So, I was browsing the East Midlands Trains press release archive (yeah, it’s the sort of thing you do when you’re unemployed), and in amongst the tedious news about timetable updates and corporate partnerships, this leapt out at me:
“On Friday 23 May East Midlands Trains played host to a very special passenger. His Holiness the Dalai Lama travelled on the company’s 14.55 from St. Pancras International to Nottingham. His Holiness was travelling to the city to give five days of teachings.”
Christ on a bike. This means that the DALAI LAMA, must have sped through the small, unimportant, somewhat incestuous, Tory safe-seat in which I live – in fact, His Holiness must have passed a mere few hundred metres from my house. This is particularly notable, as he must be the biggest celebrity we’ve had in a ten mile radius since Frank Bruno opened the Carnival about 15 years ago.
EMT, who seem pretty chuffed with this PR-coup, posted some photos for proof:
Unfortunately for his Holiness, it looks like had to put up with the gurning East Midlands Trains chief executive for the entire two hour journey. No doubt they exchanged stories about what its like to be the spiritual leader of millions of Tibetans, and what it’s like to be in charge of an important transport artery linking London with places like Luton and Kettering. Looks like the EMT guy managed to work his magic and charm his Holiness with his dreamy eyes though:
“So the other week I was campaigning for human rights in Tibet and highlighting abuses by the Chinese occupiers to the United Nations Security Council”
“Yeah, I was having my photo taken with a sausage”
It does make you think though, what do you do if you get on the train and see the Dalai Lama. Do you say anything? Exclaiming “You’re the Dalai Lama!” would be pretty stupid, as he probably already knows that – he was discovered to be the 14th incarnation when he was four years old, so is probably well aware by now.
Similarly, sitting opposite him and just reading your book or newspaper with your iPod in as usual seems a bit of a waste – and staring at him would be even more awkward than it is when you forgot your stuff and have to just stare at the person opposite.
And what if you’d reserved a seat and when you got there found the Dalai Lama sitting in it? Do you turf him out? Actually, I’d quite like to be able to tell the story of how I kicked the Dalai Lama out of my seat.
Despite positioning myself as a rationalist, and a militant Dawkinsian (I’m coining that now), there’s one part of my character that before I’ve never really been able to justify: my vegetarianism.
Even though Stephen Law, in The Philosophy Gym, in his philosophical judgement, puts the burden on the meat-eaters to justify their murderous lifestyle, and even though there’s stacks of reports condemning the treatment of animals raised for their meat, my vegetarianism has been driven mainly by the arguably irrational position that “killing is wrong”, and more importantly the notion that “you can’t hurt cute little animals!”
However, it turns out that I can link my irrational lifestyle to a firmly rational topic: the global food crisis. For those out of the (honey-nut) loop, various tedious economic factors have sent the price of basic food staples, like grain soaring, meaning loads of people haven’t been able to afford food – hence stuff like the riots in Haiti – and its only going to get worse.
The thing is, there’s apparently loads of food to go round, its just that animals used in meat production are getting it instead of humans, and so the production of meat uses more food resources than non-meat products. Which is obvious when you think about it – if you’re growing up a cow so that you can mercilessly slaughter it, it does all of things that the “MRS NERG” mnemonic (Move, Respire, er, Something, Nutrition, Something, Something, and Something) states whilst its still breathing.
Anyway, to cut a long story short (just read the damn article), Monbiot reckons that if everyone cut down on meat consumption, the global food crisis would be solved. So this means that next time anyone questions my vegetarianism I can trot out an altruistic answer and claim I’m saving the world. Excellent.
This almost makes up for my gigantic carbon footprint.
“What?! That’s clearly not true! There’s just a big scientific conspiracy by the liberal left to give the scientists jobs! Anyone who talks about the shape of earth should give a balanced view and give equal time to the flat earth society!”
I hate it when science is politicised. This might surprise you, as I love needlessly politicising everything else: films, TV shows, abstract concepts, politics, I’ll find a political angle on them all. But I think that the politicians should stay the fuck away from science.
Case in point: dangerously credulous Tory blogger Iain Dale keeps posting tenuous stories about how climate change totally isn’t happening. Y’know, despite all of the stacks of evidence and the overwhelming scientific consensus saying that it is.
What bothers me about it that its a purely dogmatic thing: Tory Iain presumably is under the impression that because he’s a Tory, he hates taxes, and therefore, if there’s green taxes to try and manipulate the market away from fossil fuels and carbon emissions, its a bad thing, because taxes are bad full stop, and therefore, any crackpot claiming that climate change isn’t occurring is proof that it’s a New Labour nanny-state socialist money-grabbing exercise to increase state control of the economy.
Its the same with the new laughing-stock of a film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, about how how evolution by natural selection is a conspiracy orchestrated by “Big Science” and their Nazi agenda- the latter part of the title being a subtitle, not instructions to the cinema about who to turn away.
Obviously the thought process is even more clearly dogmatic here: “Our book says God created the Universe, therefore, despite stacks of evidence, evolution is totally untrue”.
I think it’s pretty clear that I disagree with them.
“But they just want a balanced view!”, defenders cry. That’s sounds fair, doesn’t it? Freedom of speech and all that? “If we don’t have freedom of speech then its Nazi Germany!”
Unfortunately for the global warming deniers and the creationists, science is not democratic, you cretins. Everyone could think something and it’d still be wrong, because science needs evidence. It’d be madness to suggest that (Godwin alert!) Holocaust Deniers should be allowed to give a “balanced view” of the Holocaust, because there’s stacks of evidence contrary to their ludicrous opinions.
And yeah, I know I’m not a scientist, but I do appreciate and understand the value of evidence – obviously if the scientific consensus on an issue were to shift, it’d be because some new evidence came to light. If the scientists launched a new satellite that scanned the earth’s interior and determined the earth had a honeycomb centre, and there was observations to back this up which falsified previous theories, then I’d be willing to believe the scientists.
So, please, politicians and dogmatists, please can you stay the fuck away from science, for the good of humanity?
Assuming I’m not the victim of an obscure (and late) April Fools joke, apparently Richard Dawkins is going to guest star in Doctor Who. All Russell T Davies needs to get now is Adam Hart Davis and the Misery of Others to cameo and all four of my favourite things will be united at last.
Apparently Davies, who is pictured in the article dressed as a middle-aged Neo at the weekend, is a big fan. Which makes me wonder just how Dawkins will be incorporated into the show.
I think it’d be pretty good if Dawkins would become the new companion – its not as if the Doctor has too many after all. He could provide a level-headed rationalist counter to the Doctor and the villains they encounter.
He’d be great fun – he could sneer at any credulous villains who speak of what they believe, and demolish their arguments academically.
I guess the only downside it would prevent the Doctor from so wrecklessly ignoring the laws of physics and using his sonic-screwdriver to get out of every situation, because Dawkins would tell him that there’s no way it could work, and there’s no evidence to suggest it could.
Last Summer, my friend Katy and I went down to the Natural History Museum in London and made a stupid video, where I pretended to be a creationist, and went around, “debunking the science”. If you didn’t catch it, take a look:
I thought that my video was far too ridiculous – but remarkably, some commentators on YouTube (and indeed GodTube) took it seriously. As if this isn’t mad enough, it turns out that some creationists have stolen my idea. Check out this video below – they’re totally ripping me off – but unlike me, they’re totally sincere:
The horrible thing is that its better than my video. There’s so many great lines – I wish I’d thought of them…
“How do you know?”
“I come here for facts, not somebody’s fantasyâ€
You’ve got to love the Daily Express. They can’t write about Maddie any more, and the Diana Inquest is nearly over, so they need a new issue they can write about to death on their front page. The weather? Nah, it’s spring now so things will be getting better. What about vilifying the Muslims? Brilliant idea! No one loses with that!
The front page today screams about a “FURY OVER PLAN TO TEACH KORAN IN SCHOOLS”, suggested by the National Union of Teachers – the sensational revelation not being that they want to teach kids about the Koran (this already happens), but the idea floated by the NUT, which in the Express’s world has already become a concrete plan, is that they want to invite Muslim Imams into schools to preach – and its been nicely illustrated by a photo of some MUSLIMS in school in BANGLADESH. That is exactly what things will like if this madness doesn’t end.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I think this is a stupid idea – I don’t think religion has a place in schools outside of history and sociology lessons or as a perverse exercise in critical thinking, but the Express seems indignant that:
The National Union of Teachers’ conference also said existing religious schools – almost all of them Christian – should have to admit pupils from other faiths.
Not other faiths! They might disrupt the institutionally Christian hegemony with their unspecified and miscellaneous characteristics!
But hang on… where is the “FURY”?! Oh, that’s right, an obscure MP is a bit pissed off:
But the proposals prompted immediate outrage. Conservative Party backbencher Mark Pritchard said: “This is just further appeasement for Muslim militants.
“We should just follow the existing laws on religious education, which state that it should be of a predominantly Christian character. All this will do is further divide many communities that are already split on religious lines.”
That’s quite a bizarre non-sequitur. Apparently by schools being more inclusive by not isolating anyone (apart from secularists, it would seem), that will split communities?
But then, this is Mark Pritchard. He isn’t really in touch with reality. Mark Pritchard is the man who wasted several hours of limited parliamentary time last year complaining about Christianophobia and how Christianity is apparently under threat. Y’know, despite it being the official state religion, having guaranteed Bishops in the House of Lords, aka the legislature, being practised by millions of people, and having the shops open for less time on Sundays, just for them.
Call me a godless revolutionary, but surely we could do away with all of this faff by having secular schools, and y’know, if they must, let people practice their religions privately?
There’s an old maxim used to point out something obvious: “Is the Pope Catholic?” – the idea being that everyone knows that the answer is “yes”, and would respond to such a question by pushing their tongue into their bottom lip and make a “duuhhhhh” noise. Unfortunately, this could soon be out of date, as there’s a very real question that we could ask where the answer isn’t so obvious: is the Archbishop of Canterbury a Christian?
Rowan Williams doesn’t seem to be into the whole Christianity thing – he doesn’t tend to do the whole fire and brimstone angry rhetoric that a lot of his peers do, instead preferring to calmly offer some platitudes about how important it is to protect the environment and that sort of thing – and he’d make it more difficult to slag off Christianity if all Christians were like him (thankfully a quick Google search for “Westboro Baptist”, “Ray Comfort” or “Irreducible Complexity” gives us anti-theists something to be angry about).
In fact, Williams has said some downright atheistic things, which really makes you wonder how he got his job in the first place. Last Christmas, talking about the Nativity story he said “Nah, its all bollocks really” (paraphrasing). Apparently the three kings were made up, and there was no proof of animals in the stable – “It works quite well as legendâ€, he apparently said. “And as for the star rising and then standing still: the Archbishop pointed out that stars just don’t behave like that” according to the Times. It wouldn’t be surprising if he’s extended this reasonable logic to everything else in the Bible.
This doesn’t make him sound very good at his job – I mean, you should probably expect him to be a bit more Christian than that… he’s the Archbishop of Canterbury. He gets paid for going on about God too, so you’d think that he’d be a bit more enthusiastic about it.
So its completely and utterly baffling to see Williams sticking up for the other guys. He’s advocating Sharia Law. Maybe he’s getting a bit mixed up, as the major religions are a bit samey – but Sharia law is the Islamic one… and he’s supposed to be a Christian.
Even if he has converted to Islam (and presumably kept his job because of anti-discrimination laws), it still makes him sound like a crackpot. Why? I don’t need to explain why Sharia Law is bad, do I?
For International Relations to function well, then all of the participants (states, inter-governmental organisations, leaders, etc) must be rational actors. Its the reason why the Cold War didn’t end in nuclear holocaust: because both sides got a grip and realised that it was within the best interests of everyone if they don’t blow each other up. Its basically Game Theory: “if they other side don’t think you’re going to a twat about it, then they’re not going to be a twat about it, so you don’t be a twat about it either” (The RAND Corporation probably didn’t swear as much as this).
So it worries me that in the world today there is (at least) one man who is either a total nutter, or a horrible liar: The Pope.
The Pope is a man who must either believe that his fictitious God is listening to him and he can hear God talk back to him or is a deceitful liar, and is merely using the office of Pope as a vehicle for pushing his own political agenda on to millions of Catholics. I’m severely hoping that this Pope is a case of the latter.
If the Pope really does hear voices in his head, then he is mentally ill and thus an irrational actor. Yet unlike the crazed lunatics who prowl their city-centre habitat looking for unsuspecting normal people to harass and scare (and who have Facebook groups made by students calling them a “legend”), people actually listen to the Pope. Unlike the municipal nutters, if the Pope was to wear a sandwich board claiming the sky was falling, rather than just cross the road to avoid walking near him, some people would actually listen to him and probably start building bomb shelters. Its quite a precarious situation for us to be in: if Benedict II had a seizure and “God” told him to launch of a new Crusade, it’d cause no-end of hassle.
I hope he isn’t mentally ill – listening to a mad man’s opinions on political issues would be as insane as, say, letting a celibate man have the last word for millions of Catholics in AIDS-ridden places in Africa on issues of the human reproductive process. … Oh.
The much preferable situation is that the Pope is in fact a horrible liar. He’s not hearing voices in his head, and all of the decisions he makes and the things that he says are based on a rational world-view and weighing up observable evidence. He’s merely piggy-backing on the deluded dogmatism of others for his own political ends. And maybe wants to get away with wearing a dress without accusations of being a “tranny”.
Having a liar in charge would at least mean that although he is accountable to no-one (not even the man who doesn’t exist in his head), he’s not going to go and do something stupid. In fact, a Pope who’s a liar would probably be able to identify better with a lot of politicians and participate in the political process more easily.
So, is the Pope a liar or a nutter? What do you think?
I’m afraid I’ve got an apology to make. The reason I’ve not posted anything for the past week isn’t because I’ve been too busy mourning Heath Ledger (funny how an anagram of the name of a man who died after a prescription drugs overdose is “Health Greed”), not because I’ve been too upset about my Facebook friend Peter Hain getting kicked out for being phenomenally corrupt, but because I’ve been misleading you, dearest readers.
I’ve posted countless times having a go at the reactionary huffing-and-puffing right wing types who read the Daily Express, but it turns out they were right all along. Not about Princess Diana. But it turns out that political correctness has actually gone mad after all.
Apparently the story of the “three little pigs” could be offensive to Muslims. I assume the logic here must be that “if Muslims don’t eat pigs, then, er, they might be really offended if they read a story about them building houses”.
It pains me to be critical on this, as I know that morons could seize upon this latest news as an excuse to complain about not being able to use the N-word or whatever, but it does strike as a teeny-tiny little bit over-zealous. I really hope this is genuine PCGM, and not me becoming naturally more conservative as I age, as that’d be phenomenally depressing.
I mean, I don’t eat animals because I’m a vegetarian… so should I be offended by it? Its a story about something I don’t eat, after all. Maybe its just humanity power tripping, with them wanting to know that if an animal ever challenges their technological authority by building a dwelling of its own, a human could eat it and thus… win at… life?
I could perhaps understand it if in the Koran there were a commandment like “Thou shalt not allow animals to build houses, as they don’t have the dexterity to properly handle construction equipment in a safe manner”, but I’m about 85% sure that isn’t in there. Can any Muslim readers confirm this?
Maybe this is really a case of the Bett awards judging panel being subconsciously racist, and assuming all Muslims are of the ultra-crackpot variety, and don’t want to cause a fuss like with the Danish cartoons?
This said, there is a valid reason to censor the three little pigs hidden three paragraphs in, which is just past that threshold where you assume you’ve got the gist of the story and it isn’t worth reading any more:
“The judges also attacked Three Little Cowboy Builders for offending builders.”
This is a case of political correctness Nazis making the right decision.
Builders are a persecuted minority, with offensive stereotypes about them overestimating the costs of work and driving like wankers. But builders are different to us, and we should recognise and respect those differences. They treat women differently, oppressing them through wolf-whistling and objectification, and they have traditional dress that we may find unusual (low-slung jeans). Their holy book though, known as The Sun, is much like the Christian Bible – there’s a lot of myths and allegory within, but at its core is some firm moral guidance – such as the (photo case) Book of Deirdre.
We must respect their culture and their values – so offending builders is a valid reason to censor the three little pigs.
I made the mistake of venturing into the part of the Sky EPG I never usually touch the other day, and discovered the 50-odd religious channels. It turns out that, shock horror, they’re shamelessly using religion to extort money from viewers! Here’s a little compilation video I made…
