One AK per child

November 6, 2008 — xanthippa

No, this is not some sort of a perversion of the ‘One Laptop per Child’ initiative – a very positive effort to help fight poverty in developing nations by placing education within the reach of each and every child, and which I wrote about here.

Instead, one Kalashnikov rifle is the price Osama bin Laden paid for each one of the child slaves he purchased to work on his marijuana farm in Sudan.  Think about that next time someone offers you a toke.

Yes – child slaves.

This seems unthinkable – today, in 2008, there are still children being captured and sold to slavery!  Some of their stories are beginning to come out, like ‘Slave:  My True Story’  by Mende Nazer  and ‘Escape from Slavery: The True Story of My Ten Years in Captivity and My Journey to Freedom in America’ by Francis Bok.

You can read more in FrontPageMagazine’s story, ‘Child Slavery in the Sudan’ by Stephen Brown.  The callousness and lack of empathy of the slavers is difficult to comprehend.

So, how could it be that today, slavery could still be practiced so openly?

I suppose we can thank the ‘desert religions’ and their ‘holy texts’ for this!

Please, do not misunderstand me – most Christians, Jews and Muslims today unequivocally condemn the practice of slavery.  Francis Bok even says that he could only escape his slavery because a Muslim family which disapproved of slavery helped him! 

Yet, Christian, Jewish and Muslim ‘holy books’ not only permit slavery, they describe the rules of how it should be practiced.  And, because ‘it is permitted by God’, many people justify the practice today.

Let’s look at the Christian’s Old Testament (it’s Jewish counterpart being the Torah).  Thanks to the Society of Christians for the Restoration of Old Testament Morality, here is an easy link to their ‘Biblically Correct Family Values’ , which quotes: 

Exodus 21:7-8: “And if a man sell his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the menservants do. If she please not her master, who hath betrothed her to himself, then shall he let her be redeemed: to sell her unto a strange nation he shall have no power, seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her.”

If you are confused by the term ‘maidservant’, note that someone is sold to become one.  (Just keep this in mind when reading other bits of the Bible, and the word ‘maidservant’ is used.)  And, we know what ‘bethroher her to himself’ means…

The Society’s ‘Biblically Correct’ pamphlet on how to treat rape victims is no less informative:

Deuteronomy 22:28-29: If a man find a damsel [that is] a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found; Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel’s father fifty [shekels] of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days.

Note that it is her father who gets the fifty shekels. The rape victim herself is not even worthy to receive monetary damages.

In other words, the rapist has just bought himself a ‘wife’ by paying her father 50 sheckles.  And, she becomes her rapist’s ‘wife’!

But there is more – here is explicit command to obey one’s owner– especially if one’s owner is also a Christian!

1 Tim. 6:1-2: “Let as many servants as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honour, that the name of God and [his] doctrine be not blasphemed. And they that have believing masters, let them not despise [them], because they are brethren; but rather do [them] service, because they are faithful and beloved, partakers of the benefit. These things teach and exhort.”

My point is not that the slavers in this story are Muslims – there are all kinds of slavers in the world today, both religious and secular.  However, it seems that feeling justified in owning (and abusing) other humans who are enslaved, feeling righteous in this practice, truly believing that one has the right  to oppress others because it pleases God – that is a monstrous mindset. 

Yet, it is this very mindset which is at the root of both slavery and the imposition of religious law onto secular society.  Whether it be the medieval Inquisition or modern-day Sharia – the mindset is the same.  People feel justified in committing atrocities because they truly and honestly believe this is the will of one God or another…

That is why it is essential that we do not allow our secular laws to become increasingly accomodating of religious laws or even religious sensitivities!  That is why we must fight against the creeping of religious rules – ALL religious rules – into governing the behaviour (and speech) of the people in our society!

 

Posted in atheism, freedoms, opression, politics, religion, society. Tags: , , , . 1 Comment »

Fighting opression through education: ‘hole in the wall’

November 4, 2008 — xanthippa

The best way to make this world a better place for everyone, in my never-humble-opinion, is to make good education so accessible, everyone gets some.

The more, the better.  Why?

It may be naive on my part, but I have always thought that many injustices throughout the world are not opposed because it simply does not occur to people that they could be opposed.  One good thing that results from education is the broadening of one’s perspectives, learning about different places where things are done differently, and the realization that it is possible to ‘question stuff’…

Education also teaches us how to reason.  It does not matter what we are learning, we cannot escape acquiring some formal reasoning when we ‘learn stuff’.  That is also good.

But, perhaps one of the best reasons for making education available to everyone is that it will open horizons for kids and open up possibilities for them that they never dreamt of before.

That is why I think that efforts like ‘One Laptop per Child’ are so important – and why every child, male or female, should become educated.

But many people question how children would benefit from simply having an internet-connected laptop.  What would they do with one?  How would they learn?  Many of them do not even speak English – or any of the other languages dominating the internet!  What use would such a computer be to them?

A little while ago, one of my sons came across an interesting article about a brilliant study done by a physicist named Sugata Mitra in New Delhi, India.  It was called ‘Hole in the Wall’:

An Indian physicist puts a PC with a high speed internet connection in a wall in the slums and watches what happens. Based on the results, he talks about issues of digital divide, computer education and kids, the dynamics of the third world getting online.

The results were brilliant!  The computer, connected to high-speed internet, had a touch-screen interface.  It ‘mysteriously’ appeared, cemented into a wall, in a New Delhi slum… no instructions, no manual, no rules, no help.  What happened next was, well, enlightening!

What he discovered was that the most avid users of the machine were ghetto kids aged 6 to 12, most of whom have only the most rudimentary education and little knowledge of English. Yet within days, the kids had taught themselves to draw on the computer and to browse the Net. Some of the other things they learned, Mitra says, astonished him.

If you have the time to read the whole interview with Dr. Mitra, I would greatly suggest it.  If not, here are some of the highlights:

  • Children aged 6-12 were the most avid users of the computer
  • without any instruction, they taught themselves to use a paint program and to access sites with games
  • Dr. Mitra played an mp3 file for them – a capability of the computer that had not occurred to them.  In several days, Dr. Mitra says, they knew enough about mp3 files and music online ‘he could have learned a thing or two from them’.
  • If children think something is worth learning, it is not necessary to use formal instruction (expensive in the developing countries) to teach kids – instead, it ought to build on knowledge kids can self-teach

But there was more to Dr. Mitra’s curiosity…he wondered how effective self-directed learning would be in more formal subjects…like, say, physics…

Well, I tried another experiment. I went to a middle-class school and chose some ninth graders, two girls and two boys. I called their physics teacher in and asked him, “What are you going to teach these children next year at this time?” He mentioned viscosity. I asked him to write down five possible exam questions on the subject. I then took the four children and said, “Look here guys. I have a little problem for you.” They read the questions and said they didn’t understand them, it was Greek to them. So I said, “Here’s a terminal. I’ll give you two hours to find the answers.”

Then I did my usual thing: I closed the door and went off somewhere else.

They answered all five questions in two hours. The physics teacher checked the answers, and they were correct. That, of itself, doesn’t mean much. But I said to him, “Talk to the children and find out if they really learned something about this subject.” So he spent half an hour talking to them. He came out and said, “They don’t know everything about this subject or everything I would teach them. But they do know one hell of a lot about it. And they know a couple of things about it I didn’t know.”

That’s not a wow for the children, it’s a wow for the Internet. It shows you what it’s capable of. The slum children don’t have physics teachers. But if I could make them curious enough, then all the content they need is out there. The greatest expert on earth on viscosity probably has his papers up there on the Web somewhere. Creating content is not what’s important. What is important is infrastructure and access … The teacher’s job is very simple. It’s to help the children ask the right questions.

This makes so much sense!

And, please, consider that many universities and colleges have started putting their undergraduate courses online – accessible for free!!!

Here are some examples:  MIT Open Courseware, Carnegie Mellon open learning initiative, John Hopkins open courseware, and many, many more!!!  So, with a laptop, an internet connection and a healthy dose of curiosity and desire, a kid in Africa or Sri Lanka or anywhere else in the world can access world-class education.  There is still the question of accreditation, but that is only necessary to getting a job – not to actually using the education on their own! 

Just think how empowering it would be for young people, all over the world, to gain access to this kind of education!  If Dr. Mitra is correct, then self-directed learning is the most effective way to educate our children.  So, let us put the tools into their hands – and let’s watch them grow!

Of course, education is not the answer to ending oppression – but it is an important step.  It is much more difficult to oppress a society of people who are well educated and internet literate than it is to control people who don’t know how to call out for help!

Posted in education, freedoms, human nature, opression, politics, science, society, technology. Tags: , , , , , , . 3 Comments »

Steal this post!

October 16, 2008 — xanthippa

With the upcoming conference ‘The Media’s Right to Offend: Exploring Legal and Ethical Limits on Free Speech’ in Halifax (Yes, Ezra will be speaking), I cannot but make the connections between the limitations on the freedom of speech the government on one hand and corporate interests on the other.

This is not meant to distract from the one – rather, it is to call attention to the connections between the two, and to make sure we don’t get side-swiped by corporate censorship just as we will have won the legal battle against the government.  And, it seems clear to me that corporate censorship is as much of a threat to our freedoms as government censorship is.

xkcd’s ‘Steal this comic’

If you dont like this, demand DRM-free files
xkcd says:  … I have lost every other piece of DRM-locked music I had paid for. 

While I have too much respect for the rule of law to advocate piracy, I do think that we need change bad laws.  And laws which turn the majority of the population into criminals (even without their knowledge) are bad laws – in my never-humble-opinion.

If you want more info on this – and missed my earlier rant on this, please, watch ‘Steal This Film’!  It is important that we understand how these laws can affect us….and what USED to be perceived as ‘piracy’:

  • in the 1970’s, network TV fought against Cable, saying putting their content onto a cable that ran to people’s home was ‘piracy’
  • when the VCR was invented, Hollywood movie studios predicted that this would be the end of them, as this ‘piracy’ would rob them of revenue.
  • the ‘sheet music’ people – as well as many musician unions – resisted ‘recorded music’, because they perceived it as ‘piracy’
  • the 1st mp3-player out there (long before ipod) was met with lawsuits for ‘facilitatin piracy’

Traditionally, copyright violation was a matter for civil courts.  In order for a criminal prosecution to occurr, there had to be more than just simple copyright violation.  But that is no longer the case, as corporations are forcing criminal charges to be laid agains simple, non-commercial copyright violation….that is something we need to pay attention to!

So, please,

Steal This Film

Posted in freedoms, human nature, opression, politics, society. Tags: , , , . 3 Comments »

What do Olympics and DRMs have in common?

October 1, 2008 — xanthippa

Freedom of speech is so important, it is fundamental to freedom in a society.  The threats to freedom of speech come in many shapes – some from government (like the Canadian Human Rights’ Commissions and similar organizations), some from religious leaders, others from corporate interests.

After all – he who controls what and how ideas are communicated has a great amount of control of what and how people think.  And how they spend their money.  Power and money – it’s that crass.

John Perry Barlow wrote, in an article The Economy of Ideas which appeared in Wired in 1994:

The greatest constraint on your future liberties may come not from government but from corporate legal departments laboring to protect by force what can no longer be protected by practical efficiency or general social consent.

Barlow was speaking of things which we have all seen to happen.  From DRM laws, which are based on the idea of ‘every customer is guilty of being a potential pirate, don’t bother with a defence’, to some serious weight being thrown around by the Olympic committees, we are experiencing true and real erosion of our freedom of speech and expression with the sole aim to further corporate interests.

Don’t think so?

If someone from ‘the government’ tried to control what people wore to a sporting event, we would scream ‘censorship’.  Yet, Olympic organizers get away with it – if your T-shirt displays a logo of a non-sponsor, you are asked to remove it, wear it inside out, or – I know this happened at the Athens games – you are handed an official Olympic ‘logo cover’ thingy you have to stick over top of your ‘unapproved’ logo.

This is all in the name of ‘protecting their sponsors’!

Want to drink water from a non-sponsor’s bottle?  Not at the Olympics….

Is your hotel, near the Olympic venue – and visible from it, not a sponsor?  Well, then its name will have to be covered up during the games by the official Olympic ‘sign cover’.  (In Beijing, all logos, even on water taps and toilets, from non-sponsors were covered up by sticky tape.)

And we all know how much the IOC is intent on ‘protecting’ freedom of speech from the nice deal they struck with the Chinese about censoring all ‘non-sports relevant’ internet sites.  Their attitude is best exemplified by this answer, given by BOCOG speaker Sun Weide, when asked why access to all sites about Falun Gong religion….keep in mind, the question was why was the access censored:

“I would remind you that Falun Gong is an evil, fake religion which has been banned by the Chinese government.”

But all this is just a tip of the ice-berg.

The IOC – and its various local minions – have been busy little beavers indeed.  If you think the Beijing one (BOCOG) was in Communist country and therefore much more oppressive than most, think again.  Look at what is already happening in preparation for the Olympic Games in Vancouver (VANOC) in 2010!

  1. Bits of the Canadain National Anthem are being TRADEMARKED by the Vancouver organizers.
  2. Other words, like ‘winter’, ‘2010’, ‘games’, ‘medal’, ‘gold’ and many more are also being trademarked by VANOC. 

Usually, these would be just too general to be registered – but that does not worry the Olympic committee.  While back, they got a law passed (I understand that there is a similar law in the USA), Bil C-47, which makes it OK…

You may think that it is really just meant to protect the sponsors, that the IOC would not abuse this to hassle legitimate businesses, right?  You might want to discuss that with the many businesses that have the word ‘Olympic’ in their name – even Greek restaurants, in Greece…or ones on ‘Olympic peninsula’ in North America.  They might be able to explain why they keep receiving letters from the IOC lawyers, telling them they are in violation of a trademark…

Freedom of speech indeed… 

From DRM laws which assume all of us are lawbreakers and must be handcuffed (digitally) lest we steal what we see, greedy corporate interests, to corrupt, money and power grubbing international organizations, we are increasingly finding our freedoms eroded, one little bit at a time.

And isn’t it a coincidence that both the ‘Olympic marks’ Bill C-47, which allows unprecendented powers of censorship to the Olympic Committee, and the ‘movie piracy’ Bill C-59 both received royal assent on the same day?

Posted in freedoms, opression, politics, society. Tags: , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

‘An Immigrant Speaks on Immigration’

July 2, 2008 — xanthippa

Today, Blazing Catfur’s post ‘An Immigrant Speaks on Immigration’ quoted my post, Immigrants:  escaping the ‘self-imposed ghettos’.  Thank you, Blazing!

Having re-read my post, it seems to me that the idea Blazing was getting at was burried at the bottom of the post…even though this is something I really, really think is important.  So, perhaps it will not seem too egotistical if I pull up that portion of the original post and repeat it here:

In times when so many immigrants live in self-imposed ghettos, it is important for those of us who have succeeded in integrating into our host cultures to share our experiences and insights.  It is imperative that we go out of our way to help all other immigrants – not just those from out specific background – succeed the way we have, so they, too, may enjoy all that our new homeland has to offer us! 

It is just as important that we do identify ourselves as immigrants to ‘the mainstream culture’ – in order to make people see that immigrants CAN successfully integrate!  And, of course, to reassure them that we came here BECAUSE of thier culture and customs, and that we, the immigrants, want them preserved at all costs!!!

Therefore, it is also imperative that we, the well-adjusted immigrants, oppose most vehemently and most vocally the erosion of values in the cultures of our adoptive homelands!!!  We are the ones who MUST LEAD the forces that protect the cultures and customs whose protections we sought when we were the most vulnerable! 

After all, this is the only way we will be able to preserve our host cultures!  We have NOT picked them lightly, we picked them because we liked them. 

Perhaps each and every immigrant is not completely comfortable with all aspects of the host culture, but the whole is what we came for, and this whole cannot exist without the bits we are not all that comfortable with….so we must protect ALL OF IT!!!! 

All right, I know I am ranting now – but, well, this is something really, really important! 

I do not wish to loose all that my adoptive homeland has to offer – especially its culture!  I came here for the benfits the ‘Western culture’ of individualism has to offer – and I’ll be damned if I don’t do everything in my power to preserve it for my children to enjoy!!!

Posted in freedoms, human nature, immigrants, opression, politics, society. Tags: , , , , . 2 Comments »

Yet another reason to skip the Beijing Olympics

May 21, 2008 — xanthippa

As if continuing to opress its population were not enough!

As if forcing women to undergo ‘abortions’ against their will were not enough! 

As if China’s continuous disregard for the environment were not enough!

As if its exploitation of Africa were not enough!

After all – all these things could not possibly outweigh our desire to ‘not dissapoint our athletes – or so we have been told by so many apologists…. 

Now, we have another reason for not going to the Olympic games in Beijing.  And this one actually poses danger to the athletes – and all the spectators – themselves!  No, not just the smog, or something equally long-term.  We are talking about real, immediate, physical danger.  And not just to them alone, but to everyone back home when they return, especially the kids.

What, do you say, could this be?

The National Post has an interesting article about the outbreak of the infectious hand-mouth-foot disease (HMFD) in China!  According to CDC, HMFD can be caused by several different viruses, some of them mild, some potentially deadly, especially to children.  The National Post article says this outbreak is caused by EV71, of which the CDC says:

“Another cause of HFMD, EV71 may also cause viral meningitis and, rarely, more serious diseases, such as encephalitis, or a poliomyelitis-like paralysis. EV71 encephalitis may be fatal. Cases of fatal encephalitis occurred during outbreaks of HFMD in Malaysia in 1997 and in Taiwan in 1998.”

This disease can be spread by such innoculous means as cutlery not washed in hot enough water (CDC).  It is usualy only serious for children and people with weakened health, but strong adults (like, say, athletes) can become infected without becoming symptomatic, and spread the virus for several weeks (like, say, when they return home to their kids).

In other words, the athletes and millions of Olympic spectators could become infected, without being symptomatic.  Most visitors and athletes would likely fly home – and airplanes, with their re-circulated air, are perfect incubators for infectious pathogens… ask any nurse! Once home, all these people will celbrate, hug and kiss their kids, relatives, friends….get together to show photos and talk….

This sounds like an ‘ideal’ way to spread this disease!

Oh, but China would take all precautions to contain the infection, right?  Ask world’s leading experts to help them do all it takes to protect its own citizens as well as Olympic athletes and visitors?  Right?

As luck would have it, Taiwan is seen as having some of the best expertise in containing this disease – they have successfully done it two times recently!  Nice and close – except that…  China is not willing to accept help! 

Not only has it refused Taiwanese experts entry, it has also banned Taiwanese journalists.  Its own official newspapers are not exactly forthcoming with information on the epidemic…  Nice to see how well they are handling it…their traditional way of deny, deny, deny!  No problem here!  Yeah, and you expect us to trust any assurances after this, too?  Some track record!

It would be foolish to allow people to attend the Olympics in the midst of a deadly epidemic (and children in China have died during this outbreak already).  Or, in the least, governments which allow its citizens to travel to the Beijing Olympics MUST, as a matter of national health policy, establish quarantine areas where anyone returning from Beijing will have to be detained for several weeks, until any danger of spreading the disease has passed (both athletes and visitors).

Now, this is a thoroughly NON-POLITICAL reason not to go to this Olympics! 

It would not be a political boycot.  Rather, it would be a prudent and responsible policy to prevent the worldwide spread of a disease that kills children.

Will THIS be enough to make the world do the right thing?

Posted in freedoms, opression, politics, science, society. Tags: , , , , . 1 Comment »
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