New site launched – The Pirate Perspective

I have been busy the last week or so setting a new website set up.

The Pirate Perspective is a blog that discusses topics such as file sharing, copyright law, fair use, and other miscellaneous Internet and technology issues.

(via Talking in Circles)

Sigmund Freud on Religion

Sigmund Freud (born 6 May 1856, died 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and psychologist and the founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology.

While many of Freud’s theories about psychoanalysis are no longer believed to be fact by most modern psychologists, he often had very profound things to say, both about his field of psychology and about other subjects.

On the subject of religion, he had the following things to say:

• A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.
• Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
• Our knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect.
• The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. It is still more humiliating to discover how a large number of people living today, who cannot but see that this religion is not tenable, nevertheless try to defend it piece by piece in a series of pitiful rearguard actions.

(via Talking in Circles)

We already have “death panels” — they’re called health insurance companies

So, the new talking point from the far-right is that Obama’s health care plan is a secret plot to kill your grandma (as seen on Fox News and Sarah Palin’s Facebook page). They claim that the bill will create “death panels” to decide whether elderly people are worthy of care or not.

There’s no truth to this conspiracy, of course. The provision they point to is one for voluntary end-of-life counseling, which was actually proposed by a Republican and is overall a pretty good idea.

However, there already is an entity that will sit in judgment of you when you get sick, deciding whether you are worthy of treatment. It is official policy among the private health care providers in the US to look for ways to deny care to sick people.

They are perfectly happy taking your money when you aren’t sick, but once you try to make a claim they will scour through your record looking for any reason to deny your claim. A small error on your application form, even an insignificant one or one that you could not have known about or fixed, becomes justification for revoking your coverage and handing you the hefty bill for your treatment. For many patients unable to pay for the treatment, this is a death sentence.

Forget a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor; this is a profit-driven corporation standing between you and your doctor.

Why does the right worry about their fake, hypothetical “death panels” when a more serious and sinister problem already exists, and is already killing innocent people?

(via Talking in Circles)

Richard Feynman on light.

Mind. Blown.

(via Talking in Circles)

Doctored photo of Obama smoking

Politics Daily reports that the Arizona Republican Party is running a photo of Obama with a cigarette dangling from his mouth as part of their campaign against health care reform. The image appeared on AZGOP news, but appears to have since been removed.

Look how hopeless he looks — irresponsible even with his own health. Surely a great PR strategy.

Except the photo is doctored. Photoshopped. The original photo was taken by Kwame Ross on Aug. 3, 2004.

I’m not alleging that the Arizona GOP doctored the photo themselves — just that they didn’t bother to do any research before posting the photo. Obama does smoke. This doesn’t bother me but might bother some people, so it makes sense that the GOP would try to use that against him in their propaganda. Hard for the Arizona GOP to pass up an opportunity to use a photo that shows him looking so tired and hopeless while smoking, though, even if it’s a fake photo.

(via Talking in Circles)

Richard Dawkins interviews a creationist

In this 7 part series, biologist Richard Dawkins interviews Wendy Wright, a creationist.

Parts 2 through 7 below the fold.

(via Talking in Circles)

Richard Dawkins interviews a creationist

In this 7 part series, biologist Richard Dawkins interviews Wendy Wright, a creationist.

Parts 2 through 7 below the fold.

(via Talking in Circles)

Joel Fought Back — after going to court over 30 downloaded MP3s, verdict is $675,000 fine

What punishment do you think would fit the crime of pirating 30 MP3s? If you said “over $600,000,” you probably work for the RIAA.

After a valiant and creative defense from Charles Nesson and his law students, Joel Tenenbaum lost the legal battle that has captured the Internet’s attention for days under the nickname Joel Fights Back, in reference to the fact that Joel chose to go to court rather than settle under pressure like the majority of the targets of the RIAA. The final verdict of his case came in a few minutes ago.

$22500 per MP3 is completely unreasonable. To put it in perspective, Air France paid $24000 to each of the families of the victims of the crash of Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. This makes a single MP3 worth slightly less than a human life.

I won’t recount the whole story here. The link above as well as these blogs do a better job of explaining it all than I ever could. I just want to share my thoughts on the subject.

I pirate music. All of my friends pirate music. Any of us could have been in Joel’s place. Indeed, the MP3s he shared were shared by millions of other people. He was just a drop in the ocean. This is where the injustice bothers me most; it’s just luck that he’s on that stand, rather than me or one of my close friends, or pretty much anyone my age. Hell, I’d bet that every single student I see on campus when school starts again is guilty of the same crime Joel is. How can any of us say he deserves such a verdict?

This isn’t justice, and it makes me ashamed of my country’s justice system.

UPDATE: JoelFightsBack.com is accepting donations. I have donated $30 to helping Joel out with this financial burden, and (hopefully)with future legal defense. While I don’t like the idea of paying money that could end up in the hands of the RIAA, I sympathize so strongly with their cause that this was the least I could do.

(via Talking in Circles)

Joel Fought Back — after going to court over 30 downloaded MP3s, verdict is $675,000 fine

What punishment do you think would fit the crime of pirating 30 MP3s? If you said “over $600,000,” you probably work for the RIAA.

After a valiant and creative defense from Charles Nesson and his law students, Joel Tenenbaum lost the legal battle that has captured the Internet’s attention for days under the nickname Joel Fights Back, in reference to the fact that Joel chose to go to court rather than settle under pressure like the majority of the targets of the RIAA. The final verdict of his case came in a few minutes ago.

$22500 per MP3 is completely unreasonable. To put it in perspective, Air France paid $24000 to each of the families of the victims of the crash of Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. This makes a single MP3 worth slightly less than a human life.

I won’t recount the whole story here. The link above as well as these blogs do a better job of explaining it all than I ever could. I just want to share my thoughts on the subject.

I pirate music. All of my friends pirate music. Any of us could have been in Joel’s place. Indeed, the MP3s he shared were shared by millions of other people. He was just a drop in the ocean. This is where the injustice bothers me most; it’s just luck that he’s on that stand, rather than me or one of my close friends, or pretty much anyone my age. Hell, I’d bet that every single student I see on campus when school starts again is guilty of the same crime Joel is. How can any of us say he deserves such a verdict?

This isn’t justice, and it makes me ashamed of my country’s justice system.

UPDATE: JoelFightsBack.com is accepting donations. I have donated $30 to helping Joel out with this financial burden, and (hopefully)with future legal defense. While I don’t like the idea of paying money that could end up in the hands of the RIAA, I sympathize so strongly with their cause that this was the least I could do.

(via Talking in Circles)

Christian Civil Liberties Union calls for book burning in Milwaukee

Here we go again. I think I’m becoming desensitized to these stories. I just can’t muster up the moral outrage like I used to. CNN reports:

The strife began in February when West Bend couple Jim and Ginny Maziarka objected to some of the content in the city library’s young-adult section. They later petitioned the library board to move any sexually explicit books — the definition of which would be debated — from the young-adult section to the adult section and to label them as sexually explicit.

Ginny Maziarka, 49, said the books in the section of the library aimed at children aged 12 to 18 included homosexual and heterosexual content she thought was inappropriate for youths.

She and her husband also asked the library to obtain books about homosexuality that affirmed heterosexuality, such as titles written by “ex-gays,” Maziarka said.

“All the books in the young-adult zone that deal with homosexuality are gay-affirming. That’s not balance,” she said.

So, fundie Christians are offended that books in a library say being gay is okay, and they call for the books to be removed from the library re-labeled as sexually explicit and moved to the adult section (thanks for the correction, WBCFSL and Frack). “Inappropriate for youths” they say. Apparently they don’t realize how hypocritical this is, considering all the violence, sex, and rape in their own holy book.

Censorship attempts like this are pretty typical, alas. As CNN noted, the American Library Association reports more than 500 such instances in the United States in 2008, mostly in schools and public libraries. But this story gets weirder:

Outside West Bend, the fight caught the attention of Robert Braun, who, with three other Milwaukee-area men, filed a claim against West Bend calling for one of the library’s books to be publicly burned, along with financial damages.

The four plaintiffs — who describe themselves as “elderly” in their complaint — claim their “mental and emotional well-being was damaged by [the] book at the library.”

The claim, unconnected to the Maziarkas, says the book “Baby Be-bop” — a fictional piece about a homosexual teenager — is “explicitly vulgar, racial and anti-Christian.”

Braun, who says he is president of a Milwaukee group called the Christian Civil Liberties Union, said he singled out the book because it “goes way over the line” with offensive language and descriptions of sex acts.

The call for burning the book showed his passion, Braun, 74, said. “I don’t sit on the fence when I do these things. When I make a decision to speak up on something, I go for it.”

The name “Christian Civil Liberties Union” is pretty hilarious, especially in this context. I think the phrase “civil liberties” doesn’t mean what they think it means.

Their case obviously isn’t going anywhere. They have no legal basis for their claim. Still, this story means that there are actually people out there who consider book burning to be defending the civil rights of Christians.

Also, here’s Ginny Maziarka’s blog. It’s hilarious, in a surely unintentional way.

(via Talking in Circles)

Vacations

Last week I was in San Francisco to see the de Young museum. Now I just (yesterday) got back from Sea Ranch.  I’ll be back to posting normally soon.

(via Talking in Circles)