One of the more jarring sentences I've read recently. I hate to think anyone finds "active population reduction" unacceptable only politically.

You stopped reading my comment...halfway through the first sentence, after reading a bizarre meaning into it that obviously wasn't intended?

Your choice, I suppose.

There's no such thing as a "neutral, healthy" upbringing. The mind is shaped into the mold of society. What you propose is a system that ascribes particular values and norms to religion (the idea that there is no "right" decision, making the choice essentially arbitrary, and that extended exposure to particular religions somehow stunts the mind). Defend your values, norms--fine. I can respect that. But please, by now--in the twenty-first century, with postmodernism nearly old hat--can we get over the myth of a neutral society?

I'm not sure whether you're being facetious or are just incredibly uninformed, but the situation you're describing is only true of a fraction of homeschoolers and certainly has nothing to do with the chief advantages of homeschooling. The situations you describe are more typical of private schools, in fact.

Let me give you some of my background. I was homeschooled from kindergarten to high school (although the last three years of high school I took additional classes at a local community college). My family is deeply religious (and fairly conservative), but my curriculum incorporated teaching about all of the world's major religions, and in speaking to my public-schooled peers I have found that I know as much as if not more than they know about non-Christian religions. As an aside, several of my good friends in high school were bi- or homosexual; I read a number of books on evolution as pleasure reading in high school; and just a few months ago I attended a lecture by Dawkins. And what I've seen of other homeschoolers has indicated my situation is fairly typical.

As for advantages? Well, there is the flexibility. As I mentioned, I took around 50 hours of courses at the local community college, all while spending less time in schoolwork than any of my peers. (One person mentioned that even if you go to public school you're free after 3. Not true: Several of my friends taking multiple AP classes and going to magnet schools were up late nearly every weeknight doing homework. In contrast, I never once had to lose sleep to finish an assignment.) I was able to achieve quite a bit academically while focusing most of my time on my main interests--which, in high school, meant everything from playing guitar and keyboard in a band to reading extensively (Wealth of Nations and the first volume of Das Kapital in their entirety, for example) to teaching myself C++, Java, and several other languages.

Not everyone's going to want that, though, and that's fine. Let me tell you about my sister. When she was entering elementary school she was diagnosed with minor learning disorders (in addition to hearing loss, a speech impediment, and a few other issues); if she had gone through school as most students do, she would have been placed in a special ed program. My parents chose to home school her, and in eighth grade she entered a local public middle school. Long story short, she's now in the all-As honor roll at her high school, taking classes at a local arts magnet school, and having a blast in her school's marching band. I doubt things would have gone nearly as well for her if not for the flexibility and individual attention homeschooling affords.

I don't think it's just a matter of liking the flexibility, customization, individuality, etc. We live in a world where we're barraged with news sources; there's far more than any one person could keep up with, even if they spent most of their time worrying about it. People are overwhelmed, so they throw up their hands and stick to their little corner. It's a distinctly modern phenomenon.

The entire point of having more than one government, of having national rather than global governments, is so that governments and citizens of other nations can step in when a national government has oppressed its bounds. We can argue about where the appropriate boundary is (for example, if it came to violence, I certainly wouldn't approve of a corporation like Twitter arming revolutionaries or lending its support to dissident groups), but I would argue that a group of people working to make means of communication available among repressed people is clearly within its bounds, regardless of whether the repressive government in question approves of this communication.

This is, of course, leaving aside the possibility (if not likelihood) that for Twitter this is as much about image and self-promotion as activism. But if it is, so what? No one does anything for just one reason, and I approve of their action whatever the reasoning behind it may be.

That's a good image; I'll have to remember that one. LeGuin doesn't seem to be saying that artists should hold onto their work forever. She's saying that while the copyright is in effect a large corporation (in this case Google) should not have the ability to twist the law to their own ends. I would have thought the typically left-of-center audience of Slashdot would sympathize with this sentiment.

Books are a poor example. People can and do read books outside; I have yet to see someone trying to play Halo out on the quad, on the other hand. Video games may be being singled out excessively, but comparing them to television I don't know nearly as many shut-ins who watch TV obsessively as game obsessively.

Most of my favorite artists don't tour or perform in the conventional sense. Recorded music has moved beyond the performance paradigm, as it well should.

Speaking as a college first-year, I'm sure I get well above that number, if we're counting generously. Nearly all my profs use Powerpoint, so that's a few hours of media usage right there. And then I tend to leave Facebook and Gmail open as I study, whether I'm using the computer or not, so there's a few more hours. When I hang out with the others at my hall, almost inevitably there's a TV on or someone's playing Wii or Madden. I'd say the only time I'm not connected to some sort of media is when I'm sleeping or out walking.

I don't have any problem with using tools like AdBlock to prevent obtrusive ads from appearing on whatever random website I click through. It's easy to disable AdBlock on websites that have legitimate, inoffensive advertisements (Slashdot, for example, and webcomics, although many of the ads on those sites are customized by their site owners and thus slip through either way); I don't see why there's any problem with blocking ads on websites that have unpleasant advertisements (especially when using a computer in a public place where children seeing bad ads can be a problem). Once websites began putting borderline-pornographic ads for "dating" websites on the edges of pages they lost any right to have users support their "business model."

You seem to think people will only act maliciously if there's something to be gained. I can't imagine why one would think that.