The news that didn’t make the news

Here are the top 25 censored stories of 2007 published by Project Censored, a media research group that specializes in disclosing important stories that don’t make it to the mainstream press.

In summary:

1. Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media
2. Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran
3. Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger
4. Hunger and Homelessness Increasing in the US
5. High-Tech Genocide in Congo
6. Federal Whistleblower Protection in Jeopardy
7. US Operatives Torture Detainees to Death in Afghanistan and Iraq
8. Pentagon Exempt from Freedom of Information Act
9. The World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall
10. Expanded Air War in Iraq Kills More Civilians
11. Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed
12. Pentagon Plans to Build New Landmines
13. New Evidence Establishes Dangers of Roundup
14. Homeland Security Contracts KBR to Build Detention Centers in the US
15. Chemical Industry is EPA’s Primary Research Partner
16. Ecuador and Mexico Defy US on International Criminal Court
17. Iraq Invasion Promotes OPEC Agenda
18. Physicist Challenges Official 9-11 Story
19. Destruction of Rainforests Worst Ever
20. Bottled Water: A Global Environmental Problem
21. Gold Mining Threatens Ancient Andean Glaciers
22. $Billions in Homeland Security Spending Undisclosed
23. US Oil Targets Kyoto in Europe
24. Cheney’s Halliburton Stock Rose Over 3000 Percent Last Year
25. US Military in Paraguay Threatens Region

And here’s one more substantial story that received virtually no media coverage: Iraq government votes for US withdrawal

Is pornography degrading?

Last week I attended a presentation on pornography at New College Florida. During the discussion, a student voiced her opinion that pornography is degrading to sexuality and the people taking part. I disagree. Does filming a couple kissing degrade the act of kissing? Does filming someone bicycling degrade bicyclists? It seems irrational to think that putting something to video automatically objectifies, degrades, exploits, or trivializes the act or the actors.

Pornography typically depicts frivolous sex acts outside of conventional standards such as monogamy, privacy, and romance. It is that casual and unconstrained attitude that most people tend to object to. But regardless of one’s specific reasons for protest, disagreeing with how sexuality is portrayed does not constitute an absolute moral judgment. Such judgments are merely personal.

One might argue that pornography cheapens and objectifies physical intimacy. But I’d respond that it only has that effect if the observer unrealistically generalizes what he or she is watching. It is the viewer in this case, not pornography, that is objectifying sexuality. Sex is not a solitary phenomenon. It is a collective name for a large variety of similar behaviors and instances existing exclusively from one another. The manner in which others have sex is separate from one’s personal sexual affairs. Every consenting adult is afforded the right to define and engage in sex as they see fit for their own purposes. No more. No less.

In that vein, opponents of same sex marriage claim that marrying gays violates the sanctity of marriage. The sanctity of whose marriage?, I ask. If a homosexual couple gets married, how does that affect the marriages of heterosexual couples? Will husbands and wives turn to each other and say, “Our marriage doesn’t mean as much now that gays are doing it?” Again, the reasoning seems irrational. Likewise, pornography may depict sexual relations that deviate from critics’ personal ideals, but it needn’t have any effect on their own sex lives.

It appears that opponents of pornography, like those against gay marriage, are disapproving in order to prop themselves up on high moral ground. Anything can appear offensive or depraved from such a self-serving viewpoint. Having a particular idea of what sex (or marriage, for that matter) should or shouldn’t be doesn’t mean everyone else must abide by one’s personal preference. What gives someone the authority to be a moral dictator? I think contempt towards others for having different opinions or lifestyles is degrading.

Pornography is said to “lack the moral standards and values of our Judeo-Christian heritage” in the 1965 anti-pornography propaganda film posted below. The vacuous notion that sex and nudity are almost inherently immoral and “dirty” continues to impose on our culture today. That oppressive idea is sadly self-validating. Current laws force people to hide their breasts, buttocks, and genitals, thereby turning those body parts into objects of indecency. A two-piece bathing suit not only hides a woman’s unmentionables, it also draws attention to those distinct parts of her anatomy by the very act of covering them up!

Sexual behavior is obscured by the same irony. Aren’t our laws and standards explicit evidence that society itself is objectifying and degrading sexuality while helping to create an atmosphere of suppressed sexual curiosity and impulsion? Perhaps pornography’s extremes might be explained as a retaliation against—and even a reflection of—society’s stubborn disgust and condemnation of one of life’s most fundamental and natural activities.

Rejected

Today I received a letter from New College Florida, likely the best school in the state, declining my application for Fall 2007. The reason they stated was that they received a record number of applications and couldn’t accommodate everyone who qualified. It seemed like a standard bulk form that they probably issued to everyone they refused, irrespective of actual objections. I’m all too familiar with the ways of business.

Regardless, I will be contacting the admissions department tomorrow to see about reapplying for Spring 2008. In the meantime, I’ll take primer classes at the University of South Florida or the local community college. Additionally, both Stanford and MIT offer free online courses in my field of study: cognitive neuroscience. I’m determined to pursue my academic interests one way or another. The turndown from New College has given impetus to my ambition. There is opportunity in every setback.

Evolution does not infer amorality

Christian evangelists Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron have challenged two atheists to a debate over the existence of God that will air live at ABC’s website on May 5. What caught my eye in the article that introduced me to the debate was this quote by Cameron:

Atheism has become very popular in universities – where it’s taught that we evolved from animals and that there are no moral absolutes. So we shouldn’t be surprised when there are school shootings.

Teaching evolution is responsible for school violence? Perhaps if no one had ever committed a wrong in the name of religion there might be some inkling of reason to consider his proposition (which also presumes that evolution and religion are mutually exclusive). But people commit crimes regardless of spiritual belief. And when religion is involved, the criminal always points to dogma, not it’s absence, as justification for his acts. No one has ever hurt another human being out of atheist fanaticism.

The Bible is not the only source of morality. And I’m grateful for that. If we all lived by it’s exact words we’d be stoning our children, keeping slaves, and offering our underage daughters to house guests for non-consensual copulation (I’m too lazy at the moment to cite the passages that advocate the items in this list; but if you insist, I’ll procure them). Where might an atheist, then, get his or her moral sense? I agree with Albert Sweigart:

[...] I don’t think we have a moral mandate because God said so. I think we have a moral mandate because our actions, nevertheless what we think, make a difference. We affect the people around us in material and emotional terms, and our actions set an example for others to follow.

We have a moral mandate to take responsibility because we are in the rare position among life forms on earth to think, reflect, and take consideration of consequence. I think to fail to excogitate on our actions with our unique mental capabilities is tragic. And we see the problems that arise out of this failure, both in problems of hurt emotions and damaged relationships, and in problems of brutal violence and conflict.

Our ancestry from millions of years ago doesn’t limit our intellectual capability to find solutions to these problems today. It doesn’t impede our moral imperative to heal ourselves.

From what I can tell, most atheists take the ethical position of humanism. While humanism may not contain moral absolutes, it certainly objects to murder and other forms or cruelty and injustice. If there’s anything immoral suggested by Kirk Cameron’s statement, it’s that blaming science courses for deadly violence without sound reason is intellectually, socially, and ethically irresponsible.

There is no connection whatsoever between the teaching of evolution and school shootings. There does however seem to be a link between the promotion of creationism and a delusional cognizance of one of the greatest achievements of science.

America: Made in China (a brief rant)

I discovered that my mother owns an American flag with a “Made in China” tag on it. It’s times like this when I wish I owned a camera. Pictures can be far more effective than words at conveying such symbolic irony.

So what am I implying? That I’m against the advancing global economy? Not entirely. But when corporations move their factories overseas and cut deals with oppressive governments that put children to work in sweatshops for five cents an hour*, support lucrative violence and genocide (look up East Timor, and let’s not forget the diamond industry), and buy up indigenous resources so the citizens are forced to work for the corporations in order to pay for things they once obtained for free, then, yeah, I guess I have a problem.

But, hey, it makes for inexpensive products at Wal-Mart like U.S. flags.

Keep shopping cheap, America. You’re only helping to screw over less fortunate people thousands of miles away. Out of sight, out of mind. Right? We can all afford to be ignorant—literally speaking, that is.

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* I recently watched a pro-Wal-Mart video filled with straw men, biased statistics, and flimsy anecdotal evidence. In it they tried to justify child labor by claiming that it provided work for children who might otherwise seek money from prostitution in order to pay for bare necessities. Here’s an idea: Pay parents a living wage so their children don’t have to work at all! How big an asshole do you have to be to justify child labor? (And if you want to consider the plight of third world workers, ask them personally how they feel about their situation instead of consulting a lone economist analyzing money matters from afar.)

None of the above

Do you think the media, in general, is too conservative, too liberal, or actually pretty impartial?

(a) Too conservative
(b) Too liberal
(c) Impartial

The former question—found at the questionnaire-based dating site I frequent, okcupid.com—invites a popular red herring into the argument of media bias. Political influence is not the important issue. The structure of big media is sculpted by capitalist bureaucracy, and the resulting bias is therefore forged by corporate and elitist interests, not political ideology. Impartiality to oligarchical groups and institutions is nearly impossible under these socioeconomic conditions. How can any business cater primarily to the public when their bottom line is influenced more by advertisers and wealthy shareholders than by their consumers?

To the extent that political alignment does affect the media and its consumers, it seems the liberals have an advantage. In a survey released earlier this week from The Pew Research Center, the results found that Americans who watch Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” and who also visit newspaper websites, are the most knowledgeable of current events. At the other end of the political spectrum, regular viewers of Fox News ranked second to last. “Told that Shia was one group of Muslims struggling in Iraq, only 32% of the total sample [of Fox News viewers] could name ‘Sunni’ as the other key group.” (Editor & Publisher, 2007)

But the overall trends revealed by the Pew survey seem to indicate that public awareness of even the most elementary matters in local and global affairs (and across the political spectrum) is not a major press concern. Is our society truly dumb, or is it being dumbed down by our common avenues of information?

Some claim that the news media are simply telling the public what it wants to hear. After all, televised news is subject to the same network concern over ratings as other programs. In short, more customers equals more money no matter the nature of the business. But I wonder how news agencies “know” what the public wants. Unless they’re conducting polls and surveys on a moment to moment basis, there’s no way they can predict exactly which stories are going gain the most favor, especially considering that the stories themselves are unpredictable.

Furthermore, the world is a busy place with megatons of news being created every minute. Surely a significant percentage of it would fall into the categories of public interest. In order to restrict content to fit time slots and page space, the press needs some sort of additional criteria to determine which stories to investigate and which to overlook. Certainly that selective agenda comes down from the top. And who’s at the top? The rich and powerful, of course.

Entry essay for New College, FL

The following is a persuasive essay written in letter form. I decided to express my anti-capitalist views in a personal context by addressing the CEO of a company I worked for several years ago.

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Dear Sir,

Within the U.S. economy, wealth is too unfairly distributed to allow for the mitigation of increasing class inequity, which results in a growing body of underpaid and under-educated workers. For the betterment of your company and the many thousands of lives it directly affects, I implore you, as someone in a position of authority and influence, to examine your priorities and consider placing the interests of the greater share of individuals above those of an affluent few.

I am a former employee of your company’s corporate headquarters, which manages over 100 youth correctional facilities and a handful of adult prisons. Having worked in your Human Resources Department, I am familiar with your employees’ wages. After you laid off 90 percent of said department, I was rehired into your Legal Department, where I learned the details of your company’s persistent litigation.

It is my contention that your business is in a position of great responsibility concerning the welfare of your employees, your inmates, and the surrounding public. Nonetheless, you operate by cutting corners in the name of profitable efficiency and at a great cost to those whom you, as chairman and CEO, are entrusted to aid and employ. When applied to the nature of your business, this approach augments the public danger of imprudent criminal reform.

Paying your guards insufficient living wages ensures that they will be young and unskilled. With a generational and socioeconomic affinity to the inmates, it follows that the two groups would form undesirably intimate bonds. As I recall, guard-inmate relationships caused half of your company’s legal complications. Moreover, the guards’ inexperience and lack of education fostered irresponsible conduct, such as the gross mistreatment of detainees, which produced the other half of your lawsuits. It is no surprise that one of your top-paid executives is a lawyer whose primary job is to handle the litigation and minimize costs by promoting out-of-court settlements. Your company is thus able to avoid exhaustive legal processes, comfortably circumventing potential guilty convictions on the company’s behalf.

Are you responsible for the social consequences of minimizing wages and contractual obligations? If they cause illegal behavior, the answer is a judicious “yes.” But consider, too, the moral bearing of your business operations. Following the HR layoffs, those positions were delegated, leaving many employees with much additional work—for which no one received a raise. However, everyone in the administration saw his or her salaries markedly increase. I can see no justification for this executive favoritism apart from elitist interest. Surely widespread prosperity is more valuable than a few lonely six and seven-figure incomes—as high as 100 times the earnings of your average employee.

Imagine a corporation where the lower echelon was allotted higher pay at the generous expense of the higher-ups. With less day-to-day struggling to make ends meet and with more savings to send themselves and their children to college, the lower-class workers and their families would be afforded greater opportunities, and would likely enjoy a stronger devotion to their charitable workplace. Further, with a focus on what’s best for the disadvantaged majority rather than those already financially privileged, I think your business would reach higher rates of efficiency in lowering recidivism and preventing the unlawful behavior paradoxically contributed by your employees.

The aforementioned principal responsibility to the people is indeed your company’s stated mission. Certainly, then, you are aware of the pride and prestige intrinsic to helping others. You are in an exemplary position to help lead our correctional industry and economic paradigm towards a higher ethical and socially conscious peak. A narrowed income gap is a significant step towards forging a more egalitarian liberty for workers and, by extension, for our democratic nation. The only question I ask you to ponder is, Is improving the lives of those less fortunate not worth your financial sacrifice?

Sincerely,

Jason April

Catch you later

It may be a while before I revive this blog. Other matters have taken precedence.

Observations of time

Time is especially peculiar. Mathematically, it’s a dimension just like space. But time is perceived far differently. There is no direct evidence for the past or future, for instance. They cannot be observed. There is also the unexplained ‘velocity’ of time. It passes all on its own. What accounts for these profound differences between time and space?

Petition to remove “Fuck the Troops” from MySpace

Today I read a bulletin on MySpace containing a petition to remove a group called “Fuck the Troops.” I responded with a bulletin of my own: