Wikipedia to black out in English for 24 hours tomorrow …

_{Denyse O'Leary

January 17, 2012

Academic Freedom, Culture, Free Speech, News}

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… to protest government interference in the Internet

Here. And it sounds as thought they are not kidding.

Regular readers will know that we do not recommend Wikipedia as a resource for any ID-related topic, and news staff scrupulously avoid it wherever possible on any other topic.

That said, government interference (US bills SOPA, PIPA) would only make things much worse. That’s not just falsehood or prejudice, that’s falsehood and prejudice with force to back it up. The appeal is not only to laziness in the reader, but to fear for personal safety.

We warned about this earlier. Briefly, governments that can’t balance their budgets or control crime and disorder would be happy to focus attention on controlling opinion instead. Historically, that’s one of the things they have usually done. And it is easiest to stop in its earliest stages.

See also: Think politicians don’t want control of the Internet? Read this.

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Comments

What happens if no one notices that wikipedia was blacked out? I didn't notice...Joe_{January 19, 2012
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Its the simple great equation. People believe words etc matter and change how people think. For good or for evil nothing in human history is more demonstrated that people are influenced by other peoples words. So there is a desire to control words by those who would lose something where freedom of speech happens. People can say offensive words are intolerable but in fact its trivial compared to the need and struggle for freedom of speech and so put up with what people say for a greater cause. In North america speech is targeted by the the bad guys who are behind the political correct philosophy. they all feel the world can be changed by words and they are right. so who decides what words are allowed? We decided long age. The truth must prevail and so freedom of speech must prevail and evil or wrong or offensive speech must be tolerated. Settled. Its the bad guys trying to overthrow this great tradition. Fight the these immoral and illegal powers.Robert Byers_{January 18, 2012
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News: This is one time we can agree with Wiki. KFkairosfocus_{January 17, 2012
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Looks like I posted in the wrong area. Sorry.sinclairjd_{January 17, 2012
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Thanks again for the vigorous reply! I appreciate you helping me think this through. First off, I should say I'm not attacking evolutionary theory. I really do think it is best defended from a realist A-theory framework. I have been convinced through the evidence that common descent holds. I think it would be highly entertaining if in some subsequent generation, it is the theists who defend the mantle of evolution! I think you're right that many religious concepts and narratives appeal to causation and temporality. I think it would be a very interesting question whether such concepts can be recovered in a genuinely atemporal realm. That said, although we agree that causality is a concept that need not be temporal, I don't think that the models that are being put forward are going to be compatible with an account of causality where evolution is something other than illusory. I think the situation is similar to the way temporal beooming is illusory (to the mind) on a B-theory o f time. I appreciate your appeal to Duality and multiple models of reality that are 'good'. In my business (and in, I suspect, yours) we rapidly have to build and or change to models of convenience that precisely fill a certain requirement and don't harm us in places where extrapolating their meaning would be in error. As I'm sure you agree, we have to be careful what conclusions can be drawn from them! But I think that if we want to avoid ontological pluralism and maintain a correspondence theory of truth, then there is going to be a true fact-of-the-matter regarding the cosmos (which I think you agree with given your above comments regarding realism). Thus we'd like to know which model has internal entities that correspond to that fact-of-the-matter. So, from the vantage point of the underlying ontology, which of the two models do we think is closer to the underlying truth? One possibility that I can extrapolate from your comment is that maybe both of them are far from the underlying reality! That's where the issue of Darwin (and, I think your comments regarding collateral damage) gets interesting. Here are positive claims upon which the answer to this question has a lot of impact. Could I at least get your agreement that this is an interesting question worth exploring, and maybe it is not being looked at enough by philosophers, and cosmologists who openly traffic in philosophy?sinclairjd_{January 17, 2012
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