Riveting Prometheus’ shackles

Reverend Monbiot has shown his true colours. In a tirade on the ongoing Copenhagen’s summit full of literary imagery and apocalyptic pathos (I was tempted to say puritan cant), he stated that

The summit’s premise is that the age of heroism is over. We have entered the age of accommodation

What I read here is that we must chain Prometheus to his rock again and become meek servants of the gods that rule the cosmos. That we need to stop our pursuit of happiness and well-fare and opt for the quaint and quiet life of those who can afford to live with less.

Using that old trick of the prophet and the con man, George wants us to believe that we’re up to something new, that we’ve never seen this before, that he’s the only one that can see the hosts engaging in the battle that announces the doom that is a-coming.

Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals [...] Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impediments and those who believe that we must live within limits

It’s as if he’d never heard of the oracle in Delphi, the Stoics and Saul of Tarsus. It’s as if he didn’t know about the mendicant friars, Savonarola, John Calvin and Mary Shelley’s ghosts. Restrainers are as old as humankind and have been warning us about the risks of playing with fire since the time we lived in the pit darkness of the caves. They’ve been telling us the end is nigh since the beginning and that we must repent and stop our race to reach the stars. They are and have always been a bore, and had we ever listened to them, we’d still be mourning half of our children before they could be weaned and living this only life of ours in misery and despair.

To make matters worse, Reverend George can’t even get his facts straight. He once again repeated that old canard that it’s heard far too often nowadays in both progressive and conservative circles of literati and bien-pensants,

Perpetual growth cannot be accommodated on a finite plane

This is just bullshit. As one commenter below the line retorted,

Economic growth is not the consumption of resources. It is the adding of value. This is what GDP measures: the amount of value added in an economy [...] Thus the constraint on economic growth is human ingenuity, not the physical resources of the planet

Which makes me wonder whether Reverend Monbiot really knows what he’s talking about and whether everything he says doesn’t just boil down to the rejection of that Kantian maxim that has liberated us from the Dark Ages: sapere aude (be brave to know). And if that’s the case, I really want to know why anyone on the left is still listening to this clown.

Juan P. Lewis, P for pedantic

Instead of writing my second year review, I spent the whole day Cifing on ETA’s last bombing and Euskal Herria. It was the most pleasant Cif thread I’ve ever taken part into. I did most of the talking (blogging actually), which ranged from the mediaeval history of Spain to Basque linguistics and my own experience as a member of Ezker Batua (the Basque section of the Spanish United Left). Everybody commended my insight, my wisdom and my English. It was all very touching and brought a bit of sense to my langweiliges Leben here in Bielefeld. But it was Cif, and there’s always a cretin that has to spoil it. A guy started calling me names like pedantic rambling buffoon. It was late in the evening, when sadness sets in, and at the beginning it really pissed me off and got me down. I just wanted to tell him to fuck off, but I risked being moderated in a thread that I’d made mine without trolling and that had lifted my spirit. So I decided to act intelligently and fight back with a pinch of wit.

“What can I do?”, said I “I’m socially awkward and act in a very buffoonesque way in front of other people. Cif gives me the benefit of anonymity. It also gives me the chance to be pedantic and to write in English without the horrible constraints of academic deadlines. It’s called procrastination, of which I’m a certified trained professional. I like collecting useless pieces of information and sharing them with people. It’s my only claim to fame, and the only way I can interact. I know it makes inferior minds feel threatened by the intellectual superiority of my poor self, but I don’t do it with evil intentions.”

So, just in case it happens again, I will now apologize in advance for every time my vast knowledge and eloquence hurt anybody’s sophomoric sensibilities.

בְּעֶצֶב, תֵּלְדִי בָנִים (Gen. 3, 16)

Another day, another idiot advocating the maltreatment of women. In an article for the journal Evidence Based Midwifery, ”Dr” Denis Walsh has added his voice to the misanthropic “back to Nature” apocalyptic cult and stated that “women should be prepared to withstand pain” while giving birth, reports the Observer. He bemoaned our modern loss of “rites of passage” and our “antipathy to childbirth pain.” He didn’t forget to mention that old canard that says that Mother Nature’s making childbirth painful was purposeful, useful and beneficial, as it prepared “a mother for the responsibility of nurturing a newborn baby.” It’s as if he believed that the only way to nurture a bond between mother and child was through a never ending mutual infliction of suffering.

Really, I hope “Dr” Walsh is never affected by frenulum breve, or I’ll volunteer to chop his foreskin off without anaesthetics, so he doesn’t lose a man’s purposeful, useful and beneficial attachment to his willy.

Blowing yourself up for the cause

 

Once again, I made the mistake of joining another Cif blog on the conflict that has cursed the land of Canaan. Something that utterly depresses me is how often pro-Palestinian commentators show so little regard for the life of the people they claim to stand for, as when they resort to all sort of intellectual contortions in order to “understand” suicide bombing.   

suicide bombing did not suddenly appear out of a vacuum – it is a desperate act – an almost inevitable consequence – of decades of misery, murder, theft and oppression

claimed one poster.

I’m sorry, but I yet have to be convinced of its inevitability. If that was the case, then you would have to explain why other desperate oppressed peoples don’t go for it. The Palestinians themselves didn’t do it when Israel occupied a territory twice as large as Israel itself, and when they were bombing the shit out of Lebanon.

I do recognise that Israeli brutality against the Palestinians is the context in which Palestinian violence operates. But why suicide bombings? There are many other ways to resist oppression which do not use your own people as cannon fodder and are not aimed at targeting civilians.

Suicide bombings have been chosen as a tactic by a bunch of fanatics who’ve convinced their ranks and files they’ll go to Heaven if they do it, but who won’t do it themselves (but for one exception). Those twisted minds deserve only my contempt. Telling your own people to blow themselves up for the cause shows that you don’t care about the lives of your grass roots. As a weapon, it’s useless. It doesn’t undermine your enemy’s military capacities and it’s not very efficient as a demoraliser of your enemy’s civil population.

Some Palestinian leaders encourage it in their bid to appear more radical in their fight, more loyal to the cause and more true to al-Qur’an. It has much more to do with gaining power within the internal Palestinian struggle than with steaming anger off; and it’s been a disaster for the Palestinian camp. 

Palestinians fought against the occupation for a long time without resorting to suicide bombings. Then was a time when they wore fatigues and talked about socialism and pan-Arabism. Then, the Berlin Wall came down and the whole conflict was highjacked by idiots on both sides who think their name is Emmanu’el.

Horny bastards

Ben Goldacre is a genius. He was born in 1974, which would be enough to regard him as an extremely bright man, but that’s not the only reason. His weekly column Bad Science, where he combines wit and scientific rigour like no other, will grant him a place among many other benefactors of humanity. This time he’s taken the Daily Torygraph to task. In their unceasing moral crusade against Gin lane and the sexual emancipation of women, Britain’s right-minded people’s highbrow pulp published an article claiming that science showed that “women who dress provocatively are more likely to be raped”. It only took Ben a telephone call to show how the whole report was a mishmash of badly reported unfinished postgrad research, twisted evidence, half truths and blatant lies. Sadly, no matter what pains he takes to get the record straight, it seems that people will not listen; and many of the responses to his column were just the confirmation of our own caveman’s prejudices. Take this chap, for example. He’s a regular on Cif and Ben’s columns, he leans quite to the left and he tends to show a good deal of compassion in what he writes. Nonetheless, he reckoned that,

if women wear clothes which show their sexuality, men are more likely to rape them, if rape is in their minds anyway

I can’t see how he came to that conclusion. If rape is in someone’s mind, why would he give a hoot about his female victim’s attire? Tired of that old canard, I gave it a go and put forth my own theory on not dressing modestly.

If you think about it, an attractive girl wearing high-heels, tight clothes and a cleavage that shows the white of her boobs is likely to attract the attention of many men. They will “compete” against each other, cancelling out their chances of “success” and unabling each other to pull the girl. The girl will be in control of the situation, which will boost up her confidence and leave the guys looking out like horny idiots who are not ripe enough for her. If the boys are drunk, they’ll act so pathetically that their chances of hooking up with her would be minus ten. If you’re a bloke, you know I’m right. We’ve all been there and we’ve all made fools of ourselves more often than desirable when we were young, randy and unexperienced (some of us not that young).

Contrary to what the moral brigade thinks, dressing up provocatively can be seen as a protective weapon, rather than as an invitation to rape. In fact, it seems that dressing modestly can work as an invitation to harassment in some occasions. According to Khalil Al-Anani, writing at the Egyptian Daily News, 

(Egyptian) Women today are merely combating sexual harassment on the streets, which has increased despite the fact that more women don the veil…. A report by the Egyptian Center for Womens rights revealed that 84 percent of women in Egypt are subjected to sexual harassment, 70 percent of which at least are veiled

Of course, this is all speculation, but so is the theory that states that “she was dressing like a slut, she brought it upon herself”. This is just blame the victim, which is akin to moral bankruptcy. There has never been any proved correlation between not dressing modestly and soaring rape statistics. And I hope we blokes pull ourselves together and stop insulting our own intelligence.

The fallen angel

 

What’s wrong with Satan? Satan is the angel with cojones to stand up against a totalitarian dictatorship. Metamorphosed as “el Tio” (the Uncle), he is the protector of the miners of Potosi, one of the most oppressed people in the world. You rarely hear of crimes committed by Satanists, and when you do, it’s mainly propaganda from other religious sects. No Satanist is out there, blowing himself up in the name of the Angel of Light like others do in the name of Islam or Buddhism. No Satanist is fostering rabid nationalism like Orthodox patriarchs. No Satanist is hindering science and the sexual well being of Africans like the Catholic Church. No Satanist is building illegal settlements on the West Bank because he was told to do so by his Master. No Satanist is starting wars in Mesopotamia guided by Baalzebub. So please, a bit of sympathy for an unfairly smeared angel.

Reverend Monbiot takes on Charlie users

Monbiot has just got it wrong again and wrote a piece of puritan cant lambasting cocaine snorters for their immoral consumer habits. I don’t do drugs, but for some Scotch once in a while and the puff I very occasionally give to my pipe. I also have to say that I find most drug users boring. The war on drugs is something that really interests me and I know I am a chatter-box, and yet I can’t see the point of talking hours and hours about the last substance that got you high. But that’s my shot. The problem with our failed policies on drugs is how entangled they’re with the unhealthy rigid moral code of the Pilgrims and their ilk. I couldn’t resist and shot at one of George’s most idiotic comments.

Drug production should remain illegal, possession and use should be decriminalised (…) Every year cocaine causes some 20,000 deaths in Colombia and displaces several hundred thousand people from their homes. Children are blown up by landmines; indigenous people are enslaved; villagers are tortured and killed; rainforests are razed

That’s why production has to be legalized as well, George. All the problems you talk about happen where the drug is produced, not where it is consumed. In the latter, it has filled our jails up, raised violent crime and more often than not, corrupted the police. The stupid idea that drugs are bad for you is what has to be challenged. All drugs like cocaine, heroine and morphine can be used as pain killers. Marijuana can be used to treat nausea. They can also be used as recreation drugs, such as tobacco or alcohol are. The problem is abuse and addiction, not use. Legalize production and you’ll create huge revenues for local peasants, while giving a severe blow to the mafias that control the illegal traffic. Legalize consumption and tax it, and the NHS will be able to give every person in the country first class service.

Will addiction disappear? I don’t think so, and it even may go up, but it’s all the by-products of prohibition what is destroying our social fabric, not addiction. You can even be an addict and get your degree and have a career. My dad got his BA and PhD taking huge doses of amphetamines during exams. Then he stopped and never got addicted to them, but he could study 12 hours a day. He could buy them at the chemist’s. He didn’t need to mug an old lady to get money for his pills and the bribe for the police.

The law of the land

Inayat Bunglawala wrote an article on Cif supporting “the work shari’ah councils do” in Britain. His main argument to defend that jump back to the seventh century was that… 

The supremacy of English law has always been acknowledged by Beth Din courts that have existed and operated for decades in the UK. Never has the authority of English law been questioned in relation to the arbitration offered by the Jewish courts

If English law is what calls the tune, why do you need parallel courts (Beth Din or Shari’ah councils), then? Equal justice under law. That’s the principle upon which society has escaped from feudalism. In my view, the decisions of any of such courts have as much legal value as my Monopoly currency.

The portable Indian

 

I’ve just commented on a Cif article by Janet Soskice. She’s the reader in philosophical theology at the University of Cambridge and was talking about how she found God in the shower (I’m not kidding). As it is usual with those threads, it hit the hundred comments very quickly and, as it always happens, most of them were just tripe. There was one, however, that caught my attention, even though I’m still not sure whether it was for its being either yet another example of our contempt for Asian people or a sign of Western gullibility. A (I presume) girl whose monicker was bruceybaby wrote,

As Osho says: “In the Western tradition there’s the known and the unknown. One day the unknown will become known. In the Eastern tradition, there’s the known, the unknown and the unknowable”

What can I say? Osho was talking through his back side. It’s not as if skepticism and rationality are all Western and mysticism and credulity Eastern. In fact both exist everywhere, and more than anywhere else, in India. Osho knew that most Western “seekers” didn’t know that and had a romanticised idea about India’s spirituality… and he was bright enough to squeeze them a good buck.

There’s the known, there’s the unknown, and there’s the urge to know what is yet unknown. Pre-assuming the unknowable for any mysterious reason is just surrendering curiosity. It’s intellectually stultifying and I refuse to do that. I’m glad Eve decided to let herself be tempted to know by the serpent….

Go Simon!

Simon Singh is a wonderful science writer. A Briton of Punjabi descent, after he got his PhD in particle physics, he decided that he could make a better contribution to science if he wrote books that explained how scientific ideas were developed in a way that was “plain and easy to be understanded” (Preface to The Book of Common Prayer, 1549). Both his Fermat’s Last Theorem and his account of the history of the science of the Big Bang are more thrilling than a suspense novel and at the same time scientifically rigorous. In collaboration with Edzard Ernst, he has also written Trick or Treatment, a wonderful book on alternative medicine, in which they debunked most myths surrounding the efficacy of quackery like homeopathy, aromatherapy or reflexology. The book is also a very well written history of modern medicine and the development of methods like double blind trials… as well as of medicine’s own limitations. As a follow-up of that book, he wrote a comment piece in the Guardian in which he said that the British Chiropractic Association’s (BCA) claims that their treatments were efficient to treat diseases such as colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections or asthma, could be labelled as bogus. 

As it is usually the case with “alternative” quacks, the BCA decided to counter Simon’s comment piece using their legal muscle rather than the power of their evidence (Dr Franz Frizelle dixit). They have sued Simon under the ridiculous English libel laws, which reverse the burden of the proof and have very often been used by banks, politicians and quacks to intimidate critics, stifle free speech and silence dissent, all of them so much needed in any society that sees itself as democratic. 

Most of the times, people who are sued for libel in England tend to back off in order to avoid a costly judicial process that can lead to huge amounts of stress, unbearable pressure and ultimately bankruptcy. Simon, however, has bravely decided to fight back and face the risks. Supporting Simon is critical for those who either were born in Britain or have chosen Britain as home, like myself. But that’s just part of it. Simon’s fight is also the fight of everyone of us who believe in the beneficial effects of free scientific enquiry, unhindered debate, free speech and democracy… and who think that “alternative” is a meaningless concept and an oxymoron if it is paired with medicine.  

A worldwide campaign has been launched to support Simon against the prophets of unreason. You can find more information about this case and also sign a statement against BCA’s bullying here. The Facebook group For Simon Singh and Free Speech already has more than 5,300 members and counting. If you care about science, freedom and democracy, join in and help this collective effort to give the bullies a bloody nose.  

Go Simon!