The UK is trying to enact a very stupid and logically farcical law, which guarantees to increase religious hatred by outlawing it.

The problem is that religion is not without its own hatred.

Religion is also not based upon the same logic as the secular law, being based upon belief rather than reason, so good people ignore the passages in religious texts that include incitement to hatred. The law would prevent this loose interpretation.

Under the proposed law almost any practitioner of any of the word’s major religions could be charged with religious hatred, either for threatening infidels with the ultimate torture, an eternity of hellfire, or for explicit threats within respective texts.

Laws within a tolerant society are based upon logically consistent arguments, such as the existing UK laws against race hatred, which protect groups such as Sikhs and Jews not because of their ideology or belief, but because of who they are.

Changes to the proposed law include making it illegal to explicitly threaten violence against religion, which begs the question what has religion got to do with this? Current laws against violent acts protect society from what people do, there may an argument for extending this to what they threaten to do.

A law that protects religion would have to define what constituted a religion:

If a religion is a ‘commonly held belief system’, then potentially any type of belief system or ideology like Nazism could potentially be protected by law.

If it isn’t all commonly held belief systems, then the law is discriminatory itself.

If it is any commonly held belief system that doesn’t itself promote discrimination, then Judaism, Christianity and Islam would be excluded, if tested under current legal arguments.

In other words, you get both Christians and Nazis or a law which manages to break itself. A candidate for the legal equivalent of the Darwin awards.

The reality of this sleepwalk into chaos is that the reason people tolerate each other, who have different beliefs, is often by finding common ground and empathy while ignoring the logical inconsistencies between their beliefs. These inconsistencies are not obscure theological arcana, but whopping great Fuck Yous - such as be ne of us or go to hell. This law will bring these ‘inconsistencies’ to the surface and result in inevitable persecution.

The best thing to do about religion is to ignore it and focus on good. The best thing to do about this future law in the UK is to provoke a showdown by taking religion itself to court.

BBC NEWS | Politics | Religious hatred plan is defended

Over the last six months I have kept meaning to switch to outline style blogging.

For all the hoo ha about OPML as a standard for reading lists - you might reasonably ask why not use RSS - after all RSS is often used for playlists so what could the difference be?

The difference is really fairly subtle, but also very important, and the real answer has nothing to do with syndication, but the process of writing and what people who evangelize outliners have been trying to persuade people for years.

The comments on Anil Dash: Outlining a Blog are a really clear illustration of the problem.

Later generation blogging tools were designed with the influence of RSS which in turn was influenced by news headline syndication.

This meant that every post had a headline and with only one default template for post styles post templates tended to look like news stories with a big bold headline and text beneath.

If you want to post small snippets, the news story style format is a problem. If you put the headline in the body, then what do you use for the headline? If you use the snippet as the headline, the bodyless post looks empty and you can’t put links to sites mentioned in the snippet in the headline.

Non outline style blogging leads to the type of writing where you feel compelled to make every post a mini essay. This is bad for both writers and readers - since most people don’t want to read essays about everything and most bloggers don’t really want to write essays about everything.

The headlineless style allows people to write more freely and more often, note style - what blogging is about.

Reading through the comments on Anil’s site my gut feel is that the solutions to this are:

Multiple styles for post templates - headline or essay.

Dates/times as default headlines in syndicated outline style posts.

Named anchors as permalinks for individual entries within an outline style list post.

Ability to nest OPML within RSS within OPML namespace or use separately for a pure list.

(BTW- if anyone reading this knows - how are images handled in OPML?).

First store in Manhattan to open in Union Square in 3 months - all hail Trader Joe’s.
Considering that we hired a car and spent 4 hours going to Trader Joe’s and back again, only last weekend, I am, as they say - stoked.

Even better news is that they are opening a separate wine store next door to get round the stupid New York license laws which are a throwback to prohibition.

Trader Joe’s to Open in New York - New York Times

In the UK in the late 80’s British Telecom carried out one of the single biggest acts of design vandalism when they systematically removed the famous red telephone boxes designed by Gilbert Scott et al.

The justification for this was that they were not accessible to people in wheelchairs. This argument was impossible for people to counter and yet hid the truth - there were other ways of making phone boxes accessible that would not have required a complete change.

People argue, quite rightly, for web accessibility, but what are the results?

If you pass some of the top web sites’ front pages to the W3C validator:

Yahoo - does not validate

Ebay - does not validate

Amazon - does not validate

Google - does not validate.

These have all been around for a while, however. What about the newer breed of online services?

Flickr - does not validate

Digg - does not validate

Del.icio.us - does not validate

Are all these companies wrong, or is there something wrong with current accessibility standards?

In the next part I’ll look at the current state of HTML and argue for a different approach.

Tom Foremski reports on the irony of America’s most famous investor buying Business Wire, a company that flourished under web 1.0 but is entirely obsolete in web 2.0. Online press releases will be part of an open infrastructure rather than a walled garden service. Which means no long term room for Business Wire, period.

5 other companies that Buffett could buy to match his most recent acquisition:

Xerox

Siebel

Kodak

Sun

Silicon Graphics

Buffett acquires business wire

We wait till people reach maturity before we allow them to choose their political affinity and vote based upon it. As Dawkins points out, labelling a small child a neo-marxist is absurd. So why don’t we let people choose their own religion when they grow up?

Religion is traditionally passed from adults to children.

The second part of Dawkin’s documentary on religion was shown in the UK last night - thankfully torrent files are already available.

This tackled the dirty little secret of all religion - that it requires people in a vulnerable state of mind to infect. Of course the best place to find vulnerable minds, as a matter of course, among the healthy is in schools. The program suggested, perfectly reasonably, that religious teaching in schools is a form of child abuse.

In the UK:

“The number of faith schools is increasing. More than half the Government’s proposed City Academies will be run by religious organisations and there’s a growing number of private evangelical Christian schools. ACE: Accelerated Christian Education has developed a curriculum which includes a mention of God or Jesus on every page of its science text book.”

For people who would like to see a world of both reason and understanding, then the best thing to do is to teach young children to have an open mind, to enjoy mysteries and fiction but to question and discover the wonder of the world around them - to teach children atheism, as I will teach my children.

Channel 4 - Can you believe it? - The Real Exorcists

I just noticed that Google add automatic Map Links when something that looks like an address appears within a message in Gmail.

This kind of on-the-fly detection of metadata to create searches could be used for auto-dialing phone numbers or adding appointments to a calendar - but I guess we’ll have to wait for a Google Calendar product for that.

“Gmail makes it easy for you to keep track of your packages, and map out directions to your destinations; when you open a message that lists an address or package tracking number, Gmail shows you handy links to maps and directions, or your package’s delivery status.”

I watched some of the Alito hearings in awe. Alito is very impressive, a great speaker, coherent and logical - but he is damaged goods since his reason and logic has boundaries.

The evidence - the refusal to acknowledge that the constitution is a ‘living document’.

This is the latest meme to attack the very foundation of American Democracy by people who cannot accept the Constitution unless it is ‘Intelligently Designed’ and not Evolutionary.

Since the constitution clearly does change - there are amendments, the argument against it as a living document is not creationist - i.e. it does not pretend that the amendments are fiction, that would be crazy.

Instead, like Intelligent Design it tries to create a mechanism whereby things do change but they change because of an original, divinely inspired and complete design - the original Constitution.

This is the exact opposite of what the founding fathers intended and unlike the biblical history - we have thousands of sources to verify it.

The reason the constitution has amendments is not because it was perfect to start with but badly interpreted, but precisely because the people that wrote it knew the dangers of a frozen religious like document being the central pivot of government.

If you seriously think the constitution is not a living document, then you either:

Stupid: think that Black people should not be treated as human and are too stupid to sit on a supreme court

A constitutional creationist: think that scientific discussion of the Constitution is not possible because it is divinely inspired and therefore your application of reason only extends to areas that are not infected by faith.

A constitutional proponent of Intelligent Design: think that every amendment was because the founding fathers really meant what the amendment says, but people didn’t really understand not because there is progress.

Alito is in the last category, he thinks that the Constitution is a religion.

Google Search: living document

Although unannounced publicly, Google appears to be testing its Yellow Pages killer, maps based advertising.

If you do a search for Hotels in New York on Google Local, you get something that you don’t get for a search for ‘hotels in San Francisco’ - ads. Right there as little blue map balloons rather the red, algorithmic, local search results.

Not only are the ads local, but they are contextual i.e. hotel searches bring up sponsored results for local hotels.

In some ways this is a relatively obvious move, however its big news considering that:

1. The Yellow Pages advertising market is bigger than the entire existing online search advertising market.

2. Offline Yellow Pages directories will clearly be replaced, over time, by online products, and it looks like maps are how this plays out.

3. Ad products are where Google makes the money that justifies its gargantuan Market Cap. so a new ad product is a big deal. Now, alongside Adwords and Adsense it has a third revenue source that is in a bigger marketplace.

With ads - Google Local - hotels loc: New York, NY

Without ads - Google Local - hotels loc: San Francisco, CA

Channel 4 - The Root of All Evil