Article backlog

I ran a word count today which revealed I have a backlog of more than 14,000 words of jotted thoughts which which will become articles. Most relate to human nature. I wrote ten times this amount in my late teens and early twenties, and I only took time off to study philosophy formally and learn Flash. Now I split my time. And with that, I must get on with work.

New Order: Bizarre Love Triangle

I post this because I was actually in the crowd at this gig in Finsbury Park in Summer 2002, and I can confirm it rained solidly all morning and all throughout the gig. But, if you can tolerate the bizarre dance of a now middle-aged Bernard Sumner, the greatness of the studio version of this track can still be detected.

Atheist Alliance International videos

Do you care about reason, truth, and kindness, in a world increasingly threatened by asburd and barbaric religious beliefs which lack any supporting evidence whatsoever?
If so, you might like to watch these speeches by leading free-thinkers and humanist luminaries.

Petition to make faith schools illegal

The office of the Prime Minister is being petitioned in the hope that faith schools might be banned. Here’s why:

“Faith schools remove the rights of children to choose their own religious, philosophical and ethical beliefs. They also sanction ethnic segregation and create tension and divisiveness within society.

Schools should be places where children are given a free education, not centres for indoctrination. Creationism and other religious myths should not be taught as fact regardless of the funding status of a school. Abolishing faith schools will provide children with more freedom of choice and help to promote a fully multi-cultural, peaceful society.”

Since Gordon Brown is the son of a clergyman and nearly went into the clergy himself, there is a fat chance chance of this noble cause succeeding, however if you live in the UK please consider signing the petition nonetheless.

Religious victimisation of women

This is a sensitive subject, isn’t it? Simply because it involves people’s irrational beliefs. It would not be controversial in any other context. It must be faced up to, without fear, by all of us, in this context too.

I have just received my e-mail newsletter from the National Secular Society and it links to an excellent article by Johann Hari about a lady called Mina Ahadi, who has just won the Secularist of the Year prize. With this article, and with others, Mr Hari excuses his dumbing-down appearance on the trash that is Big Brother.

Says the newsletter:

“Mina Ahadi started her serious political activities when she was 16 and living in Iran. She was at university in 1979 in Tabriz at the time of the Iranian revolution and she began immediately to organise demonstrations and meetings to oppose the compulsory veiling of women. This courageous dissent got her noticed by the Islamic regime’s authorities and soon she had to go underground to avoid retribution.

At the end of 1980 her house was raided by the police and her husband and four of their comrades arrested. Mina escaped only because she wasn’t at home at the time.

Her husband and the four arrested were all executed by firing squad soon after. She lived underground for some time and then fled to Iranian Kurdistan in 1982, where she continued to struggle against the Islamic regime for the next ten years. In 1990 she went to Vienna. She moved to Germany in 1996 and has lived in Europe since then.”

Mr Hari in his article rightly challenges the disgusting liberal relativists who seek to excuse religious people for their absurd beliefs. People: the Iranians follows these rules because they are clearly stated in the Koran. They are following their religion properly. It is with the religious texts themselves that the problems lie (“lie” being the operative word).

I shall say no more and hand over to Mr Dawkins himself, whose humanist eloquence seemingly never fails:

“I have long felt that the key to solving the worldwide menace of Islamic terrorism and oppression would eventually be the awakening of women, and Mina Ahadi is a charismatic leader working to that end. The brutal suppression of the rights of women in many countries throughout the Islamic world is an obvious outrage.

Slightly less obvious, but just as outrageous, is the supine willingness of western liberals to go along with it. It is worse than supine, it is patronising and condescending: “Wife-beating is part of ‘their’ culture. Who are we to condemn their traditions?”

A religion so insecure as to mandate the death penalty for apostasy is not to be trifled with, and ex-Muslims who stand up and fight deserve our huge admiration and gratitude for their courage. Right out in front of this honourable band is Mina Ahadi. I salute her and congratulate her on this well-deserved award as Secularist of the Year.”

Duties come before rights

While waiting for a friend of mine outside a box junction in Balham this evening, I noticed an interesting thing. It is illegal for vehicles to enter a box junction unless they can see their way clear for leaving it. On this occasion a “minicab” had actually parked in the box junction to let a woman out – on the corner of the junction, blocking traffic from three directions.

It was there for some time – we’re talking two or three minutes. Eventually a woman got out, and a man behind sounded his horn. Did the woman look embarrassed and apologise for the obstruction? Of course not. She raised her fingers and scowled at the man, then disappeared into a pub.

What must have been going on inside this woman’s mind? It can only have been “I wanted to do that so I will do it. I don’t care what you think” – as is so prevalent these days. This seems like a trivial incident, and we all see them every day. One can hardly walk 10 minutes in London without witnessing some kind of vulgarity or insensitivity (10 seconds on Oxford Street). But society comprises of trivial things, the strands that (should) join us together are many and thin, and the fact we see them broken every day should be of serious concern to us.

These issues boil down essentially to a sense of “rights above duties”. Not only is this sense morally wrong, it is also self-defeating. Only when you care about others as much as yourself can you ever live any kind of fulfilled life. Some people know that. We must insist that all people understand it.

No more TV

“I wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence. There’s one called brightness, but it doesn’t work.”

Eugene P. Gallagher

I am pleased to report I have just cancelled my TV licence. I’ve done this because:

• Most TV is rubbish.
• The advertising one must tolerate between programmes is even worse.
• If there is anything you wish to watch you can usually do so on the Net instead.
• I use my TV (which is a high quality Bang & Olufsen model) only to watch DVDs (and a virtual fireplace).
• TV watching is passive and saps your time.

This move is going to save me £140.50 per year and bring me the satisfaction of not paying for things I do not watch. And all the time I can still listen to the intelligent speech on BBC Radio 4 (and to any other radio station).

Here are some interesting links regarding this issue:

• Remote Controlled by Aric Sigman
• Pravda article
• More links

I’d like to see the licence fee (and advertising funding) abolished and subscription only services introduced instead, so that you get only what you pay for and pay for only what you get. I hope now the TV Licensing people don’t come pestering me. If they do they will be given short thrift..!

2001: A Space Odyssey

This is one of the most famous sequences in cinematic history, with an inspired choice of music.

Blade Runner

Blade Runner is a classic science fiction film with numerous deep philosophical themes relating to free will, artificial intelligence and ethics. It is so stylishly directed and produced it revived film noir and invented the “cyberpunk” genre. In this excerpt, from the opening of the film, replicant Leon Kowalski undergoes a test which was actually proposed by genius code-breaking mathematician Alan Turing in 1950 (“The Turing Test“). If a machine’s replies are indistinguishable from those of a human being, Turing proposed, then we should grant that machine the same sentient status as a human being…

The Cloud Horizon

One of the reasons I love flying…

Churchill quotations

Two of the finest come-backs you are ever likely to read…

Bessie Braddock: “Sir, you are drunk!”

Churchill: “Madam, you are ugly. But in the morning I shall be sober.”

Lady Astor: “If you were my husband I’d poison your coffee.”

Churchill: “If you were my wife I would drink it”.

On Che Guevara and casual idolatry

Walking around London, you will sometimes see people wearing t-shirts saying things like “Make music not missiles” or bearing the iconic image of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, from the famous photograph by fashion photographer Alberto Korda. These are extremely naïve statements, extreme simplifications of complex matters, which mainly serve to indicate that the wearer actually knows very little about the issues he or she claims to champion. They are intellectually lazy.

The first example is so grossly simplistic I shall not deal with it in detail. Suffice it to say that decommissioning of arms is an extremely difficult and delicate matter and we cannot all simply pick up guitars and sing songs around a fire without the slightest further care about national security. Especially not while Christianity harks for armaggeddon and Islam seeks to convert or eradicate “infidels”. All this said, international disarmament, as much as possible, obviously remains a priority of any right thinking person.

Let us move onto the issue of Che Guevara. Che Guevara was a socialist, some say communist, so it is ironic that his image should now be at the centre of a marketing machine, now be a fashion brand, and I dare say many who wear it know know little about their idol beyond some vague ideas that he “stood for freedom”. This kind of naivity and political ignorance, leading to unthinking idolatry, is not only embarrassing, it can also be dangerous.

It is wrong to idolise anyone, because they will always fail to live up to expectations. But let us review a few known facts about Che Guevara, in order to help these people back down to earth:

• He pawned his sister’s jewellery to make money for himself.
• He had the annoying habit of addressing people as “mate” – hence his nickname.
• He never worked for a living.
• He summarily executed many suspects without trial (as Cuban-American actor Andy Garcia has pointed out).
• He was an adulterer.
• He fully desired to fire nuclear weapons at the United States.
• He regarded North Korea as a model to which Cuba should aspire.
• He was extremely anti-American, urging people to “take up arms and create 100 Vietnams”.
• He was an aggressive individual since his youth – indeed even his protector Castro cited his “excessively aggressive quality”.
• His last words were supposedly “Shoot coward – you are only going to kill a man”. I’m sorry, “only”..?
• He was responsible for setting up forced labour camps.
• He displayed an inability to work with others, often patronising them.
• He staged terrifying mock executions of boy soldiers.
• He rarely washed (and was proud of this – earning him the nickname “The Pig”).
• He naively thought he could “go missing” for an extended period and evade the United States, when in fact they had him under constant surveillance.

Che Guevara was a contradictory character – more than anything a rebel looking for a cause, and his social outrage only gave him an outlet for an obvious love of violence. He also, incidentally, failed in his overall aims. The worship of him is naïve adolescent revolutionary romanticism, and we should take no notice of those who wear his image unless they have also an intimate knowledge of his politics, for by wearing his image they do nothing but mindlessly contribute to a commercial machine to which he was by all accounts overtly opposed.

How to fight back against brainless advertising

You know all those annoying banner ads all over your web browser? And those ones all over MSN Messenger? Did you ask to see them? I didn’t think so. Every time we go out and use public transport, even walk down the street, we are patronised by someone else’s usually impoverished idea of wit as they lie to us and try to manipulate us into buying whatever it is they have to sell. While all the time everybody knows that a really good product sells itself, and the best means of advertising is word of mouth.

They even get us in our home – but we can stop them there. TV stations are yet to broadcast a signal notifying your TV to mute itself and turn to a black screen while the vacuous adverts are on (which would be great), but fortunately there is little on the TV worth watching anyway, so our primary concern is stop these stupid adverts coming at us on the web. There are some excellent means to achieve this end:

1. Ensure you are using Firefox web browser, the fastest and best.
2. Install the Adblock Plus extension. You can right click on offending iframes and adverts to blank them, and if you subscribe to a service (free!) it even automatically blocks all known ads.
3. Get the Mess Patch for your version of MSN Messenger, which enables you to totally configure the application and completely removes all advertising from it.

These measures will enable you to enjoy the peace of mind of ad-free surfing without idiots trying to make you buy things. Happy surfing!

The problem with the term “atheist”

It is self-defeating to create a label and a “cult” where none is required, and although I use the term “atheist” I am a little uncomfortable with it. I need not elaborate further on why, because my concerns have been articulated with characteristic eloquence by Sam Harris both here and here. Take a read…

The problem with prostitution

You are probably familiar with the moral theory of consent – the idea that anything is okay as long as the two parties consent. This is not a good theory, because it allows – for example – for people shooting up drugs together, being anorexic together and committing other self harming acts – such as engaging in prostitution. While prostitution is obviously inadvisable because of the dangers to physical health it presents, it is inadvisable on other grounds too, and these are interpersonal grounds. People can be mistaken about what is good for them. Prostitution is not good for them, and so it is a good thing to highlight why.

From the point of view of the client, the man let’s say, there is a fundamental problem with the idea of prostitution, which has caused me to never properly understand how men can possibly do it. Sex is, deep down, about winning acceptance – willing acceptance from another. It is about being liked and desired by another human being. It will not be entirely satisfying unless it has this element of genuine interpersonal exchange. In the case of prostitution, whatever else a client may know about the woman, he knows one thing for sure: she does not like him. She probably despises him. She has not accepted him, would never accept him. Indeed, the man has paid money for the service, and this can only be degrading for him. The exchange is physical only, two-dimensional. It can never be ultimately satisfying.

From the point of view of the prostitute, the problem is that she is debasing herself and devaluing what should be an intimate and meaningful act. We cannot completely disassociate the physical from the psychological unless we repress the latter, and this is not a healthy way to live. The prostitute makes a mockery of the most intimate act, one which should ideally be associated with affection and genuine feeling (much of the media does the same by continually having it bound up with ego instead). In doing this she dehumanises herself and at the same time is complicit in the client’s error of seeking a “quick fix” rather than a genuine solution.

The reasons for prostitution are complex, but often neither party is innocent (women very often voluntarily become extremely rich from it) – and, even when it is consensual, neither party is properly considering life and what it takes to really be happy.