Obscenity

I haven't seen this around, and I thought some people might be interested. It raises some interesting questions:

What’s Obscene? Google Could Have an Answer

Judges and jurors who must decide whether sexually explicit material is obscene are asked to use a local yardstick: does the material violate community standards?

That is often a tricky question because there is no simple, concrete way to gauge a community’s tastes and values.

The Internet may be changing that. In a novel approach, the defense in an obscenity trial in Florida plans to use publicly accessible Google search data to try to persuade jurors that their neighbors have broader interests than they might have thought.

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.

It may be the first time I've ever heard of somone using that data collection to protect free speech rights, rather than to violate them, so it's interesting if only for that reason. It also amuses me that they're still charging smut peddlers. I watched Swingtown last night, and it was about the prosecution of Harry Reems, the star of Deep Throat. Serendipity.

But more importantly, it forces the question of "community standards". What are they? Does it matter? Should all members of a community be held to the same standards? If you, and all our neighbours, only like vanilla sex, does that mean that I'm not allowed to try S&M? If you, and all our neighbours, hate porn, does that mean I can't watch it? At home? In private?

Because that's what it's about, really. It's not like the defendant in this case was filming or showing porn on the street: he runs a website. You have to look for it to find it. Punishing the guy who provides the images is stupid. If you really want to bump community standards, and you think that getting rid of porn is the answer, stop looking at porn yourself.

Sustainability Geek

I was out in the park enjoying the moderate temperature and sunshine an hour ago. There's a church down the street. Someone's getting married, probably as I write this. One of the monstrosities above was parked outside.


It made me annoyed, because the SUV limo is essentially a big "fuck you" to the rest of us. Climate change? Fuck you. Peak oil? Fuck you. Poverty? Fuck you. Blood for oil? Fuck you. See? It looks like an SUV, but really, it's one of these:

I just fucking love that kid.

It put me in mind of this editorial from the New York Times a couple of days ago:

It’s hard to convince most Americans that there is a silver lining to $4-a-gallon gasoline. But General Motors provided a nugget of good news when it announced that it would shutter much of its production of pickups and sport utility vehicles — and might even get rid of the Hummer, the relative of the Abrams tank unleashed on the streets in the cheap-gas days of the 1990s.

It’s hardly the solution to global warming, or the country’s dependence on imported oil, but it’s a start.

...and a related story from the Toronto Star of a couple weeks back. I'm amazed that people think our governments can do anything about the harsh economic realities facing the big three automakers.

And I'm getting a bit tired of harping on this (probably not as tired as you are of hearing it), but not everybody gets it. You, loyal reader, undoubtably do. But many people don't, and think that any attempt to reduce our dependance on oil is just hippies being pushy. I started a fight on the local fishwrap's blog yesterday by asking why us sustainability geeks inspire such venom. One regular responded:

Brett,those crappy jobs that you speak of, are worked by real people, with real families. If those jobs disappear, there is nothing to replace them. Good for you that you are fortunate to work at a job that does not emit carbon, and your workplace will be able to absorb the cost of a carbon credit to keep you employed. It is economic suicide for any city to put its inhabitants out of work. The city coffers cannot absorb the number of people who will be unemployed thanks to the the green hysteria movement. It is fortunate that you have the surplus income to be able to afford to pay higher gas prices to drive your car, to heat your home and to light your home. Without a job, there are many that will be unable to do that.

I made a reference to McJobs being crappy in my comment. And I still believe that those jobs are crappy, nay, shitty, and I wish a sector of the population didn't have to rely on them. It's the job itself that is shitty, not the poor bastard who's stuck doing it (which has been me in the past, and may be me again in the future).

And I don't know how the editor will respond to my link or quote. So don't tell him.

The "stay the course" mentality is disturbing to me. You can deny climate change all you want. Tell that to the people standing neck deep in a river that used to be their cornfield in the midwest. Tell that to people in deserts that used to be meadows. It was 32 fucking degrees here last Thanksgiving. That's not normal. But fine, climate change ain't happening. Knock yourself out. But the ideal that an economy so dependent on one resource is the best plan for North America makes me gape. I have no idea what to say to people who think that oil is limitless, virtually free, and convenient.

I know a petroleum based economy seemed like a good idea at the time. It's only faith, stubbornness, ignorance or fear (and those four things are very closely related) that keeps us on this path.

I see a lot of parallels between being an atheist and an environmental activist.

A Letter to Uncle Sam

Canadians have a funny relationship with the US. It's complicated, to say the least. The US is our single largest trading partner, we share the longest undefended border in the world, and American movies and television keep bleeding into our airwaves. As a result, the CRTC enforces rules on the amount of Canadian content our broadcasters must use.

It's not all sunshine and ass-kissing, though. We are critical, very critical, of American foreign policy (some of us not so critical, but most Americans would agree those guys are idiots), and a good deal of your domestic policy. The whole "right to bear arms" thing is baffling to most of us, and the "church and state" thing gets some of us angry. We don't have any such policy, but oddly, we don't have any problems with it, either (except Catholic education, but don't get me started).

We are attracted and repelled at the same time, annoyed and affectionate, comfortable and frightened. The sheer volume of the States is deafening, and we're too close to hear anything else too clearly, so our historical ties to Britain and France mean less than our proximity to the Great Elephant (to borrow an image from Trudeau).

On the whole, though, I want to see the US succeed, flourish and prosper, and I'd like to see my neighbour become a force for good in the world. Unfortunately, though, that train has sailed, and I think the American Empire has met its Endor.

There are several reasons for this, of course, including your soaring debt, your oil dependant culture (ours is no better), your idiotic wars that can't be won, the essential unsustainability of your economic model, the fact that you've consumed most of your resources without regard to the future, the essential fraud of the democratic system (ours, too) and the bitterness of the other 190-odd nations on the planet. The last thing the US needs is another fatal flaw.

But you've found one: biblical inerrancy.

The idea that a single religious text, especially one so riddled with contradictions, is flawless, is a uniquely American idea, and it is eating away at everything from your relations with Middle Eastern countries, to your presidential campaign, to your Constitution. In fact, it is irrevocably tied into all the crises that face your nation, and it's making it worse:

• Climate change looks a lot like the End Times.


• Israel must be protected at all costs.


• Russia is evil.


• China is evil.


• God chooses your president.


• God will provide, so conservation is blasphemous.

It all looks scary up here from the north, and I wish you'd do something about it.

One phenomenon that doesn't affect anyone but you guys, but still strikes me as spectacularly dumb, is the emergence of Creationism (under any guise) in your science classrooms. Why anyone would want to take as truth something that is so clearly allegorical (at best), and handicap your children with nonsense is beyond me. It's another nail in the American coffin, my friends, and you really ought to rethink it. Things are bad enough for your republic, my friends.

There's nothing to be gained from letting god into your science class. Even if he does exist, god's not particularly helpful in predicting the behaviour of the universe. In fact, god makes a habit of fucking up the natural order of things. It's what makes him special, right? That he can change natural law? Not helpful, whether you're plotting the course of a planet or projectile, predicting the behaviour of organisms, or studying why volcanoes blow up.

There are voices of reason, like the New York Times:

The trouble is, a creationist system of science is not science at all. It is faith. All science is “naturalist” to the extent that it tries to understand the laws of nature and the character of the universe on their own terms, without reference to a divine creator. Every student who hopes to understand the scientific reality of life will sooner or later need to accept the elegant truth of evolution as it has itself evolved since it was first postulated by Darwin. If the creationist view prevails in Texas, students interested in learning how science really works and what scientists really understand about life will first have to overcome the handicap of their own education.

...and you'd do best to listen to them. There are no quick fixes to the Middle East, climate change or peak oil, but you can do something about your children's education with very little pain or effort at all.

The Bible is a religious book. It is not a science text. Just try to remember that.