A Clear Sense of Priorities

This has been a tiring week for more than one of us, obviously…I don’t have kids (unlike Kevvyd, who has totally adorable kids, although I am surrogate dad for an absolutely amazing 3-year-old), but I helped birth some legal amendments this week. By the end of the day on Wednesday, I was convinced that Shakespeare was a very smart man – with one exception, killing all the lawyers was a reasonable idea.

Anyway, that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

Have you ever heard something that only seeps in later, after the source is unavailable (hence no links)? Something I heard this week, I believe in reference to the U.S., troubles me, and reminded me of something I learned many years ago. What I heard was this:

There is a more severe penalty for downloading music than for possessing or distributing child pornography.
Is anyone else as bothered by this as I am? Admittedly, I can’t cite a source for this, and for that I apologize – we are nothing if not diligent here at Blevkog – but this is more visceral than factual.
This reminded me of something I learned in High School, which struck me as odd then, in what seems like the Pliestocene Age. The penalty, at the time (the 80’s), for arson, was more severe than that for infanticide.

Let these two things sink in.

I often start paragraphs with the phrase what is wrong with us as a society, and this is no different: What is wrong, where are our priorities when protecting the rights of property owners and huge multimillion-dollar music publishing companies, not to mentioned spoiled artists, is more important than the lives of children?

In the case of the Internet, nobody who was making laws as recently as the mid to late 80’s could even conceive of it (among other things, hence my stressful week). The Internet has been a boon to many, providing a world of information (and opinion – hi there!) at their fingertips, but as we have seen demonstrated in the past, any benefit of this type has a dark side, any group of well-meaning techno geeks are often followed in close order by those who will exploit technology for personal gain, to the detriment of the people the technology is designed to serve. When the Japanese finally develop robots capable of helping the disabled or the elderly to maintain their independence, someone will be along in the next 30 days with software that will make the robot polish some lonely guy’s knob. Voila! Prostitution will survive as long as the batteries do.

I met my wife through the Internet, and it was one of the most fun experiences of my life getting to know her through messaging, then meeting her, etc. Without the Internet, I never would have known that someone that has so much in common with me (or at least is willing to overlook and tolerate a LOT) was just on the other side of town. Groups (like this one, for example) provide a forum for discussion and debate.

But, it also makes it possible for the creepy loner who never knew people felt the same way as he did about the neighborhood kids (or even worse, his own), to find the rest of his demented tribe of pervert mutants and discuss strategies and share pictures. To speed up the process of gratifying sick appetites, while destroying lives and scarring the psyches of innocents.

Read Masha’s story to find out what I’m talking about.

I don’t have a solution, or an answer. I don’t know that there are answers, at least not in the way we like them. Not neat and tidy. I have nothing but respect and admiration for police forces around the world who subject themselves to images of horror and degradation to bring these people to justice. I know I wouldn’t be strong enough.
Isn’t it the least we can do to provide an appropriate penalty when they catch these evil bastards, and let kids know they are more important than anything Metallica has ever recorded?
Please, lawmakers, tell me that they are.

Oh that al-Zarqawi!

The right-wing blogosphere and the MSM agree – that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is one crazy guy! Video released by the US military today shows him trying unsuccessfully to change the fire rate of a rifle and then trotting along, apparently unprofessionally in his combats and New Balance. (I hope the good PR weenies at New Balance are aware of this endorsement opportunity. )

I guess the message we’re supposed to be getting is that al-Zarqawi, the reputed leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, is a useless prat that can’t even use his tools right. Sounds good to me, but two questions rise to mind:

1) If he really is what they say he is, his lack of competence makes the American troops who are unable to catch him… uh, what?

2) How do you think Donald Rumsfeld is at weapon use?

Israel, Palestine, and tugging at the right

I’m really not sure what it is about the darker side of the right-wing blogoshpere that draws me like a moth. Whatever it is, I can generally be sure that when someone on some fool place like Little Green Footballs writes (link theirs, emphasis mine):

One of Brandeis’ student newspapers has published a virulently anti-Israel piece by a junior student that is almost beyond belief: Israel must renounce violence, recognize Hamas.

I can be pretty well assured that I am going to agree whole-heartedly with the link. And what, pray tell, is so virulently anti-Israel in the article? It is that the Israeli government, if they actually want peace, will have to aknowledge Hamas and the Palestinian state. Beyond belief! What really is so beyond belief about having to aknowledge the existence, the right to exist, of an adversary with whom you have fought for over thirty years? It is absolutely right for Israel and her allies to demand that Hamas aknowledge the state of Israel, and it is absolutely right for Palestinians to demand that their elected government be accepted internationally. Like any “road to peace”, there has to be at least two lanes.

This is of course easy for a putz like me to say – I’m not Jewish, Arabic, or have ever been to that part of the world. I don’t know anyone killed by a bus bomb in Tel Aviv or an air strike in Ramallah. I’ve never had my house or well bulldozed and have never been conscripted into an army to defend my home. I have been blessed with never having been unemployed, I own my own home (well, part of it), and I walk the streets without fear of being attacked. Being, as they say, disinterested, it is easy to say that standard negotiation techniques have to be used, but on an international level this is often complicated. So many people smarter than I have tried to straighten out this mess that to say that I know the solution is not only arrogant, but stupid.

Why can’t idiots like these guys at LGF and even the less strident, extreme, and immature blog-circles make the same aknowledgement before the write inflammatory crap? Before they write malicious garbage like this. I won’t even more than passingly mention the GI-Joe wannabe “101st Fighting Keyboardists” that have recently “deployed” as they are wont to say. A group of narrow-minded, xenophobic Maxim-reading fools playing soldier-boy on the intergeek would not be noteworthy if they weren’t so populous.

I suppose it’s the blogging tactics that these guys employ that draw me – take a little bit of information, add a whole pile of emotional “editorial” and press “Rant”. Out it goes to the blogline where hundreds of other similarly-minded tell you how clever you are, and pity help anyone that actually sticks their head in with a contrary opinion, as I’ve done from time to time. You end up getting cursed at a hundred times, derided for believing the MSM and for not reading Fox or Ann Coulter, scratched at by the feeble and the nasty for daring attempt actual debate, and at the end of the day none is any the wiser.

It’s fun just to watch the feathers fly.

A meandering brain dump

For whatever reason, today I don’t feel like posting on an actual topic. Either my head is too full of stuff that just has to get out quickly, or I’m just too tired to organize my thoughts into coherent posts. Now that I write that, it is most likely the latter – child #2 has had a cold this week and all of our sleeps have suffered from it. Anyway, I thank you for your forebearance and forgive you if you decide to leave without reading further.

I guess another reason my thoughts wax and wane today is that I am going through a kind of “attention transition”. As the national political scene settles down and the threat of a quick election fades with the BQ and Tories forming an unholy alliance of sorts, my attention is drawn once again to international issues. And being Canadian after 12 years of Chretien-Martin isolation, where foreign policy really was used as a lever for business access and little else, philosophical wanking has taken the place of actual involvement. I am now typing with one hand.

On foreign policy, my hope for a Harper government is that we do become a more international nation. He has certainly made overtures to that end, though by pissing on Kyoto he has also made some early missteps. I’m sure I won’t agree to his version of internationalism, which will tie us ever more tightly to American foreign policy, but at least he aknowledges we share the same planet with these other bipeds, a fact that appeared to slip by Chretien and Martin as they chased balanced budgets and spent 8 years patting each other on the backs for having found it. I’m OK with having to say “sorry” to the rest of the world after Harper’s tenure as PM – at least he’ll have reintroduced us to the planet.

Naturally, if Stephen Harper confuses the terms foreign policy and military, as has been done in recent years all too often in the US, I am prepared to eat every single syllable in that paragraph. I have a sneaky feeling after our recent discussions on Afghanistan, that verbiage might well become part of my diet in the near future.

Oh well.

Yeah, Tony, it’s your ministers they want out of office