Absolutely and completely bonkers is the only way to describethis:
In addition to blocking traffic from websites they don’t like, it looks like the web-geniuses behind the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow site have a few other tricks up their sleeves, such as automatically replacing any use of the word “gay” with the word “homosexual” in any of the AP stories they run … leading to instances in which proper names are reformatted to meet their ridiculous standard, such as this article about sprinter Tyson Gay winning the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials in which he is renamed “Tyson Homosexual”:
For one reason or the other I was reminded of this story from the Times Higher Education:
In a forthcoming paper for the journal Intelligence, Richard Lynn, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Ulster, will argue that there is a strong correlation between high IQ and lack of religious belief and that average intelligence predicts atheism rates across 137 countries.
You see, Hell was destroyed in a fire and the Chapman Brothers decided to rebuild the place – bigger and more evil, and now retitled Fucking Hell.
But my real reason for relaying Palmås’ post is his considerations on “evil” and how to deal with the historical figure Adolf Hitler. My impression is that Anglo-Saxons on both sides of the Atlantic have a tendency to explain wars, genocide and other nasty phenomena as caused by Evil with a capital E – metaphysics entering the physical world. (See also Bush 43′s infamous and empirically incorrect “Axis of Evil”)
The problem is that when you declare something to be Evil (as opposed to morally wrong), it becomes so much easier not to question the role of individuals, organisations and social institutions. If, on the other side, Hitler was an ordinary, but deeply disturbed human, the problem is not “Why are the Germans Evil?” (look no further than to football commentary to see this image of metaphysical German Evilness – and then we haven’t even touched upon the sorry subject of British tabloid media), but “Which combination of individual actions, organisation and social institutions allowed a person like Hitler to become the political leader of Germany?”.
I consider the second question (and the possible answers) more unsettling than the first, by the way. But then again, I’m a social scientist, not a theologian.
Gary Becker and Richard Posner addresses the issues of natural monopolies, newspapers as cash cows, bundling and unbundling and parasitic internet media.
Here’s Posner and Becker continues the argument. Highly recommended.
A personal perspective: When I lived in Denmark in the 1990s, I subscribed to two morning papers and one weekly. Usually, I also bought an international weekly paper and I also had access to somewhere between 22 and 28 TV channels. When I moved to Sweden, two Danish morning paper subscriptions became one Swedish, while I’m now at three weekly papers.
I had internet installed in my home in 2002 (!). Originally, I had something like 20 TV channels, but when my landlord changed distributors, I didn’t bother to make a new subscription for extra channels.
I’ll be moving back to Denmark in late August and to be honest I actually consider not subscribing to a daily newspaper and I’m not really sure that I want more than basic cable-TV. But without an internet connection, I’d be pretty much dead.
If you play around with the scales, the developments in Danish opinion polls can look very dramatic. But to make a long story short – the only thing which has really happened since November is that the Socialists are up from 13 to 17 per cent of the vote, and parliamentary majorities are still in play even if Ny Alliance and the Christian Democrats are as good as dead on the electoral arena.
Fogh misforstår bevidst Vestager. Ikke bare lidt. Han voldtager hendes udsagn – ellers kan han ikke bruge det. At Margrethe Vestager stiller sig i en position, hvor hun bevidst kan misforstås, er så hendes fejl.
Or in English:
Fogh is deliberately misunderstanding Vestager. Not just a bit. He’s raping her statement – because he couldn’t use it otherwise. That Vestager has placed herself in a position where she can be deliberately misunderstood is a different matter.
Perhaps Fogh’s distortion of both the Social Liberal standpoint and Danish political history wasn’t that surprising but the crudeness of the argumentation is noteworthy. But then again, Fogh seems to make a Karl Rove-like petty envy the basis of his political project.
But let me, just in order to keep the low level of discourse, note that there were two parties who were spectacularly absent from the Danish resistance movement during WW2: The Social Liberals – motivated by a curious mix of realism and pacifism – and Fogh Rasmussen’s Liberals – motivated by greed as farmers were busy producing for the German market.
Seriously, there is more to be said about Margrethe Vestager’s complete lack of political timing and Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s non-fact based foreign policies.
Birthrates across the Continent are falling at drastic and, to many, alarming rates. Why are Europeans so hesitant to have children, and what does it mean for their future and for ours?
Saudi Arabia accounted for 28 per cent of all global amphetamine seizures in 2006, the latest year for which data are available, according to the UNODC’s annual report.
The quantities impounded in the kingdom started to rise sharply in 2004 and reached 12.3 tonnes in 2006. “This is equivalent to the sum of all UK seizures – the biggest amphetamine market in Europe – from 2000 to 2006,” the report said.
So the Saudis are high as houses. Should we be surprised?
