Category — Social Policy

Belfast Telegraph:
Isn’t it contradictory to ascribe human-based rights to animals? Surely
it is absurd to apply a purely human concept to an animal who has no hope of ever understanding such a thing?
Zaki Nahaboo, London

Not at all. Anyone who ascribes rights to babies or humans with intellectual disabilities must be willing to attribute rights to beings who can’t understand the concept. It’s the moral agents, the ones who are acting, who need to understand the concept. Those to whom we attribute rights, do not need to understand these concepts.
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He’s a utilitarian, i’m more of a virtue theorist, but unsurprisingly most of his ethical answers are similar to mine.

Seed: Girl Shortage Could Cause Rise in Crime:
The authors assert that over the next 20 years, in parts of China and India, there will be a 12 to 15 percent excess of young men—men who will have to remain single in societies that also place a high value on marriage. Because women will be able to select high status males to marry, the men who remain single are most likely to be members of the lower classes or those who are otherwise undesirable.

These unmarried, low-status males are the people most likely to be perpetrators of violent crime, the authors suggest. Previous research has shown a strong correlation between sex ratio and violence.

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the lumpenproletariot will lead the revolution? to what… we’ve seen this demographic shift in the past, and yes, two factors increase in male youth and unmarried males both contribute significantly to crime rate… what we’ve not seen is this sort of ’scale’ of problem.

Guardian Unlimited Technology | Technology | Andrew Brown: on how much we divulge to Google & co :
Every time you use an internet search engine, your inquiry is stored in a huge database. Would you like such personal information to become public knowledge? Yet for thousands of AOL customers, that nightmare has just become a reality. Andrew Brown reports on an incident that has exposed how much we divulge to Google & co
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unfortunately, i don’t think the populace at large really cares…..

Activist’s remark starts FBI probe – Yahoo! News:
“I told him, `How could you possible think this is a terroristic threat? Don’t you have something more to worry about?’” Bensman said. “He said: ‘We have to investigate everything.’”
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you are a terrorist until they prove you are not to their own satisfaction:)

YouTube – Meet Alfred – The Belgian Penguin Man:
Meet Alfred – The Belgian Penguin Man
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well… you see… the thing is… that while this penguin man is perhaps a bit extreme…. his beliefs about ‘becoming’ and ‘enacting’ are the central beliefs of careerists in modernity. I have a ton of friends that have lived their lives in a way to ‘become’ something… something that usually isn’t too far removed from being a penguin.

Mutiny as passengers refuse to fly until Asians are removed | the Daily Mail:
Monarch said last night: “The captain was concerned about the security surrounding the two gentlemen on the aircraft and the decision was taken to remove them from the flight for further security checks.

“The two passengers offloaded from the flight were later cleared by airport security and rebooked to travel back to Manchester on a later flight.”

A spokesman for the Civil Guard in Malaga said: “These men had aroused suspicion because of their appearance and the fact that they were speaking in a foreign language thought to be an Arabic language, and the pilot was refusing to take off until they were escorted off the plane.”

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This is what happens when people are afraid… they turn into racist pigs. The fear of other people speaking in foreign languages is completely unjustified. The real thing to fear are the people who are afraid… Those people will act like herd animals and seriously injure themselves and others…. given the slightest provocation.

Of course, the moral judgement of this situation and the scared people caused the wrong people to be booted from the plane by the airline. The people that should have been left behind are those who refused to board or disembarked without cause. But because there were more of them, they got to fly, and the gentleman who looked scary were booted. I would have done the opposite. I would have said, ‘these gentleman are fine, you do not have to board the flight, and you can purchase a new ticket at your leisure’, that in my mind would have been a good response from the Airline.

Wondermark by David Malki ! – 220: In which a Plan comes together:

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its about how many millions you can inconvenience. why? because if you inconvenience them, then they will remember why they are inconvenienced. ‘for their safety’ against … someone. Great cartoon.

The One Man Advertising Campaign: 10 Reasons Gay Marriage is Wrong:
10 Reasons Gay Marriage is Wrong

01. Being gay is not natural…..

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oh… that’s just the start of a concept. this really is worth reading.

The Dumbing Down of America:
This dumbing down of the people continues to this day. The average level of literacy of adult Americans in the 2003 Adult Literacy Survey of the U.S. Department of Education was exactly the same as in 1992. That may sound not too bad –at least there was no decline. Yet over that 11 years, the average amount of education received by Americans rose. At any given level of educational attainment, literacy declined. Only because Americans in 2003 had more years of schooling on average did we prevent an overall decline in literacy.
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I think this is because television watching went up and book reading went down…

IST Results – Do ICTs improve our lives?:
The project’s final report reveals that many of the assumptions about ICTs and their advantages or disadvantages are not entirely accurate.
We assume, for example, that computer skills improve our chances to find a new job, with an estimate of 60 percent of existing jobs and 90 percent of new ones requiring ICT skills, according to the SOCQUIT report. Based on these figures, PC skills should have a determining effect on people’s ability to find employment.
On the contrary, “Our study showed that it is the social contact with other people that influences if people find a job or not, rather than the level of their ICT skills,” explains Heres. Equally, ICT benefits for elderly people are not reflected in the job market. “We did not find convincing evidence that the employment issue can be solved with ICT. However we did find examples that because of ICT, the elderly leave their jobs,” he says. These people are not motivated to change, as there are younger people with better skills, according to Heres.

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they showed, once again, that social contact is very important.