Why Dont You Blog?

Some Jewish girls, plainly prevented by the nature of their social values from asserting their religious and cultural identities by just wearing a veil or a promise ring or whatever, have achieved this seemingly fashionable goal by boycotting Shakespeare in their GCSE exams.

Because of his anti-semitism, it appears…..

I assume they are thinking about the Merchant of Venice. Even if you choose to ignore the fact that Shakespeare actually gave Shylock some of the most stirring anti-bigotry speeches ever written, Shakespeare’s views on any topic (if you can deduce what they might have been) were the views of a sixteenth century playwright.

Should we only read or listen to or look at works of art if we agree 100% with the worldview of their creator? In that case, we had better get really brilliant at writing and painting and making music, because, for each of us, there is only one person that we will ever agree with completely. Even then, we must be careful not to change our minds as a result of experience, because we won’t be able to use even our own creations then.

Why stop at works of art? Can I live in a house built by people who are on the other side of the political spectrum? Wear clothes when the person who made them might not agree that we are heading straight towards ecological disaster? My Freya, I suspect that the person who made the cup I’m drinking from didn’t believe the Wire was the best TV series ever made.

Discussing the school students’ absurdity in the Guardian, Seth Freedman argued that this sort of religiously-inspired intervention in education is inherently dangerous.

Policy makers should be joining the dots and realising that they have a tough choice to make when it comes to appeasing religious minorities on the one hand, and making Britain a country that opposes fundamentalism and extremism on the other……
The reluctance of religious institutions to pay heed to secular teaching methods can be found right across the spectrum of faiths in the UK, as well as abroad. Devout Christians are just as unlikely to force their children to learn how man descended from monkeys as ultra-orthodox Jewish parents are, and so too is the case with strict adherents of Islam.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Stop it now. You were doing so well with your legal system actually starting to work and your advisers starting to tell the truth, and then you just have to go and spoil it, don’t you? You are getting really scary. I really don’t want to be Raptured. Most of the people on this planet don’t. Maybe that’s just us.

These items were on the BBC today:

(Minor insanity) Huckabee saying that Gitmo is too luxurious. Hmm. I would hate to see the neighbourhood that you live in, Huckabee. Even round where I live, which is often seen as a bit rough, waterboarding is not yet considered an everyday occurrence.

Bizarrely, Huckabee (the name invites so many parodies that I’ll resist the challenge) said that the Gitmo prisoners were mollycoddled, considering their crimes. Well, the prisoners in Gitmo haven’t actually been convicted of crimes. They certainly haven’t been tried and found guilty of anything. Isn’t that the whole point of Gitmo? If there was any valid evidence against the prisoners under national and international law it would have been used to convict them. The US, being inconveniently hamstrung by national and international law, delierately stuck this abhorrence on a place that it can represent as beyond any normal constraints.

(Major insanity) American warships supposedly threatened by a suicide attack by Iranian speedboats? Argh. Argh. Arch. Must I keep saying “Argh” until more appropriate words come into my head? I know think that all <strike>non-Yanks</strike> Iranians are dumber than a box of Twinkies but, hey, c’mon, dudes. Surely, by the beard of Loki, the US voters aren’t going to swallow this bull excrement. Your faithful allies are never going to fall for the same trick twice.

Iran is a state that you claim (directly in the face of your own intel) is almost a nuclear power. You expect us to believe that it is ready to declares war on the most powerful country in the world by ramming warships with speedboats. (For a start, we all know the torpedo has been invented. )

This WMD stuff and imminent-attack-danger Pearl Harbour stuff doesn’t work anymore. The Iranian nuclear threat didn’t work. You characterised last year’s captured Brit sailors and marines as “spineless” for refusing to act in a mad gung-ho way that would have started a war with Iran. You don’t have a blank cheque that lets you draw on the support of your allies and the compliance of the UN for ever.

Get over it. Just accept that you have to pay more for your oil…

Popularity: 10% [?]

Sunk in post-holiday torpor, I somehow missed the full flowering of the avowed atheist’s (TM) atheism in the Guardian’s Comment is Free on 30 December.

Bear in mind Brendan O’Neill is someone who introduces his own blog with this blurb:

One of this country’s sharpest social commentators’ (Daily Telegraph)

What country are they talking about? (Although, the Daily Telegraph probably wouldn’t recognise sharp social commentary even if it was poked in the eye by it.)

In the blogpost I’m talking about, O’Neill pours even more scorn on public atheists than he bestowed on the Archbishop of Canterbury.  His victims are Dawkins, Hitchens et al.

The new atheism
There is more humanity in the ’superhuman’ delusions of the devout than there is in the realism of the hectoring atheists

Blimey, can you plagiarise yourself? Weren’t these pretty well the exact words he used in the Spiked-Online article about Rowan Williams. (Well, except for the “monkeyman” bit. Maybe the Guardian found that too offensive for the subhead? ) He must be really really proud of these phrases.

I am as atheistic as it gets. But I will not be signing up to this shrill hectoring of the religious. The new atheists have given atheism a bad name. History’s greatest atheists, or the “old atheists” as we are now forced to call them, were humanistic and progressive, critical of religion because it expressed man’s sense of higher moral purpose in a deeply flawed fashion. The new atheists are screechy and intolerant; they see religion merely as an expression of mass ignorance and delusion. Their aim seems to be, not only to bring God crashing back down to earth, but also to downgrade mankind itself.

And so on. In so doing, he brings up Darwin and Marx, apparently “old atheists” - whose words must therefore provide the all-wise authority that this “atheistic as it gets” person apparently can’t live without.

Indeed (in the second article of his that I’ve decided to savage) he yet again takes Marx’s words completely out of context, to somehow derive a meaning that is the opposite of what the man was saying. All the same, it wouldn’t matter if O’Neill hadn’t got it wrong. If historic figure X believed the moon was made of paper, their success in another field wouldn’t make it true.

This doesn’t stop O’Neill referring often to Marx, as if some acknowledged wisdom in political philosophy made everything Marx said true. And, most bizarrely, as if Marx somehow agreed with O’Neill that Dawkins et al should just shut up.

For Marx, religion had to be abolished because it made man despicable; for new atheists religion exists precisely because man is despicable, little more than a monkey.
New atheists will continue to ridicule the religious in 2008. But there is more humanity in the “superhuman” delusions of the devout - in their yearning for a sense of purpose and greatness - than there is in the monkeyman realism of the hectoring atheists.

Oh, look, there’s the “monkeyman realism” stuff again. How odd that he hates the whole idea of evolution but seems to worship Darwin.
Here’s the “superhuman delusion” quote again. Again, ffs. Look, Brendan, it just wasn’t that good. Sorry.

And, surely, Marx didn’t believe religion “made man despicable”. Blimey, I doubt that even the allegedly “hectoring” Dawkins and Hitchens would go that far. IMAO, Marx (and other classical social scientists) saw religion largely in terms of its social role of providing ideas that support social relations. (Generally 19th century intellectuals tended to look at how things work in the real world.)

If this is what “being as atheist as it gets” looks like, can we have an atheist competition to see if its possible to get more atheist, please?

Popularity: 12% [?]

Some old photographs on the BBC’s website show the young Benazir Bhutto. She wore standard international 1970s clothes - a vaguely “ethnic” dress in one picture and a silk blouse in another. She didn’t just lack an all-covering tent/veil - she wasn’t even wearing a headscarf. She looked wealthy and confident. Hardly surprising, given that she was the Pakistani Prime Minister’s daughter. You could be looking at a young female member of the Kennedy clan. She could have been a privileged young woman from any cultural background. Becoming Prime Minister in her own right must have seemed an achievable goal, even at that age, with the example of Indira Gandhi in India.

Her assassination was clearly horrific. It even took in a couple of dozen other people, in what could almost be the textbook definition of overkill. That is, Benazir Bhutto had already been shot dead by the time the assassin blew himself and the surrounding crowd up.

I have no knowledge of what the killer expected to achieve or what his beliefs were. The BBC site suggests that similar attacks are being directed against the ruling party and other opposition parties and hence her assassination is indicative of a general regional destabilisation.

However, Benazir Bhutto’s murder still has unusual international resonance, just because of the rarity of her career. A woman Prime Minister elected to power in a Muslim country. Twice. So huge numbers of Muslim voters and Muslim clerics didn’t have a problem with her lack of hijab, her high-powered education, her outspokenness, even with seeing her naked face.

(At least as rare in the non-Islamic world. You can count major female political leaders on the toes of one foot and still have two to spare.)

She was a successful and powerful woman in a country set up as Islamic from its very first day. How likely is it that a Pakistani woman from a similar background could even be photographed in such an innocent way today, let alone that she could achieve political power?

Wasn’t the 20th century supposed to be about progress? It looks as if the world of 40 years ago was much more modern and progressive than today’s world. So why not all vow to devote the next century to returning to medieval values, so that, when we fail dismally to achieve that goal, we might actually find we’ve sparked some advances.

Popularity: 19% [?]

I was going to avoid the topic of how recent research identified hardly any one knew the biblical stories any more. Heather has covered it, as has Psycho Atheist. Both of these posts pretty much hammer every point I could think of making on this. Until today, that is.

Today, as I was driving around the freezing, wet, countryside, I was listening to BBC Local Radio. There was some weird discussion (I missed the start of it, so was a bit lost), but it basically boiled down to some lunatics ranting (and I mean they sounded like froth was coming out of their mouths they were so angry) about what a disgrace it was. The general consensus was that this loss of nativity teaching was leading to a complete breakdown of our society.

This did get me thinking a bit. I like history, and historical stories, as much (if not more) than the next person (unless that person is Alun) so I think it is a shame people do not know historical details. That said, there is a much larger gap in the knowledge than this tiny Christian questionnaire shows. To remind you, the questions asked were:

1. According to the Christian Bible story where was Jesus born?
2. Who told Mary she would give birth to a son?
3. Who was Jesus’ cousin?
4. Where did Joseph, Mary and Jesus go to escape King Herod?

Ok, I have to admit, I had to double check who Jeebus’ cousin was. Shame on me. However, in my defence, this is not a history of my culture. In the modern ages we place a lot of emphasis on people tracing their roots and learning their own cultural history, so as far as I am concerned this is as alien to me as if the questionnaire was about the Jade Emperor. Despite the nonsense I heard on the radio, one caller actually said “like it or not, we are a Christian nation and our children should learn the facts about Christianity” (I suspect he is unaware of the term “ironic”), I live in a Northern European with a celtic-slavic population. With that in mind, I wonder how many people know the proper history about their own culture. If I did a survey of people in the street with the following questions, how many would answer ANY correctly?

1. What tribe was Beowulf from?
2. Where did the Scot tribe come from?
3. Who was Fenrir’s Father?
4. Where does Heimdal stand guard?

I suspect there will be less than 1 in 3 of the population who can get those correct (at least without resorting to Wiki / Google searches).

If we want to teach our children myths, teach them ones which are interesting a relevant to their culture. If we want them to learn “real” history, then teach them the real history not the biblical variant.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Minette Marrin ranted absurdly against Michael Moore’s new film Sicko, in the Times Online.

Apparently, Michael Moore made the unarguable point that the NHS is free. (Well, almost free, except for prescription and dentistry charges) Free at the point of delivery. Provided according to need, not according to the ability to pay. That’s the principle.

For the benefit of Americans, that means, for example, that you don’t face bankruptcy at the same time as major illness.

Being sick is bad enough in itself, surely. Free access to competent medical treatment isn’t just one of the best candidates for recognition as a universal human right. It even makes perfect common sense socially, given that the healthy aren’t normally mad-keen to catch TB from the untreated poor.

The infinite superiority of free medical care was made eloquently clear by Richard Titmuss decades ago in The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy , original updated 1997, LSE Books.* Titmuss showed that the properties of altruism and social responsibility, on which UK blood banks depended, actually produced a product - blood for transfusion - that was of better quality than that available from US blood banks. (People who sold their blood tended to be hungry, diseased, alcoholic and/or drugged. People who willingly gave blood tended to be healthy. Well, d’uh.)

Moore seems to be making a similar, but updated, point that free healthcare is better for the vast majority of consumers, is cheaper and more effective. (We are English. We aren’t supposed to need telling that.)

It’s hard to see how free health care could seem like a bad thing to anyone except the executives of medical insurance companies. (Not even to doctors, given that they do pretty well out of the NHS and can also run unfeasibly profitable private practices.)

In England, we complacently take the National Health Service for granted. We whine constantly about specific local problems. Plenty of people (including us) rant about crazy high-level decisions to spend billions on computerising bits of it. But, we genuinely cannot imagine what it would be like to live without it.

Well not so Minette Marrin. Her piece has the title “Quack Michael Moore has mad view of the NHS“

Quack? So Michael Moore’s film is peddling crystal aromatherapy for cancer then? I assumed from the reviews that it was about the horrors of US healthcare and the merits of alternative ways to provide it. Silly me.

She claims that Moore showed a rosy view of the NHS, apparently by showing a clean and efficient hospital.

You would never guess from Sicko that the NHS is in deep trouble, mired in scandal and incompetence, despite the injection of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money.

Well, I can only assume that her definition of “deep trouble” is subtly different from mine. Even without referring to years of targets- and cost- and privatisation-driven policies that have been imposed on the NHS (spot the misdirection, yes, I did mention them) I would say that the NHS may face a few problems

These tend to be problems talked up out of all proportion by a biased media, but, wait, that’s what she’s accusing Michael Moore of doing.

Nothing undermines the principle that our NHS is so superior to the US health care system that it can look mockingly over its shoulder at US healthcare and say “Call that a health care system?” Then give a sarcastic laugh.

Even Minette has to acknowledge this, after she’s brought up a selection of NHS failings: prevalence of hospital infections; loss-making NHS trusts and GPs who don’t provide out of hours healthcare.

None of these problems mean we should abandon the idea of a universal shared system of healthcare. It’s clear we would not want the American model, even if it isn’t quite as bad as portrayed by Moore.

I think that is too grudging and it’s way too late to unsay what she’s already said.

The issues she mentioned are all issues of policy. They do not in any way relate to the wider principle of free universal health care. It’s as if Micahel Moore said he liked your house. You say “I hate it”, listing things you hate - like the creaking doors - without considering that this might imply that you believe you would be better off homeless.

* See, I can reference, though granted it’s not Harvard system. The British Medical Journal has a full reference. There’s a Wikipedia article on Richard Titmuss, if you are interested in post-WWII social policies

Popularity: 32% [?]

Atheist defends Dawkins. Shock, horror. (OK, not.) Still the Times has an unpleasant piece by Daniel Finkelstein in which he distorts something Dawkins said in the Guardian in order to misrepresent Dawkins as anti-semetic.

So Dawkins, a liberal hero, believes, er, that Jews control world power. And, judging from the Guardian, it is now a part of mainstream debate to say so. Perhaps you think I am over-reacting, but I am a little bit frightened.

Well no. What Dawkins actually said is that atheists need some organisation analogous to the Jewish lobby, which had proved its success by the fact that it had managed to

more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see.

It seemed obvious to several commentators that
(a) US foreign policy seemed more than a little pro-Israel;
(b) this is not even explicable in terms of the US’s own national interests (oranges versus oil, as one commentator remarked);
(c) it reflects the influence of pro-Israeli American lobbyists and people in power.

This is a huge leap away from saying that Jews monopolise world power, as the blog headline and comments said. However, this misrepresentation of Dawkins was taken by some Times commentators as a given. And stuck together with a self-evidently ludicrous claim that Dawkins wanted to take children away from their parents if the parents taught them religion. To make a general attribution of Dawkins really being a Nazi.

I know. I know. This sort of thing doesn’t even bear recognising as a rational discourse. But still, I think it is worth repeating ad nauseam that opposing Israel does not make one a Nazi.

The Jews suffered terribly in Germany. Why didn’t they get given Germany? They didn’t suffer anything at the hands of the Palestinians. Why did they get Palestine? Well, partly because they carried out a prolonged terrorist campaign against the British government to get it.

Terrorist campaign, note. The British government gave in.

If the USA had not been committed over decades to supporting everything that Israel did, ignoring the complaints of the Palestinians as their land was taken and they were turned into refugees in their own country, there would be no insane jihadists now.

The only quarrel I would have with Dawkins in this is that atheists don’t have an agreed agenda beyond removing religious influence from the public sphere. What else would be the point of atheist lobbyists? Remember the herding cats thing? The capacity to think independently is the strength of rational people, not their weakness.

Popularity: 50% [?]

The fashion for apologising for things that happened many centuries ago has now hit the Vatican, which is about to publish a book saying it might have made a bit of a mistake, according to the Times and Telegraph .*

According to the Telegraph,

In 1307, King Philip IV “the Fair” of France, in desperate need of funds, ordered the arrest and torture of all Templars. After confessing various sins their leader, Jacques de Molay, was burnt at the stake.

And the Church quickly declared them all heretics. The new -found paper supposedly shows that pope Clement dissolved the Templar Order but said they weren’t heretics. Though the evidence for their non-heresy seems quite unconvincing, by the standards of the day, considering how little it took for a hedge-witch or a dissenting peasant to get tortured and killed for heresy (by both Catholics and Protestants) over the next few hundred years. It is tempting to suggest that the surviving Templars must have still had a fair bit of that Holy land wealth left with which to buy a relatively favourable judgement.

Now, 1307 is 700 years ago. The Vatican could teach any existing government a thing or two about keeping politically sensitive secrets.

What is the point in this? Given that the Templars were monk-knights, they shouldn’t even have any direct descendants who could accept an apology for wrongs done to their 175th generation-back ancestors. It’s obviously a soundbite thing. The Templars’ much-vaunted “secrets” have been attracting publicity again, in the silly da Vinci Code movie for a start.

Just in case, some people might be put off the Catholic Church because it did wrong in the 14th century, it’s going to apologise and set the record straight. It doesn’t cost anything. It’s not like they are going to make France hand back any of Phillip the Fair’s ill-gotten gains is it?

Much as I hate these ritual apologies to people who don’t exist any more, on behalf of the people who wronged them, but also don’t exist any more, why stop there? Why not apologise for the Crusades and the things the Catholic Church rewarded the Templars for doing? It wouldn’t make any more sense but at least it would show the beginnings of a sense of moral responsibility.

* (Look I don’t read these papers in real life. Honest. But, they are online….)

Popularity: 25% [?]

Charges were dropped against 6 people who were arrested in July, when they protested at a council meeting against the remains of the 4,000 year-old Rotherwas Ribbon being buried under a road.

The road building is going ahead. Hereford Council has a site with its news. It seems that, after unsuccessfully and half-heartedly trying to pass it off as a natural artefact, the council’s arguments are:

• the roadbuilding uncovered it in the first place;
• they’ve done everything they reasonably could to get it investigated;
• covering it up won’t do it any harm;
• moving the road would damage other nearby sites;
• the cabinet office says go ahead with the road as fast as possible

All reasonable points. It still seems a pity that we have to discard irreplaceable treasures just to make yet another road.

There is interesting information on the Ribbon on the Megalithic Portal written by one of the people in our blogroll at the right, Alun Salt from clioaudio

He says:

Archaeologists believe this major find may have no parallels in Europe, with the closest similar artefact being the 2,000-year-old serpent mounds of the Ohio river valley in America.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Who is the godfather of the Internet?

Today’s Guardian Technology page identifies him as Vint Cerf
Vint Cerf, aka the godfather of the net, predicts the end of TV as we know it
Web guru foresees download revolution

But wait. What about

Mark Joyner, often referred to as the “Godfather of the Internet”

according to Articles about cable, dsl, etc?

Or Imperial College’s candidate,

… Imperial College alumnus, Donald Watts Davies, the Welsh computer genius regarded by many as the godfather of the internet.

Or Al Gore?

…Earlier today, Xeni spoke with former Vice President Al Gore, internet godfather and co-founder of Current TV,

(Phew, at least I know who Al Gore is. I have heard of Vint Cerf, but a name so unremittingly stunning would stick in the brain anyway, after one hearing. I have never heard of the others.)

Or this candidate on interandom

.. Carnegie Mellon Professor and “Godfather of the Internet” David Farber

Or this from some sort of podcast scraper list:

Thomas Prendergast, CEO of Inetekk & creator ot the Veretekk Automated Lead Generation & Online Marketing System. .. Thousands know him as “The Godfather Of The Internet”…

From MQ magazine

Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) is considered by many to be the godfather of the internet.

There are loads more Internet godfathers but I got too bored and stopped collecting them.

How many godfathers does the Internet need?
What does it mean to be an Internet godfather?
Do they insist on being called don and putting horse’s heads in the beds of adherents of traditional media?
Or do they grant wishes, like fairy godmothers? I’ll take health, wealth and happiness if they’re still going. Though I’ve never heard of fairy godfathers. Obviously shoudl have paid more attention to the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson and Andrew Lang’s vari-coloured Fairy books. (That’s a link to Project Gutenberg if you want to make a liar of me and find fairy godfathers aplenty.)

There are so many questions here and I’m a bit stumped by not knowing what even a traditional godfather does. I have a fuzzy impression thay promise to bring up the child they are godfathering as a Christian or mafia member, or both, according to context Give a few gifts in exchange for the family’s votes in some Latin political systems? That’s about it.

Is there a godmother of the Internet? On safer ground here. I know what a godmother does. They grant wishes and turn pumpkins into coaches.

Well I found a paltry two candidates,

Takeaway media says

…according to Esther Dyson, the godmother of the internet, we may even see by 2100 the end of life’s only two certainties, death and taxes.

Well, surely a half-decent fairy godmother should be able to sort those little inconveniences out.

Flash Goddess names Lynda Weinman, although she seems unsurprisingly reluctant to claim the title, possibly because she’s not confident about her scullery-maid-to-princess skills.

Q How do you feel about being referred to as the “godmother of the internet”?
A. I’ve never heard myself referred to as that! It’s an uncomfortable and inaccurate label.

Popularity: 29% [?]