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Well, Bill 44 has been passed into law.
What is Bill 44? Bill 44 is the ‘parental rights’ legislation that stipulates that parents have the right to pull their children out of contentious classroom situations. Topics such as Human Sexuality, Religion and Evolution have been mentioned as possible situations.
Bill 44 or “The Right to Remain Ignorant” bill has been postponed in its implementation. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reports that the culture minister Lindsay Blackett has delayed the legislation for some more fine tuning to allow the schools to as he puts it: “Our intention is certainly not to get school boards before the Human Rights Commission.”
Intentionally or not this legislation allows teachers to be brought before a HRC tribunal when discussion such controversial topics such as evolution and sexual education are included in a lesson without parental approval.
This is a gross neglect of public education in Alberta. I’ve already written about Bill 44 here when this particular travesty of Bill came out. I am hoping that the Alberta Government have realized the magnitude of the stupid (stupid burning so bright that it made it a mark on PZ Myers’s blog Pharyngula) that is in this bill and working to neuter it as quickly as possible.
Given the lovely conservative nature of the politics in this province, I highly doubt any significant revisions will be made.
It is nice to establish base definitions everyone once and awhile. With all the rambling going on in the blogosphere it seems that certain basic terminology needs a good going over. Socialism happens to be one of those terms as suddenly in the US healthcare debate it has been repeatedly mischaracterized as misanthropically evil. Socialism, like Capitalism, has its flaws but it is certainly not intrinsically evil. A system based on exploitation of another however might qualify….
I grabbed this definition from a ytube video that attempts to define what Socialism is. The video is a little bombastic, but gets the point across. Socialism is a political economic philosophy that is based on a democratically cooperative society in which the means of production and distribution are owned by the people.
Or see what dictionary.com has to say about Socialism:
so⋅cial⋅ism
| 1. | a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole. |
| 2. | procedure or practice in accordance with this theory. |
| 3. | (in Marxist theory) the stage following capitalism in the transition of a society to communism, characterized by the imperfect implementation of collectivist principles. |
Read the first part here and part two here , part three here part four here if you need to catch up.
Conclusion: The Digital Revolution: Evolve or Die.
“In order to secure for individuals in society an adequate information environment, we would have to provide for resource spaces within which no one is susceptible to manipulation by others, at least not as a result of legally-backed rights to provide or deny access to information and communications resources. We also would have to secure sufficient minimal access to the means of producing and exchanging information and cultural expressions so as to provide to all a robust and diverse set of perspectives on how life can be lived and on why life is better lived one way than another.”
-Yochai Benkler -SIREN SONGS AND AMISH CHILDREN: AUTONOMY, INFORMATION, AND LAW
Part 4 is fresh off the press, read the first part here and part two here , part three here if you need to catch up.
Section Three: Evolution, Reactions and Compromise.
“The Internet is the widest public space that mankind has ever known. A space where everybody can have their say, acquire knowledge, create ideas and not just information, exercise their right to criticize, to discuss, to take part in the broader political life, and thus to build a different world of which everybody can claim to be an equal citizen”
–An excerpt from the proposed Internet Bill of Rights.[1]
[1] Collaborative work. “The Internet Bill of Rights” Last updated: November, 2005. http://internet-bill-of-rights.org/en/appeal.php Accessed: August 10, 2008.
The things people do to avoid the secular school system.
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Part 3 is fresh off the press, read the first part here and part two here if you need to catch up.
Section Two – Democracy, Autonomy and Copyright.
“I argue that a purely market-focused information policy—in particular one focused on exhaustive propertization of the physical, logical, and content layers of the information environment—exacts a significant normative social cost in terms of personal autonomy”.
-Yochai Benkler –SIREN SONGS AND AMISH CHILDREN: AUTONOMY, INFORMATION, AND LAW.
The introduction can be found here
Section One: The Permission Culture – Antagonist or Friend of Free Culture?
“Copyright may be property, but like all property, it is also a form of regulation. It is a regulation that benefits some and harms others. When done right, it benefits creators and harms leeches. When done wrong, it is regulation the powerful use to defeat competitors.”
– Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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