Not really. It only exists in one book, and right after that cup is documented the dude comes back to life. That would indicate that any historical references must be taken with a grain of salt.
I think that the main problem here is that they are attempting to charge directly for something that has ALWAYS been free -- news in all its current iterations is solely an ad-supported medium. People pay for newspapers, that is true, but the costs of subscription barely (if at all) covers the cost of cutting down trees, milling them into paper, putting ink on them, and then putting them on trucks to deliver to front doors across the world. The costs associated with the actual journalism part has ALWAYS been ad-supported, that is why you do not need to pay anything to watch news on TV or listening to it on the radio. Subscription costs have historically been assessed to cover the cost of distribution. With the relatively minimal cost (I know bandwidth is not free, but it is significantly cheaper than the printing press) of distribution online, there is no need to charge subscription. When the newspaper business comes and tries to tell you that the Internet is changing the game by getting you your news for free, tell them to blow it out their ass. They are the ones trying to change the game here, they are trying to charge for something which has been free as long as it has been in existence.
What part of "inalienable rights" is so hard to understand?
It is very interesting that we would choose to talk about the American ideal of "inalienable rights" in reference to our dealings with Iran -- just look into the CIA's involvement in Iran. Overthrowing a popular leader for greedy economic interests? Check. Installing a brutal, tyrannical dictator in his place? Check. I mean, the CIA trained SAVAK, the secret police force responsible for repressing political dissent! The United States government saying ANYTHING about Iran silencing dissent is hypocrisy of the worst kind.
Not to mention all those assholes wearing crosses around their necks -- isn't that kind of like walking up to Jackie Onassis wearing a sniper rifle pendant?
NOTE: This joke was created by the late, great, Bill Hicks and paraphrased by yours truly.
I can certainly agree with this sentiment for a child that is too young to know the difference and should be supervised all the time anyway, (3-5, maybe up to 7 if your child is not the sharpest knife in the drawer), but once they get old enough to understand privacy the GPS tracker needs to go permanently. A degree of freedom is CRUCIAL in proper socialization and in psychological development. Yes, your children will be in slightly more danger, but that is ok. It is by this reasoning that the police cannot randomly search anybody and everybody's house -- surely they could prevent a great deal of crime, but we would quickly develop social psychosis due to our lack of freedom. The same thing can be said for raising a child. It will be the hardest thing in the world for you to do, but you need to cut them loose a little bit if you want them to grow up to be normal, functioning members of society.
And their parents may use any method at their disposal to verify the children are at the places they say they are. Privacy of location is not a right children have at any age.
You are certainly right about this, in the fact that this is what the law states. In practice, however, this will completely f*ck your kids up.
It is my opinion that children (especially teenagers) NEED a degree of freedom to learn about the world around them. Let's look at teen drinking, for instance.
Scenario 1: A child is raised in a strict Baptist household. They are told from a young age that alcohol is bad, and they should just not do it. They are heavily monitored all the time to prevent them from going to parties and such where drinking will occur. This child gets to college, and sees everyone around them drinking all the time. Because they never had any experience with alcohol, they will have no concept of moderation. Since the overall behavior is entirely off-limits, they will have no sense of limits within this behavior, so to speak.
Scenario 2: A different child is raised in a household where they are given a degree of freedom. Mom and dad will occasionally let them have a beer or glass of wine, just as long as they aren't driving anywhere. They are allowed to go to parties, but told that if they drive drunk, they can expect a can of whoop ass to be opened as soon as their parents find out. This child will have a sense of boundaries about alcohol. They will understand that you can drink to moderation. They will have a sense that it is ok to be drunk, but not to drive drunk.
We can see this even more clearly in the real sex-ed vs. abstinence only debate -- kids who are only taught abstinence and take abstinence pledges are every bit as likely to have sex, but are significantly less likely to use condoms.
All this being said, if your child is seriously in trouble (addicted to heroin, involved in a street gang, etc.) it is your job as a parent to take extraordinary measures to get your child back on the right track. It seems, however, that many parents seek to abuse these extraordinary measures and seek to use them against the ordinary dangers children face, which is entirely unacceptable. Your children need to get hurt sometimes, it is the only way to really learn about the world. For instance, you can tell a child 1,000 times not to touch the hot stove, but if you actually let them do it once you can be sure it will never happen again.
Of course I know the British court system was around first. I was just under the impression that the 'innocent until proven guilty' thing was inspired from across the pond, but it does not seem that that is the case.
There have been numerous studies into all sorts of "alternative medicine", chiropractic included. Some have been found to be effective (certain herbs mostly) and have since become -- medicine. Yes, all the "alternative" label means is "not known to do jack shit".
we may be overlooking something that does in fact work, but under a mechanism that we don't understand yet.
There is no mechanism by which chiropractic could work. It is 100%, pure, unadulterated bullshit. Whatever this "mechanism" is, there is not one shred of evidence for it in the real world, and would involve a rewrite of biology and physics. Not that I have any problem rewriting the laws of physics, mind you, but when someone claims to have done so it needs to be treated with a huge amount of skepticism as it is exceedingly unlikely.
No data ever comes from anecdotal evidence. In science, when we see that after doing X, Y happened, we don't immediately make a new law. We need to repeat X until Y happens every time. For instance, if you stood in front of the radar antenna, and the chocolate bar in your pocket melted, you would need to check all the variables to see why that happened. Did you just happen to step from the shadow and into the sun? Did your body heat finally catch up to the chocolate? In science we need to experiment exhaustively and tease out all the possible causes and effects. If you rely solely on anecdotal evidence, you would immediately jump to the conclusion that it was the radar dish even though you were standing right next to a dryer vent. In medicine, this is particularly important, due to the fact that our bodies are pretty good at a) getting better on their own, seemingly miraculously and b) making us feel better via the placebo effect.
They have done numerous double blind studies into chiropractic and have included placebo. There is some evidence to suggest that chiropractic may have slight therapeutic benefits for back pain, but literally every other item on the list is completely bogus. Realigning your spine will NOT cure any sort of disease. It will not make you "healthier". It will not relieve your baby of cholic or kill cancer cells. These claims are completely, 100%, provably bogus.
Yes. We need to fight the bogus bogosity of the bogus statements these bogus excuses for human beings let spill from the filthy sewers that they call minds. They are liars, frauds, hucksters, charlatans, and snake oil salesmen. They know how bogus their bogus treatments are but are simply making too much money fleecing gullible idiots to own up to it. What do they do instead? Sue an honest man for LIBEL when he attempts to expose them. People like them make me wish Hell was real...
I find the guilty until proven innocent part here pretty horrifying -- I was under the impression that the British legal system was very closely related to the one in my country (U.S.A.)
As to Singh's defense -- I think it ought to be fairly easy to prove that the treatments being advertised by the BCA are indeed, bogus. They made numerous claims on record that are provably false, even last bit of evidence has shown chiropractic to be no more effective than placebo for anything other than back pain. Since all of this knowledge is in the public sphere, I would think that it would be more than reasonable to assume that the BCA knew of the bogosity of their treatments. If they are not aware of this, that means at the very least that they are clearly not doing any research and are making wild unsubstantiated claims, which ought to fall under some sort of truth in advertising law, right?
In any case, good luck Simon. I hope that these idiots get their asses handed to them so that they can be publicly seen as the frauds, hucksters and charlatans that they are.
Yeah, that is the problem. I think we should be putting in place the groundwork for rational thought and inquiry from kindergarten on. Obviously, a five year old does not have the cognitive capacity to really use logic and reason, but you can certainly start putting in place the groundwork. You can gradually build upon this through education so that by the time they get to college they are prepared to question things, and to assess the world through the lens of logic and reason. Unfortunately, the Evangelicals will never let this happen because all of their success hinges on widespread ignorance. I mean, you can't be retarded enough to believe that there is an invisible man watching you and keeping track of who you fuck if you just use a little logic, right? I guess I am just a dreamer...
You are right, science has taught us to never say never about anything. We can talk probabilities, however. Taking into account everything we currently know about life, it is orders of magnitude more likely that we will find life on Venus than on the planet in question. When the probability of something is that remote, most scientists would consider it a safe bet to call the planet uninhabitable, with the understanding that we can't ever really know anything for sure.
Thank you for proving my point fully. You admit yourself that people made these lines. Did it occur to you that these wildly differing world views and the resulting violence are not just the cause of these borders, but also an effect? That keeping the world cut up into little nationalistic pieces only serves to further divide us and creates a nasty feedback loop?
I can clearly tell by the end of your statement that you know nothing about hallucinogens. Please do a little bit of research into the subject and you will find that these substances can have extremely profound, positive effects on the human mind. Just because they make you see funny colors does not make the experience less valid.
If you think they are just artificial constructs then why don't you try living in North Korea for awhile?
These artificial constructs create places like North Korea. We would not tolerate part of our own nation becoming like North Korea, now would we? There would be massive amounts of effort and capital thrown into improving that part of our country so as to bring it up to at least an acceptable standard of living. When we create an artificial construct such as national boundaries, however, it becomes very easy to ignore such horrors and pit them on somebody else. This sort of territoriality is deeply ingrained in the human psyche but is every bit as primitive as when your dog pisses on your sofa to claim it as his.
While few people recognize it as such, China is waging war against the west. And, they are claiming victories every day, because we have trouble just spelling "asymmetric warfare". I wonder if that recto-cranial insertion so common in Washington and on Wall Street have anything to do with it?
I recognize that the Chinese government is "waging war" on the west in order to become the next century's superpower. This does not mean that we ought to resort to xenophobia and racism to "beat" them. That is completely back-asswards and will only serve to give them more ammunition against us.
Plus the fact that China uses its technical workers for both industrial and political espionage quite frequently, and has been caught doing it several times.
I never said that China was not using tech workers for industrial espionage -- all I am saying is that it is racist to avoid hiring Chinese people because of this. By this sort of reasoning, cops ought to pull over every black man they see operating a motor vehicle, and Arabs should not be allowed to utilize air travel. Both of these have come into the courts and both have been shot down. Repeatedly. They are shot down because they go against EVERYTHING that a free society stands for -- you can't judge a whole group of people by a select few individuals. It is unconstitutional, unjust, and it does not even make practical sense from a probability standpoint.
Agreed -- that whoever modded this down is a jackass. I mean, the joke wasn't that funny, but I can't see how that could be considered flaming by anyone with an IQ greater than that of a muskrat. I have been baffled by some of the moderation on/. lately -- I think some folks just can't handle the responsibility.
Well, this planet in particular will never be able to support life as it is only about 2.5 million km from its parent star (which is about 23 times closer than Mercury is to our parent star, aka the Sun). Being this close, the planet is likely tidally locked like our moon, meaning that one side of the planet always faces the star. This would make the day side of the planet lava and the night side akin to one of the moons of Saturn (assuming, of course, that there is no atmosphere, which is an exceedingly reasonable assumption to make given the proximity to the star). That means that this planet never was, and never will be, capable of sustaining anything that we know of to be life.
As planets which could be habitable -- when you speak of the time we actually get to these planets, we are only talking in terms of thousands or tens of thousands of years. These measures of time are beyond insignificant in geological time and would have next to no impact on habitability (barring, of course, sudden events such as asteroid impacts, nearby supernovae, wandering black holes, etc.) -- if it is not yet habitable you can't really count on that changing too much in the next ten thousand (or ten million for that matter) years.
Yes racial profiling.
Thing is, the Chinese have this whole "for the mother country" thing going on, so it's a sensible precaution.
You say "sensible precaution", I say "blatant xenophobia/racism". The only reason people are worried about any of this to begin with is that America has that same childish and ignorant "for mother country" thing going on as well. It really disturbs me that in 2009 such hatred and bigotry is still the norm and is spouted, not only without consequence but to rave reviews and record ratings, on Fox News and right-wing pseudo-fascist radio programs. We need to realize that all of these boundaries we have set up are simply arbitrary, artificial constructs that have NOTHING to do with reality. To quote the great poet Bill Hicks, "I hate patriotism! It's a round world the last time I checked."
In the majority of human civilization, such pictures (the ones of mutilation) would not be regarded as artistic, but rather as obscene. In modern times, we've turned freedom of speech into a license to do wholesale degradation to beauty, truth, human sexuality, etc. to such a degree that even the most perverse things as tolerable.
While I fear empowered censors more than the effects of such "art," we should at least have the honesty to admit that such "art" expresses the worst of humanity. I'm not even 30 yet, and quite frankly I've grown sick of the self-assured, hipster posers who think this trash is edgy and avant-garde.
Some of the art out there certainly does express the worst of humanity. This does not make it one bit less valid as art, though. There are many out there (myself included) who feel that to experience all that it is to be human you need to be aware of the good, the bad, and the ugly sectors of human society. Furthermore, you could not have missed the mark any further in stating that "obscene" work degrades the truth -- these things you consider to be obscene are part of the human experience and thus are intricately interwoven with the fabric of truth. The logic behind your assertion that avoiding this sort of art will preserve truth is backward at best, and totalitarian at worst.
There is no such requirement in the U.S., as that would constitute a violation of the First Amendment. That being said, it seems like lately Congress has been using the Bill of Rights as toilet paper, so I would not be surprised to see some sort of legislation like this passed "for the children" in the future.
Very well said, sir. The solution I came up with for this problem would be to have a separate class in school teaching logical reasoning and the scientific method. Science teaching should be approached as a system of thought rather than a collection of facts. I mean, I am as fascinated by science as anyone and yet even I can remember being bored to tears in all of my science classes because of this dry treatment.
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Its existance was documented.
Not really. It only exists in one book, and right after that cup is documented the dude comes back to life. That would indicate that any historical references must be taken with a grain of salt.
I think that the main problem here is that they are attempting to charge directly for something that has ALWAYS been free -- news in all its current iterations is solely an ad-supported medium. People pay for newspapers, that is true, but the costs of subscription barely (if at all) covers the cost of cutting down trees, milling them into paper, putting ink on them, and then putting them on trucks to deliver to front doors across the world. The costs associated with the actual journalism part has ALWAYS been ad-supported, that is why you do not need to pay anything to watch news on TV or listening to it on the radio. Subscription costs have historically been assessed to cover the cost of distribution. With the relatively minimal cost (I know bandwidth is not free, but it is significantly cheaper than the printing press) of distribution online, there is no need to charge subscription. When the newspaper business comes and tries to tell you that the Internet is changing the game by getting you your news for free, tell them to blow it out their ass. They are the ones trying to change the game here, they are trying to charge for something which has been free as long as it has been in existence.
And if Iran was the USA, you'd have a point.
What part of "inalienable rights" is so hard to understand?
It is very interesting that we would choose to talk about the American ideal of "inalienable rights" in reference to our dealings with Iran -- just look into the CIA's involvement in Iran. Overthrowing a popular leader for greedy economic interests? Check. Installing a brutal, tyrannical dictator in his place? Check. I mean, the CIA trained SAVAK, the secret police force responsible for repressing political dissent! The United States government saying ANYTHING about Iran silencing dissent is hypocrisy of the worst kind.
Not to mention all those assholes wearing crosses around their necks -- isn't that kind of like walking up to Jackie Onassis wearing a sniper rifle pendant?
NOTE: This joke was created by the late, great, Bill Hicks and paraphrased by yours truly.
I can certainly agree with this sentiment for a child that is too young to know the difference and should be supervised all the time anyway, (3-5, maybe up to 7 if your child is not the sharpest knife in the drawer), but once they get old enough to understand privacy the GPS tracker needs to go permanently. A degree of freedom is CRUCIAL in proper socialization and in psychological development. Yes, your children will be in slightly more danger, but that is ok. It is by this reasoning that the police cannot randomly search anybody and everybody's house -- surely they could prevent a great deal of crime, but we would quickly develop social psychosis due to our lack of freedom. The same thing can be said for raising a child. It will be the hardest thing in the world for you to do, but you need to cut them loose a little bit if you want them to grow up to be normal, functioning members of society.
And their parents may use any method at their disposal to verify the children are at the places they say they are. Privacy of location is not a right children have at any age.
You are certainly right about this, in the fact that this is what the law states. In practice, however, this will completely f*ck your kids up.
It is my opinion that children (especially teenagers) NEED a degree of freedom to learn about the world around them. Let's look at teen drinking, for instance.
Scenario 1: A child is raised in a strict Baptist household. They are told from a young age that alcohol is bad, and they should just not do it. They are heavily monitored all the time to prevent them from going to parties and such where drinking will occur. This child gets to college, and sees everyone around them drinking all the time. Because they never had any experience with alcohol, they will have no concept of moderation. Since the overall behavior is entirely off-limits, they will have no sense of limits within this behavior, so to speak.
Scenario 2: A different child is raised in a household where they are given a degree of freedom. Mom and dad will occasionally let them have a beer or glass of wine, just as long as they aren't driving anywhere. They are allowed to go to parties, but told that if they drive drunk, they can expect a can of whoop ass to be opened as soon as their parents find out. This child will have a sense of boundaries about alcohol. They will understand that you can drink to moderation. They will have a sense that it is ok to be drunk, but not to drive drunk.
We can see this even more clearly in the real sex-ed vs. abstinence only debate -- kids who are only taught abstinence and take abstinence pledges are every bit as likely to have sex, but are significantly less likely to use condoms.
All this being said, if your child is seriously in trouble (addicted to heroin, involved in a street gang, etc.) it is your job as a parent to take extraordinary measures to get your child back on the right track. It seems, however, that many parents seek to abuse these extraordinary measures and seek to use them against the ordinary dangers children face, which is entirely unacceptable. Your children need to get hurt sometimes, it is the only way to really learn about the world. For instance, you can tell a child 1,000 times not to touch the hot stove, but if you actually let them do it once you can be sure it will never happen again.
Of course I know the British court system was around first. I was just under the impression that the 'innocent until proven guilty' thing was inspired from across the pond, but it does not seem that that is the case.
we may be overlooking something that does in fact work, but under a mechanism that we don't understand yet.
There is no mechanism by which chiropractic could work. It is 100%, pure, unadulterated bullshit. Whatever this "mechanism" is, there is not one shred of evidence for it in the real world, and would involve a rewrite of biology and physics. Not that I have any problem rewriting the laws of physics, mind you, but when someone claims to have done so it needs to be treated with a huge amount of skepticism as it is exceedingly unlikely.
No data ever comes from anecdotal evidence. In science, when we see that after doing X, Y happened, we don't immediately make a new law. We need to repeat X until Y happens every time. For instance, if you stood in front of the radar antenna, and the chocolate bar in your pocket melted, you would need to check all the variables to see why that happened. Did you just happen to step from the shadow and into the sun? Did your body heat finally catch up to the chocolate? In science we need to experiment exhaustively and tease out all the possible causes and effects. If you rely solely on anecdotal evidence, you would immediately jump to the conclusion that it was the radar dish even though you were standing right next to a dryer vent. In medicine, this is particularly important, due to the fact that our bodies are pretty good at a) getting better on their own, seemingly miraculously and b) making us feel better via the placebo effect.
They have done numerous double blind studies into chiropractic and have included placebo. There is some evidence to suggest that chiropractic may have slight therapeutic benefits for back pain, but literally every other item on the list is completely bogus. Realigning your spine will NOT cure any sort of disease. It will not make you "healthier". It will not relieve your baby of cholic or kill cancer cells. These claims are completely, 100%, provably bogus.
Yes. We need to fight the bogus bogosity of the bogus statements these bogus excuses for human beings let spill from the filthy sewers that they call minds. They are liars, frauds, hucksters, charlatans, and snake oil salesmen. They know how bogus their bogus treatments are but are simply making too much money fleecing gullible idiots to own up to it. What do they do instead? Sue an honest man for LIBEL when he attempts to expose them. People like them make me wish Hell was real...
I find the guilty until proven innocent part here pretty horrifying -- I was under the impression that the British legal system was very closely related to the one in my country (U.S.A.)
As to Singh's defense -- I think it ought to be fairly easy to prove that the treatments being advertised by the BCA are indeed, bogus. They made numerous claims on record that are provably false, even last bit of evidence has shown chiropractic to be no more effective than placebo for anything other than back pain. Since all of this knowledge is in the public sphere, I would think that it would be more than reasonable to assume that the BCA knew of the bogosity of their treatments. If they are not aware of this, that means at the very least that they are clearly not doing any research and are making wild unsubstantiated claims, which ought to fall under some sort of truth in advertising law, right?
In any case, good luck Simon. I hope that these idiots get their asses handed to them so that they can be publicly seen as the frauds, hucksters and charlatans that they are.
Yeah, that is the problem. I think we should be putting in place the groundwork for rational thought and inquiry from kindergarten on. Obviously, a five year old does not have the cognitive capacity to really use logic and reason, but you can certainly start putting in place the groundwork. You can gradually build upon this through education so that by the time they get to college they are prepared to question things, and to assess the world through the lens of logic and reason. Unfortunately, the Evangelicals will never let this happen because all of their success hinges on widespread ignorance. I mean, you can't be retarded enough to believe that there is an invisible man watching you and keeping track of who you fuck if you just use a little logic, right? I guess I am just a dreamer...
You are right, science has taught us to never say never about anything. We can talk probabilities, however. Taking into account everything we currently know about life, it is orders of magnitude more likely that we will find life on Venus than on the planet in question. When the probability of something is that remote, most scientists would consider it a safe bet to call the planet uninhabitable, with the understanding that we can't ever really know anything for sure.
Just because its constitutional and just doesn't make it a smart move though.
So are you saying that it would be a smarter move to re-institutionalize racism?
Thank you for proving my point fully. You admit yourself that people made these lines. Did it occur to you that these wildly differing world views and the resulting violence are not just the cause of these borders, but also an effect? That keeping the world cut up into little nationalistic pieces only serves to further divide us and creates a nasty feedback loop?
I can clearly tell by the end of your statement that you know nothing about hallucinogens. Please do a little bit of research into the subject and you will find that these substances can have extremely profound, positive effects on the human mind. Just because they make you see funny colors does not make the experience less valid.
If you think they are just artificial constructs then why don't you try living in North Korea for awhile?
These artificial constructs create places like North Korea. We would not tolerate part of our own nation becoming like North Korea, now would we? There would be massive amounts of effort and capital thrown into improving that part of our country so as to bring it up to at least an acceptable standard of living. When we create an artificial construct such as national boundaries, however, it becomes very easy to ignore such horrors and pit them on somebody else. This sort of territoriality is deeply ingrained in the human psyche but is every bit as primitive as when your dog pisses on your sofa to claim it as his.
Assassin's Mace, anyone?
While few people recognize it as such, China is waging war against the west. And, they are claiming victories every day, because we have trouble just spelling "asymmetric warfare". I wonder if that recto-cranial insertion so common in Washington and on Wall Street have anything to do with it?
I recognize that the Chinese government is "waging war" on the west in order to become the next century's superpower. This does not mean that we ought to resort to xenophobia and racism to "beat" them. That is completely back-asswards and will only serve to give them more ammunition against us.
Plus the fact that China uses its technical workers for both industrial and political espionage quite frequently, and has been caught doing it several times.
I never said that China was not using tech workers for industrial espionage -- all I am saying is that it is racist to avoid hiring Chinese people because of this. By this sort of reasoning, cops ought to pull over every black man they see operating a motor vehicle, and Arabs should not be allowed to utilize air travel. Both of these have come into the courts and both have been shot down. Repeatedly. They are shot down because they go against EVERYTHING that a free society stands for -- you can't judge a whole group of people by a select few individuals. It is unconstitutional, unjust, and it does not even make practical sense from a probability standpoint.
Agreed -- that whoever modded this down is a jackass. I mean, the joke wasn't that funny, but I can't see how that could be considered flaming by anyone with an IQ greater than that of a muskrat. I have been baffled by some of the moderation on /. lately -- I think some folks just can't handle the responsibility.
Well, this planet in particular will never be able to support life as it is only about 2.5 million km from its parent star (which is about 23 times closer than Mercury is to our parent star, aka the Sun). Being this close, the planet is likely tidally locked like our moon, meaning that one side of the planet always faces the star. This would make the day side of the planet lava and the night side akin to one of the moons of Saturn (assuming, of course, that there is no atmosphere, which is an exceedingly reasonable assumption to make given the proximity to the star). That means that this planet never was, and never will be, capable of sustaining anything that we know of to be life.
As planets which could be habitable -- when you speak of the time we actually get to these planets, we are only talking in terms of thousands or tens of thousands of years. These measures of time are beyond insignificant in geological time and would have next to no impact on habitability (barring, of course, sudden events such as asteroid impacts, nearby supernovae, wandering black holes, etc.) -- if it is not yet habitable you can't really count on that changing too much in the next ten thousand (or ten million for that matter) years.
A kick in the nuts from me for being a jackass.
Yes racial profiling. Thing is, the Chinese have this whole "for the mother country" thing going on, so it's a sensible precaution.
You say "sensible precaution", I say "blatant xenophobia/racism". The only reason people are worried about any of this to begin with is that America has that same childish and ignorant "for mother country" thing going on as well. It really disturbs me that in 2009 such hatred and bigotry is still the norm and is spouted, not only without consequence but to rave reviews and record ratings, on Fox News and right-wing pseudo-fascist radio programs. We need to realize that all of these boundaries we have set up are simply arbitrary, artificial constructs that have NOTHING to do with reality. To quote the great poet Bill Hicks, "I hate patriotism! It's a round world the last time I checked."
In the majority of human civilization, such pictures (the ones of mutilation) would not be regarded as artistic, but rather as obscene. In modern times, we've turned freedom of speech into a license to do wholesale degradation to beauty, truth, human sexuality, etc. to such a degree that even the most perverse things as tolerable.
While I fear empowered censors more than the effects of such "art," we should at least have the honesty to admit that such "art" expresses the worst of humanity. I'm not even 30 yet, and quite frankly I've grown sick of the self-assured, hipster posers who think this trash is edgy and avant-garde.
Some of the art out there certainly does express the worst of humanity. This does not make it one bit less valid as art, though. There are many out there (myself included) who feel that to experience all that it is to be human you need to be aware of the good, the bad, and the ugly sectors of human society. Furthermore, you could not have missed the mark any further in stating that "obscene" work degrades the truth -- these things you consider to be obscene are part of the human experience and thus are intricately interwoven with the fabric of truth. The logic behind your assertion that avoiding this sort of art will preserve truth is backward at best, and totalitarian at worst.
There is no such requirement in the U.S., as that would constitute a violation of the First Amendment. That being said, it seems like lately Congress has been using the Bill of Rights as toilet paper, so I would not be surprised to see some sort of legislation like this passed "for the children" in the future.
Very well said, sir. The solution I came up with for this problem would be to have a separate class in school teaching logical reasoning and the scientific method. Science teaching should be approached as a system of thought rather than a collection of facts. I mean, I am as fascinated by science as anyone and yet even I can remember being bored to tears in all of my science classes because of this dry treatment.