With very few exceptions, I’m opposed to capital punishment. In my book, murder is murder, whether it’s committed by individuals or the state.
In this case, the convicted are being used as an example, in hopes that the severity of the punishment will change the behaviour of others, and shift the culture of violence. That’s a good thing. It will very likely save more innocent lives than the cost of the four convicted. This makes it not a moral decision, not an issue of justice for the victims, but an issue of body count mathematics and of cultural shock therapy.
Throughout the world, women don’t have anything resembling equality with men, be it violent rape in India or malicious Internet based harassment in North America. Numerous more gentle efforts seem to improve the situation in one aspect, but not prevent the development of new avenues for discrimination and harassment. We fix mechanisms but changing the culture remains an elusive, distant goal.
In this context, the decision to execute these four young men may very well be the right one. That doesn’t mean it isn’t troubling in many ways. Not only is the use of state sanctioned murder difficult to accept, it is more that this blunt instrument appears to be the only effective tool. This above all demonstrates our inadequacy when it comes to making women an equal part of society. More than sixty years after the wave of post-WWII feminism, and we’re still not past this.
There’s no lack of evidence to show that there are people in the world who think that an appropriate response to the misdeeds of the West is to bring the death and destruction back and throw it in our faces. I fail to understand this logic of revenge, but unfortunately there are many who embrace it. Humanity has a long history on the failure of using evil to counter evil, but we never seem to convert this knowledge into wisdom.
This might be surprising, but because of this I’m not entirely opposed to governments communications surveillance for security reasons, even the communications of their own citizens – after all most acts of terror come from hateful people within our culture, not from the stereotypes the media is so enamoured with. (more…)
By now, just about everyone has heard about Marissa Mayer’s first big public move as newly-minted CEO of Yahoo, Inc.: no more remote work, issuing a directive that all remote employees need to show up at a physical Yahoo office.
This has resulted in a storm of criticism from journalists, armchair-CEO’s, and remote workers around the world (including me). (more…)
One has to give LinkedIn credit for trying to be more than just a network of vague business connections. They have a difficult challenge: Investors and advertisers value them more on membership numbers than on the quality of the connections in the network, yet the quality of the network is the primary value for those members. (more…)
For the past few years, the leading edge of online marketing has been “content marketing”. As advertising becomes increasingly ineffective at driving sales, and as most lead generation tends to come via search engines, marketers have figured out how to produce content that ranks well in search, which brings traffic, which converts to sales/revenue/whatever.
The problem is that as more and more people buy into this, there has been a subtle change. Now the industry is engaging in “marketing content” rather than “content marketing”. The result is a flood of low quality content. Ten thousand blogs, all rehashing the same information in slightly different ways. So much duplication and plagiarism that it’s impossible to tell who had an original idea, if anyone. (more…)
Let me start this with full disclosure. Although I am not a member of the wine writing community, I have close ties to it. I have a business relationship with two of the writers who have complained about theft of their content, and I know several more personally. Additionally I have business and personal relationships with several small wineries and winemakers.
I’m also a wanna-be writer, although not in the field of wine journalism, or more accurately in the field of writing about wine. I say that because calling some of this “journalism” would be an insult to the word, even the watered-down definition that has emerged in the Internet age.
Natalie MacLean stands accused of appropriating wine reviews from other writers, reproducing excerpts without permission or acknowledgement. The details can be found on this article from Palate Press. Interestingly, another set of allegations emerges in the comments, but that’s for others to pursue. (more…)
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