Slowly working out the bugs on my links section. It took me a while to get the links function up and running, but one more thing beaten into submission.
One of my goals is to add five or six links a day at least for the time being. Once I get that up and running the next job is of course the joys of ping backs and letting the people know who I’m linking to that I have linked to them. The goal is to create a general interest/culture site with an emphasis on natural selection. There really isn’t anything quite like this, so if you want one you more or less have to go one building yourself.
The major things I do notice, especially when putting together the general news catagories, is how shitty the American newspapers are when compared to other newspapers around the planet.
One explanation I’ve seen for this which makes a certain amount of sense to me is American newspapers are more dependent on advertising dollars than most of the other nations in newspapers which rely on the subscribers to pay the bill. What this means is that American newspapers are more accountable to advertisers than they are its readers – meaning it should not surprise anyone when they stop writing for human beings, instead focusing on the corporate entity as its reader.
This probably goes a long way to explain why religion is so tenacious in this country as it is primarily a private enterprise as opposed to state run as is the practice in Europe and again focusing on the corporate entity, in this case God if you will, as opposed to human need an interest. It’s a bit of a stretch this connection I am making, but I do think the same basic elements or play.
It’s like the connection between the pro-life pro-death penalty crowd fighting it out against the pro-choice anti-death penalty crowd. They’re so busy shouting past each other it is very easy to forget and get lost in what they are actually fighting about. As someone who does think that abortion should be legal and the death penalty banned I really had to sit down and think through the ethical ramifications of my position, because it simply isn’t one that the mainstream media puts forth.
My objection to the death penalty isn’t because I think it’s always bad to kill people, since I do think it is important to maintain a military and four police officers to have the option of deadly force. My objection to the death penalty is based solely on the notion that I do not trust any government that has the power of life and death over its citizens and frankly I think that anyone who trusts the United States government to get a death penalty case right when they can’t get anything else right are a bit on the foolish inside.
But our beloved mainstream newspapers really don’t put forth this rather obvious observation in the conflict between these two groups because they are more interested in perpetuating the confusion and division between these two groups which serves as a distraction from advancing a more humanistic agenda.
Anyway, gossip sells. I do admit the connection I am making this a bit more murky were the subject of religion and economics are concerned, but I do think they are more or less the same thing. the bottom line to all of this is, of course, I can spend more time writing and putting my links together and just getting the fundamentals to work.
