Jacob Christensen

Absolutely and completely bonkers is the only way to describe this:

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”:

And while we’re at it, there’s also this wonderful story.

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.

Correlation, causation … here.

Karl Palmås writes about the strange fate of the Chapman Brothers‘ installation called Hell.

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.