Without the state

David Brin is an optimist!

Three cheers for the Surveillance Society! - Salon

Location awareness will pervade the electronic world, thanks to ever more sophisticated radio transceivers, GPS chips, and government-backed emergency location initiatives like Enhanced-911 in the United States and Enhanced-112 in Europe. Cellphones, computers and cars will report position and unique identity in real time, with (or possibly without) owner consent. Lives will be saved, property recovered, and missing children found. But these benefits aren't the real reason that location awareness and reporting will spread to nearly every device. As described by science fiction author Vernor Vinge, it is going to happen because the capability will cost next to nothing as an integrated part of wireless technology. In the future, you can assume that almost any electronic device will be trackable, though citizens still have time to debate who may do the tracking.

The National Secular Society nails the Theos Report

According to the National Secular Society the recommendations of the Theos “Doing God” Report are a “Recipe for Disaster”.

“Polls show that the majority don’t agree with faith schools, want voluntary euthanasia legalised, want the abortion laws kept liberal, don’t want to persecute homosexuals, and don’t want religion foisted on their children at school. Many religious groups want to impose the exact opposite.

“For all our sakes, religion must not be handed power. History has shown that it will inevitably abuse that power. Only last week the Catholic Church forced the government to back down on admissions quotas to improve cohesion in faith schools. The change has a potentially huge adverse implication for community relations in the long term. In the last few days, a Church of England amendment to the education bill to lift existing bans on discrimination against non-religious staff in publicly-funded ‘faith’ schools was forced through Parliament.

Who reads the newspapers?

You've probably all seen this in one form or another:

The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country;
The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country;
The Times is read by people who actually do run the country;
The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country;
The Financial Times is read by people who own the country;
The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country;
The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it already is.
The Sun is read by people who don’t care who runs the country, as long as she’s got big tits.

Now (from here via here) comes this US version:

1. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.
2. The New York Times is read by people who think they run the country.
3. The Washington Post is read by people who think they should run the country.
4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don't really understand The Washington Post. They do, however like the smog statistics shown in pie charts.
5. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn't mind running the country, if they could spare the time, and if they didn't have to leave L.A. to do it.
6. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country.
7. The New York Daily News is read by people who aren't too sure who's running the country, and don't really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.
8. The New York Post is read by people who don't care who's running the country either, as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.
9. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren't sure there is a country, or that anyone is running it, but whoever it is, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are a handicapped minority, feministic atheist dwarfs, who also happen to be illegal aliens from any country or galaxy as long as they are Democrats.
10. The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country, but need the baseball scores.

America beware

It doesn’t seem to me to be entirely coincidental that despite the vast wealth accruing to the Middle East from oil revenues, they are not hotbeds of technological innovation. Given the predominance of a religion that places adherence to the word of the Book over the world in front of us, it was never likely that the money was going to be invested in anything challenging to orthodoxy.

That’s why the US needs to be careful. The Christian fundamentalists are not just going after evolution, but astronomy and the other sciences. If they manage to expand their presence in the US education system, the ability of the US to maintain its position as a world leader in science will inevitably be prejudiced.

EDIT: see also this at Stumbling and Mumbling which sort of meshes with my point.

 

Harold Evans on the limits to free speech.

My position on religion should be clear by now but I still find this shocking. I despair that any religion should be privileged in this way, but that it should be used to defend the anti-semiticism built into unreformed Islam is doubly shocking.

Something similar happened at this year's Hay-on-Wye festival, sponsored by the Guardian, where a five-person panel discussed "Are there are any limits to free speech?" One of the Muslim panelists said if anyone offended his religion, he would strike him. A lawyer, Anthony Julius, responded that Jews had lived as minorities under two powerful hegemonies, Christian and Muslim, and had been obliged to learn how to deal nonviolently with offense caused to them by the sacred scriptures of both. He started by referring to an anti-Semitic passage in the New Testament — which passed without comment. But when he began to list the passages in the Koran that denigrate Jews, describing them as monkeys and pigs, the panelists went ballistic. One of them, Madeline Bunting of the Guardian, put her hand over the microphone and said words to the effect, "I am not going to sit here and listen to any criticisms of Muslims." She was cheered, and not one of the journalists in the audience from right or left uttered a word about free speech — not hate speech, mind you, but free speech of a moderate nature.

[via Norm]

I don't believe it either...

You Are a "Don't Tread On Me" Libertarian

You distrust the government, are fiercely independent, and don't belong in either party. Religion and politics should never mix, in your opinion... and you feel opressed by both. You don't want the government to cramp your self made style. Or anyone else's for that matter. You're proud to say that you're pro-choice on absolutely everything!

What's Your Political Persuasion?

I think this finally demonstrates these quizzes are nonsense...

Blending in

Blending in, originally uploaded by av_producer.

Ron Diorio, the originator of this image, has a great eye and the ability to simplify a captured photographic image to present the essence of a moment. Many of his images are taken on the streets of New York and have for me come to represent that city.

See also his blog - which I wish he updated more frequently.

Atheism is the default position of a sane intelligence

That’s A C Grayling’s position, although Theo Hobson is having none of it at Comment is Free as he tries to argue that not believing in someone upstairs watching every sparrow fall is an article of faith.

Grayling also “objects to the term "atheist", for it carries the implication that belief in God is normative; it defines non-believers by their dissent from it. Rationalists also dissent from belief in fairies, goblins and all other superstitions, he observes - why should their rejection of God be singled out as their defining feature?”

Seems reasonable to me…!

Hobson doesn’t have an easy time though as a perusal of the comments will quickly show.

No comment

Arty Meme

I picked this up from Anke at Anart Island Studio.

The idea is that the first five people to respond to this post (via comments) will receive a piece of art from me! I don’t know yet what that will be – it could be a print or a piece of jewellery but you never know. You may have to wait a while too, but I’ll get there…

The catch, of course, is that if you respond, you then have to post this meme to your blog!