"If you're reading and reviewing new books," someone may ask, "where are the book reviews?" They're being pre-scheduled. I'm trying to be more conscientious about posting new book reviews on the day the new books land in stores. As a result I've been writing book reviews and scheduling them to appear here in June or even further ahead. (If I die, Google will post those reviews.)
There's a temptation to think "I owe people these reviews! They must be posted! If I'm online all day on Saturday, I don't deserve a day of rest!" That is why, I think, it's in the Bible that we all have to observe a day of rest. Everybody, even the dumb ox in the field, deserves one--not for doing good work all week, not for being "spiritual," so much as just for being alive. I promised to post reviews of these books but I didn't specify a date. Reviews will eventually be visible here. I don't deserve a day of rest but I'm under orders to take one anyway.
Censorship
A "game" being offered to students in some public schools is "You're a prisoner on Epstein's island. Can you avoid being molested for five nights?"
How bad is that?
What I find worrisome in the video linked below is the claim that "because people made a fuss about 'freedom of speech,'" sneer, sneer, "kids can be downloading this on their tablets anywhere."
If parents want to protect a child from downloading or playing a game, it might help for them not to give that child a "tablet."
But I'll say this. Young people, even children, do hear the sensational "news" about Epstein's island and other hatecrimes against women and the young. They are told to stay away from Mr Stranger Danger. They are thinking about what Mr Stranger Danger might want to do to them. They know he doesn't want to dump them out a hundred miles from home merely as a joke.
I read the horror stories about how girls and women were just helpless bait for street terrorists in news magazines and newspapers--as a precocious reader, at age four. By age six or seven a major theme in the stories I acted out with toys was how the doll or the model horse escaped from kidnappers. I didn't have nightmares about kidnappers in grade two. What I worried about meeting in my dreams, that year, was that cartoon of a dead horse lying in the road, just a flat heap of brown ink in a drawing, that had become a symbol for the probable loss of Grandmother and possible loss of Mother--that awful year when Grandmother was in fact dying and Mother was in the middle of a complicated celiac pregnancy. I galloped toys around the mud room and felt that, like them in my games, I could dodge kidnappers. Death was harder to dodge. But the point is that a game of "dodge the molesters around Epstein's island" would not have been likely to put ideas into my head that hadn't already been there, even in the far from innocent Johnson Administration.
I would not have wanted to play any fantasy adventure game at school, with some lame-brained teacher trying to oversee the game. I would, if such things had been invented, have wanted to play it on a computer, privately. And it might even have been useful. There aren't as many kidnappers and molesters in the world as parents (not unreasonably) fear. Parents would rather be safe than sorry so they imagine a molester lurking behind every tree. In real life the closest to a molester I ever got was the public school boys yelling snarky "compliments" out of their car when I was walking home from my student labor job at age nineteen. But that might not have been the case and it might have been useful that I'd started thinking about strategies like distract and run, twist wrist out of hand, screech, bite, gross out, etc., at age seven.
Yes, I think freedom of speech is worth the possibility that a child might play a computer game that admitted it was about escaping from molesters. I think some parents might even want to buy that game for their kids.
Christian
Ali Kaden makes some valid points in suggesting that St Paul can seem like a wolf in sheep's clothing.
Messianic Jews usually say that about the "Apostle to the Gentiles," but it's unusual to see it from a non-Jewish person.
Glyphosate Awareness
The only news here is that awareness is growing, but isn't that good news?
No comments:
Post a Comment