This is just a quick aside to follow up my previous post, I have read a few more comments on Simon Jenkins’ article and they are so painfully stupid – yet worryingly representative of public thought – that I am going to have to blog about them again soon. If you don’t believe me about the idiots, read the times online article.
Monthly Archives: October 2007
Islam vs The West
At the risk of being seen as a Times Online Groupie, I find myself wanting to comment (and draw attention) to yet another excellent post there. In an excellent article titled “The biggest threat to the West lies within itself, not with Islam,” Simon Jenkins examines some of the myths and stupid arguments being thrown around in international relations today.
In a nutshell, Mr Jenkins takes the current ideas about “Islam” being out to destroy the West to task and exposes some of the nonsense being thrown around the corridors of power (and regurgitated by people to stupid to know any better, and sadly by people who do know better but are too bad to do better). Mr Jenkins contrasts the recent letter to the Pope by 138 Muslim leaders with correspondence in the 9th century, before the fall of Byzantium. Quite rightly, he points out that this letter is not the ideal peace offering that some try to make it out to be, but in reality is an acceptance of the false war between Christianity and Islam – a war which only really exists in the minds of the insane fundamentalists on both sides trying to bring around the end of the world. For example, Mr Jenkins comments on the implication that if Islam and Christiantity do not stand together there will be war:
Such an implication is grandiose, dangerous and wrong. It implies that the Muslim world has a politico-military power that is in some sense equal and opposite to that of Christianity. This elevates the so-called jihadist tendency within Islam to a status that it does not have and should never think it has. It suggests Islam has sufficient power to confront and possibly undermine the West. It implies a balance of power parallel with a balance of theological interpretation.
Such an implication feeds a no less dangerous paranoia in the West. By stating that the “survival of the world†might turn on a struggle between Islam and Christianity, the letter reinforces the militarist fantasies of neoconservatives who see the world as just such a struggle. It is a paranoia which, since 9/11, has driven the “war on terror†and fomented the tension and antagonism to the West to which the scholars’ letter is so vacuous a response.
It is worrying that the idea there is an Islamic war against the “west” is so prevalent in modern society. People have, through fault or design, conflated the idea that buildings are western civilisation and that “our” society is so fragile the loss of lives and property will see the end of it. It defies any amount of understanding I possess, that people who are so wedded to western society they would happily bomb other nations back into the stone age to defend it are so unaware of what a society is that they will equally dismantle every positive aspect of it at the same time.
Unfortunately this is a collective madness which seems to have overcome the entire western world. The neocons and hawks in various administrations have successfully convinced the public that “Islam” is trying to destroy the west and make our “free, democratic nations” into scared, theocracies with no civil liberties. The real act of evil madness comes in the chosen method with which people defend said “free democracies.” We seem to defend our freedom by removing it. We protect our liberties by sacrificing them.
Madness.
Simon continues:
The chief threat to world security at present lies in the capacity of tiny groups of political Islamists to goad the West into a rolling military retaliation. Extremists on each side feed off the others’ frenzied scenarios so as to garner money and political support for their respective armies of the night. Each sees the other as a cosmic menace and abandons communal tolerance and peaceful diplomacy to counter it. The authors of this letter would be better employed vetting their own blood-curdling mullahs and madrasahs than in writing platitudes to the Pope.
Again, spot on. There is no denying the fact that there are evil, hate filled Islamic religious leaders who seek to destroy what they see as decadent western civilisation. The fact is, they can not destroy it. Freedom and democracy are stronger forces than hatred. People may die, but surely the concept and the liberty will live on. If killing people were enough to stifle a democracy, then the United States would still be part of the British Empire. Even if the minority of radical mullahs were able to kill a hundred people each, “western civilisation” would remain unscathed. The ideas born in the French and American revolutions, in the renaissance and in the subsequent years are robust enough to live on. They are attractive enough that people will gravitate towards them – to such an extent that it requires government oppression to prevent this happening.
Sadly, the extremists in the west are supplying that government oppression. Islam can never destroy the west, but the west can.
Simon Jenkins’ article is so well written and (IMHO) correct, I could end up quoting every paragraph here – and I dont want to do that, because I need to save space to savage some of the comments. I will restrain myself to one more quote from the original:
There may be young Muslims and their teachers with a vested interest in talking up such a war. There are those in the West with the same interest, such as the booming armaments and security industries with their think tanks and lobbyists.
Such vested interests need to be exposed as such. To portray Islam as a whole as a concerted threat to western security, and to imply that the West’s democratic institutions and freedoms are not proof against that threat, is absurd and close to treason. Then to demand that western freedoms be dismantled and stored away for the duration of a “war on terror†is to wave the flag of surrender.
This defeatism led the American Congress to allow its president to authorise torture and detention without trial in what Senator Robert Byrd called “the slow unravelling of the people’s libertiesâ€. It enabled a British Home Office to curb free speech and habeas corpus. It arms police, fortifies buildings and impedes the free movement of citizens. It makes every Christian suspicious of every Muslim.
…
When Thomas Paine told America that “we have it in our power to begin the world over againâ€, he meant by example, not military conquest. His utopianism was a brave, confident and open-hearted one. That of his successors is sinking into the opposite, a fearful, besieged, security-obsessed wimpishness, in which Muslims rightly feel threatened by the arbitrary violence of the American right.
That, to me, sums it up perfectly. Now I can move on to the entertainment and the idiocy which lives in the comments (it is interesting how so many people in New Zealand or Australia feel qualified to pass comment on the effects of recent immigration policies in western Europe. Either they are recent expats which makes it very hypocritical or they are simply feeding off media lies and confusion…). I will begin with this bit of confused nonsense:
You ar wrong Mr Chui.[a previous commenter] Not conservative perversity, but liberal ineptitude of its perception of human rights. People of colour can do no wrong. Its the white man with their skills and their willingness to develop the world that are the monsters. The tragedy of Africa, notably Zimbabwe, is the product of its near non existent morals on human freedoms. Liberalism is so ensconced with its directionless policies on fundamental human rights to the point that it even denies the right of the parent to raise his/her family in the manner she/he deems fit.!! Same applies to religious bodies. The London Tube bombings are the direct result of this so called liberal ineptitude. There is no democracy . They pass laws dictating to me how to run and manage my tiny little country pub in the heart of the British country side. That’s Liberal democracy which we are forced to accept. Bruce B, Sutton, UK
This typifies “middle Englands” attitudes towards human rights – a term often spat out with hatred and the implication that it means the persons rights are being downtrodden. This is, of course, nonsense but it remains a popular idea. Sadly, few people spend more than a moment following their own ideas to their logical conclusions and, as a result, end up with (for example) the idea that a parent’s rights outweigh the rights of anyone else in their family. Bruce obviously has issues with legislation on how he can run his pub so I can only assume he wants to put his staff and customers health and safety at risk.
American readers are always a good source of religious nonsense:
Mr. Jenkins is half correct in a walking backwards sort of way. The threat to the West is twofold, first multiculturalism and run amok secularism has destroyed the nourishing root of Judeo-Christian morality from whence the West draws its strength. So once weakened Islam like an opportunistic infection can bring down this once mighty oak. It is delusional to look at the empty husk of our dying Democracies and think they are anything as robust as they were even 50 years ago. Too many writers like Oriana Fallacia, Robert Spencer and a host of others have been crying for the West to wake up, while men like Mr. Jenkins sing lullabies. Paul T, Phoenix, USA Arizona
It is sad that Paul T has such a poor understanding about what “democracy” means. It has nothing to do with Judeo-Christian morality and it certainly can not be “weakened” by secularism. The only threat to democracy in the west is the rampant violation of civil liberties and the massive growth of a “policed state.” Paul T obviously skipped what ever lessons Americans teach politics, philosophy and social studies in.
Next up is a lesson in logical fallacies. This is a comment which is nothing more than ad hominem attacks and a false appeal to ridicule:
There’s always some nitwit, some appeaser around to say “We’re not really involved in a global conflict.” We had Jimmie Carter to refer to the West’s “inordinate fear of Communism,” and now we have Simon Jenkins to pour his fatuous platitudes all over the Moslem jihad. That proves how cosmopolitan, how broadminded he is — he never takes offense when visiously attacked. I guess there’s no need to worry about Islam. “Jihad” is a peaceful word that just means “struggle” — just like “Mein Kampf.” Larry Eubank, Bloomington, Indiana, U.S.A.
There isn’t any point in me addressing the points made here – because there aren’t any. Larry is simply wrong and poorly educated.
If you have the time, and can stand the idiocy, read the comments on Simon Jenkins’ post. They show how people can be very, very wrong. If you are short on time, just read Simon’s post – it shows how sometimes someone can get it very, very right.
Wingnuts rewrite history
In an amazing piece of pseudo-history, Worldnet daily is bizarrely claiming the Ku Klux Klan as an invention of the Democrats, set up to target Republicans, no less. (With an implicit suggestion that this is where Democratic politics really lead, in sharp contrast to Republicans’ tolerance and diversity.) Snurfle. Choke on your coffee. You think I’m joking?
I am going to quote WND. (Sorry.) Richard Barton is the author of:
….”Setting the Record Straight: American History in Black & White,” which … that not only did the Democrats work hand-in-glove with the Ku Klux Klan for generations, they started the KKK and endorsed its mayhem.
“Of all forms of violent intimidation, lynchings were by far the most effective,” Barton said in his book. “Republicans often led the efforts to pass federal anti-lynching laws and their platforms consistently called for a ban on lynching. Democrats successfully blocked those bills and their platforms never did condemn lynchings.”
Now, I am pretty certain that enough Democrats were implicated in the activities of the KKK. However, there is something that could politely be called “disingenuous” in the WND attempt to whitewash the Republican’s major role. Indeed to present the Republicans a dogged fighters against the KKK hamstrung by Democratic opposition. (It could less politely be called lots of things, such as “barking mad”, “lying” and so on. For any WND readers who’ve strayed here by the grace of Google, I’ll have to admit “Yes, that is in fact what I mean. I was using the word disingenuous, because I was pretty sure you wouldn’t know what it meant.”)
All the same, I do recognise there has been something of great leap forward in the US. At least, the actions of the KKK must now be recognised as so universally repellent that you can really harm your political opponents by making spurious attributions of relation to them.
I found some interesting observations on Christian Ethics Today about Nicholas Barton whose spreading this crap.
Barton has become the guru of Religious Right antiseparationism.
(referring to the separation of church and state)
A careful look at that material, however, shows that “Mythbuilders†would describe it more accurately than “Wallbuilders,†for the essence of his message rests on eight historical fallacies regarding the Constitution
Basically, they are politely saying he’s a far-right nutjob and that Wallbuilders is a pseudo history site with anti-separation of church and state agenda…. This point of view is put rather more forcefully on Right Wing Watch blog, where a Sept 19 post said
A Right-Wing Three-Fer
Right-wing pseudo-historian David Barton will be addressing the Regent Law School chapter of the Federalist Society….
In fact, now I’ve got to Right Wing Watch, I see that there’s an much more elegant deconstruction of this ludicrous David Barton story than I can manage. (Because I’m too busy laughing at the effrontery of it)
Religion and the Military – Stupidity at its best
In the times recently, there was a piece on the boss of the army, General Dannatt claiming more should be done to equip soldiers for a life after death:
“In my business, asking people to risk their lives is part of the job, but doing so without giving them the chance to understand that there is a life after death is something of a betrayal,†he said.
Now, it goes without saying that, while soldiers who think death will give them a wonderful afterlife (where have I heard this before) may well fight better, it is worrying that the Chief of the General Staff is becoming concerned about the soldiers’ afterlives. Does he anticipate lots of them dying? Is he revving up for a jihad holy war in Iran? Is he trying to soften the blow when hundreds of body bags come home – at least the families can think their loved ones are in a better place (along with all the goldfish, cats, dogs, budgies, etc…)?
Personally, I hope not and I do actually think this is just an example of how evangelical Christians are fundamentally idiots. Dannatt continues:
“I think there is very much an obligation on . . . a Christian leader to include a spiritual dimension into his people’s preparations for operations, and the general conduct of their lives,†he said. “Qualities and core values are fine as a universally acceptable moral baseline for leadership, but the unique life, death, resurrection and promises of Christ provide that spiritual opportunity that I believe takes the privilege of leadership to another level.â€
Which pretty much proves my point. Well spoken idiocy is still idiocy. Moving on from his witterings though, the comments are where the real stupid burns away. As you can imagine, the words of a rightwing, Christian soldier appeal to all the baser instincts of the Times’ readership. This leads to comments like:
Would that we have a world free of all violence: until then, our armed forces serve to protect US. Forget the rights and wrongs of Afghanistan or Iraq: our forces are there whether they like it or not and so THEY at least deserve our full support. Why should not a general offer spiritual support and advice? Oh, and does God exist? Or can anyone here prove that they exist rather than being a figment of my imagination? Paul R. Kent
Would that I could meet Paul R from Kent and see if his imagination makes his nose hurt. I agree 100% that our forces deserve our full support, but I have to question what value support they are getting from being told that death is great and a wonderful afterlife awaits them as long as they adhere to Creed X.
Gen Dannat is not a war Monger, nor a fanatic, If he were he’d be keeping our Boys out there instead he’s going against Govt Policy & trying to get them back home to their families And trying to get them better equipped and paid so if there is a need to fight they are More likely to survive than they are now. As for his Christianity, look around you…this country could certainly do with getting back to it’s traditional British Christian based Family Roots. Adrian Peirson, Bedford, Awakening Britain
Wow. It is that special kind of history again. “This country” (assuming Mr Peirson means the Great Britain) has no “traditional British Christian based Family Roots.” Giving them capital letters doesn’t change anything. Traditionally the British peoples are worshippers of dead religions with a family and social structure unrecognisable today. If he means that weird form of “traditional” which has an arbitrary start date then when is it? Does he mean the Catholic traditions, Anglican traditions? Both? Neither?
When people write idiotic things like this, they tend to mean the Victorian traditions which are far from traditional (yet have captured the public imagination as “real history” – especially in Scotland, Wales and Ireland). Any one who harks for a return to “Victorian” values is certifiably insane.
True, religion (or rather our response to God) is a personal matter, but it is clearly not a private matter, as Jesus clearly demonstrated by his final words to the disciples to ” go and make disciples of all nations… ” So, General Dannet’s comments are entirely understandable. Jesus requires a very personal decision from every single one of us to either believe what He said or choose not to believe what He said. General Dannet is simply wanting to ensure that each soldier does infact know what Jesus said so they can make that very personal choice for themselves prior to going into battle because after death, if Jesus’ words are true ,as in His parable of the rich man amd lazarus ..it will definitely be too late to change ones mind. rebecca pluke, hemingford grey,
Hmm. I assume Rebecca thinks every soldier in Britain managed to avoid the compulsory religious education lessons and a quick chat from Gen Dannatt will rectify their ignorance. Hmmm. Still, her nonsense is mild compared to this bit of drivel:
The Victorian British Army would have understood where General Dannatt was coming from. The British nation and it’s great army then was a God fearing nation who honoured Jesus Christ and respected the Bible. God’s favour on England from the reformation to the second world war is obvious, God made us great. Now we have turned away from christianity and become weaker and embraced other religions and no religion. Queen Victoria said….The secret of Britain’s greatness is the Holy Bible. Only the blood of Jesus Christ can wash away sin and make us fit for heaven. Nothing else has the power to do this. Therefore British soldiers and us dying outside of Christ have no hope. Philip, Dorset, England
The only positive thing I can take from this is that is proves my point about how people (idiots) think anything Victorian is traditional and good. For those outside the UK, Dorset is very rural with all that implies about peoples intelligence. Philip has obviously been reading too many novels about Sharpe et al., to realise that the “God Fearing” nation under Queen Victoria was very dissimilar to what he describes here. The whole “Gods Favour” thing is so stupid it burns. Philip also seems to assume Queen Victoria was so knowledgeable that everything she says has divine authority – Tutatis forbid she say something stupid or proven wrong… As for the blood of Jesus Christ… Does this mean that EVERYONE who died before Jesus went to hell? What sort of sacrifice was it for Jesus to make when he was actually giving up the mortal realm to go home? It is a bit like me claiming leaving work at the end of the day is the ultimate sacrifice (the opposite is true).
The stupid, painful as it is, continues:
Jesus, the author of the Christian Faith said “Except a man be born of water and the spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God”. Dying on the battlefield does not guarantee a place in heaven. Obeying Jesus’ commandments does. Brian Pennington, Launceston, Tasmania
Actually, I would have thought the killing part of being on a battlefield makes it hard to obey Jesus. Did he have some sort of get out clause which allows a secular authority to override his dads main commandments? Is the override only allowed for killing (which could explain why homosexuals are still persecuted)? Also, more obviously, where can I find this book called “the Christian Faith” which Jesus wrote? I mean, he didn’t even have the courtesy to write the bible…
From the depths of idiocy came this nonsense: (emphasis mine)
At one time it was gays who had to stay in the closet – now it’s anyone with a faith that is serious enough that they want others to think about the big issues of life too. But good for General Sir Richard Dannatt in raising his head above the parapet by daring to suggest that believers have as much right to speak about their faith as atheists do about theirs. The snipers will no doubt attack him for what they will dub his outrageous involvement of personal views in a public office, for they always manage to think that their atheistic, secular worldviews are soemhow neutral in a way that the General’s aren’t. But never mind the snipers, Sir Richard. Thank God for a man who faces up to the realities of life and death! Mike Beaumont, Oxford, UK
Blimey. Since when have the bloody “faithful” shut up talking about their belief? All the major newspapers have religious correspondents. All have daily references to God and the Christian faith. The rest of the imagined oppression (a Christian speciality…) is pure drivel. A secular worldview is, almost by definition, more neutral than Dannatts….
Fortunately it is not all bad – and I have had my fill of nutters, if you want to read more go to the Times article itself – for balance (does this count as “Both Sides?”) we have:
Soldiers beware – your military leader believes there is something good waiting for you after death! Let’s hope operational planning is not based on this delusion. ken Jones, Dundee, UK
and
It’s bad enough having religious nutters on the other side let alone your own. TomS, Essex, UK
Strikes me, as that says it all.
Yet another badger rant
The science shows that culling badgers would spread, not limit the spread of cattle TB, according to Roy Hattersley, writing in the Guardian today
.. the assumption that culling will reduce the incidence of the disease is wrong. Indeed, unless we brush aside the work of Britain’s most distinguished conservation scientists, we have to conclude that the sort of cull proposed by Sir David King, the government’s chief scientific adviser, will do more harm than good.
Well said, Roy. He points out that killing badgers will only placate the influential National Farmers’ Union leaders who have either no rational idea what to do or who see more effective responses as too costly.
The argument is that limited killing of badgers would be counter-productive. David McDonald of Oxford University calculated that a cull in Cornwall – the central focus – would cut the TB incidence there by 20% but increase the level outside the cull area by 27%.
An unlimited culling of badgers would surely be an environmental crime of immense proprtions. No government needs to placate farmers that badly. Can’t we just pay them to leave the badgers alone or to vaccinate their cattle?
Roy Hattersley, points out that, even if the government doesn’t follow the simple moral path and refuse the cull, there would be a serious political fallout.
there is no doubt that, should ministers decide to follow his (the chief scientist’s) advice, they would unleash a countrywide campaign that would make the pro-hunting protesters seem half-hearted.
Well, I’m not holding my breath on the government’s taking an ethical stance on this. However, as a distinguished old-Labour politician, Hattersley is probably pretty shrewd when it comes to judging what might have influence on the Department of the Environment. Let’s hope that a government keen to paint itself as green doesn’t miss his message.
Atheism, Faith and Idiotic Confusion
It seems that all the PR work by Dawkins, Hitchens, PZ Myers, Harris et al., is still not fully driving home the message of what atheism is and what atheism means. Part of me feels that, for all the good intentions in the world this is something they will never achieve, and a small part of me feels that “organised” atheism is seriously a step in the wrong direction.
At its most basic level, being an atheist implies nothing about a persons intelligence, rationality, political leaning, attitude towards others, scientific literacy, education (and so on). All being an atheist means is the person does not believe in gods. Nothing else. Al Kafir Akbar is a recent example of an atheist who is not rational, intelligent or scientifically literate (and I dread to think what his political leaning is… 🙂 ). Campaigns such as the “Scarlet A” and “Brights” are, IMHO of course, eventually doomed to failure as the differences between any two atheists start to far outweigh their single shared characteristic. In the past people have mooted ideas such as atheists becoming “politicised,” will such a thing ever work? Would you, for example, vote for a raving right / left (depending on your own orientation) lunatic simply based on his atheism?
For me, the worrying thing about all this – along with the growing sycophancy which surrounds the more prominent atheists (Dawkins lost a bit of support when he dropped a clanger and used the term “Jewish,” but the others still get the hero worship…) – is that it starts to scream “religion.” I am sure everyone remembers election campaigns where one church or another pledges the support of its followers to Politician X because of his beliefs, as soon as the prominent atheists pledge their support (and the support of their sycophants, followers, readers) to a politician because s/he is an atheist the final difference will be gone [*].
In recent months, the furore over the the Scarlet A struck cynical old me as if people were starting to demand an atheist doctrine which was going to be laid down by the high priest (pontifex maximus? We all know where that took us…). People who disagreed with PZ Myers over the “A” for example, were savaged (online, rather than a visit to the lion enclosure) and for one reason or another, large numbers of atheists have fallen in line and display the A on their sites. Now, I must stress, I do not think this is a bad thing in general. If you want to put an A on your site to denote you are an atheist, great. I think it is really cool. I am concerned about the process which brought this about though.
Reading through the ever entertaining times online today, I came across an article by “Dolan Cummings” in the “Battle for Ideas” section. Titled “Count me out of atheism’s creed,” this article expresses some of the points of view I am trying to make, but mostly in a more readable manner… I found this bit quite relevant: (emphasis mine)
From attempts to popularise the term ‘bright’ as a positive identity to calls for atheists to be included on the roster of BBC Radio 4’s ‘Thought for the Day’, it seems that some want to establish atheism as an alternative, non-religious camp for people to belong to. But atheism itself ought to be the least interesting thing about atheists, who surely have various and often conflicting beliefs and passions of their own.
Everyone who writes for this blog is an atheist, yet Heather and I have (at times) viewpoints which are at polar opposites. Calling us “atheists” with an implied commonality of purpose seems to gloss over that. If you search around the various atheist blogs, there are mountains of interesting, entertaining and educational blogs – all written by atheists. There are also lots (sadly too many on the blogroll now) of blogs which are little more than people shouting “I am an atheist” over and over.
For a long time people (famous or otherwise) have been trying to get the unthinking masses to realise that atheism is not a religion, chanting is as a mantra sets that task back considerably. If people want to challenge irrational belief then it needs to be done with logic and reason, not with formulating a “counter-church” for people to rally around. Take this idiotic comment on the Dolan Cummings’ article:
Atheism is not non-belief – it’s active faith in the non-existence of God – an unprovable hypothesis. Atheism is just another religion. Richard, Colchester, UK
Pure stupidity. Sadly, as atheism becomes more of an “active” process, people may start to think this even more.
Before I finish, I think I should stress I am not a supporter of the quisling atheists who seem to think religion should be tolerated and pandered to. Religion (any) does not deserve special status or special treatment. Irrational idiocy should be challenged at every juncture. I love to read Sam Harris, Pharyngula, Dawkins et al. I agree with an awful lot of what they have to say. However, there is no holy doctrine of atheism and I do reserve the right to disagree with the prominent spokespersons when they are (IMHO) wrong.
The greatest challenge for atheism is learning how to “cure” people of religion, without becoming a religion. Are people up to that task yet?
—
* I am more than aware that the chances of a prominent public figure in either the US or UK coming out as an atheist is close to zero at this time, the future may be different. Also, rather than the politician being an atheist per se, s/he could simply espouse atheist-friendly policies.
Deny this
Climate change denialists have yet another serious piece of evidence to ignore.
The work was produced through a collaboration of the Global Carbon Project, University of East Anglia and British Antarctic Survey. Studies of ice cores found that levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide were rising at a rate that is about a third higher than was predicted only half a dozen years ago.
This increasing rate is not seen as due to an increase in emissions but to an apparently failing planetary capacity to soak up the excess. This is a very depressing finding, suggesting that it might soon be too late to do anything to solve the problem.
The study suggests that
….18% came from a decline in the natural ability of land and oceans to soak up CO2 from the atmosphere.
About half of emissions from human activity are absorbed by natural “sinks” but the efficiency of these sinks has fallen, the study suggests. (From the BBC report of the study)
If you can understand it, the dry pre-publication abstract is available at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences website
Why do some farmers hate Badgers?
Badgers are always the first up against the wall when there’s a hint of TB in cattle. The BBC reported today that “Science chief urges badger cull.”
This is despite there being plenty of evidence that killing badgers doesn’t even stop the spread of TB in cattle.
The most recent study by the Independent Scientific Group, published in June, also suggested badgers played a role in the spread of bTB, but warned that culling would have to be so extensive it would be uneconomical.
Meanwhile, conservation groups, including the Badger Trust, argue the disease can be contained by improving the cattle-testing regime and introducing tighter restrictions on cattle movements.
(Source: Another BBC post)
Killing badgers is not popular. In 2006, 96% of 47,000 people who responded to a government consultation were against it. Yet another pointless waste of money on a public consultation that is going to be ignored, then?
As the British Badger Trust says:
The badger is one of Britain’s best loved and iconic animals and as such is part of our National Heritage. They are a poignant symbol of the British countryside and a protected species.
A “protected species”, note.
In case, you assume that Britain is awash with wild mammals, especially badgers, it isn’t. The English countryside bears the scars of decades of agribiz and can barely furnish up a half-eaten water-vole for your environmental pleasure. The badger is one of the few surviving wild mammals of any size.
Barely anyone has ever seen a badger, outside of children’s book illustrations. There are a handful of badger refuges where you can watch them from a hide. I have seen a road-killed badger up close. Once. In almost the only area of England that is neither developed nor mountainous. (Probably not for long.)
Badgers are not just threatened by farmers who have somehow come to believe that their cattle can catch badger diseases.
There is also a “sport” (I use the term ironically) called badger baiting (the clue’s in the name) which involves sending dogs into badger setts and killing them. This is understandably illegal. Badger Watch has a News section that consists of recent prosecutions. So, how is it not criminal to consider gassing hundreds of badgers. Even the repellent humans who kill them for sport don’t kill more than one or two at a time. The cull is aimed at most of the findable badger population.
This isn’t a problem because badgers are really cute (although they are.) It’s a problem because it’s yet another misguided assault on an increasingly fragile ecosystem, driven by short-term economic goals, at a time when we are all supposed to be coming to recognise the interdependence of life in our increasingly fragile eco-systems.
There is an online parliamentary e-petition against culling. Please sign it if you live in the UK and you don’t support culling and you can bring yourself to believe there’s any point.
Was it something we said?
Our ranting has become notably less authoritative recently. (Odd, as I feel at least as authoritative as I have ever been. i.e. not at all.) And consistently less visible.
Maybe somebody has an explanation. The whole blogternet can’t have (slightly) broken, can it?
- A week or so ago, I tried to post a comment on a student post on Pharyngula – to be told repeatedly, in the face of the evidence – that I needed to have a name and an email address. Checked. Yes they were definitely there. I copied and pasted. I rewrote them several times.
The helpful message (I paraphrase here, and use leaden sarcasm while I’m doing it) said I was probably being blocked as spam, but that I could try enabling javascript or cookies or allowing/ deleting the science-blog cookies. Tried them all. My comment stayed unposted. It wasn’t a great loss to twenty-first century thought, to be honest. Still…
- This blog has been leaking Technorati “authority” like an authority-leaking sieve. Over the past month, we’ve been dropping a few links a day, according to Technorati.
One day, it was something like 40 down today from the previous day. I’m pretty certain I would have noticed three months ago, if the blog had suddenly accumulated 40 links in one day, . So how could we lose them all in one day?
Oddly, firestats and feedburner show that blog hits are much higher than they were when we had twice the “authority”, three months ago.
- We’ve been intermittently vanishing from the Atheist blogroll over the past few weeks. This now seems to have become a permanent affliction. I hovered over the blog’s name on an Atheist blogroll site that has a static list. It said the the last post was on Friday at 12:38. Well, no. There have been a good few posts since then.
- When the blog has appeared on the blog roll, over the past few weeks, it has taken at least an hour to appear. If the posts are queued somewhere for an hour, where is that please? Because it doesn’t seem apply to other posts that just appear after they are posted.
When we’ve looked at the time stamps of blogs that appear long before ours, we find they’ve been written later. And magically appeared without falling into some warp dimension on the way. Maybe it’s crossing the Atlantic then? No, that doesn’t work either. There are UK-based blogs that pop up seemingly almost as soon as they are posted.
We were even testing an ongoing hypothesis that the blogroll would only display this blog name when there were another more recent three blogs to put ahead of it. We never managed to falsify this.
However, being ungrateful at being consistently fourth started to seem a bit churlish when we vanished completely.
TW has tried pinging the blogroll, in various ways, without any effect. Pinging Technorati seems to have an effect, in that Technorati will usually list a post within a few minutes of a ping. Or even respond to the auto-ping function and find the blog posts, all by itself.
As a side-effect, an increasing proportion of visitors are coming directly from search engines. There is a fair amount of entertainment value in working out how some of these searches would have led to here, unless every other blog in the known world had already been taken straight to heaven in the Rapture.
Anyone with any ideas about what’s going on?
Pipex is still crap
Even though I had thought my problems with pipex were over, the BT engineer had come out and supposedly fixed the line, it seems I am still paying over the odds for a non-existent service.
I am aware ADSL is dependant on the number of subscribers at the local exchange but I also know that there are no new subscribers hanging off my exchange. From the chart you can see that in Jun and early July, the service was acceptable. In August it was non-existent (completely) and since it was restored it has been painfully slow.
Pipex is a terrible ISP. Pipex customer service is borderline incompetent. If you are looking for a new ISP, steer clear of Pipex.
Kaos ministries: proof of parallel universes
Hell’s handmaidenhad an excellent post showing the Kjos Ministries’ take on a (possibly imaginary) UN peace-keeping initiative (which had me wondering “And this is supposed to be bad thing?”)
It seemed worth finding out exactly what the The New World Order was supposed to represent. Obviously, my first thoughts are “Wasn’t that what Joy Division became? No, fool. The word “World” didn’t fit in the Manchester band’s name.
It’s a bit of a shock to discover that there are people so far to the right of George W Bush (Bush I) that they can present him as part of a global conspiracy to undermine America. (I can appreciate that point of view. Engagement in stupid wars that created whole new categories of enemy may indeed have undermined the US. I don’t think they mean that though.)
It’s hard to make sense of what I will henceforth, ironically, refer to as “arguments”. The difficulty comes partly because words that you thought you understood are used in new and surprising contexts. It’s as if you thought you knew what a table was, then found yourself talking to people who use the word to describe what you call a toothbrush. Globalisation for instance. I followed a dozen links and I still can’t see what they are referring to.
In fact, at the end of the New World order page, I still don’t understand their argument. They have managed to distort the views of people as diverse as John Dewey and Pastor Rick Warren. These people treat the European Union as a successfully achieved Nazi project. So, no prizes to them for succeeding in characterising even UNESCO as vaguely sinister. Well, what could be more sinisterly anti-American than international co-operation to stop kids dying?
Keep in mind, this mind-changing system has no tolerance for God’s divisive Truth. Unless Christianity blends with other religions through diversity, dialogue and deconstruction (compromising or tearing down old beliefs) our globalist leaders will continue to face resistance. That’s why Federico Mayor, former head of UNESCO used yet another crisis to fuel revolutionary fervor:
“The mission of UNESCO… is that of advancing… international peace and the common welfare…. We have witnessed… the resurgence of nationalism, the growth of fundamentalism and of religious and ethnic intolerance. The roots of exclusion and hatred have shown themselves even deeper and more tenacious than we had feared…
You might naturally assume that Mayor’s words represent a wise and concise analysis of the current (“old?”/”new?”) world order.
However, they were cited by the (unpronouncable) Berit Kjos because she assumed readers would find them self-evdently threatening, as if any Christian who read them would see the inherent danger of creeping new-world-order-ism
No, I do get it. There is a parallel universe. In this universe, the Bush dynasty is a socialist plot. Franklin D Roosevelt was a socialist visionary. The EU sucked the US dry for the funds to set it up and is now laughing behind America’s back as it builds up regional power blocs to challenge the US. UNESCO threatens the right to practise religion. The silly Oprah-publicised The Secret actually provides secret esoteric wisdom and is a cunning wile of the devil . Role-playing games lead you sites where you can meet real occultists. And so on.
This is not obviously the same universe that I live in. Or at least, it wasn’t the universe that I lived in until the wall between worlds started to give way. Now, Kaos is leaking into our universe, probably though the mini-black-holes they are creating in CERN. Where is Chakotay when you need him?
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Aside
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There are pages and pages railing against immigration. It’s all the work of the new world order, of course. (I assume that’s why the US was populated entirely by Native Americans until recently) E.g. Berit Kjos:
Why won’t our leaders enforce a simple, straight-forward immigration policy?
But Berit Kjos:
Both Andy and Berit were raised Lutheran — Andy in North Dakota, I in Norway.
One discoverer of double-helix turns out to be fool
Happy Jihad’s House of Pancakes (which has some almost painfully funny posts, like this on Beowulf, and some generally sparkling use of language) quoted Answers in Genesis on the racist garbage reported as having come from the mouth of (Mr DNA) Watson.
What is perhaps most notable is that despite the flak from other scientists, Watson is being entirely true to his atheistic, Darwinist beliefs.
This got me frothing with righteous rage, as nothing has since – well – yesterday, probably. I am going to say this once, despite my desire to repeat it infinitely. But I ‘ll use Bold and caps. Just in case, it’s not clear.
THE CONCEPT OF RACE IS NONSENSE. THERE ARE NO “RACES”
It is science in the same way that crystal aura therapy is medicine.*
Everyone on the planet is of mixed genetic heritage.
However, the human race seems to have indeed originated in Africa, which makes us all genetically African. Which is obviously a problem for Watson, because that includes him in the allegedly less intelligent section of humankind. (Along with, oh I don’t know, 100% of the human species.)
Watson’s adherence to a completely stupid belief system (the unfounded belief that there are races and that there are better and worse ones) does not relate to his atheism. Nor even to his so-called “Darwinism” (which I will take as referring to his recognition of the evidence for evolution, as I am unaware that Darwin devised a philosophical system.)
Wingnut daily took evident delight in drawing a connection between Watson’s casual Jade-Goody-style racism and his failure to believe in God. As if they somehow reflected on atheism itself, in conceptual contrast to the rainbow-coloured-group-hug gathering of brothers and sisters in Christ. As if atheism breeds racism…..
It’s therefore worth pointing quite how recently the US religious right became anti-racists. There was virtual apartheid in the Southern States until the 1960s. And it didn’t go quietly either.
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*Unnecessary footnote to spell this out but I’m going to anyway. Just in case someone like Watson ever reads this:
Think “human race.” In this case, the word “race” means “species” – an abhorrent connotation when it’s carried over subliminally into the whole discourse of “race” to refer to … well, what? What else does “race” mean. It would have to have a definable meaning, surely, if Watson believes it can be used in “scientific” experiments to measure “intelligence” (and since when have we had valid cross-cultural measures of that?)
As a concept, “race” has a relatively short and murky history. It was developed, as an ideology, in support of the genocide of the native population of the Americas and, above all, the Atlantic Slave Trade – in order to appease the consciences of the societies that profited, by inventing categories of human beings who could be considered less than human. The idea of race was further refined through centuries of European colonial expansion.
(The Romans had slaves who were mainly Northern Europeans. They characterised all non-Romans as barbarians, i.e. not fully civilised human beings. This [seeing people you are oppressing as not really beings human] seems to go with the slavery territory. However, it wasn’t full-blown racism. Maybe you need pseudo-science to underpin that.)
From the European perspective, “race” got a pseudo-scientific gloss, in Victorian times, along with lots of other wierd pseudo-science concepts about human beings, like phrenology or Lombroso’s identification of criminals by their facial features.
Racist ideas were thus conveniently placed to support the full-blown era of European colonialism in Africa, in the later years of the 19th century. In the 1930s, as colonialism was falling apart, “race” appeared as part of the odious concept of eugenics, which, of course, found its full expression under the Nazis.
In the USA, false concepts of race were used to “justify” slavery and post-slavery Jim Crow laws until the mid-1960s.
Racism seems to have two main flavours: the monochrome (blacks/whites) version or a graduated scale (e.g. the brazilian version with seemingly dozens of distinctions between moreno and louro).
Trying to treat this hateful concept with some undeserved respect, at best it could be seen as a shorthand to describe varying collections of physical and ethnic characteristics. Hence, the Victorian English were able to conceive of the Irish as a different race, on the basis of a slightly greater statistical preponderance of red hair, a different accent, a potato-heavy diet and an adherence to the catholic religion.
The very fact that races cannot be defined outside of culture should be a clue to the purely cultural nature of the construct of race.
Racial definitions continue to manifest themselves very differently throughout the world. In the US, you are racially black if you have even one distant African ancestor. Americans who would be considered unquestionably white in Africa are considered unquestionably black in the US. Do they gain or lose IQ points according to their surroundings?
Baseless Creationist Arguments Find a New Home
Blimey, yesterday, Heather wrote about some empty nonsense being spouted by a blog on the atheist blogroll. In a nutshell, Tom Stelene, writing on the Al-Kafir Akbar blog, has spent a few days recently, ranting about how environmentalism is a “secular religion,” how global warming is a scam, how people who care about about the environment are dirt worshippers and so on. Over the last few days, Heather, Blacksun Journal and Salient have drawn attention to the nonsense he spouts.
Tom Stelene has tried a comeback blast with a post titled “Deniers” (Blog Action Day Continues), and it is well worth reading if only to see the logical holes presented as “argument” and the good rebuttals from BlackSun and Salient. They have both done an excellent job of taking his nonsense to task.
Not being grown up enough to be bothered engaging in reasoned debate, I am simply going to point out some of the more obvious bits of nonsense Tom has turned into bits on the internet. Fisking is fun. If we start with the opening paragraph:
Amidst the latest politically-correct trend of environmentalists to throw out the smear, “global warming deniers,†I sense that by and large they probably have little familiarity with the science and reasoning as to why some deny “global warming†– as most narrow-minded religionists are unfamiliar with the reasons and arguments of atheists – or, better still: “God-deniers.â€
By Toutatis, that is a difficult sentence to read. It is completely meaningless but it is still difficult to read. It makes a single attempt at a real claim and, personally, I doubt that this (basic) claim is true. If he is saying, as it seems to read, that his detractors have little understanding as to the science about why the detractors deny global warming. After the headache (caused by trying to resolve this tortured line of attribution) cleared, I decided he must be talking about the psychological reasoning as to why some people will pathologically deny the evidence which is presented to them and disproportionately give value to the minority evidence which can be interpreted as arguing against the mainstream. I am sure that there is a term for people who evince this weird behavioural trait, but I am not a psychologist so I have no idea. Generally, most of the people who do this seem to be arguing for the creationist brand of woo.
After I realised where I had seen this idiotic type of “argument” before, it suddenly became clear that pretty much all of Tom’s “arguments” against AGW fall from the Intelligent Design is Science school of idiocy. Blimey. Loki must have been having a field day letting this one out into humanity.
Tom claims his area of expertise is philosophy, so we can look at the first type of argument he uses and critique it with a philosophical point of view attached.
One of his oft-repeated claims is that those who advocate action to combat human-influenced climate change are following a “secular religion” – he uses such entertaining terms as “dirt worshippers” and so on. All very clever. This is the same as the ID / Creationist claims that “Darwinism” is a religion. The reality however is different.
Religion, in its normal use of the term, tends to mean people are holding to a belief either without any evidence or will hold to the belief in the face of evidence to the contrary. In keeping with the creationists, Tom holds to his beliefs without any evidence and retains the belief in the face of contrary evidence. Yet he still claims it is his detractors who are holding to a religion. Yeah, seems odd to me as well.
The next issue I have with his claims is, still in keeping with the creationist ideal, the idea that the isolated – often badly interpreted – data which may be interpreted as contradicting Anthropogenic Global Warming is so significant and Earth shattering it means more than the mountains of data which support AGW. Here Tom shows he doesn’t understand science – something he freely admits – and really should try to learn some more before demonstrating his ignorance. The fact of the matter is there is nearly always some data published which can be interpreted as contradicting a scientific theory.
Most of the time this data is the result of experimental issues – poorly designed experiments, mistaken conclusions, equipment issues and so on – but some times the data is valid and does pose a contradiction. What happens next is part of the broader scientific method – something Tom seems to neglect – the data is double checked, additional experiments are conducted and, if it is verified and repeated, the theory is adjusted to account for the new information. Despite the greatest wishes (and prayers) of the creationists, isolated findings do not count as evidential falsification. Likewise, Tom has fallen into the layperson’s trap of finding isolated contrary reports and attributing to these much greater weight than they deserve.
Here is a quick quiz question: If 99 reports conclude humans are responsible for climate change and one doesn’t, which should you go with?
The most blatant example of Creationist-Inspired woo-nonsense comes in this little gem:
Precisely because science is not my area (that being philosophy) I have to carefully consider both sides, and for some twenty years as a curious observer (if man causes global environmental problems I obviously want to know) I have read and listened to environmentalist claims – which get plenty of publicity – yet the science that challenges them gets ignored.
This is seriously worthy of some further examination. It reeks of the same lack of understanding which tries to push ID into the classroom. There are not “two sides” to the argument (if anything there are dozens), so considering “both sides” is meaningless. In the past, I have commented on the debate problem which creates the illusion there are “both sides” regarding evolutionary theory. It seems the same fallacy applies with regards to AGW.
The idea that some one completely ignorant of the methodology and theories of climate science can accurately assess the validity of any competing theories (and there are dozens) is interesting – strictly speaking the layperson can go through the published data and draw their own conclusions, but the chances of that conclusion being a valid expression of the reality are not great. It would be better for Tom to say that, because science is not his area he would be better off listening to the scientific consensus.
For my, cynical, mindset, the reason why he has not gone down this route is borne out by the last part of that sentence. It reeks of the conspiracy-theories pushed by all kinds of deviant scientists.
“…yet the science that challenges them gets ignored.”
Utter nonsense. The “science” that challenges the various AGW theories is not “ignored” by any stretch of the imagination. Where science does challenge the theory it is investigated – sadly most of the claims of “science” which challenges turn out to be bad science at best. This, as with most of Tom’s arguments, is straight from the ID School of non-science. When people from wildly unrelated scientific disciplines (at best, often it is complete non-scientists) write a pile of nonsense about Evolution / AGW, it is quite rightly ignored. The pro-ID / Anti-AGW crowd then pick on this nonsense and scream about some hidden cabal who are suppressing the “alternative theories.” Total nonsense.
If some one can prove AGW is false they will be in line for the Nobel, along with all the people who can invent perpetual motion machines, prove ID, falsify GR, falsify SR etc., etc.,
Until then, science is science. You can rail against the findings all you want, but remember it is akin to shouting at the sun that your “research” shows it should be dark…
Thinking outside the X-box
No, really. I didn’t make this up. Security Service targets gamers according to the BBC website.
UK GCHQ intends to recruit gamers through adverts for the GCHQ website in X-box 360 games.
GCHQ, which works alongside the UK’s other intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6, employs about 5,000 people and provides monitoring information for the government and protecting its communication and information system (BBC Technology website)
river, new hampshire
river, new hampshire,
originally uploaded by iris.rigby.
I mentioned in the past that I was planning to try and find some nice pictures to post on an irregular basis, to liven up the the generally text-heavy nature of the blog.
It has been a while, but I found this one on Flickr and it impressed me enough to want to blog it. I love the mysterious, magical, tolkein-esque feel to the photograph.
I love photographs like this and it makes me wish I lived in New Hampshire!