More Serious Than We Ever Imagined

The B.B.C. reports that we're no longer to be thumpingly reminded that we wouldn't steal a car, but instead will enjoy the more insidious treatment of having our attitudes changed. (There seem to be so many people out to change attitudes these days that my attitudes must feel like visitors to Circe's island.) It's not a regular case of refusal to respect and engage the public as co-travellers in intellectual debate, though:

Children are supposed to gently arrive at the conclusion that if creativity is good, and content is valued, then copyright infringement may be wrong.

This is no longer just about term extension, D.R.M. and the rest: apparently they're out to assault modus ponens.

(Okay, plug in the right set of suppressed premises and it does make sketchy sense; but the description of proposed techniques given in the article gives me no faith that anybody is intended to be so equipped.)

Leave the Barricades At Home

Having had a tutee who wrote that 'we all believe in human rights' – naturally I wrote 'I don't' in the essay margin before sending her to Žižek, as a warning about generalisations – I'm very tempted also to send her this news item: Human Rights Laws 'Being Abused'. Not least because it reflects some very odd stances on what human rights are supposed to be for—that they are being presented as means to some end(s) is plain enough (it looks as though we're dealing with some form of rule consequentialism, possibly a pluralist one), but what ends? 'Human rights laws have improved elderly care and helped tackle bullying, the report claimed.' Laudable ends, but not exactly something a Lafayette or a Paine would have written; with the 'improved' and the 'helped' this sounds positively pettifogging. One wonders how we ever opposed bullying before the vast edifice of transnational human rights law was erected.

Maybe I ought to be happy about the apparent acceptance that human rights don't exist in any robust metaphysical sense; but then I see a statement like 'Human rights are a framework for ensuring that the power of the state cannot override the rights and freedoms of the individual', and end up wondering whether we have instrumental 'human rights' being defined in positive law in the service of (other?) 'rights... of the individual' considered as ends without qualification... or whether the whole enterprise of seeking to justify human rights has ended up in confusion.

A Chicken That Says ‘Dummy’

Debug/test/unused stuff in Mario Golf:Advance Tour. Loading the game data in Atrius's Golden Sun: The Lost Age editor (the games use the same engine for field scenes, and some of the same people worked on them both) shows twelve map IDs with 'test' in the name (as well as more leftover Golden Sun sprites), but whether they have objects that can be loaded is another matter.

The presumably prototypical Marion Club foyer has quite a few differences from the final version: the GBC-esque sprites are an odd touch, and presumably they, like the locker room map from GBC Mario Golf, were a placeholder early on. So were the Golden Sun assets, no doubt.