Taking the blame

The list of things which the Catholic Church has blamed for the pedophile proest scandal grows ever longer and more bizarre.

They have so far blamed:

- An increasingly liberal and secular society.

- Satan possessing priests.

- Jews.

- Homosexuality.

I've probably missed a couple: there have been so many.

The lastest one has to be the most bizarre, though. Apparently, the people who should be punished for these horrific crimes, committed by a minority of priests are.. all Christians.

Yes, the Pope, in his wisdom, is calling on Christians to do penance. From The Times article I linked to above:

[The Pope] added: “Now, under attack from the world, which talks to us of our sins, we can see that being able to do penance is a grace and we see how necessary it is to do penance and thus recognise what is wrong in our lives”. He said that “pardon and purification” were the keys to “renewal”, which was “the work of divine mercy”.

Or, to put it another way: "we committed various disgraceful crimes. Blaming others hasn't worked, so while we're not going to admit what we did, we're asking everyone to forgive us."

One thing is for sure: we know that the Vatican continue to absolutely rule out both celibecy and the persistent covering up of offenders and allowing them to re-offend.

Because those two things could not have contributed in the least. Obviously.

Israeli war crimminals

Recent reports suggest that the government is considering giving politicians the veto over international arrest warrants. I didn't blog about this at the time, but a recent prompting by Amnesty gave me a call to action. I got off my arse and emailed Gordon Brown, using the page here.

I don't think it worth rephrasing everything and repeating myself, so I'll just copy what I wrote to Mr Brown, as I think it explains my views quite well.

Dear Mr Brown,

I read with alarm that Mr Ivan Lewis and Mr David Miliband are suggesting that the UK should reconsider our laws concerning the bringing to trial of suspected war criminals.

If a British court using the British justice system has determined that an individual has enough evidence against them for there to be a case to answer, then there is a case to answer and a warrant should be issued. Not allowing the courts to even consider the case would be a worse travesty than ignoring their decisions.

The motivation for the proposed changes appear to be solely concerned with saving the Israeli government some embarrassment. I would suggest that the Israeli government would be better served by the simple expedient of not appointing to government positions any person who has outstanding evidence of war crimes against their name. At least until such time as they have answered the charges in full and have been acquitted after due process.

The Israeli government could save themselves further embarrassment by the equally simple and just measure of handing over investigations of allegations against their armed services to an independent body, preferably from a neutral country, and prosecuting to the full extent of the law wherever it is determined that crimes have taken place.

Britain has a simple choice: we can honour the law, or we can make it clear that we honour the law for everyone except our friends. This is not a just position to take, and should this country adopt it, our reputation would suffer considerable harm - and rightly so.

All ethical considerations aside: at a time when this country is trying to fight a war against terrorists who are claiming that we are complicit in the human rights violations perpetrated against the Palestinian people, is it really wise to announce a policy of disregarding war crimes which have been committed against Palestinians and only Palestinians?

The suggested changes make no sense: either ethically or politically.

The day that a suspected war criminal cannot be apprehended in this country will be the day that every single citizen of the UK will have to hang their head in shame.

Proposition 8

The Times reports that Mr Brian Brown, of the "National Organisation for Marriage" said of the recent court review of the notorious Proposition 8:

"Our founding fathers would be rolling over in their graves if they heard that the Constitution guarantees the right to redefine marriage. This is absurd."

This argument is spurious at best: the Founding Fathers made three references condoning slavery* in the original Constitution, and the original document didn't even contain the Bill Of Rights (the best known of these is the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of religion and of speech, among other things).

Thus the argument against changing what the Founding Fathers wrote is spurious, because it has clearly been amended already. No fewer than 27 times, in fact, including:

• The famous First Amendment (freedom of religion, speech, assembly, press and petition).
• The Seventh Amendment (guaranteeing trial by jury).
• The Eight Amendment (prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment).
• The Thirteenth (abolishing slavery).
• The followup Fifteenth Amendment (black people are now allowed to vote).
• The Eighteenth amendment (alcohol is abolished).
• The Nineteenth Amendment (women can now vote too).
• The Twenty-first Amendment (which repeals the Eighteenth).

So arguing that the Founding Fathers wrote something which cannot be amended suggests that Mr Brown is in favour of:

• Women losing the vote
• Black people losing the vote
• Slavery being re-instated
• Cruel and unusual punishments being reintroduced (hey! Guantanamo! Well, there's one he can chalk up, I suppose)
• Trial by jury being abolished
• The revoking of freedom of speech and all the other First Amendment rights

Hence, it is an obviously spurious argument to anyone who can think clearly. I suspect, therefore, that either Mr Brown is a fundamentalist, or that he hasn't actually read the Constitution.

What interests me, given my current theme, is this: who exactly is Mr Brown? A quick google for "National Organisation for Marriage" throws up a bunch of news stories, but no actual page owned by the organisation itself. Only a blog page (which could be anything and written by anybody) came up.

Is this organisation so poor it cannot afford a website? Why are its views being reported so widely if they can't even get into the google rankings? Who are they? Can anyone tell me? I can well believe that such an organisation can exist, especially in the USA. I just can't find it. How do the reporters find it?

* the references in the Constitution are:

Article 1 Section 2 - "the whole Number of free Persons... and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons" (i.e. slaves count as 3/5 of a person in the census)

Article 1 Section 9 - "The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight" (i.e. the Middle Passage is such an enjoyable cruise that it must be offered to the good folk of West Africa until at least 1808)

Article 4 Section 2 - "No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall... be discharged from such Service or Labour, But shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due." (i.e. escaped slaves must be returned even if they esacpe to a State in which slavery is illegal)

Wootton Bassett Islamist protests

A news story caught my attention this morning. Wooton Bassett is where the coffins of British soldiers arrive from Afghanistan, and the people there have been lining the streets on a regular basis to greet them, and paying their respects. Now an Islamist group called "Al-Muhajiroun" have announced that they are going to protest at the town to engage the British public on: "the real reasons why their soldiers are returning home in body bags and the real cost of the war".

The response has been an outcry from the residents of Wootton Bassett and the Wiltshire Islamic Cultural Centre, who condemned the sect as "deviant".

Al-Muhajiroun claim that 500 people would march, even though The Times reports their membership as in the region of 50.

Alan Johnson (the Home Secretary) said he would have no hesitation in supporting a ban on the march if the council requested one.

Those are the facts. What to make of them?

Firstly, I am utterly opposed to people being prevented from demonstrating. That is disgraceful, and Mr Johnson ought to be ashamed that he has aimed to score cheap political points when the more unpopular (but ethically sound) route would have been to apply the principles of Freedom of Speech. If the group are not inciting hatred and want a peaceful protest, then that is their right, no matter how offended other people may be.

The only reason I can imagine for Mr Johnson's reaction is that it would offend the sensibilities of the people of Wootton Bassett and of the people who support the soliders and their families.

So what? It hurts the sensibilities of the BNP when counter-protests are allowed. It hurts the sensibilities of Government Ministers and their supporters when political rallies are held against them. It hurt the sensibilities of US Servicemen and their families when the first protests against Vietnam were held: protests which helped to change public opinion.

I very much doubt as if this (planned) protest would change public opinion, but they should have as much right to protest against what they see as wrong (as long as they do so within the law): whatever I or anyone else thinks of their views.

Protests are there precisely because they hurt somebody's sensibilities: that's the whole point. They are traditionally held in places which will generate the most publicity.

So yes, the protests should be allowed to go ahead.

But 500 Islamists having a march, and being confronted by much larger number of counter protestors would make a very different story. Al-Muhajiroun know this, and so probably will not follow through.

Especially since those protestors could make the very valid point that the "real reason" that soldiers are returning dead (from Afghanistan at least) is because a foreign state was run as a theocracy based on a right-wing and evil religion* which sponsored and actively promoted terrorism, along with facilitating the mass murder of innocent civilians in other countries.

Counter-demonstrators could even wear bikinis (assuming the protest was held at a slightly warmer time), in order to ram home the point that in this country, women are free - while at the same time managing to offend everyone at the other protest. Now there's an image that the media would lap up. Maybe a counter protest should go ahead, even if the originally planned protest does not? I'll bring me camera.

But the most interesting point on this whole news cycle is this: that the media picked it up at all. Why did they pick it up? A tiny group of people who haven't had a successful protest (as far as I can see from a quick google) announce another planned protest which may or may not happen. What is newsworth about that? Yet they now have coverage in every major newspaper, and

a Facebook group of nearly half a million people discussing them and their views.

That's the kind of publicity which a (planned) protest involving 500 people can't get you unless you're an Islamist and therefore (by default) newsworthy. If the media ignored them, they'd melt away (or at least we'd never hear about them, because 50 people don't make that much noise). But at the moment, this group of 50 people have the headlines at their command.

Interestingly, moderate Mulsims got 62 words in the printed Times article. They were not mentioned at all in The Sun. Their views, clearly, are not nearly as interesting.

* I refer not to Islam in general, but the specific sect of Islam to which the Taleban (and apparently Al-Muhajiroun) belong.

On "bogus" and "bullshit"

Some posts in the sceptical world have got me thinking about the word "bogus, the word "bullshit", and the difference between them.

Mr Justice Eady, at the High Curt in London recently ruled that the word "bogus" meant something akin to deceiving people with malice aforethought. The word "bullshit", however, has this marvellous definition, courtesy of Harry Frankfurt:

"It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose."

I cannot help but wonder (especially in light of the BCA's infamous "plethora of evidence"): if Dr Singh had described the BCA's claims as "bullshit" as opposed to "bogus"... would they have been able to sue for libel quite so easily? And what meaning would the judge have attributed to the word?

Is it legally safe to describe the BCA as "bullshitters"? I await a professional opinion on the matter, but it is certainly an interesting point to ponder.

When logic fails

Logic is great. Really fab. But it cannot and should not be used in all areas of life.

A great example of this happened to me tonight: I have some friends (yes, really), and some of them are in a band. Their debut gig was this week, and it sold out in advance (they have some canny publicity behind them).

These guys are talented. And I mean really talented. They call themselves The Clockwork Quartet, and their music is available for free download. I got to see them live: and they played a style of gig which I think is very original and entertaining. I also got to hear their new tracks: two of which especially show great promise (the Magician's story and the tale of the General's wife).

Given that I attended the debut gig of a band so chock-full of talent, logic dictated a specific course of action. The programmes were on sale for £10, and this included a limited-edition CD of their music. Bargain! So I bought two copies. One copy I intended as a keepsake, and the other I had the band members sign (a tiresome task which I asked a friend to perform for me whilst I socialised and admired younger women wearing corsets). That's going to be part of my pension fund*, I thought, if any of them ever get famous (and I firmly believe that the odds are in my favour here).

So far, so logical. But one of the band members left a personal message for me when he signed: an in-joke between us involving naked nymphs and their stubborn unavailability to myself. Don't ask.

Anyway, I realised afterwards that no matter what logic (and large wads of cash) suggest, I would find it almost impossible to part with that particular memento. So I'll have to flog the unsigned copy at auction in twenty years, for much less moolah.

Clearly, then, logic has its time and its place. It's not always applicable, and what an awful world we would live in if it was.

Therefore, I shall leave the signed version to my kids, who can flog it for as much as they want. They won't care: they weren't there, and if they know anyone who was, it'll be an elderly person who they call "Uncle", and who smells funny. I think that this is a very logical solution.

* The "signed programme" would have been be part of my pension fund, not "younger women wearing corsets". This fact annoys me almost as much as my consistently missing the Naked Nymph Parties.

The Glenn Beck rape and murder allegations

Sometimes.. just sometimes, I think that schadenfreude is justified. Case in point: Glenn Beck. For those who don't know, Glenn Beck is a presenter on Fox News. He treats evidence and logic as equally inconvenient, and he doesn't seem to bother much with either. Instead, he makes impassioned rants which don't make a lot of sense, and which are filled with vitriol and rhetoric.

Mr Beck recently claimed that President Obama is racist. Which is slightly ironic, since (by his own definition of racism), Glenn Beck is racist himself.

Not content with this, Mr Beck recently asked a Muslim Congressman to prove that he's not working with the enemies of the USA. This is typical of Beck's style: he abandons logic and uses the obvious logical fallacy of asking somebody to prove that a baseless claim (made by Beck himself) is wrong.

But of course this will be lost on many of Mr Beck's viewers, who probably aren't au fait with the finer details of logical arguments. What they may hear is that the Muslim guy cannot disprove that he's not their enemy and assume that there may be something to the (utterly unfounded) allegation.

Thus I found it nicely ironic when I heard of the meme which is asking Glenn Beck to prove that he did not rape and murder a young girl in 1990.

Naturally Mr Beck cannot disprove the ludicrous accusations, because he cannot prove a negative. This minor point of logic is, however, likely to be missed by many of Glenn Beck's viewers, who are not au fait with the finer details of logical arguments.

So that's not the story which many people will hear. Now people who don't know the source of the meme are starting to ask if Mr Beck has anything to hide.

To see somebody who abuses logic to the degree that Mr Beck abuses logic being hoist with his very own logical petard is irresistibly delicious.

Update: This blog has been sighted by didglennbeckrapeandmurderayounggirlin1990.com :)

UPDATE: further links.

A blog following the Glenn Beck allegations

The lawyer acting for the website owner gets interviewed

Funny pictures:

quiz show

Einstein

Glenn Beck Rape Graph

Glenn Beck police report for rape

Einstein again

Google Glenn Beck rape murder for many, many more...