That's fucking stupid

Posts Tagged ‘muslims’

Jacqui Fucking Smith:

If people feel it appropriate to demonstrate against our troops coming home from defending this country abroad, we – as Government and others – will say in turn that we think that that’s wrong.

Cheers, Jacks. Thanks for that.

Here’s a bonus quote for you from our beloved W:

Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.

Peace out, kids, and keep those naughty thoughts to yourselves!

New Scientist has published an excellent article concerning research by Scott Wiltermuth of Stanford University in California that suggests that “activities performed in unison, such as marching or dancing, increase loyalty to the group”. The article discusses proposals by psychologist Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville that “this research helps explain why fascist leaders, amongst others, use organised marching and chanting to whip crowds into a frenzy of devotion to their cause”.

The article very carefully skirts around the similarity between the chanting and singing, encouraged by facist leaders, and the hymns and prayers which form the bedrock of religious observance.

Once again, we appear to be living by the standard that those who shout the loudest wield the most influence.

There is man employed by the UN to, in a nutshell, safeguard the freedom of speech of people all over the world. He monitors, investigates and recommends solutions to specific human rights problems. He’s called a Rapporteur.
60 years ago, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was written, and emphasised that “a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief is the highest aspiration of the common people”.

What this boils down to is that everyone has the fundamental right to speak freely about their beliefs. That everyone has the right to agree or disagree with someone else’s beliefs, and to call those beliefs into question when they clash with pesky little things like basic human rights.
This of course isn’t good enough for the shouty-shouty Islamists in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Egypt, who have somehow come to the conclusion that the Declaration is “disrespectful” of religion because it won’t let them torture, intimidate and kill the people they govern. Consequently, they have demanded that the Declaration be rewritten to account for the “unique sensitivities” of religion. Which effectively bans anyone from raising an issue that involves Islamist beliefs and laws.
I’m sorry, what?
We are talking about representatives of 3 states with the worst human rights abuses in the developed world. We are talking about the Egyptian representative refusing to discuss the stoning of women accused of being unfaithful, and refusing to discuss child marriage on the basis that he would not see Islam “crucified” by the council, stating that these sorts of things are within the boundaries of shariah law and consequently untouchable to the infidel West. Allah forbid we ask the followers of Islam to please stop torturing people. How disrespectful of us, eh?

We are also talking about anti-Musharraf judges, lawyers and human rights activists in Pakistan being rounded up wholesale and arrested for peacefully voicing their beliefs, and an authority that has banned the establishment of independent judiciaries.

We are talking about Saudi Arabia and its proclivity to issue Capital Punishment without undue process, which still amputates the hands or feet of those accused of robbery, which still practices beheading as a “humane” method of punishment and which routinely denies that human rights abuses take place at all.

And the worst part of all of this?

The UN complied with their demands to rewrite the Rapporteur’s job spec to include not only naming and shaming human rights abusers – such as Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia – but also to investigate and put a stop to the “defamation of religions and prophets”. And so he protects our rights and freedoms with one hand and takes them away with the other to appease an angry and abusive faction of religious hotheads who are terrified of their citizens thinking for themselves.

Every time the UN rolls over for these abusers is another chip away from the faith we ordinary mortals have placed in it. Every concession granted to these fanatics who play the religion card to get their own way is an erosion of the principals on which the UN was founded. Every time nobody stands up to these evil and heartless men, they get away with murder – literally. And every time we step on eggshells for fear of offending these poor, defenceless tyrants, we allow them to keep pushing us further and further away from the ideals that make the UN such a powerful force for good.
In addition, every day that countries like Britain and the USA support the governments of these and other notoriously tyrannical nations is another day they make a mockery of themselves, their politics and us. They are getting away with demanding that their laws – because they are an integral part of their religion – become unquestionable, infallible and untouchable.
If that’s the case, then they don’t belong in the UN, in any form of governmental agreement with Britain or in the civilised world.

Continuing the current theme of expanding on the misconceptions of the ignorant I thought I would share this wonderful comment which was made on another site related to the MMR debate:

Why are we made to give this artificial drug to our kids? Drugs like this are known to create superbugs that kill more people.

I totally love that shit. Mutant superbugs are at your door waiting to rape your daughters and kill your sons! Clearly it’s all because of the drugs that these superbugs exist and kill our grannies when they go into hospital for some completely unrelated reason.

Hysteria aside there does appear to be a common misconception that antibiotics cause germs to mutate into strains that are either more virulent or are resistant to those antibiotics. This is a variation of the classic correlation/causality fallacy where it is assumed (by idiots) that if two things are related then it follows that one thing causes the other (which is *sometimes* the case but not *always* the case and even when it is the case it’s hard to prove which one causes the other). Viruses mutate, that’s a given, but it’s not assumed by rational thinking people that the mutation is caused directly by the antibiotics because mutations have been observed in controlled environments where no antibiotics are present. What *has* been observed is that when antibiotics are used to remove the population of a particular bug, what remains is likely to be resistant to the antibiotics; otherwise it too would have been wiped out.

This is a crass analogy but if I were to engineer a method of killing everyone who has brown, black or blonde hair (but not ginger) and leave it on earth for a great many years while observing from a secret space station I would return to earth to find a lot of ginger folk. I would not have *turned them all ginger*, I would have merely selectively removed the dark haired and blonde haired people and allowed the gingers to thrive and pass on their ginger genes. It follows that if I wipe out the population of a virus that is not resistant to my antibiotics, whatever is left (if there is anything left) will be resistant to the antibiotics.

So how did they get resistant in the first place? Pretty much the same way we have ginger people, albino people, white people, black people, hairy people, bald people or any of the other myriad of variations in our own population; pure chance. When the genetic information is passed from one generation to another there is often a little bit of scrambling along the way, this is what introduces variations in organisms that reproduce asexually. It’s actually a little more complex in organisms like us that reproduce sexually, our genetic information is a milkshake of our parents’ genetic information along with the odd random mutation, but essentially there is randomness in all living things.

For those with a few cells of grey matter, you might be thinking:

“Oh, shit, that sounds an awful lot like that theory of evolution thingumy!”

Yes. Yes it does, doesn’t it. It’s another observable example of the theory in action. If you can find a better explanation using the scientifically observed information (and can prove it to a point where peers in the scientific community can’t fault your theory) then you should let everyone know by sending your answers to:

I.want.one.of.those@nobelprize.org

Newspapers.

Let’s examine that word for a moment. A newspaper does exactly what it says on the tin, yes? It’s a paper which reports the latest news from all over the world, right?  

Wrong. In the vast majority of cases. “News” papers are fast becoming nothing more than gossip magazines without the unnecessary expense of glossy photos.

Redtops in particular barely deserve the title. Let’s get something ironed out: “News” and “Amy Winehouse flashes her minge” are not synonymous. Celebrity sex lives are not News. The coke-fuelled antics of some Z-lister who’s having a second crack at fame by sitting in a jungle doing naff-all for eight weeks is not News. These stories may be “human interest” but that doesn’t mean they belong in a paper that purports to furnish us with daily updates on the world’s breaking stories.

Right now, papers are happy to say and do anything as long as it gets their rag selling by the million. This means that educating the public is no longer the top priority of a paper – it’s selling millions of copies. As a consequence, papers will only publish what sells – and sex, drugs and celebrities sell very well indeed.

But it’s not news. That’s not to say that gossip magazines don’t have their place – but you don’t see OK!, Hello, and Closer styling themselves newspapers.

Let’s not heap all the blame on the Redtops, though. There are other issues at stake.

News is no longer the unbiased reporting of the latest updates to global and local events. News has become a saleable commodity wherein fact can be sacrificed on the altar of popular opinion. Newspapers should exist to educate and inform. That doesn’t involve an article that contains more rant than news, dressed up in an angry little package with the instructions that you should be outraged about this, because we are, and if you’re not as outraged as us then you probably aren’t a proper British citizen, or you’re a foreigner who shouldn’t be here in the first place, and probably Muslim to boot.

Education doesn’t start and finish in schools and universities. It starts with the family, with your parents – biological or adoptive or otherwise – and it continues our entire lives. Teaching people to think is the single most important thing we can do for our society. Only that’s not going to happen when our press dictates to us what we ought to think, instead of letting us form our own ideas.

Opinions belong in the Opinions Column in any newspaper. They don’t belong in the front page article, which has been written by some shrieking propagandist who sits at his or her PC with a checklist of words to be included in their article – usually ‘Terrorist’, ‘Foreigner’, ‘Muslim’ or ‘Princess Diana’ – and thrashes out some semi-hysterical gobbet of bile directed at anyone who isn’t white, middle class and a reader of their paper until they collapse into a shivering, apoplectic heap and have to be revived with an injection of undiluted Moral Outrage.

We need to learn to think for ourselves again. If the press won’t help, maybe this article will. Here’s hoping.