radiant.matrix

A family member sent me this news item:

“Section 8 of Senate Bill 200 is a wide open door for any judge to censor anything that condemns homosexuality, including Scripture,” Colorado State Rep. Kevin Lundberg said.

Many Christians fear that one day the Bible will be considered illegal in America.

“I do believe that the Bible is banned, under the plain language of this new statute,” Steve Crampton, general counsel of the pro-family Liberty Counsel, said, indicating he believes that day is already here. — “Censoring the Bible? It Could Happen in CO“, CBNnews, retrieved 2008-Aug-20.

Could there really be such a bill under consideration? Fortunately, the State of Colorado posts all bills under consideration by the Senate in PDF format: Bill 08-200 is no exception.

This whole fiasco appears to be much ado about nothing: the bill in question basically prohibits owners of businesses (not churches or private associations, mind you) from doing things like posting “gays not allowed” signs.

Read more »

An article over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog titled “One in five use iPod at work” got me thinking. Especially this bit:

at least one productivity expert warns that listening to music might cause people to work less.

It’s these kind of broad generalizations that lead to Dilbert-esque policies like the “30% of British firms [that] have banned the use of iPods in the workplace.”

Read more »

We’ve all heard it: “If you have nothing to hide, why do you mind [[insert privacy-limiting action here]]?” The answer is obvious to people who care about privacy, but explaining it to the querant can by time-consuming and trying. Enter Canada’s Privacy Comissioner (as an aside, why don’t we [the US] have one of these?):

The truth is that we all do have something to hide, not because it’s criminal or even shameful, but simply because it’s private. We carefully calibrate what we reveal about ourselves to others. Most of us are only willing to have a few things known about us by a stranger, more by an acquaintance, and the most by a very close friend or a romantic partner. The right not to be known against our will - indeed, the right to be anonymous except when we choose to identify ourselves - is at the very core of human dignity, autonomy and freedom.

(from the Canadian Privacy Commisioner’s Annual Report to Parliament 2001-2002 as quoted in Bruce Schneier’s blog).

There’s a fantastic article in the Arkansas Times about teachers in Arkansas under administrative pressure to avoid “the e-word” (evolution), but also to refer to the age of rocks in a geology classroom only as “very old”. Apparently, the administration is concerned that telling kids that we believe some rock to be about 300 million years old will spark controversy.

A lot is at stake here. The article focuses on a program that has increased the general level of scientific education for students, but which would be threatened if a controversy over evolution and “deep time” were raised. Educators and administrators are faced with an ethical dilemma: if they choose to teach sound science by dicsussing the theory of evolution, they risk losing the resources that support an otherwise excellent cirriculum. Adding to that dilemma is the nagging matter that the Arkansas state cirriculum standards actually require evolutionary biology and an understaning of an earth that is billions of years old; administrators that avoid these topics are actually violating the state’s own cirriculum standards.

Some of the best bits are at the end of the article… I especially like the point the writer makes that while plenty of scientists are both supportive of the theory of evolution and deeply religious, certain individuals and groups in the fundamentalist communities continually assert that one must be either anti-evolution or an atheist.

Ah, yes. Another stupid law.

Apparently, Michigan now wants to make it a crime to sell video games that are “sexual” or “ultra-violent” (that’s actually the term proposed in the law) to anyone under 17. The same law also requires that sellers of such games create a “restricted area”, defined in much the same way as it is for selling adult magazines and videos. On the face, those provisions seem a little extreme, but understandable: people want the same standards applied to video games as to other visual media.

Unfortunately, the same law also allows for civil action against game makers and sellers when some foolish kid snaps (again) and a video game gets blamed. Remember Columbine? Those kids supposedly “honed their skills” by playing Doom. Now, I’m not too bad at FPS games like Doom and Quake — but I couldn’t shoot a real rifle with any kind of accuracy. Statements about how playing fantastical video games translates to real-world violence are just stupid, if anyone bothered to scratch below their surface appeal.

I continually fail to understand why nobody seems to blame the people who perpetrate violent crimes. Are people somehow supposed to be free of blame because they are under 18?

Besides, do we honestly think that these kids are spending $50 or more on a videogame? It’s parents and other adults that purchase these videogames. Unfortunately, parents often buy games for their children not to use them as pastimes, but to serve as babysitters. If a parent can’t be bothered to observe the games they buy their kids (or, heaven forbid, read about them before buying them), then why do we blame the kids instead of irresponsible parents?

Granted, a violent kid isn’t always a parent’s fault. But why don’t we ask what’s at fault instead of assuming that a 16-year-old is so impressionable that they are incapable of separating the fantasy of killing pixels from the reality of killing a living thing?

If such things really affected kids so much, then how come generations of kids who learn to hunt real, living things aren’t hunting humans en masse? It’s because most normal people, with proper guidance, can separate killing one type of thing (fictional or edible) from killing humans.