Ike’s Insight

Apr 19, 2010 | Australian Values, Cultural Values, Democracy, Economic Values, USPol, Values, War

Ike’s Insight

It seems so strange to realise that Dwight Eisenhower, a 5-star General and highly-respected Republican President in his day, would nowadays be regarded by most ordinary Republicans as a pussy, a commie and a traitor to “traditional” American values.

Values Australia has been saying for years that the American right is crazy mad. Now here is statistical proof:


 

Seems pretty precisely to map the Republican vs Democratic states.

But Eisenhower’s understanding of America’s role in the world is as relevant today as it was when he was President and the Republicans could do worse than to take another look:

“  The way chosen by the United States was plainly marked by a few clear precepts, which govern its conduct in world affairs.

 

First: No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice.

 

Second: No nation’s security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only in effective cooperation with fellow-nations.

 

Third: Any nation’s right to form of government and an economic system of its own choosing is inalienable.

 

Fourth: Any nation’s attempt to dictate to other nations their form of government is indefensible.

 

And fifth: A nation’s hope of lasting peace cannot be firmly based upon any race in armaments but rather upon just relations and honest understanding with all other nations.

He also said in his “Cross of Iron” speech:

“ Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

 

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

 

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . .

 

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

~  April 16, 1953

 

 

Millennial Jubilation

Apr 13, 2010 | Arts, Australian Values, Citizenship, Cultural Values, Democracy, Fame, Freedom of Speech, Lifestyle & Life, Media Values, OzPol Values, Religious Values, Science Values, USPol, Values

Millennial Jubilation

 

 1,000

 

 

Today, Sir Roger celebrates his 1,000th post in 1277 days – or exactly 3½ years – since the inaugural, ungainly, embarrassing post – Minister von Rock Opens Australian Refujesus Exhibition – on 15 October 2006. Since then he has improved marginally, been mentioned in the Press and on numerous websites, and been included in the top 40 blog posts for 2007 at On Line Opinion.

He’s been #1 on Google for over three years and, better than that, he’s consistently beaten out the #2, his arch enemy immi.gov.

He won the Australian election, unseating the sitting Prime Minister in the process, and caused a landslide in the US Presidential elections. Perhaps more importantly he got rid of Mick Keelty.

He’s been congratulated by some of the people he most respects including Richard Neville, Stephen Poole and Club Troppo collectively.

He’s been threatened with the big government stick of the Crimes Act by silly old Immigration Dept clown, Bob Correll, and survived. In fact possibly Sir Roger’s proudest moment was his reply to Bob and the response that received, especially from Ken Parish who Sir Roger likes to think still had his marbles when he called it “quite possibly the best piece of passionate, angry polemic I’ve ever read, certainly on a blog. ‘Roger Migently’ is roused to extraordinary heights of eloquence.”

Ah, the olden, golden days …

Sir Roger has attracted 127,838 spam comments, some of which he has celebrated. (Sorry, 127,839 127,840 127,841 127,842 . . . . )

And it all happened because Howard and Beazley were in a race to the bottom to hijack Australian values from the people who really own them.
Us.
And the giant Sir Roger was roused to fight.

 

So Sir Roger has waited a few days since Post #999, hoping for inspiration befitting the global significance of this occasion, wishing once again to elevate himself to the heights of grandiloquence of which he was once capable.

And then, you know, he realised that self-aggrandisement was out of place.

Instead, his deeply-felt gratitude, especially to his readers, yearns for expression.

It is simple, open, soul-bearing transparency that is called for.

And so he has chosen to mark this special moment in an understated way with a simple yet gloriously compelling message which quietly expresses his beliefs. This is the sauce of Sir Roger’s strength, his balm and succor:

Produced by TheThinkingAtheist.com

 

 

May the Sauce be with you and may His Noodly Appendage be upon you and guide you safely through pirate-infested waters.

RAmen!

 

Bertrand Russell & The Life of Brian

Jan 8, 2010 | Australian Values, Democracy, OzPol Values, Racism, Religious Values, Terrorism, Values, War

Bertrand Russell & The Life of Brian

 

 

Bertrand Russell’s grandmother’s favourite Bible verse was this:

“ Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.”
(Exodus 23:2)

We can think of a lot of people we would like to see taking that to heart. The ones with special vests and exploding underpants1, for example. Christian missionaries and evangelists, for instance. This is how it works:

Perhaps these words from Bertrand Russell will enrich and enwisen(!) you as they do Sir Roger.

30 years ago Russell said of the “Palestinian problem”:

“ The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was “given” by a foreign power to another people for the creation of a new state.
The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their numbers increased.

 

How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict.

 

No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled en masse from their own country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate?

 

A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East.

 

We are frequently told that we must sympathise with Israel because of the suffering of the Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. […] What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy.

—Bertrand Russell , 31 January 1970

How quaint! Look how much has changed in the 30 years since Russell made that statement!

… What? …

Yes, so the only thing that has changed is that the problem has become worse. The situation in Palestine now inexorably drives and inflames global politics. 9/11, Afghanistan, the rise of islamic fundamentalism all feed from this one trough. Not any amount of cosmetic or diplomatic pretense, no “negotiated compromise”, no artificial “roadmap to peace” will make any difference at all.

The problem is not on the surface but in the poison in the system that causes the inescapable and constant eruption of the angry, putrid, existential carbuncles that are likely to haunt this century as they have the last 50 years.

The Israelis know this (as do the Americans, of course) but they are willing to watch — no, force — the rest of the world to pay the price for what they believe is their god-given right to their “promised land”.

Religion.

Always a force for good.

Without it we wouldn’t know what was the right thing to do.

 
 

Here’s how Russell summed up his life at the age of 84:

“ Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

 

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy—ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what—at last—I have found.

 

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

 

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

 

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me. 

 
  ¹ Just a question … if a person’s exploding underpants actually do work, are the 72 virgins of any use to him in heaven? Just another question? (Okay, just a few more.) If a suicide bomber is a woman does she get the 72 virgins as well? How does that work? Does she have to fuck 12-year-old muslim boys (given, after all, that only muslims are allowed into heaven)? Does she really want to? If a muslim is male and over 12 and is still a virgin surely he’s gay? Does she have to fuck him? Does she want to? Will he let her? Or do female suicide bombers have to be lesbians? Are there enough muslim virgins in heaven to pass 72 around each suicide bomber? They must be getting younger and younger nowadays. Are the virgins forced to be fucked by suicide bombers? How would that not be rape? Or is rape okay in islam?

Sir Roger’s optimistic feeling about suicide bombers is that the dickheads are doing the rest of the world the favour of removing themselves from the gene pool. It can only get better, right?

Sam Harris: The God Fraud

Jan 6, 2010 | Australian Values, Cultural Values, Humour, Religious Values, Science Values, Values, War

Sam Harris: The God Fraud

God May Be Dead But Damned if I Am

 

I n her recent outing in Foreign Policy Magazine, noted apologist, Karen Armstrong, says Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins:

  “  … are wrong … about human nature.

Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus.

As soon as we became recognizably human, men and women started to create religions. We are meaning-seeking creatures.

While dogs, as far as we know, do not worry about the canine condition or agonize about their mortality, humans fall very easily into despair if we don’t find some significance in our lives.

Theological ideas come and go, but the quest for meaning continues.

So God isn’t going anywhere.

And when we treat religion as something to be derided, dismissed, or destroyed, we risk amplifying its worst faults.

Whether we like it or not, God is here to stay, and it’s time we found a way to live with him in a balanced, compassionate manner.

Or in other words, god may be dead but don’t let’s upset the natives – they’ve got guns and bombs and exploding underwear and if you’re unkind to them they might set them off.

So let’s pretend for the sake of a peaceful life that he’s not dead, okay? And after all, the human diddums is fragile and if we tell her there is no objective meaning “out there” diddums might cry.

I don’t know about you but when you read her article do you get the awful feeling of sly inauthenticity and wheedling manipulation all for the sake of her desperation for … what? Her own frantic need for a sense of her own meaning, probably. The fact that people may naturally, in a search for meaning, have conjured up an imaginary friend doesn’t make the imaginary friend either real, or worthy of respect or protection.

If there are no gods then there are no gods – end of story. No point in the prolonging the fantasy. And, by the way, there is no evidence that there is one.

Anyway, we can’t respond to the Armstrong nonsense nearly as neatly as Sam Harris’s reply:

“  In her article (“Think Again: God,” November 2009), Karen Armstrong discovers that Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and I have mistaken “fundamentalism” for the totality of religion. (Sorry about that.) But do Richard and Christopher really hold religion responsible for “all human cruelty”? That is a surprise. I hadn’t realized that they were idiots.

In any case, I am hopeful that Armstrong’s winsome depiction of Islam will shame and enlighten them, as it has me. They will discover that Hassan al-Banna and Tariq Ramadan are paragons of meliorism and wisdom, while we are ignorant bigots who know nothing of theology (of course), politics (Christopher, are you listening?), human nature (what’s to know?), or the proper limits of science (um … narrower?).

[ … ]

But in Kenya elderly men and women are still burned alive for casting malicious spells. In Angola, unlucky boys and girls have been blinded, injected with battery acid, and killed outright in an effort to purge them of demons. In Tanzania, there is a growing criminal trade in the body parts of albino human beings — as it is widely believed that their flesh has magical properties.

I hope that Armstrong will soon apply her capacious understanding of human nature to these phenomena.

[ … ]

People will torture their children with battery acid from time to time anyway — and who among us hasn’t wanted to kill and eat an albino? I sincerely hope that my “new atheist” colleagues are not so naive as to imagine that actual belief in magic might be the issue here.

Read his whole reply here.

[Armstrong’s response to Harris is upsettingly whining, disingenuous, special pleading, illogical and just nonsense. She seems to want a “dialogue” about the existence or not of a god but the existence is not open to question.] 

 

R’Amen (and may his noodley appendage be upon you)

 

 

The Ascent of Man & Descent of the DLP

Dec 16, 2009 | Australian Values, OzPol Values, Religious Values, Values, War

The Ascent of Man & Descent of the DLP

Draining the Swamp

 

This is by way of ridding ourselves of the bible-bashers,

  

the deluded believers in absolute truths and faiths built on fairy stories and long-disproven assertions about the universe and how it works, who have lately infested this site.

We wish we had never taken our cheap shot at the Mad Rabbit Abbot and his joke about the DLP.

The drivel the DLP light-heavyweight god-botherers have dripped over our pages leaves a nauseating stench of death and decay.

We are not interested in debating with you.

There is no point in attempting to support your theories with quotations, chapter and verse, from a vaguely anthropologically interesting, self-contradicting, xenophobic, hate-inciting, ignorance-insisting, genocide-, infanticide-, siblicide-and homocide-approving, terror-inducing, fantastical artefact of an ancient Sand People, which is simple, non-unique mythology – metaphor, perhaps, not written by your imaginary friend, mentor and tormentor but by simple men trying to make sense of the world in distant, superstitious, more ignorant times.

The emperor has no clothes.

There is no point in discussing the exquisite craftsmanship of the gold buttons on the royal doublet.

The doublet does not exist. There is no doublet.

Nor do the buttons. There are no buttons.

There is no emperor.

I am well-acquainted with the ritual, the theology, the anthropology, sociology, psychology, mythology and pathology of your belief system and its requirement to believe, in the face of contradictory evidence and of none, and it has nothing to do with a god.

But the desperation of your belief in it and your faith’s evangelical eagerness – at times its bloody zeal;

to coerce others into accepting your delusional fantasies;

your special pleading for tolerance;

for privileges denied those who disagree with you;

for special respect for your beliefs merely because they are beliefs;

for special standing for your beliefs because they have no testable basis whatever,

have inflicted terrible sins on humanity in every continent for over 2000 years — more in the case of some beliefs.

We can respect you as a human being, as an individual expression of humanity — indeed many of our favourite friends share versions of your beliefs (and at least as many do not) …

but we decline, utterly, to respect your beliefs and we will not debate their merits with you.

 

‘this pathetic bleating for shelter from skepticism’

Dec 10, 2009 | Australian Values, Religious Values, Values

‘this pathetic bleating for shelter from skepticism’

Atheists need a little woman to calm them down

 

Yes, we know it is a bit late in the day to be discovering Pharyngula but we did and there is nothing to be done but fall down and worship. No, we mean sit down and learn.

PZ Myers is a prolific, deservedly famous and notorious biologist, evolutionist and atheist.

“In 2006 the journal Nature listed Myers’s Pharyngula as the top-ranked blog by a scientist based on popularity. Myers received the American Humanist Association’s 2009 Humanist of the Year award.” 

Today amongst his many gems there are a couple of matching diamonds.

One,

about so-called ‘Atheism 3.0’, decries the tendency of conflict-averse atheists to seek refuge in niceness and conciliation, a sort of “don’t upset the nice godbotherers; give them the benefit of the doubt”.

The full-of-faith agree, of course. “Don’t be nasty to us! Respect our faith!”

(Why? And no!)

As PZ MYers says, “religion should be strong enough to stand against academic rudeness and mockery without this pathetic bleating for shelter from skepticism.”

“ We don’t care if you think religion is good for you, or if you love your faith, or if you think rituals are lovely, or if believers have done good in history, or if a lack of praise for Jesus irritates the Baptists. That’s not the issue. The central, fundamental question is whether anyone has any reasonable evidence for the existence of any gods, especially the gods that everyone is so busy propitiating. You haven’t got any? Then we’ll continue pointing out that you’re chasing leprechauns, no matter how annoying you find it. It’s the truth. Argue against that with evidence — anything else is fluff and noise.

The other,

‘we macho atheists need a little woman to calm us down’, is in response to an article decrying the lack of soft, less confrontationist, maybe less threatening, perhaps easier-to-dismiss, women atheists to counteract the nasty, hard men like Dawkins, Hitchens and Sam Harris (and we suppose Myers).

The nakedly sexist nature of the article has caused something of a furore and Myers has tagged strident, combative atheist, Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon, to take Stephen Prothero on.

In doing this she has made, with this one paragraph, the clearest and cleanest case we have ever read against the believers and their simpering, atheist apologists:

“ Look, I think believers and atheists should practice tolerance and get along. Of course I do. But practicing tolerance doesn’t mean that you have to pretend that a truth claim isn’t a truth claim. As believers feel free to make claims about the way the universe works, then they should be challenged on it. That’s what happens when you make truth claims. That your claims are hard to back up is unfortunate, but that isn’t the fault of atheists, and calling atheists mean because this is true doesn’t change that. Having your arguments disproven isn’t assault, and using terms like “pummel” implies coercion that is not going on. You’re free to believe that the moon is made out of green cheese, but being free to believe that doesn’t require that other people coddle that delusion.

Hear, hear.