A Voice for Freedom

I read an article today about a family in Pennsylvania that's been accused of keeping a 19-year-old girl as a slave since September. It's a sickening story, but I'm afraid this time I'm not going to feign surprise at the depths of depravity that humans can reach. We've all heard worse, and we'll hear worse again. So it wasn't the subject of the article that warranted its inclusion in my blog; no, it was a line about halfway down the page, two short sentences which form a paragraph of their own, with no relation to anything before or after them. They were:

"Mark Pollard is black. Cynthia Pollard and Nicely are white." (The Pollards are the accused; Nicely is the victim.)

The preceding two paragraphs deal with police statements regarding the Pollards' physical abuse of Nicely; the following paragraph is about the threats they used to keep her from leaving. Neither seems to necessitate a mention of anyone's race, yet it's there. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. My guess is that MSNBC didn't intend it to have any particular point to it at all; they've just had "racial awareness" hammered into them so much in the past few years they've come to think that this is somehow essential information.

Witness, once more, our "progressive" media taking every opportunity to try to make racial differences into an issue, rather than trying to erase that issue. More proof that the conservative ideal of tolerance - a colorblind society, which also happened to the be the goal of one Martin Luther King, Jr - is the only one that is really about tolerance at all. Liberal ideas of "diversity" are all about keeping us separate, and this is the result: more people today believe that race has meaning than did ten years ago. In my elementary school, whites were in the minority, and greatly so. No one cared, as far as I could tell - not the teachers, not the students. We were just kids. But twelve years later, the Diversity Police have moulded our society into one that says, "You two have different skin colors. You're equal, but you have to be different. You stand over there, with people your own color, and vote one way, and listen to one kind of music; you go stand over there, and vote a different way, and listen to different music. And either one of you can be a doctor or a lawyer or whatever you like, but you'll never be the same because we won't let you."

Education majors are now taught that our students' races make them different, and that we need to separate kids in our own minds based on the color of their skin. And then we're told that it's important to foster interracial friendships and cooperation between students of different ethnicities. It's like taking a perfectly beautiful and unified work of art, smashing it, and then putting the pieces back together. And of course, they never fit just right. There are always weaknesses there, waiting for someone to come along who knows how to exploit them to bring the whole thing crashing down in a pile of useless rubble.

Apparently Canada isn't the only place where police are turning into power-happy goon squads; at least a few cops in Baltimore have clearly gone the way of the Imperial Stormtrooper, several days ago arresting and handcuffing a seven-year-old boy for the crime of driving a motorized dirt bike on the sidewalk.

Gerard Mungo Jr was handcuffed and taken to the local station house, where he was cuffed to a bench and "interrogated", according to his mother. The cops claim an officer saw Mungo riding his dirt bike on the sidewalk; his mother says he was merely sitting on it with the motor off. The way she tells it, an officer simply came up to her son and pulled him off the bike by his collar. "I told them to let go of my baby," she said. "Since when do you pull a 7-year-old child by his neck and drag him?"

She has also accused the police of fingerprinting her son and taking a mug shot when they arrived at the station. The mayor has issued an apology and the police have begun an "internal investigation", but one has to question how much good either of those things will actually do. Of course, some groups are crying racism - Mungo happens to be black - but personally, I think this is just an example of the corrupting effect of power.

Meanwhile, in Liverpool, UK, another seven-year-old, accused of stabbing an adult neighbor twenty-one times with a kitchen knife, has not been arrested. The child's mother and the neighbor - who had a longstanding but occasionally tumultuous friendship - were arguing, and the kid picked up a knife and went after the neighbor. She survived and was in "serious but not critical condition" when she reached the hospital - obviously none of the stab wounds were too deep.

Regarding the child in question, other neighbors said that he was "like all young lads", "not a bad lad or a wild child", and "a nice little lad".

The child has been referred to social workers, since seven is three years under the criminal age of responsibility in the UK. In other words, the western democracies of the world have this week demonstrated their willingness to treat a seven-year-old riding a dirt bike as a dangerous criminal and a seven-year-old who has stabbed a person twenty-one times as a person who needs a little counselling. This criminal-as-victim, innocent-as-criminal attitude has been more widespread in Canada than anywhere else in recent years, as far as I've seen, but it seems to be taking root everywhere. Amazing.

Trust the South Koreans to come up with something like this: an ethical code for robots, to be based somewhat on the famous Laws of Robotics devised by Isaac Asimov (no word yet on whether the lesser-known "Zeroth Law" is to be included, though that would solve some problems; see below). This is the first time that a government has pursued this sort of thing, though independent groups have put forth various options in recent years.

South Korea is currently a hotbed of development in the cybernetics industry, the most impressive advancement being the proposed robot guards to be placed along the border with North Korea. This is where the ethical conflict comes in: if robots are programmed not to harm humans, they won't make especially efficient guards. Asimov's Zeroth Law allows a robot to harm a human if this action is judged to be beneficial to Humanity at large. Of course, Asimov's robots are designed to figure such things out for themselves; these guard robots would have to be programmed with the belief that eliminating North Koreans constitutes helping the human race, a slippery slope to say the least.

There is, however, another ethical conflict, one that bothers me even more: robot rights. And if this sounds like science fiction, think again: according the to BBC news article linked above, a UK government study conducted last year predicted that "in the next 50 years robots could demand the same rights as human beings". And what gives us the right to demand absolute obedience from our artificial creations any more than from our children? If someone builds a robot that can think for itself, it should be allowed to...well...think for itself. Telling them not to kill is one thing; building a race of slaves is quite another.

But for the moment, the proposed moral directives will do little beyond ensuring that a robotic bartender can't be programmed to poison someone. Which is good, I guess, though I wouldn't mind a homicidal C-3PO going after Castro or Kim Jong Il.

This could be one of the new issues my generation will see make the transition from pointless discussion to divisive point of contention - just as stem cell research and the resounding flop that is the US space program were for the last one. Something to think about, isn't it?

Politics is best defined as the science of sinking to new lows. Case in point: On a recent visit to Israel, several German bishops compared Israeli treatment of Palestinians to treatment of German Jews during the holocaust. They compared the de facto Palestinian capital of Ramallah to the Warsaw Ghetto. Their reasoning? The so-called Jerusalem Wall, which divides the center of Jerusalem from outlying Palestinian suburbs. Some claim that the wall was built "illegally".

The law that prevents a nation from building a wall on its own soil is no doubt contained within the same document as the one that prevents a nation from going to war against a terrorist regime in possession of massive quantities of chemical and biological weapons.

The Israelis are anything but happy about the comments, of course; their ambassador in Germany responded by saying that "Instead of resorting to demagogic usage, the bishops could have met the families of more than 8,000 Israelis who have been victims of Palestinian terrorism in the past six years, solely because they are Jews."

Germany was terribly wounded twice in the twentieth century by circumstances which, by the time it was understood what was happening, were far beyond the average citizen's purview to change. But the way to heal that wound is not to use it against others - especially not against those who were the greatest victims the first time around.

Do I support the existence of the Jerusalem Wall? That's a far more interesting question than you might suspect; I've done some writing recently which has caused me to consider the idea of walls like this somewhat more than the average person. All I can say is this: that Israel had to do something. As long as so many Palestinians continue to insist on blowing things up everywhere, their innocent brothers and sisters are going to pay the price. That's the just way the cookie bounces.

So clearly, the liberals were right when they said that the new Iraqi government would end up being nothing but a puppet of the British and the Americans; I mean, only a puppet government would publically criticize the actions of British troops in Iraq, right?

The British troops in question, along with some Iraqis, raided a National Iraqi Intelligence Agency building in Basra yesterday and captured five alleged militants, including a death squad leader. They also discovered thirty prisoners with torture wounds, including two children. But Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has criticized the multinational force for breaking into a government building. No mention was made of what the militants were doing in a NIIA building, nor of why civilians were being tortured there. Personally, I think Maliki's off his rocker for criticizing the Brits here. But the point I'm trying to make is that he is criticizing them; and I challenge the left-wing "blood for oil" morons to fit this into their delusions.

Today, I found this fascinating little tidbit in the Scifi Channel website's "tech" feature, which has also covered such recent advances as bionic butterflies, lojack staples, and a helmet that reads brainwaves to control an Xbox. This particular article is about a screensaver called Twingly, which displays an image of a globe complete with information on the current state of the blogosphere. Every time a blog entry is published - supposedly, anyway; often, too much is happening at once for the system to log all of it - the location the entry is created from appears on the globe, and its title appears in a list at the side of the screen. Despite the fact that I feel like John Connor watching the advent of Skynet, it's pretty cool. But if it starts trying to take over the world, I never said anything of the sort.