US-based toy retailer Toys"R"Us has been reprimanded for gender discrimination following a complaint filed by a group of Swedish sixth graders about the store’s 2008 Christmas catalogue. According to the youngsters, the Toys"R"Us Christmas catalogue featured “outdated gender roles because boys and girls were shown playing with different types of toys, whereby the boys were portrayed as active and the girls as passive”. Thumbing through the catalogue, 13-year-old Hannes Psajd explained that he and his twin sister had always shared the same toys and that he was concerned about the message sent by the Toys"R"Us publication. “Small girls in princess stuff…and here are boys dressed as super heroes. It’s obvious that you get affected by this.” – Read the full article at The Local
Hey Koes, it’s a pony! ;) Photo made by Cheatara
I’m well aware of what kind of comments will be posted by some of our readers but I don’t really care. I’m so sick of these stupid gender clichés. You like boys to be “boyish”? Well, good for you but that doesn’t mean they want to be boyish just because you or the society expects them to be. We should get rid of the whole concept of acting masculine or feminine. The case above isn’t really special for Sweden but I’m glad to see that this Swedish attitude comes to Germany too (even if some Swedes might already be annoyed by all the political correctness ;p).
UPDATE: Boing Boing had a post about this too earlier today and the first 2 comments there made my day. Sorry America, you just got pwned ;o) On a more serious note: Stop thinking of teenagers as brainless mutants, kthx.
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Posted by Josh~ in Fight, Other, tags: Sweden
An incredible number of amazing stuff comes from Sweden… magazines, models, sex idols, pedo vampires & zombies, queer kids and The Pirate Bay of course. And the guys behind the latter are working on another gift to the world: IPREDator. Its naming is a none-too-subtle jab at Sweden’s recently-launched IPRED or Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive, which allows copyright holders to identify individual file sharers. Therefore IPREDator counters this action by disguising your identity, just like any other virtual private network, although the key difference is that it doesn’t keep any records of your activity. No records means there’s nothing for law firms to go after, which is why it’s appealing to those living outside of Sweden’s new laws.
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Not only file sharers will love this but also people who are getting nervous about new repressive laws regarding pictures of teenage boys. The service is currently in closed beta testing and the Pirates were kind enough to give me a beta key so I can tell you a bit more about it.
The sign up is pretty easy: You register an account, pay 149 Swedish Krona (about $ 19) for 3 months of anonymous surfing and you’re ready to go. Setting up the connection to their network is dead simple (they have instructions on their site). Once you’re connected through their service you will have a Swedish IP and can do whatever you want – everyone who tries to find out who you are will just see this IP which you share with thousands of other users and since no connection data are saved at the IPREDator servers no one can tell which user did what.
The speed is surprisingly good: I surf with about 4 Mbit here in Germany and even if I’m used to 32 Mbit with my normal connection that’s still a damn good speed to load some torrents or surf the web. It will be interesting to see if the speed stays at this level once the service opens up to everyone which should happen by the end of this month.
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