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Various Issues

Entry 361, on 2006-07-09 at 17:14:55 (Rating 4, News)

There were several interesting issues I found in the new today which I felt I should comment on. There are also a couple of personal experiences I found interesting...

A while back I blogged about whether we can trust police with non-lethal weapons such as tasers. There have been several occasions recently where police have misused the weapons they have already, such as pepper spray. Today a 5 year old girl was accidentally sprayed with pepper spray by police during a domestic incident. Police claim only one person was sprayed but members of the family that were there disagree, and say two pregnant women were sprayed in the face. I'm not saying we can't trust the police. Trust isn't a simple thing: its not just present or absent - there are degrees of trust. In my opinion, the amount of trust we have for police isn't high enough to justify them having weapons like tasers.

The Church of England's ruling body is currently discussing the issue of whether women should be able to be ordained as bishops. Specifically, whether it can be justified theologically. The argument against female bishops seems to revolve around whether her orders could be accepted. So they are saying that women shouldn't have the authority to be bishops because they don't have enough authority to be a bishop. This really sounds like a circular argument. Of course women should be able to be bishops. I thought it was illegal in most "civilised" countries to prevent someone from being given a job based on their sex. Apparently that doesn't apply to the church. What nonsense. If women want to believe Christian mythology and be involved in the church hierarchy they should be able to. In my experience women are no more incompetent in positions of power than men.

Another headline says that the presence of British troops in Afghanistan has "energised" the Taleban. We don't hear that much about Afghanistan in the news, presumably because news from Iraq, where the situation is even more negative, takes priority. We continually hear that the US coalition forces have done all the wrong things, and this seems to support that. Of course, I'm not sure what the answer is, except (as I have said in the past) the leadership should admit they have done the wrong thing in being there to start with.

I went to the movie "Pirates of the Caribbean" last night, and I must say it was quite entertaining. It certainly wasn't a great movie in any sense, and I can't see what the fuss is about. Depp's character was amusing, but still rather one dimensional and saying it was great acting is a bit of hyperbole. Still, I shouldn't be surprised, commercial movies aren't intended to be great art. They are there simply to make money.

I received a bizarre email a couple of days ago, from a representative of Apple New Zealand. he was requesting that I remove graphics based on the Apple logo from my web site. I've had those graphics for about ten years, and no one has commented before, but I have changed them. the last thing I want is to be attacked by the much-hated Apple lawyers. As I said in the email I replied with "Have you got nothing more important to worry about!"

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