Musings on broken minds

I'm currently reading Alan Dean Foster's Founding of the Commonwealth series.  Specifically, right now I'm on volume three, Diuturnity's Dawn, which has various fanatic, xenophobic factions among both human and thranx planning terrorist acts to try to prevent the birth of what will become the Humanx Commonwealth.  There comes a point at which the human and thranx xenophobes meet each other.

At first, it made my brain hurt to try to think of the sheer broken-mindedness and mental contortions necessary for opposing groups of human and thranx fanatics to cooperate and work together with each other to try to prevent the possibility of humans and thranx ever cooperating and working together with each other.  But then I took a mental step back and thought about the broken-mindedness that makes its presence known almost every day, all over our world.

And suddenly, it really didn't seem that big of a leap any more.

(Naturally, it goes almost without saying that both groups are planning to backstab the other as soon as their respective dastardly deeds are done.)

"Kid-safe" Firefox addon implements whitelist "bubble"

I think the developers behind this idea are well-intentioned, but haven't really thought the problem through.  The odds are any whitelist of allowed sites that any but the most narrow-minded and blinkered parents are going to be able to assemble is going to be so closed-in it'll be of little use to anyone — and frankly, people whose idea of the sum of acceptible content on the Web can be fit into a manageable whitelist probably aren't going to be letting their kids on the Internet anyway, lest they encounter (the horror!) a new concept or unapproved idea.

Afterthought:

There is always the possibility, of course, that it's been written to allow you to "subscribe" to someone else's published whitelist (rather in the fashion of AdBlock Plus and Filterset.G for spam control).  This could make the process manageable, by allowing you to simply pick a published whitelist (or group of whitelists) that more or less matches what you want your kids to have access to.

Of course, there's still the potential for the Little Metal Box scenario (for instance, I can quite see someone publishing a whitelist that contains only Conservapedia and sites linked from Conservapedia), but when has that ever not been so?  As long as there are people who are afraid of unapproved ideas, there will be people who want to control what other people are allowed to read, hear, see, and think.