Not relevant. This doesn't ban content, just the reproduction of specific works.
> So, Australia has the principle of being able to ban entire works and yet doesn't ban anything.
You literally just contradicted yourself, when you mentioned a work that Australia did ban.
> partial censorship is okay
It is when you can evade it entirely by releasing an 'unrated' version of your movie, as is common practice in this country and has been for years.
> On the other hand, states in the US have laws stating that you can't take office if you are an atheist.
Outdated laws nobody would dare enforce, given the hugely expensive legal case which would result.
And, no, I never said it was fine and dandy. Stop putting words in my mouth. Every country has a sordid history which it needs to move past. Or do I need to remind you of the Stolen Generation?
> I didn't say anything about principles. I was talking about idealism being tested. These are not the same thing.
You are trying to draw a distinction based on absolutely nothing. The words mean the same damn thing.
> You have a pretty tortured definition of racism, if it requires the banning of face veils before it's a problem.
I never said this. I said that institutional racism is pretty damned bad when people can't even dress the way they want without being punished for it.
Every country has racism problems. At least in the US, we admit it without trying to claim our racism isn't racist.
> in the US, despite your puritanical ideal of free speech, you have a whole selection of two political parties to vote for
Or not vote for. You know, we have the freedom to not vote in this country, which seems to be foreign to the Australian mindset.
And, if having umpty-dozen parties is so great, how come the only ones who get elected are the ones that censor the damned Internet?
> If your son (or anyone) understands variables, assignment and adding them together, they fundamentally understand Algebra.
A more important part of algebra is symbol manipulation, and understanding why some manipulations are valid and others are invalid. That symbol manipulation is the core of grade-school (or trivial) algebra. Being able to 'see' how to solve a problem, and being able to abstract general rules to solve whole classes of problems, all flow from that.
Of course, there's a disconnect between using '=' to denote a state of being (the state of equality) and using '=' to denote an action (the action of assignment). As an example, 'x = x + 1' is either trivially nonsense or trivially valid. Haskell actually uses '=' in the mathematical sense, to denote a state of being, and SSA languages such as Erlang come pretty close to it, I think.
> BULL and SHIT. In Australia, there is no routine pixellation of middle fingers, likewise pixellating the mouth of someone swearing.
We don't ban whole works. Australia does.
> Hell, even movie ratings are a form of censorship,
Nonsense. Self-imposed rating systems are in no way comparable to governmental censorship.
> Some US states prevent atheists from holding political office
Wrong. Those laws may be on the books, but they could never be enforced, due to the First Amendment of the Federal Constitution.
> Your wikipedia link has little that Australia has banned in the past couple of decades
It's the principle of the thing.
> Idealism is nice... until it's tested, then pragmatism needs to have a voice.
Wrong. Utterly wrong. If you abandon your principles the moment they're tested, they were never your fucking principles at all.
> But the pragmatism of legislating against holocaust denial or sporting the swastika is basically the same as anti-defamation legislation: it's saying 'don't diminish this'.
By making it seem that it can't fight deniers on an equal footing, that it needs laws to bolster its argument.
> those laws are very specific in terms of what they ban
So? That doesn't make it better.
> US free speech also does nothing to solve any of the real problems modern America has with anti-Mexican and anti-Muslim racism.
We don't ban face veils. Talk to me about racism when you've stopped banning veils.
> They're there to stem violent nationalism, the European forms of which don't exist in the US.
We had the KKK, which was just as violent and just as nationalistic as European forms of it. We were able to destroy it (twice!) without resorting to the destruction of fundamental freedoms.
> but rather in the fact that face coverings make identification difficult
A poor reason to assault someone's culture and religion. Rather Big Brotherish, in fact.
> and do not fit in with the expected norms for social interaction in that country.
Back in the day, allowing blacks and whites into the same schools didn't fit in with the expected norms for social interaction in the USA. We got over it.
> France also has a ban on the display of religious symbols in public schools.
This I don't have a huge problem with, even though it seems a bit over-broad. Does it also prohibit people from wearing cross necklaces, for example? How about if someone had put ashes on their face for Ash Wednesday?
> In theory, the objective of defamation laws is to balance protection of individual reputation with freedom of expression. In practice, defamation laws are frequently used as a means of chilling speech. A threat of (costly) defamation proceedings and damages, whether or not a plaintiff's claim is likely to be upheld by a court, is often used to silence criticism not only by a particular person or group but also as a threat to others.
Basically, defamation laws in the USA are much more defendant-friendly compared to their equivalents in Commonwealth countries. Australia deserves much praise for apparently being much better in this regard compared to the UK, for example: Australian law recognizes truth to be an absolute defense, which is not generally the case in Commonwealth libel laws.
Canada deserves special approbation for its insane hate speech laws:
There have been just as many substantial fascist parties in places with those laws as there are in places without them: Zero. They're an attack on free expression, a universal human right, and they're an absurd over-reaction, an example of terrified cowering at a few worthless fools. What's worse, they do nothing to solve any of the real problems modern Europe has with anti-Roma and anti-Muslim racism.
Robust free speech protections, ability to rough it in a country that's still in the first world, and the ability to enter industries that don't exist to the same extent elsewhere.
We're also much less racist than Europe, for example: We haven't banned wearing traditional Muslim garb, for example, and we don't have the hatred of the Roma which is endemic to the European continent.
The categorical imperative is strictly weaker: It's possible to use the veil of ignorance to argue against positions nobody is insisting must be made universal.
For example, "In this house, you always clean up": The categorical imperative only works to argue against this if you try to find a way to apply it to every household; the veil of ignorance works simply by forcing the members of the household to be ignorant about who 'you' refers to.
Predicting food shortages, particularly of meat, was commonplace then, and increasingly common through the 1970s. Housing shortages were another theme, as was endless billowing torrents of acid rain. Turns out, the EPA actually did its job on that front and headed off a disaster in this country.
How often do the programmers around here need binary arithmetic? Not very often, I'd wager. Even the people who do low-level programming use logic and decimal arithmetic more than actual binary arithmetic.
It's almost as funny as Heinlein just assuming that every computer expert would need to have tools to repair hardware. He never quite wrapped his mind around someone focusing exclusively on software; maybe he never grasped 'software' as a distinct concept.
Cocaine is not an opiate.