On the Soapbox

The title of this post may seem a little odd, but there is a connection... I had just finished reading an article by the New York Times titled "Lactic Acid Is Not Muscles' Foe, It's Fuel". It was an article that appeared in the NYT's list of most e-mailed articles a few days ago. It was added to my to-read queue, and I finally got around to it today. It's an article about biology, athletics, and exercise--all of which are topics in which I have no interest, which made the process of reading the article not all that enjoyable. So when I reached the end and found that the article's title pretty much said all that needed to be said, I found myself asking, "Why did I bother reading this article?"

The article proposed an interesting idea. In this case, since I had no interest in the topic itself, what made the article's proposed idea "interesting" was that it challenged what is for many people common knowledge. And before I felt comfortable kicking the old teachings out of my mind in favor of this, I felt the need to validate it. In this case, it meant reading about the methodologies described in the article, reading about the exact findings and various caveats--if any--as described in the article, reading about dissenting opinions from the scientific community--if any--and the basis of any dissent, and then running all that through and seeing if the conclusion that I come to given this information matches that of the article.

And after thinking about my behavior some more, I guess this is also why I dread opening up my RSS reader because I know that it would drain a lot of time away. There have been many instances where, upon reading a says-it-all title (like that for the lactic acid article), I tried to force myself to move onto the next item in my RSS reader. Despite that, I am almost always unable to force myself to skip articles that propose "interesting ideas", even if the title and opening blurb provide a good summary and even if, as it was in this case, the topic itself isn't even interesting to me.

Perhaps I am being a bit anal-retentive about all this, but as I think about it, there have been times when the titles and conclusions of various news items are distorting, misleading, or simply wrong. This is especially true with Slashdot (and for the Digg fans out there, Digg is about ten times worse). And I suppose it's also true on occassion with news sources that are not as reputable as the Times (and even they aren't perfect). I often look at the people on Slashdot who post knee-jerk article reactions that miss the point after just reading the title and quick summary without actually reading the article in depth, and I wonder, how many people out there in the mainstream fall prey to this problem with other news sources? With Slashdot, it's just a few geeks who get misinformed about mostly techie stuff. With other forms of media, it's the general public and issues that are sometimes more important. Remember the hysteria over the Dubai ports deal?

According to an article that Carl sent me today, Christie's will be auctioning off Star Trek props, uniforms, etc. in October. It's the 40th anniversary of Trek, and I guess they don't need these things any more now that the powers to be have more or less destroyed the once-great franchise with their poor writing.

The article mentions that there is the possibility that the amount that they expect for items to fetch may be underestimated because of the fanaticism of the fan base. Well, if they expect for the flute from TNG's "Inner Light" (yes, that flute) to fetch just $300, I think they are indeed underestimating, wouldn't you agree?

I know I haven't posted in a while. I've been busy and I've had a cold this past week, so I just didn't feel like posting anything, even though I have a growing backlog of things kicking around in my head. Which is why I suppose it's nice that Google Labs released Google Notebook this past week, so I could jot those ideas down on something other than scraps of paper that easily get lost. Actually, I hadn't been doing that for a few months now; I had started using a similar server-based (so it's accessible from any of my systems) post-and-edit note system a couple of months ago, but my system was just a quick hack job that I did and so it was nowhere as good as Google's system.

Speaking of hacking up code, I really should get around to finishing writing version 0.3.0 of my blogging software, especially now that I'm getting more comment spam, which unfortunately means that I'm going to have to add some anti-spam mechanisms to my system. Oh joy.

Oh, and I finally got around to fixing the hinges on my laptop, which had been broken since 2004 (the hinges lost resistance so that screen had to be literally propped up from the back). The downside was that the replacement parts--just a pair of replacement hinges--that I ordered cost me a bloody £25 (the only supplier was located on the wrong side of the pond; and the weak dollar wasn't very helpful), but the upside was that this was my first time disassembling a laptop, and, as such, it was oodles of fun.

Finally, I just want to point to this nice post about net neutrality, which is different from what most people have written about the topic in that it points out the role of the all-you-can-eat cross-subsidization pricing scheme of Internet access these days. I think that this would be a great reason to force net neutrality because it would give the telecoms more pressure to switch to a more sane pricing scheme by preventing them from shifting costs to content suppliers to avoid fixing their bad pricing structure.

As reported by Reuters, a "leading cardinal" of the Catholic Church has urged that Christians take legal action against the Da Vinci Code. These were the words of Cardinal Arinze:

[...] legal means which can be taken in order to get the other person to respect the rights of others.

This is one of the fundamental human rights: that we should be respected, our religious beliefs respected, and our founder Jesus Christ respected.

What struck me first about this comment was the remarkable similarity that it had to those of the Muslims protesting the Muhammad cartoons. The Muslims demanded that their "rights" be respected and claimed that the mockery of their prophet Muhammad was a violation of their freedoms.

I have to admit that I have not read the Da Vinci Code, but based on the media coverage that it has received, I have a general idea of what it is about, and most importantly, I also know that it is a piece of fiction, published by Doubleday Fiction. That was the second thing that struck me: that the Catholic Church was up in arms about a piece of fiction; it can't even be classified as libel.

However, the issue that bore into me the most was the attempt by the Church to disguise a positive right as a negative right. A negative right is expressed in the form of restricting the actions of an entity with power (usually government). The First Amendment begins with, "Congress shall make no law..." These are "rights" in the traditional sense. A positive "right" is not really a "right" in the traditional sense, but rather, it is an entitlement. Instead of restricting the actions of an entity wielding power, it grants people certain things. For example, the "right" to jobs or to health care are positive rights often associated with liberals, and the "right" to be free of indecency in the media would be an example of a positive right often invoked by conservatives.

The primary danger of these pseudo-rights is that they are arbitrary. Someone can claim the "right" to just about anything, ranging from those that are reasonable, such as the "right" to provided basic food and shelter, to those that can be quite absurd, such as the "right" to be provided with a cell phone. As a result of this arbitrary nature, positive rights can often clash with one another and with negative rights. When those who claim the "right" to be free from offensive material turn to the government to enforce that "right", they come in direct conflict with the negative right of free speech. Additionally, as more and more people from both ends of the political spectrum couch their agenda in the distorting language of positive "rights" and "freedoms", it causes confusion and disorientation for people. How many people do you know are able to distinguish traditional negative rights from entitlement positive rights? This misuse of distorting language often hampers and obfuscates meaningful debate.

The casting of the cartoon and Da Vinci Code controversies in the language of positive rights is misleading and harmful to the public. If the Catholic Church is so opposed to the book and movie, they are perfectly free to arrange boycotts and protests, which they have already done. But when they start asking for legal action, they are crossing the bridge and turning a legitimate protest into an oppressive use of legal power; they are seeking to trump a "true" negative right (free expression) with their "false" positive right. But of course, the obfuscating nature of the language used neatly hides it.

Finally, I must take issue with their claim that the "right" to respect is a "fundamental" human right. In dealing with government, this is true in the sense that all people must be equal under the law.* But when dealing with private entities, respect is neither entitled nor decreed--it is earned. If anything, the holding and expression of various opinions--disrespectful or not--is a much more "fundamental" right. Perhaps in time, the Vatican will finally learn that obtaining respect requires the shedding of their thin skin and the cessation of a history of attempts at oppression.

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* On that note, legalizing gay marriages would grant gays the negative right of equality under the law while depriving Christians the positive right being free from the "menace" of gay marriages.