I didn’t hear it myself, but apparently Queen Beatrix’s Christmas message this year underlined the importance of free speech. But then she went and blew it by adding that of course no one has the right to insult anyone else. Er, then it isn’t really "free speech" is it, Beatrix? Silly woman.
Category: Society
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Sometimes…
…I wonder why can’t we just lighten up a little? There’s a rather depressing firestorm broken out in a small corner of the Blogosphere over transgender. In particular whether transgendered people support the patriarchy or not. A good, but rather worthy, discussion of the minutiae can be found here.Basically, from my point of view, either we treat transgender people as people or we don’t. And depressingly, there are a number of people, who call themselves feminists, who don’t. Pot, kettle, black, sistas.But, by way of lightening up, as a result of exploring the various discussion threads, I came across this totally politically incorrect, but oh so brilliant video from the Scissor Sisters: Filthy Gorgeous.Thank god for art, and outrageous camp. Amen. -
North Pole, Alaska
Jon Ronson is an excellent writer who seems to specialise in describing the stranger shores of the human species. His The Men Who Stare At Goats, for example is a book both hilarious and chilling about some of the bizarre characters in the US military. Well worth checking out.If you’ve never read any of his stuff, then here’s an excellent introduction in today’s Guardian. It’s an article in which he describes his visit to North Pole, Alaska. Truth is stranger than fiction, and Ronson’s deadpan descriptions of the people and the place are terrific, in all senses of the word. -
Natural Family Planning
As the old joke says, the majority of those who use natural family planning turn out to be parents… Never a truer word was spoken… And don’t even begin to ask about the appallingly stupid dandelions versus thornless roses that also figure in this vacuous nonsense. -
Die, Blitcon Zombie Meme, Die!
That bizarre piece by Ziauddin Sardar that I mentioned recently has garnered support from (to me) an unexpected quarter: Sunny Hundal. Fortunately, J. Carter Wood from Obscene Desserts is at hand to unpick the arguments. -
Rosa Parks Lives…
Same old, same old… Meh, what can I say? It’s my species… But why is it usually the male that is the mishuggenah?(hat tip to Onegoodmove for the link) -
The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow
Mind Hacks has an entry on Professor Temple Grandin. It includes a link to the BBC Horizon programme made about her. Unlike many of recent Horizon programmes, this particular episode is well worth watching. Grandin is a fascinating individual, and her insights from her position of standing somewhat outside of the "normal" human perspective are valuable and revealing. -
Terminus In Sight
How will you react upon seeing your death come into view? It’s a question I’m often asking myself these days. I hope that I will be able to approach it with a similar reaction to Coboró’s father. -
Mind Your Language
The current events in Ipswich are depressing enough, but what makes me want to fling a boot through the TV screen at the moment is the way it is being reported.Somebody in the BBC TV News department has had the slimy idea of having the TV News anchorman do his broadcast from outside the police headquarters every night. He’s backed up by TV news journalist Richard Bilton doing his best Uriah Heep impersonation giving reports that reek of false emotion in order to pump up the story.And the language that everyone uses… It degrades the women ("girls"), whilst simultaneously pumping up the perpetrator(s) into mythic proportions ("the ripper"). A couple of examples: "Prayers will be said at the weekend for the prostitutes and their familes" and the chief investigating officer who refers to the murdered women as "girls", but to the perpetrator(s) as "person or persons unknown". Italics mine. He also "pointed out that due to their transient lifestyles he could not be sure what most of them were wearing on the nights they vanished". That’s simply gratuitous. If I lived alone, and vanished one night, it would be unlikely that the police would be able to state with confidence what I was wearing on the night I vanished either, but I certainly don’t live a "transient lifestyle".Luckily, I’m not the only one who has noticed the use of language. Twisty, as usual, has her finger on the patriarchy’s pulse. -
The Five Rules of Blogging
Jan Pronk states the five rules of blogging. He’s absolutely right. I don’t always live up to his excellent example. But then, I’m not in the situation that he is. I don’t have the courage or the ability. -
Tired and Emotional
I have to admit that I found much to smile about in this story. We are all human after all. I’m laughing with the Bishop, not at him. After all, who could resist this quote:"I’m the Bishop of Southwark. It’s what I do."Priceless. -
Living A Lie
Following on from Ted Haggard’s fall from grace last month, it now emerges that another evangelical pastor in Denver has quit after revealing that he is gay. And while I confess to feeling a slight tinge of schadenfreude in the case of Haggard because of his virulent anti-gay rhetoric, the overwhelming feeling I have after reading the report on Reverend Barnes is sadness.- Sadness that this man has punished himself throughout his life for feelings that he cannot accept:
"I have struggled with homosexuality since I was a 5-year-old boy… I can’t tell you the number of nights I have cried myself to sleep, begging God to take this away".- Sadness over the pain that this non-acceptance has now brought about to his wife and family.
- Sadness that some of the nails in his self-imposed coffin were hammered in by his father:
‘In their only talk about sex, Barnes said his father took him on a drive and talked about what he would do if a "fag" approached him. Barnes thought, "’Is that how you’d feel about me?’ It was like a knife in my heart, and it made me feel even more closed."’- Sadness that he remains trapped in a self-made cage, and one whose bars are continuing to be made afresh by his beliefs and the beliefs of the community in which he lives, and has, until recently, served:
‘Barnes described struggling with what he believes is the biblical teaching that homosexuality is an abomination. Over the years, he grew to accept that "this is my thorn in the flesh."’I can’t help but feel that the sum total of human happiness would be a lot greater if people didn’t obsess over who sticks what in where. People are more than their genitals. Speaking of which, the Intelligent Designer wasn’t showing too much intelligence when s/he decided to put the entertainment complex in the middle of the sewage works… -
A Well-Deserved Fisking
J. Carter Wood, over at Obscene Desserts, delivers a well-deserved fisking to an opinion piece written by Ziauddin Sardar. I read the piece by Sardar in the Guardian, and thought it was bizarre. The byline to the article was, I kid you not, "Amis, Rushdie and McEwan are using their celebrity status to push a neocon agenda", which instantly made me think that I had fallen down some sort of intellectual rabbithole.Luckily, J. Carter Wood is at hand to helpfully point out that it’s not me. Sardar’s article is even more bizarre than I realised.And the really depressing thing? The Guardian states, at the end of Sardar’s article, that "Ziauddin Sardar has been appointed a commissioner of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights". Gawd help us. I have fallen down that rabbithole after all. -
Continuing the Discussion
Following on from the Beyond Belief conference last month, it looks as some some of the participants have been continuing their discussion over at the Edge site. Worth stopping by and reading the contributions, I’d say. The sparring between Sam Harris and Scott Atran looks particularly good. I’ve now got a copy of Atran’s In Gods We Trust, but it’s currently sitting on an ever mounting pile of books to be read, I’m afraid. -
The War On Christmas
No, not the rather tiresome complaints by cultural conservatives in the US complaining about the secularisation of Christmas, or indeed the Archbishop of York complaining about the systematic erosion of Christianity from public life.Nope, here in The Netherlands we have our own particular war on Christmas. To be exact, it’s a war between two versions of St. Nicholas. Ladies and gennelmen, I give you, in the red corner: Sinterklaas; and in the other red corner, the non-Dutch challenger: Santa Claus.Sinterklaas is celebrated on the 5th December. But recent years have seen a blurring with the non-traditional usurper figure of Santa Claus. This year, the town of Noordwijk, instead of holding a traditional parade of Sinterklaas with his retinue of Zwarte Pieten (Black Peters), had a parade with Santa Claus. Cue 1,400 protest mails, and the disapproval of the Vereniging tot Behoud van Sinterklaas (the Association for the Preservation of Sinterklaas).Actually, I have a sneaking support for Sinterklaas over Santa Claus. It is something unique to The Netherlands and Belgium, and it will be a pity to see it being pushed aside by something that is just the same as everywhere else. That’s just boring. And I admit I take a gleeful pleasure in the political incorrectness of the Zwarte Pieten. -
Putting The Boot In
Charlie Brookner gives vent to a fine rant about psychics in the Guardian‘s Comment Is Free section. Cartoon verbal violence, but rather understandable for people such as psychics who prey on other people’s anxieties. And as a bonus, his Ignopedia entry on Creationism is worth the price of admission. -
Corporate Queer
A good article from Fortune on how corporate America is recognising that gay employees want the same things as their straight colleagues. That is, an environment where the full potential of people, regardless of sexual orientation, is realised and one which fosters their personal and professional development. -
Joining The Club
Great news that South Africa has joined the small group of other countries where same-sex marriage is recognised.And in associated news from South Africa, it appears that at long last the idiocy of the Health Minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, with her worthless treatments for AIDS, and the denial of Prime Minister Mbeki of the link between HIV and AIDS, are being overcome. Not before time, but too late for the 2 million people in South Africa who have already died of AIDS. -
In A Nutshell
Richard Norman is a humanist philosopher. He is interviewed by Nigel Warburton in the Virtual Philosopher blog. Norman is asked why he rejects the idea that God exists. His reply is a paragon of clarity:I believe that the onus is on those who believe in the existence of a god to provide reasons for that belief. (This is a point which the philosopher Antony Flew has well made.) I can’t prove that there is no god, but in the absence of good reasons for believing that a god exists, I live my life without belief in a god. In particular, the success of scientific explanations of the natural world makes religious explanations redundant. It’s in that sense that there is a tension between science and religion. The two are not logically incompatible, but the more we succeed in discovering well-founded scientific explanations of the origins of the cosmos, the origins of living species, and so on, the more the explanations in terms of a divine creator become redundant. They add nothing.I could not hope to put it better myself. This is exactly my position. -
What The World Eats
David Ng, over at The World’s Fair blog has an entry on an interesting looking book: Hungry Planet. It’s a photo-essay of the authors’ visit to 30 families in 24 countries for a total of 600 meals. The striking thing are the photos that compare what each family eats in a week. The western obsession with packaged and processed food (and the quantities thereof) was never more tellingly conveyed. A book for the "nice-to-have" wishlist, I think.
Geoff Coupe's Blog 