I’m wondering what my readers think of how well Obama has been doing (please note that I’m after genuine answers to this question, not unsubstantiated political propaganda). Given the cold, harsh political realities, I personally think he’s been doing about as well as can reasonably be expected, given that he is facing what must surely be the most difficult circumstances any President has had to deal with since World War II—it’s really quite ridiculous how much things deteriorated from the time George W. Bush came into office until he left. He’s left poor Obama one hell of a big mess to fix.

So why on earth do we use such ancient computers? Basically, because we run the classic Mac OS exclusively. All these machines are more than fast enough for this wonderfully simple, elegant and fast yet functional OS, and machines newer than Lee’s eMac won’t boot into the classic OS anyway. So how do we run our web sites with such an ancient OS? In a way, we think it’s a good thing: if our sites work on our machines, we know they will almost certainly work on any current computer or OS! However, it also means we can’t keep up with the latest web technologies, so we are going to buy a new computer soon to allow us to launch an exciting new venture we have planned—stay tuned!

So what is the point of this post anyway? Basically, to tell you about the philosophy behind the new web initiative, Last Year’s Model—”saving the planet through sheer laziness”. In a nutshell, they are encouraging people to simply keep their old tech gadgets that still work fine, rather than buying new ones just for the sake of having the latest. This is something I can strongly agree with: my mobile phone is a few years old as well, and Lee and I both still watch old fashioned CRT TVs! (Still, one of the reasons we will be getting a new computer is that we realise our future video work will have to be in HD, even though we personally don’t care about HD at all). In part, I think it was all this rampant, uncontrolled consumerism (and the resulting debt) which led to the current financial crisis, and not throwing stuff away when it still works perfectly fine is certainly much friendlier to the environment.

Which brings me to the subject of this article. Australia’s own holocaust denier, Frederick Toben, was earlier this week sentenced to three month’s jail for contempt of court, for refusing a court order to take down his web site on the subject. Please note that holocaust denial is not in itself a crime in Australia, unlike in Germany for example (indeed, Germany previously attempted to extradite him to face charges over his web site, which failed). However, like any civilised country, we are all legally bound to comply with court orders, whether we feel they are justified or not. Also, before I go any further I want to state categorically that I think denying the holocaust is crazy—the evidence for it happening would appear to be overwhelming. As such, I have little doubt that the people denying it happened are racially motivated. However, does that mean the law should step in to silence them?

If somebody got up and started spouting the sort of antisemitic rhetoric Hitler did, I think the law should silence them, as that is clearly inciting hatred and violence against a particular group of people. But does denying the holocaust happened fall under that category? Hardly. However foolish it may be, and however dubious the motivation for doing so, all they are actually doing is questioning accepted history. Historians do this all the time—the holocaust isn’t the only apparently very well documented historical event that some historian somewhere has denied. Indeed, such people are often driven by exactly the same kind of racial and/or religious motives that holocaust deniers are. As a matter of fact, there are many fundamentalist Jews who deny that the Palestinians historically occupied the land now occupied by Israel. But there are no laws against that, however overwhelming the evidence to the contrary, and how potentially racially inflammatory such statements might be.

There’s just no getting around the fact that there’s a considerable double standard here. There are far greater restrictions on what we can say in relation to Jews than there is to any other religious or ethnic group—there’s just no two ways about it. And this is very bad for Jews. First of all, it makes people feel they are receiving special treatment (which, in fact, they are), and nothing fuels racism more than that. Even worse, this is compounded by the fact that simply silencing holocaust deniers actually makes it look a cover up, which fuels conspiracy theories as well. This actually appears to give holocaust deniers credibility in the eyes of many, and reinforces the impression that Jews are receiving special treatment, all of which is a sure fire recipe for antisemitism. So the silencing of holocaust deniers is a suppression of freedom of speech and a double standard, as well as indirectly inciting antisemitism, thus ironically achieving exactly the thing these laws are designed to stop!

I can understand the overreaction to the holocaust. It seems obvious that to prevent something as terrible as the holocaust from happening again, we should suppress any information that might lead to antisemitism. But that would be wrong. The Nazis thrived on the suppression of information—if they were completely open about what they were doing, do you think they would have been able to get away with doing it? There’s a reason freedom of information is a cornerstone of democracy: it is because it is the most effective way to secure truth and justice for all (and I’m sure I don’t need to explain what an important principle freedom of speech is for a healthy democracy). Besides, as I explain above, there is good reason to believe that the suppression of holocaust denial and other similar ideas is in fact leading to far more antisemitism than if these ideas were openly discussed.

Just as I believe zionism was a huge (though understandable) mistake in response to the holocaust, so too do I think is the suppression of anything that might be construed as antisemitic. By far the best way to deal with holocaust deniers and such is to debate them openly—trying to suppress them only fuels racism and conspiracy theories, and actually gives them more ammunition and credibility.

Many who value the separation of religion and government have sought an appropriate response to the federally-supported National Day of Prayer, an annual abuse of the constitution. Nontheistic Americans (including freethinkers, humanists, atheists, agnostics, and deists), along with many traditionally religious allies, view such government-sanctioned sectarianism as unduly exclusionary.

A consortium of leaders from within the community of reason endorsed the idea of a National Day of Reason. This observance is held in parallel with the National Day of Prayer, on the first Thursday in May each year (May 7th in 2009). The goal of this effort is to celebrate reason-a concept all Americans can support-and to raise public awareness about the persistent threat to religious liberty posed by government intrusion into the private sphere of worship.

Sounds like something worth supporting to me! This is a great opportunity for my American readers to show their support of the secular values that America was founded on—not Christian values is as commonly thought. I find it highly offensive and very misleading that the National Day of Prayer web site uses what looks like a characterisation of George Washington kneeling in prayer in their banner.