Stuff and news items - 14-24 March 02012

Welcome aboard. Enjoy the knowledge that Paypal is revising their policies so as to allow for the sale of legal meterial they may personally object to. At least, for one publisher. Hopefully for all publishers.

If you simplify a gigantically complex issue like Uganda, and in the process, remove all the African voices in your single-minded zeal to create a single villain, can you make a successful and lucrative campaign? In the case of Kony 2012, you bet! But there's also some questions about who those backers are, and about how things went viral, and how the message is getting across. Let's have a nice example - in trying to show how stupid living one's life by the letters of the Chrisitan Foundational Writings, American Atheists chose to use the imagery of slavery to drive the point across. The word "backfire" doesn't even begin to describe how well the message was received.

Finally, the proper response to a disingenuous or attacking "Why?" is "Shut The Fuck Up". (Genuine whys can be answered, but not by the person who has just had their personal space invaded.) Trust the women, they know - creepy guys do not get to bed women. And, men and women, you should be able to discuss whether or not the sex is good without faking orgasms. Seriously.

Ah, speaking of women's issues, Tennessee's Republican legislators believes it a good idea to publically make available every abortion done in the state, with enough personally identifying information so that anyone can harrass the women and doctors doing the procedures.

An Arizona bishop has ordered the Catholic hospitals in his bishopric to let women die rather than give them an abortion. Not in such explicit terms, but he did order than none of his hospitals do abortions, and the one that was done (to save a mother's life) should be acknowledged as a mistake that will not happen again.

And Texas just deliberately forewent enough funding for 130,000 women to get basic health care so that they could prevent Planned Parenthood from getting any money to do those services at all.

Domestically, police suspect that detergent may be stolen and used as currency in the drug war. It is not aparently conceivable that it might be that the people who are stealing it can't afford it. Or might be doing what, say, the copper thieves are doing.

A young man is dead, having been followed by someone who believed him dangerous, who then produced his gun during an altercation and shot. The shooter claims he shot in self defense and fear of his life. Unfortunately, the law doesn't help all that much. The NAACP has requested federal involvement in the case, feeling a lack of confidence in the police department to do a thorough investigation.

One rule about taxes could raise an additional $47 billion USD for the government, mostly from the coffers of those who can afford to pay a bit more. Too bad there's an opposition that is clearly against making their masters pay anything more to the government.

The TSA is offering people a way to skip the normal security screenings and go back to the way things were before naked picture-taking - for an application fee of $100 that includes a background check.

In politics, an advisor to the still-frontrunning Republican party candidate speaks the truth - all the positions articulated in the primary are forgotten when it comes to the general election, mostly because for some candidates, that one included, the positions articulated in the primary are only there to get enough of the base to vote for them.

In technologies, the possibility that after 12 July, ISPs will willingly deputize themselves as agents of the media cabals in an attempt to curb file-sharing across the networks. If that is the case, then it may be worth investing in the Little Brother solution - encrypting and anonymizing the traffic you use with your tracker. Lifehacker offers one solution - The Pirate Bay offers another, and so forth.

NASA has unveiled a road map, should one find oneself off of Terra, of how to get about the Milky Way.

According to new research, driving while distracted is a matter of degrees, and that everyone has a slightly different tolerance when it comes to how much is too much. Which means that it's not necessarily the holding the phone that's the problem sometimes, but the conversation.

The future has developed the technology to create palimpsests using lasers. The question then is, can our historians of the future use their technologies to separate out the layers of a single sheet of paper so that they can figure out what it has been used for over time?

In opinions, Out Magazine interviews Gillian Anderson about her upcoming role at 43 of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, and gets a few interesting details about her earlier life in Republican Michigan and how much she freaked the squares by being herself. Elsewhere, speculation about the Big Bang Theory's cast, but no mention of whether Sheldon might be, say, ace.

Speaking of media and messages, captioning images from Harry Potter movies with messages of feminism. Some of which seem more effective in the contexts of their movies, like this one, that has several of the male adult figures with the caption "Masculinity is multi-faceted". Some, not so much, especially when particular authors are referenced. But they also link to such things as an unabashed love letter to Ginevra Weasley, a woman who played with the boys, did what they did, and held her own and opinions on the feminist qualities and natures of the Harry Potter series. Or the Hermione Granger series, if you choose to see it that way. (We, personally, see Neville Longbottm as the true child of prophecy, who has been hidden successfully by all the furor over Harry Potter until his proper time.)

Ms. Robinson likens the current political situation to a relationship with an abusive husband/father figure, where we must be willing to resist the bullying and band together to go forward.

Last for tonight, an image blog that engages in the practice of telling us that new technologies still require thought before they are plastered everywhere.

Shadow Idol: On the problem of the mob not wanting to get involved.

Many of us, when we talk about the past, want to say "I would never have supported the Nazis, or the racists in the South", or any of those groups for with we see the error of their ways in clear hindsight. The truth of the matter is that many of the people in the past that we condemn with our clear eyes were much more complicated than our narratives tell us. So, let's have a bit of an example. Everyone, put your heads down on your desks and close your eyes. I'll read a few statements. Tell me whether you agree with them by raising your hand.

The United States War in Iraq has been a failure.

The United States War in Afghanistan has been a failure.

Marriage between white and brown people should be outlawed.

(At this point, if there has been someone not following the directions of eyes closed and heads down, their name is invoked instead of a generic.)

Remember to keep your eyes closed. I'll do my best to make sure this is followed, but there's no guarantees that someone isn't looking and I just haven't caught them yet.

Let's continue. Remember, raise your hand if you agree with the statement

Every person deserves the right to marry the partner or partners of their choosing, regardless of their sexes.

Each person deserves to be recognized by the gender they choose, regardless of what their outward presentation looks like.

God intends for women to get married, serve their husbands, and have children to mother.

(By now, I am fairly certain that I would have a smattering of different responses, some who put their hands up, some who left them all down.)

Mm. Fair enough. Put your hands down, open your eyes, and raise your heads.

I can conclude, with reasonable certainty, that some of you would not have been fighting against the racism of the south, would not have been attempting to smuggle Jews out of Germany and other Nazi-controlled territory, and are not the civil rights pioneers that you believe yourselves to be, at this point in your lives.

How so? Because not everyone raised their hands on the civil rights issues questions after the first one (that's a control question, by the way), and not everyone kept their hands down on the women's issues questions.

This is not a reflection of your character, though. The way the questions and responses were phrased, nobody was forced to admit they were against a civil rights issue.

I reminded you a few questions ago that there was the possibility that your classmates were watching you secretly. For some of you, I'll bet you wanted to raise your hand, but if that jerk two seats down was watching you at that particular moment, you know that you wouldn't hear the end of it. And then, of course, there was always the question of whether raising you hand when the teacher was watching, or not raising your hand when the teacher was watching, was worth it. Maybe I would change your grades once I knew you didn't agree with me. That wouldn't happen. If it did, I would be fired, and rightly so.

You might have believed in the statement, but the peer pressure was too much for you to risk it. Peer pressure was there, too - if you were caught hiding Jews, you could be sent to concentration camps or killed. If you were white and seen as a sympathizer to black people, you could be fired from your job, ostracized from your social circle, and shunned from white society. If you were black and someone thought you were being an "uppity n-word", they could get friends to beat you or kill you, and the law wouldn't necessarily prosecute try all that hard to find out who did it. Does this sound familiar?

Standing up for someone else is always a risk. Sometimes it seems like the risk is too great. Some of you will work within the strictures of your social circle to spread tolerance and acceptance. Some of you will speak out against injustice, and be a visible and public presence for the causes you support. Some of you will be on the other side of that issue, with the counter-protesters and the people who believe that it's a "special rights" issue, because God-through-your-pastor said so, because your parents said so, because it's what you believe. If that's what you believe, though, you can advocate for yourselves without creating an environment of fear and hostility and without resorting to violence.

If you can only get your point across by hurting the people saying you're wrong, you've lost the argument. And as you do violence unto others, they stare at you, each asking you a question. It's the same question they ask of all the people who stand by and watch, either because they're paralyzed by peer pressure or because they secretly agree. "Et tu?" "Et tu?" "Et tu?"

When you resort to violence, it's only a matter of time before people look back at you and proudly declare that they wouldn't follow the path that you followed...while ignoring the parallels between their own issues and the issues of the past.

"La plus ca change, la plus le meme chose." Or, as Santayana said, "Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Will you be repeating the past today?
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This has been a Shadow Idol post, prompt 19: "Et tu, Brutus?"