Belated Weekly Recap: Strange Matter, evolution book ban, and honor killings in the UK?

I've been a bit busier than expected for the past week.  To tell the truth, I've mostly been out enjoying the fresh air with my wife and our dog, and just haven't had much time or energy left over to spend at the computer.  Blogging has consequently been on the back burner until now.

Posts going up within the week sometime in the near future (I swear upon Russell's Teapot):

You can't prove it's not there!

• a retrospective post about ten years of September Elevenths and the War on Terror
• a statement of my political principles as a left-libertarian centrist (partly a response to The Heathen Republican)
• a fun post in which I make up completely absurd claims and conspiracy theories
• possibly a Skeptic Freethought post as well, if I think I've come up with something worthy

At least I'm only 24 hours late on my Weekly Recap.  Let's do this.

Is my mom over the fact that I'm an atheist?

My (Republican) mom, wonderful person that she is, recently sent me a spontaneous gift of three books she bought on Amazon. They're all by the same author, and she was inspired to get them for me after said author was a guest on (cue ominous music) Fox News.

Scared yet?  Don't be.

Facepalm of the Month: "To Kill A Mockingbird" Censored

2011 has been an interesting year for cases of idiotic censorship.


In a classic episode of missing the point, a school superintendent in our great state has banned a stage production of To Kill A Mockingbird, adapted from Harper Lee's famous novel.  The reason?  It's not because of the violence or the fact that the crux of the plot is a rape trial.  No, the play was cancelled because, true to its profound indictment of the irrationality of racism, it features characters who utter racial slurs, and that's not school appropriate.

Seriously.  We might as well ban George Orwell's 1984 because Ingsoc's propaganda could be seen as pro-Communist.  Oh, wait, that's been done.

I suppose this is to be expected in an age when a prominent scholar censors the same slur out of the dialogue of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (The late Mr. Clemens would be bashing his head on his keyboard in Hell right now if there were an afterlife).  Apparently we can depict black slaves being savagely beaten, treated like subhuman beasts, and deprived of every opportunity in life, and that's perfectly fine - but if we candidly depict their tormentors calling them "niggers" it makes too many people uncomfortable.


Censoring the ugliness of our past hinders future generations from learning from their ancestors' stupidity and from preventing history from repeating itself.  When we take the sting out of human cruelty by censoring the nasty words, we're left with only statistics about death and disenfranchisement.  We're left without a moral lesson to derive from the way humans have used language to dehumanize one another, and without such poignant depictions in literature, we're left without a way to empathize with the victims of injustice.