Ricardo J Gonzalez for a Better America

The week's news you might have missed:

The Greek Island of Lesbos is suing the Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece, because their use of the term "Lesbian" is offensive to natives of the island. If they are successful, the term "Lesbian" will no longer refer to homosexual women, but to gay-bashing bigots of Greek descent. Good luck to them.

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A giant squid that was captured last year and frozen was recently thawed out and is being studied at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. The gigantic beast is said to posses the largest known eyes in the animal kingdom. But can it see why kids love Cinnamon Toast Crunch? (Too easy...)

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The Global Online Freedom Act is slated to go before Congress soon. The bill's intended purpose is

To promote freedom of expression on the Internet, to protect United States businesses from coercion to participate in repression by authoritarian foreign governments, and for other purposes.

The bill, which was crafted as a result of a controversy where Yahoo! turned over information to the Chinese government, that led to the arrest of pro-democracy advocates. It would come with a $50 Million a year price tag for tax-payers and impose a fine of up to $2 Million to the business breaking its rules. Of course, the act does absolutely nothing for the US citizens paying for it since the President may waive the application of it if

the important national interest of the United States requires the exercise of such waiver authority.

That's nice of congress, to use taxpayer money to protect citizens of other countries, while offering no protection from the same intrusions to our own.

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Yesterday, May 1st, is known around the world as May Day, or International Workers day. While there were immigation protests this year in major cities like Chicago and LA, they pale in comparison to those staged a few years ago. What many people don't know is that the supposed holiday, although originating right here in Chicago was taken over by communist supporters long ago long ago. In order to not be left out of the May Day celebrations, The Distributed Republic uses the day to remember the victims of communism. Don't miss out!

Thats all for today. If you have any stories you'd like to add, feel free to post them in the comments. Have a great weekend!

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Thanks for checking out FABA (For A better America). I'm still actively working on the blog, and hopefully it will be a bit closer to perfection soon. For the time being, be sure to check in every day as I will be keeping the blog updated. For suggestions on stories, comments, or anything else, feel free to e-mail me at rickygonzalez@gmail.com.

Thanks,
Ricky

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With the latest release in the GTA series, we see many of the same complaints that have accompanied every other release. The gist of the game is that a player can do pretty much anything they want in order to become more successful in their life of crime. For people and organizations that are constantly looking to pin the blame for all of societies ills (except personal responsibility, of course), the GTA franchise makes them salivate more than Pavlov's steaks.

It seems that if it were up to some, Grand Theft Auto would take place in a city where driving drunk would get you instantly arrested and jailed, weapons would be unavailable, since they are outlawed, you would spend the vast majority indoors, studying for your bachelor's degree or going to a 9-5 job in a cubicle only to come home to watch tv and finally fall asleep after a nice long cry. The game would be pointless and boring; it would be The Sims.

The complaint of these busybodies, is that people will be unable to distinguish what is acceptable in this video game from what is acceptable in every day life, because the game strives to be so realistic. My circle of friends includes college students, doctoral candidates, architects, engineers, lawyers, writers, and financial analysts, the vast majority of whom will at one point or another play this game. We are its target demographic, and for the most part, we love it. I can almost guarantee unanimous resent from these friends of the idea that they would be unable to handle the content of the GTA series without eventually becoming criminals themselves. For the gamer generation that has grown up in the 70s and the 80s with all sorts of video gaems, this form of entertainment has taken over the place of what for many other generations was going to the movies or watching television.

What makes the game so disturbing to some, is that there are no rules. But this is the same factor that makes it so appealing. For the vast majority of our lives, the gamer generation (middle class college student/graduates) have been living within a fairly confined set of rules. From our first day of kindergarten to our last day of graduate school, there has been a set of expectations. From the time that we started watching television we were bombarded with "don'ts". Don't do drugs, don't drink and drive, don't mess with Texas. While we understand why these are good ideas, and I can't think of anyone I know that disagrees with them, it is nice to have an escape where these rules, and really no rules apply.

If the concern is that children who can't make this distinction between fantasy and reality will get a hold of the game, then the solution lies not in trying to prevent the game from reaching the market, and having long ineffectual tirades against it, it lies in educating parents that not all video games are for children, and that just like they have to be careful of what movies their kids are watching, they need to be mindful of what games they are playing. The solution to the "problem" of Grand Theft Auto, lies not in more regulation, but in more personal responsibility.

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Labels: GTA, nanny state, Personal resposibility

When I heard that Ben Stein was releasing a movie, I have to admit I was a little excited. I had generally agreed the few comments and snippets of articles of his that had come my way. I knew him to be generally in favor of individual rights and free markets, ideas which I support myself. While I wasn't yet born when he was an advisor to Richard Nixon, I understood that this now pop-icon was a generally respected economist and conservative pundit, and I was interested to see what would come of this intersection of Washington Politics and Hollywood fame.

The actual result is, to say the least, something that I am not interested in watching. The movie, titled Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is by most accounts, a piece of creationist propaganda that sets out to demonize the scientific community for not accepting "intelligent design" as a scientific theory (although, you know, its not). This in itself is not terrible. I have myself in the past argued that we need to keep an open mind regarding alternate scientific theories, so as to not prevent the progress of science. However early reviews suggest that Ben Stein, and the creators of the film, go much further than just this argument.

The main argument of the movie?

Evolution leads to atheism leads to eugenics leads to Holocaust and Nazi Germany.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Intelligent Design discussion has officially been Godwin'd. This type of logical fallacy is so often invoked in our society that it has its own intellectually appealing name "Argumentum ad Nazium". Even if we accept the idea that the theory of evolution has a small chance of leading to eugenics and genocide, this does not in itself discredit the theory. Some of the scientific research of the 20th century led to the building of an atomic bomb that was was used to kill thousands upon thousands of people in Japan during World War 2. This tragic event does not mean that the science behind it was bad, it just means that people have a capability of doing very terrible things.

I agree with the broad point of the movie (as I understand it) that scientific inquiry should not be dismissed as nonsense before the evidence is analyzed, and this is no less true today than it was in the middle ages. However, when a theory is disproved, or when it becomes clear that it is not following the rules of the scientific method, then the so-called "conspiracy to suppress it", ends up being the common sense reaction to someone trying to portray pseudo-science as science. Intelligent design falls clearly into this category, as its main point, that the universe as we know it was created by an unseen designer, is untestable. On any note, anyone hoping to hold an intelligent design discussion, well, intelligently, is going have to find a better argument for disproving evolution than "it sounds like something Hitler would support".

I have not watched, nor will I most likely watch this movie. The reviews for it have been negative pretty much across the board, to the extent that I doubt its worth watching, even for the entertainment factor of seeing Ben Stein throw away his credibility. My fondness of the man wasn't cemented strong enough to make me feel guilty for being fickle.

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Obama essentially broke all ties today with Rev. Jeremiah Wright. After months of controversies stemming from comments made by his Chicago Pastor, he felt that his political career was more valuable than the relationship with the man who married him and baptized his children. While this is his decision, and probably the correct one for his campaign, I can't help but notice the duality between what we expect from Obama, and what we expect from McCain.

Rev. Wright's comments are inflammatory but not without merit.

We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and The Pentagon"

he said in a sermon about the 9-11 bombings.

Rev. Jerry Falwell's response to the same incident:

"...the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America...I point the thing in their face and say you helped this happen."

When compared to this nonsense, Wright's comments almost seem insightful and enlightened.

Rev. Wright's sermons and comments are the angry screams of another generation, one that has faced many trials and suffered many abuses, most of them from white men in positions of power. His church, a "black church" as he describes it, is based on the idea of sticking together to fight these abuses, to get a support network against what was for centuries a history of injustice and exploitation of the black community. Society today has made great strides towards changing its attitudes and making amends for the mistakes of the past, and while America as a whole might want to forget, it seems comical to expect Rev. Wright and and those who lived through the abuses, to simply forgive and forget. Yet rarely are these issues brought up when talking about Rev. Wright. He's dismissed as another "angry black man". Because of this anger, Sen. Obama has been pressured to distance and break ties with Rev. Wright.

On the other side of the aisle, we have people like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, the mad prophets of the Christian Conservative right. In his 2000 bid for the Presidential nomination, Sen. McCain said

Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right.

A sentiment that I completely agree with. Yet 6 years later he was forced to eat his words, due to the amount of political power that these fear-mongering, hateful, extremist pastors have in the Republican right. Their words don't come from a history of abuse and oppression, they come from a fire and brimstone worldview, in which they create and use fear and hate to maintain power. While Rev. Wright's comments can be understood as frustrations, Falwell's words only seem to support the very mindset that created the need for a "Black Church" to begin with. Yet instead of having to distance themselves from maniacs like Robertson and Falwell, Republican contenders are forced to grovel at their feet.

When talking about the duality of America, this is one of the clearest examples I can see. Obama is forced to condemn the "angry black-man" Pastor that married him, while McCain issues a statementthat a racist, bigoted, homophobe like Falwell was a man of distinguished accomplishment who devoted his life to serving his faith and country."

I'm not saying that the right needs to cut all its ties to Religion, but McCain needs to regain the chutzpah to once again distance himself from these lunatic preachers of hatred, just as Obama had to denounce his.

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You may have heard about the "Fundamentalist Latter-day Saints" in Texas, that have recently been the source of quite some craziness. The gist of it is this: Supposedly, a 16 year old girl called the police and said she was forced to marry a 50 year old man and have his children. The government's response? Take over the camp, take over 400 children from their families, remove 130+ women from the camp, and stop any of the men from leaving the "compound".

One of the things that makes this sort of thing so difficult to look at objectively, is that there were some children in danger. If there is a risk that children are being abused, surely its withing the scope of the government to step in and prevent this abuse. However, instead of taking on cases in which there was evidence of abuse, a Texas judge decided that all 416 children should be removed from their homes.

In any other small town, where the accused abuser was the mayor and some cops, and 5% of the children were confirmed abuse victims, the rest of the children, in this case 416 of them, would be left at home, with their mothers, while an extensive investigation was taking place. If these people were Methodists, watched 5 hours of TV a day, and worked in diners and factories, they would never have been forcefully removed from their homes, with all of their children put into foster care, when there is no evidence that they were at risk of abuse.

These people are different. Their beliefs, to most of us, seem very wierd. Some of them are allegedly criminal, and if they are guilty of child abuse and rape, then they should be jailed, but the rest of these families should be alone. If polygamy is a crime, it shouldn't be. It should be the decision of consenting adults how they want to run their families, and it only becomes the governments business where there is evidence of abuse, force, or fraud; but not otherwise. While some may consider wanting to have more than one wife to show a serious lack in judgment, it shouldn't be a criminal offense. And it surely isn't enough to justify taking 416 children from their homes.

Why should you care? Because the government's stance seems to be if you're wierd, and someone you know does something wrong, we're taking your children.

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