In your example, in actual fact, it doesn't necessarily mean you're a cowardly asshole, it can also mean your cultural assumptions are different. But you turn out to be right that there are enough other cues that someone should NOT learn those behaviours. And my point was not that these things teach those lessons so it's ok. My point was that they teach those lessons, full stop. Nobody's learning good sexual conduct from most porn. Nobody's learning social graces from online FPS play.

You can't learn not to do something from something that glorifies that behaviour. You can learn it other places, including when someone says, for example, games and porn are ruining your ability to relate to women. But in general socialization relies on people behaving in a socially acceptable way to each other, and these environments are rife with examples where they quite simply do not.

Porn in general is a terrible way to work your way into sex. The vast majority of pornography out there is so misogynist that it poses a real danger to any eventual partner that a person who was educated thusly might find.

Someone already mentioned Owly. I'll add Agnes Garbowska's work - at 3 you can probably do Yogurt the Ogre, then later on You, Me, and Zombie and her other books. Bone is a huge book that'll be good in a couple of years. There's also Comics in the Classroom's lists.

Maybe you're not Canadian but...CBC is designed to offer a public media (TV, radio, and now online) option that is mostly Canadian content. It's a huge driver of our domestic arts industry. They're well within their rights to compete directly with all comers. Many Canadians would prefer not to spend their tax dollars that way, but many others are quite happy with the bargain.

Neutrinos having mass AND traveling at the speed of light means there is something seriously wrong with relativity or quantum theory. There's every reason to think at this point that there is a result in the offing, and there's no point making scientists tiptoe around while they try to find the hole.

Congratulations, you've won the most irrelevant troll award for this thread!

Didn't Eric Drexler and a bunch of other people use Crit Link or something similar to do this on a website my memory says it was edge.org in the late 90s/early '00s?

They're YA but I really enjoyed one of H.M. Hoover's Morrow books, Children of Morrow. It's grim, but man I loved it forever.

Every other blogger seems to be referencing Mr. DeGusta's article. If you have a particular reliable source maybe you could point to it.

In the FA, that allegation is not founded on anything other than the car manual, which states the battery will discharge in that amount of time, but doesn't state that the battery will brick, leading one to believe that Tesla are, in fact, not total idiots and the 11 weeks are probably for normal, non-damaging "full" discharge.

As I mentioned elsewhere, there's a difference in the grounding of the two. Apologies are grounded in social traditions and laws whose intent is to keep the peace and avoid liability concerns, both of which apply to all citizens. Religious speech is intrinsically grounded in culture. There can be a legal requirement to issue an apology for damaging behavior. There cannot be a legal requirement to participate in a religion other than one's own. As someone pointed out elsewhere, this is grounded in a totally separate part of law, but that does not change the fact that the two situations are very different. The end effect is that the one is targeted at the individual (ok, and in fact the necessary operation of law in a democracy) while the other is targeted at the cultural group (not ok).

I agree, as it happens. I went to a Catholic junior high where this was the exact practice, and I was in many respects happier there than at my secular elementary and high schools. But I understand that this is not the case for everyone, any more than it would be universally comfortable for a devout Christian in a school where several times a day all the other students pulled out prayer mats, gave the Christian student the stinkeye, and then prayed to Allah. I did not say I am totally against the practice. I simply said I was less comfortable with it than with forcing people to issue public apologies. And, more importantly, that the social forces in the two cases are very different.

Yeah, no, you're totally right, in context the post was about transmission of religious belief and not about all the other situations in which kids are forced to recite prayers. Of course that's the obvious interpretation. How silly of me.

Funny, my sister, who is a modern liberal Christian, my grandmother, who is devoutly and traditionally Christian, and my brother-in-law, who is an Israeli Jew, not to mention the Muslim girl I was hanging out with over Christmas, all missed your insight. Also, the lady who wrote the Christian nonfiction book I'm currently editing. But you're right, of course.