Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.
—Bertrand Russell
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The next time I tell you that a colleague of ours is dying, and you’re tempted to say again that you can turn that into good news by saying that he’s going to be an angel, just take a page from Clint Eastwood and SHUT YOUR FACE instead. ‘K?
Via Jesus and Mo.
This is in reference to OIC urges measures against Islamophobia
The Organization of the Islamic Conference has called on the West to take serious measures to prevent offensive acts against Muslims.
“Mere condemnation or distancing from the acts of the perpetrators of Islamophobia will not resolve the issue, as long as they remain free to carry on with their campaign of incitement and provocation on the plea of freedom of expression,” OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu said, in a speech at a conference in Kuala Lumpur.
Up yours. Here’s my take: “Mere condemnation or distancing from the acts of the perpetrators of Islamist terrorism will not resolve the issue, as long as they remain free to carry on with their campaign of incitement, provocation, acts of violence, and murder on the plea of freedom of expression.”
Looks like I’m not the only one with that take: Newspaper editors worried about UN religious censorship
The World Association of Newspapers and the World Editors Forum have condemned what they say are the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council’s repeated efforts to undermine freedom of expression in the name of protecting religious sensibilities.
“WAN reminds the UN that the council’s proper role is to defend freedom of expression and not to support the censorship of opinion at the request of autocracies,” the WAN Board said in a resolution issued during the World Newspaper Congress and World Editors Forum. The 1 to 4 June meetings of the world’s newspapers and editors were held in Gothenburg.
In its resolution condemning actions by the UN Human Rights Council, WAN cited the council’s approval of an amendment proposed by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, requiring the council’s investigator to “report on instances where the abuse of the right to freedom of expression constitutes an act of racial or religious discrimination”.
Short version: The Islamists play a game of blaming the victim—or scaring or killing them to keep them out of court. Islam is not a religion of peace, it’s a heavy artillery in the hands of misogynistic troglodytes set on world domination.
...if true.
Woman Wakes Up After Family Says Goodbye, Tubes Pulled
A West Virginia woman is at the Cleveland Clinic after walking the line between life and death.
Doctors are calling Val Thomas a medical miracle. They said they can’t explain how she is alive.
They said Thomas suffered two heart attacks and had no brain waves for more than 17 hours. At about 1:30 a.m. Saturday, her heart stopped and she had no pulse. A respiratory machine kept her breathing and rigor mortis had set in, doctors said.
“Her skin had already started to harden and her fingers curled. Death had set in,” said son Jim Thomas.
So far, so mysterious.
They rushed her to a West Virginia hospital. Doctors put Thomas on a special machine which induces hypothermia. The treatment involves lowering the body temperature for up to 24 hours before warming a patient up.
And here’s the clue. In way northern climates, there’s a saying about people who drown in icy water: You’re not dead unless you’re warm and dead.
There was another case of a young woman being revived after a ridiculously long time and eventually making an almost full recovery.
Her family said goodbye and doctors removed all the tubes.
However, Thomas was kept on a ventilator a little while longer as an organ donor issue was discussed.
Ten minutes later the woman woke up and started talking.
That’s perhaps a bit unusual. The article concludes with the expected references to god, but whatever.
Phone calls database considered
Ministers are to consider plans for a database of electronic information holding details of every phone call and e-mail sent in the UK, it has emerged.
And the first thing these wankers would do is cut plaintext copies of the database to CD and lose it in the mail.
A Home Office spokesman said the data was a “crucial tool” for protecting national security and preventing crime.
Bullshit. Old-fashioned police work (which includes the trust of the population) and a few helpful tips already does the trick.
A Home Office spokesman said: “The Communications Data Bill will help ensure that crucial capabilities in the use of communications data for counter-terrorism and investigation of crime continue to be available.
“These powers will continue to be subject to strict safeguards to ensure the right balance between privacy and protecting the public.”
The only way to preserve the right balance is to scrap such plans.
Does Ratzinger ever miss an opportunity to stick his foot in his mouth?
Pope speaks of duty to convert others to the faith
Christians have this self-imposed “duty” to proselytize; so far, so good.
The Roman Catholic Church has the inalienable right and duty to convert any person to Christianity, Pope Benedict XVI said Saturday.
I don’t think so. The RCC has as much rights as any multi-national corporation and like any such entity, they have a desire to monopolize the market. This is very different from a right, though, and forget about the ‘inalienable’ bit. That’s RCC speak for “we’ll sulk if somebody takes our toys away and sends us to our room.”
The appeal for the conversion of “all nations,” attributed to Jesus Christ in the Gospels, remains “an obligatory mandate for the entire Church and for every believer in Christ,” the pontiff said.
We’re already coming full circle. It’s a right because it’s a mandate given by an alleged entity whose existence believers must dogmatically accept. In other words, they’re confusing the urge of self-preservation with a right.
“This apostolic commitment is both a duty and an inalienable right, the very expression of religious freedom with its moral, social and political dimensions,” he said.
Religious freedom—an oxymoron if there ever was one.
Like his predecessors, Pope Benedict is keen to promote missionary zeal among Catholics, most of whom live in a world of religious pluralism and other proselytising faiths such as Islam.
It’s getting warmer. Warmer.
The note highlighted the need for respect and a spirit of cooperation in dialogue with other Christians, and rejected past accusations of proselytising that have been levelled against it by the Russian Orthodox Church.
Relations between the Orthodox Church and the Holy See have been thorny, with the Moscow Patriarchate accusing the Vatican of proselytising in traditionally Orthodox lands following the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Tensions were further aggravated in 2002, after the Vatican established four permanent dioceses in Russia.
Spirit of cooperation: The RCC asking other faiths to look away while they poach tithe payers.
Via Cectic.
Click to embiggen
Just ask Army Spc. Jeremy Hall about foxholes...
Maybe the reason the misperception persists that there are no atheists in foxholes is that nonbelievers must either shut up about their views or be hounded out of the military.
I haven’t seen the U.S. military from the inside, but it wouldn’t surprise me if such were the case.
Just ask Army Spc. Jeremy Hall, who is making a splash in the news because of the way his atheism was attacked by superiors and fellow soldiers while he was risking his life in service to his country.
Hall, 23, served two combat tours in Iraq, winning the Combat Action Badge. But he’s now stationed at Fort Riley, Kan., having been returned stateside early because the Army couldn’t ensure his safety.
There is something deeply amiss when we send soldiers on a mission to engender peaceful coexistence between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, yet our military doesn’t seem able to offer religious tolerance to its own.
Technically, the American military is there to protect Bush’s legacy (if you believe McClellan) or spoils of war (if you believe anybody but a neocon speaking on record).
Hall recounts the events that led to his marginalization in a federal lawsuit he filed in March in Kansas. Hall is joined by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a group devoted to assisting members of the military who object to the pervasive and coercive Christian proselytizing in our armed forces.
Hall’s atheism became an issue soon after it became known. On Thanksgiving 2006 while stationed outside Tikrit, Hall politely declined to join in a Christian prayer before the holiday meal. The result was a dressing down by a staff sergeant who told him that as an atheist he needed to sit somewhere else.
In another episode, after his gun turret took a bullet that almost found an opening, the first thing a superior wanted to know was whether Hall believed in Jesus now, not whether he was okay.
Then, in July, while still in Iraq, Hall organized a meeting of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers. According to Hall, after things began, Maj. Freddy Welborn disrupted the meeting with threats saying he might bring charges against Hall for conduct detrimental to good order and discipline, and that Hall was disgracing the Constitution. (Err, I think the major has that backward.) Welborn has denied the allegations, but the New York Times reports that another soldier at the meeting said that Hall’s account was accurate.
Hall claims that he was denied a promotion in part because he wouldn’t be able to “pray with his troops.” And of course he was returned from overseas due to physical threats from fellow soldiers and superiors. Things became so bad that he was assigned a full-time bodyguard.
This is nothing new to Mikey Weinstein, founder of MRFF and a former Air Force judge advocate general who also served in the Reagan administration. Weinstein says that he has collected nearly 8,000 complaints, mostly from Christian members of the military tired of being force-fed a narrow brand of evangelical fundamentalism.
Weinstein, who co-wrote the book With God on Our Side: One Man’s War Against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military, has documented how the ranks of our military have been infiltrated by members of the Officers’ Christian Fellowship and other similar organizations. On its Web site, the OCF makes no secret of its mission which is to “raise up a godly military” by enlisting “ambassadors for Christ in uniform.”
Weinstein says recruitment is easy in a strict command-subordinate military where the implied message is, if you don’t pray the right way, your career might stall.
Beyond the mincemeat being made of church-state separation and religious liberty, it seems particularly combustible for our armed forces to be combining “end-times” Christian theology with military might. That’s no way to placate Muslim populations around the world.
But there’s no will for change. The military’s virulent religious intolerance could be eradicated tomorrow with swift sanctions against transgressors. Instead, it’s winked at and those caught proselytizing suffer no consequence. It appears that brave men like Hall, who simply wish to follow the dictates of their own conscience, will be needing bodyguards for a long time to come.
Well, another reason to despise organized religion.
Losing Our Spines to Save Our Necks
Good ones:
Of course, there were immediate calls for a boycott of Dutch products throughout the Muslim world. In response, Dutch corporations placed ads in countries like Indonesia, denouncing the film in self-defense. Several Muslim countries blocked YouTube and other video-sharing sites in an effort to keep Wilders’ blasphemy from penetrating the minds of their citizens. There have also been isolated protests and attacks on embassies, and ubiquitous demands for Wilders’ murder. In Afghanistan, women in burqas could be seen burning the Dutch flag; the Taliban carried out at least two revenge attacks on Dutch troops, resulting in five Dutch casualties; and security concerns have caused the Netherlands to close its embassy in Kabul. It must be said, however, that nothing has yet occurred to rival the ferocious response to the Danish cartoons.
A muted response, all things considered.
Wilders, like Westergaard and the other Danish cartoonists, has been widely vilified for “seeking to inflame” the Muslim community. Even if this had been his intention, this criticism represents an almost supernatural coincidence of moral blindness and political imprudence. The point is not (and will never be) that some free person spoke, or wrote, or illustrated in such a manner as to inflame the Muslim community. The point is that only the Muslim community is combustible in this way. The controversy over Fitna, like all such controversies, renders one fact about our world especially salient: Muslims appear to be far more concerned about perceived slights to their religion than about the atrocities committed daily in its name. Our accommodation of this psychopathic skewing of priorities has, more and more, taken the form of craven and blinkered acquiescence.
There is an uncanny irony here that many have noticed. The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn’t, we will kill you. Of course, the truth is often more nuanced, but this is about as nuanced as it ever gets: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn’t, we peaceful Muslims cannot be held responsible for what our less peaceful brothers and sisters do. When they burn your embassies or kidnap and slaughter your journalists, know that we will hold you primarily responsible and will spend the bulk of our energies criticizing you for “racism” and “Islamophobia.”
Our capitulations in the face of these threats have had what is often called “a chilling effect” on our exercise of free speech.
Emphasis added.
I could list other examples of encounters with editors and publishers, as can many writers, all illustrating a single fact: While it remains taboo to criticize religious faith in general, it is considered especially unwise to criticize Islam. Only Muslims hound and hunt and murder their apostates, infidels, and critics in the 21st century. There are, to be sure, reasons why this is so. Some of these reasons have to do with accidents of history and geopolitics, but others can be directly traced to doctrines sanctifying violence which are unique to Islam.
The lesson we should draw from the Fitna controversy is that we need more criticism of Islam, not less. Let it come down in such torrents that not even the most deluded Islamist could conceive of containing it. As Ibn Warraq, author of the revelatory Why I Am Not a Muslim, said in response to recent events:
It is perverse for the western media to lament the lack of an Islamic reformation and willfully ignore works such as Wilders’ film, Fitna. How do they think reformation will come about if not with criticism? There is no such right as ‘the right not to be offended; indeed, I am deeply offended by the contents of the Koran, with its overt hatred of Christians, Jews, apostates, non-believers, homosexuals but cannot demand its suppression.
It is time we recognized that those who claim the “right not to be offended” have also announced their hatred of civil society.
I concluded the server move. It wasn’t what I’d call an auspicious beginning with the new host, but I can always move again or throw in the towel and give my custom to Engine Hosting.
My old server host, LayeredTech, was okay as far as things went, but they hiked their prices by 8% about ten months ago. Fine, and most customers did get the remote reboot cards that all customers were promised as part of the deal. Now they’ve announced a 28% price hike across the board, which is outrageous. They’ve recently secured a decent amount of funding and have bought a competitor. There is some consensus on their forums that this rate hike is designed to make the customers pay for the acquisition and I’m inclined to agree with the point of view that LT has grown to a size where they want to shed small and low-margin customers and are going after bigger fish. More precisely, there is some supporting evidence that they are pushing small-volume customers away from low-end dedicated servers and towards their grid VPS offering. Thanks, but no thanks.
The long and short of it is this: Do not consider LayeredTech unless you can afford frequent and substantial rate hikes.
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