rights
grrlscientist | January 28, 2010tags: Rights and Privileges, ethics, social commentary, cultural observation, George Carlin, bible, humor, comedy, fucking hilarious, streaming video
Rights are cute ideas. Rights aren't rights at all if someone can take them away. 'God-given rights' are due to the god excuse: if god really gave you rights, he would have given you the right to have food every day and a roof over your head. But god is not (obviously!) taking care of you at all.
evolvingthoughts | May 13, 2009In keeping with the last post on humanities, I thought I'd ruminate with no effort or knowledge to back it up on what the term "secular" means.
If the fundamentalists are to be believed, it is a synonym of "humanist" and also "Satanist", "infidel" and "homosexual". But somewhat more seriously, I have seen it used in journals to mean those who are not religious, those who aim to the elimination of religion, and those who seek to exclude religion from the affairs of the political institutions. None of these are exactly right, as far as I can tell.
In Australia it seems to be a term used largely…
evolvingthoughts | April 5, 2009I'm very conflicted about this: An Argentinian professor who put Derrida's works in translation online because the published works were out of print or too expensive (way more than the European editions) has been charged with criminal copyright infringement, according to this page. While I think that publishers, especially academic publishers, who screw their market with exorbitant prices, or simply fail to maintain their catalogue are Bad Guys, I also know that the costs involved in publishing are nontrivial. Also, I tend to think that publishing Derrida is a criminal offense (I joke). But…
bioephemera | April 5, 2009It's just not Google's week. A mob of angry villagers north of London formed human chains and chased off the Google Maps car (no word whether they had torches). Microsoft is all up in Google's business (to be precise, they're funding a team at New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy, led by a former Microsoft programmer, which is weighing in on the pending settlement of Google's book-scanning lawsuit). And it's not just Microsoft that's taking aim at Google: the NYT has an overview of the many parties, from librarians to law professors, who have serious doubts about…
evolvingthoughts | March 27, 2009Pope rewrites medical science to suit Catholic dogma. Film at 11.
Australian government censorship website hacked. I'm not laughing, really.