The right distance to religion

Religion can be a serious subject, at least for those who believe in it. However, the simple fact that religion exists (not God - religion) affects all of us. Before Christmas most shop windows are full of Christmas decorations on the continents around the North Atlantic, and, strangely enough, in places like Japan and China as well. We need excuses to party - and religion is not a worse excuse than your birthday. And that is the case even if the religion does not happen to be yours.

One of the strangest festivals of religious origins is the carnival. Originally it was supposed to be a time, when you partied and stuffed yourself before Lent that is introduced by Ash Wednesday. However, as more and more of us have stopped bothering with Lent, what remains is the party. It now often stretches into the supposed period of restraint that was the original reason for the party.

Well, who am I to complain? More people get happy from parties than from mortification. Some illustrations of the party bit can be found here.

Censorship has a point

According to a South China Morning Post podcast (and presumably their paper edition), Beijing (北京) will initiate a point system for Mainland Chinese media, just like many countries do with driving licenses.

With driving licenses it is usually a fairly well defined system. You have 10 points to start with. Every time you are caught driving against red light or for some other infraction, you lose one point, and when you are down to zero, you lose your license.

How it will work with media in China is less clear, but each media outlet will get 12 points, which may be deducted, whenever something is published against central directives. When they get down to zero, they will have to close down.

Reporters without borders are critical to the system, but their arguments are only based on the fact that they are against censorship. Given that censorship exists in China, and that it is likely to exist for a long time, it may be good to formalise it, and this may be as good a way as any other to do it.

There are two kinds of censorship. There is the irrational random one, which reigned in Stalin's Russia. People had very little idea what one was allowed to say. Inadvertently they could write things, which might send them to Siberia or the execution squad. Then there is the formalised censorship, where the rules clearly are laid out. People can get information about what kind of issues may be discussed, and which opinions are not suitable for publication. Clearly well defined rules are better than irrational decisions.

Whether China will implement this in a constructive way is yet too early to tell.

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