[PLUG-TALK] morality in media...

gepr at tempusdictum.com gepr at tempusdictum.com
Mon Jan 19 19:45:27 UTC 2004


anonymous writes:
 > Regardless of how I feel about tobacco, which by the way took my
 > grandfather in his 50's before I was even born, it's being
 > campaigned against passionately without any help from me.

Excellent!  This paragraph indicates that you are happy to leave the
already well-fought battles to others.  Good judgement.

 > I can't tell people what to look at or read very easily, this is
 > why children need to be taught in school the types of relationships
 > that are worthwhile and ones that aren't.  I hate to say I don't
 > care about at risk adults because they are "adults," but who am I
 > to be concerned about personal freedom taken to the point of self
 > worship?

This paragraph is extremely frightening!

"... children need to be taught in school the types of relationships
that are worthwhile and ones that aren't."

Really!?!?  Our schools can't even teach our children how to integrate
or solve differential equations, both of which are simple procedures
that require very little intelligence on the part of the teacher or
student.  Do you really think that teachers SHOULD teach students how
to value relationships?

Even if you were capable of answering that with something reasonable,
there's still the unsolved problem of homogenization.  If we had a
standardized curriculum in relationship evaluation, and we taught that
same curriculum to every student (and it worked so that every student
evaluated the same relationship to the same result), then we would no
longer have a scale-free network of relationships.  (i.e.  no
"six-degrees of freedom" type stuff) The topology of our interpersonal
and business networks would all collapse to rigid networks where no
new relationships could enter.

Actually, that would be really cool to try.  Along with the free box
of Debian thong underwear we send to Salem in order to advocate
software in the public interest, we should include a proposal (50
pages max) specifying a standardized test for evaluating whether or
not our students know how to evaluate the relationships they have with
their friends and family.  If they respond favorably to our little
plan, then I'll vote for Measure 30!

-- Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

-- 
glen e. p. ropella              =><=                           Hail Eris!
H: 503.630.4505                              http://www.ropella.net/~gepr
M: 971.219.3846                               http://www.tempusdictum.com





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