip probably masks the true number of people with Evangelical beliefs at the time. I suspect that many people would have stayed Born Again but would not admit to call themselves that.
Another item from By the Numbers: Some public schools in the US still use corporal punishment. I wonder how the regularity of such childhood experiences might affect adult attitudes towards authoritarianism, reflected in voting habits, and violence in general. It can be hard to teach children that it is wrong to hit people while it is acceptable for you to hit them. I have to wonder about political correlations because that map of where hitting schoolchildren is allowed looks somewhat familiar.
Canada might be starting to let the "war on drugs" weaken their judicial system. A family of five was ordered evicted from their house after being accused of dealing drugs from there and failing to show up to defend themselves. The CBC has more information about the case.
From a purely legal standpoint, the Clarkes had their day in court. They did not show up for it and they lost by default. The more troublesome part is that accused persons under the new law are not allowed to appeal to another court to overturn a decision against them.
It can also be assumed that a lighter weight of evidence might be required to acquire an eviction order than a traditional conviction, since no one in the family was charged with a crime.
To think of it another way, the charge was against the building. The building was found guilty, and its maintainers and occupants were punished. That is an odd practice for a British-inspired justice system which usually alleges crimes to have been committed by persons.
There is another case in the news about Britain's notoriously accused-friendly libel laws. Guardian science writer Simon Singh was convicted of libel for calling "bogus" claims that chiropracty alone treats such diseases as "children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying". Singh had made this statement with evidence in the work of Professor Edzard Ernst who conducted, in Singh's words, "70 trials exploring the benefits of chiropractic therapy in conditions unrelated to the back. He found no evidence to suggest that chiropractors could treat any such conditions."
In the first link, the Guardian's Nick Cohen highlights a troublesome part of the judge's ruling. To be legally permitted to call a statement false, it is not enough to prove that it is false. One must also prove that the speaker knew and believed it to be false at the time. As Cohen says,
On Eady's logic, a writer who condemns as "bogus" a neo-Nazi's claim that a conspiracy of Jews controls American foreign policy could be sued successfully if lawyers jumped up and said neo-Nazis sincerely believed their conspiracy theories to be true.
The idea that the truth is a defense against libel is an American idea stemming from Alexander Hamilton's defense of newspaper publisher Harry Croswell in the case of People v. Croswell in 1804. It is also a good idea and one that Britain's Parliament should consider.
A manga fan in Iowa named Chris Handley is pleading guilty to child pornography charges for importing manga from Japan which depicted the sexual abuse of children. The key point of interest is that these were drawings and no actual children were harmed. "Posession of obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children" in the form of cartoons is now a federal crime in the United States. A similar law is in effect in Australia.
A Windows security update looks to see if Microsoft competitor Mozilla's Firefox web browser is installed on the user's computer, then silently attaches some Microsoft add-ons if that is the case -- and it disables the uninstall button.
There are several issues here that relate to the freedom to control your own computer. Potentially undesired software is being bundled with a patch that users need to fix a security hole, so some duress is involved. A patch is the computer equivalent of medicine for a disease, and Microsoft's actions are like mixing nicotine in the medicine in the hopes the patient will start buying the doctor's brand of cigarettes. Then the user is not allowed to undo the changes. The user was not adequately informed of the changes in the first place. We also have the case of a monopoly looking for signs that its customers are using competing products, an intrusion of privacy.
Ironically, the modifications to Firefox are also a potential security hole in themselves since this might allow websites to install additional software without your permission.