Year: 2010

  • Appiah on honour at Five Books

    His first choice is In the Name of Honor by Mukhtar Mai.

  • Fatwa train

    Why is it the Telegraph that mentions such things? Where are the papers to the left of the Telegraph?

    Nick Cohen is on the case.

    Jon Stewart’s Rally for Sanity yesterday featured Yusuf Islam aka Cat Stevens singing “Peace Train”. Islam/Stevens previously showed his commitment to peace and sanity by saying that death was the appropriate punishment for Salman Rushdie’s “blasphemy”.

    I’m hoping that Rushdie will drop a word to Stewart and Colbert and that they will say something – like perhaps that they didn’t realize that about Islam/Stevens and have no desire whatsoever to endorse fatwas on heretics or blasphemers or apostates.

  • Salman Rushdie on Yusuf Islam

    What he said to the New York Times in 1989.

  • What was Yusuf Islam doing at the Sanity rally?

    He  previously showed his commitment to peace and sanity by saying that death was the appropriate punishment for Salman Rushdie’s “blasphemy.”

  • BJP protesters besiege Arundhati Roy

    Around 150 BJP members surrounded her house chanting slogans. Roy supports independence for Kashmir, which the BJP opposes.

  • PSI research: What do these numbers really mean?

    The problem is not the results but how they are being interpreted.

  • New evidence for precognition?

    “Rehearsing a set of words makes them easier to recall in the future, but what if the rehearsal occurs after the recall?”

  • Blasphemy law in Italy

    What kind of all-powerful Deity needs secular law enforcement to protect it from the jests of a few comedians and other riffraff?

  • How Berlusconi disagrees with a female politician

    By telling her she’s old and ugly. Italian women “protest against this cretinisation of women, of democracy, of politics itself.”

  • What climate change needs is a New Narrative

    People who make a living painstakingly creating stories from ideas tend to overvalue the importance of narrative.

  • Hitchens on submitting to the needle in the arm

    He thinks of the obituaries he’d like to write, listing Robert Mugabe. Joseph Ratzinger. Henry Kissinger.

  • Terrorists inspired by Fox News and Glen Beck

    The campaign coordinator for Rand Paul who stepped on the head of a female protester is not an isolated example.

  • Discovery Institute does a bait and switch

    It was “the Vibrant Dance of Faith and Science,” but then it became War.

  • Sympathy for the doctrine

    The Freedom House report on blasphemy laws gets it right.

    [A]n examination of the application of blasphemy laws indicates that they typically give rise to the violation, not the protection, of fundamental human rights.

    …

     
    By definition, these laws, which are designed to protect religious institutions, doctrines, figures, and concepts—in other words, nonhuman entities and ideas—from insult or offense, impose undue restrictions on freedom of expression.
    Precisely. Institutions (including corporations), doctrines, figures and concepts do not need protection from insult or offense, and they cannot be given such protection without restricting freedom of expression. Since they do not need the protection, it is a bad and stupid idea to restrict freedom of expression in order to give it to them. Institutions, doctrines, figures, and concepts are just the sorts of things that people need to be able to discuss freely in order to choose among them. A doctrine that can’t be dissed is a doctrine that has way too much power.

  • Franco Frattini

    As you saw if you keep up with the News here, Marc Alan Di Martino helpfully translated some theocratic bullying from Italy’s Foreign Minister Franco Frattini in the Vatican’s house rag the Osservatore Romano.

    Christians also must be able to forge an agreement with Muslims on how to fight those aspects which, like all extremisms, threaten society. I refer to atheism, materialism and relativism. Christians, Muslims and Jews can work together to reach this common objective. I believe it’s time for a new humanism in order to struggle against these perverse phenomena, because only the centrality of the human being is an antidote to fanaticism and intolerance.

    Very papal, isn’t it. Also stupid and deceitful – the whole point of theocracy is that it is not about “the centrality of the human being,” it’s about the centrality of that thing way way above the human being: good old God.

    Frattini has form when it comes to theocratic bullying. He was on the job during the Motoons fuss (when he was justice commissioner for the EU), telling the European media to “self-regulate.”

    Frattini is appealing for the European media to agree to “self-regulate”. “The press will give the Muslim world the message: we are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression, we can and we are ready to self-regulate that right,” he said.

    Yet that man has the gall to talk about theism as giving a rat’s ass about the “centrality of the human being.”

  • Jesus and Mo blow a kiss to Franco Frattini

    The guy who’s whipping up the monotheists to make war on atheism.

  • Seriously they want me to wear purple

    The loveliness of the religious mind.

    Seriously they want me to wear purple because five queers committed suicide. The only way im wearin it for them is if they all commit suicide. I cant believe the people of this world have gotten this stupid. We are honoring the fact that they sinned and killed therselves because of their sin. REALLY PEOPLE

    Ooh ick – who’s that – some high school kid, right?

    No, it’s a school board member at Midland School District in Arkansas. It’s a grown-up male adult mature citizen over the age of 16.

    being a fag doesnt give you the right to ruin the rest of our lives. If you get easily offended by being called a fag then dont tell anyone you are a fag. Keep that shit to yourself. I dont care how people decide to live their lives. They dont bother me if they keep it to thereselves. It pisses me off though that we make a special purple fag day for them. I like that fags cant procreate. I also enjoy the fact that they often give each other aids and die. If you arent against it, you might as well be for it.

    An adult, and a school board member. He’s a member of a school board. He plays a role in education.

    I would disown my kids if they were gay. They will not be welcome at my home or in my vicinity. I will absolutely run them off. Of course my kids will know better. My kids will have solid christian beliefs. See it infects everyone.

    And a Christian.

    However, not everyone disagreed with McCance’s comments, which he had defended on his page by citing his religious beliefs.

    Gays and lesbians are “thinking they’re all right, and [God is] going to let them think that and go to hell for believing what they’re doing is right,” pastor Harry Craig, of Pleasant Plains Full Gospel Church, told CNN Little Rock affiliate KARK.

    God is love; God is compassion; what would Jesus do.

  • More on Arkansas’s fragrant Clint McCance

    “being a fag doesnt give you the right to ruin the rest of our lives. If you get easily offended by being called a fag then dont tell anyone you are a fag.”

  • Arkansas school board member to resign over FB post

    He wrote that he wanted gay people to commit suicide, used the terms “queer” and “fag” repeatedly, rejoiced “that [gay people] give each other AIDS and die.”

  • Hari on Naipaul on African belief in spirits

    Once you cede power to an invisible force, you cede power to other human beings who can then claim to use those invisible forces against you.