Posts by Danyl Mclauchlan
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Well, I'd be curious to know why Satanists are inherintly more risible than other religious groups.
Because it's the only religion founded solely on the principle of upsetting your parents.
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DAWKINS: There could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.
COLLINS: That's God.
Mr Collins wants to be careful here. We don't currently know what the origins of the universe are and Mr Collins feels it can be attributed to his God. But 150 years ago we could have seen a similar conversation between a sceptic and a believer about the creation of humanity:
SCPETIC: We could owe our existence to something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.
BELIEVER: That's God.
Turns out it wasn't God - it was a process called natural evolution, and the Believer is made to look a right plonker. There is no current scientific explanation of the first cause, or source of existence - but we could be only an Einstein or a Darwin away from a rational, scientific explanation and if it's anything like the blind determinism of natural selection then it will be decidedly ungodlike.
My other problem with Mr Collins beliefs is that he tries to have it both ways. In his debate with Dawkins he describes his God in (deliberately?) vague terms, and his deity seems to be a classic God of the Gaps which exists in the spaces between our current understanding of the universe. On occasion he sounds so open and unspecific in his belief that he could almost pass for an agnostic.
When he's not debating a fellow Scientist, however, Collins describes himself as 'an evangelical christian'. (Since almost all Americans who describe themselves in those terms refute the theory of evolution and believe the world is only 6000 years old this probably isn't an appropriate term for Mr Collins, but it's one of his own choosing.)
As he states in his book 'The Language of God', Collins believes in a very specific God - the Christian God, who came to earth in the form of Jesus and who's deeds and nature are documented in the Bible, which is also divine and infallible, even though it's clearly error-prone gibberish.
Yet in the debate I don't even think Collins even mentions Jesus - whom he is supposed to worship as the creator of the universe, or the Bible which is supposedly a text written by God himself. It seems to me that Francis Collins lacks the courage of his convictions.
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Dawkins makes very sound points, but that doesn't get past the fact that he comes off as kind of a jerk. Many of his arguments have been made in a much more eloquent and less condescending way by Bertrand Russell.
(You've got to love that photo.)
Here's a famous passage by Russell on the inabilty of sceptics to disprove the existence of God.
Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
There's more here.
Russell went on to explain in great detail why he is not a Christian.
I am concerned with Christ as He appears in the Gospels, taking the Gospel narrative as it stands, and there one does find some things that do not seem to be very wise. For one thing, he certainly thought his second coming would occur in clouds of glory before the death of all the people who were living at that time. There are a great many texts that prove that. He says, for instance: "Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man be come." Then He says: "There are some standing here which shall not taste death till the Son of Man comes into His kingdom"; and there are a lot of places where it is quite clear that He believed His second coming would happen during the lifetime of many then living. That was the belief of his earlier followers, and it was the basis of a good deal of His moral teaching. When He said, "Take no thought for the morrow," and things of that sort, it was very largely because He thought the second coming was going to be very soon, and that all ordinary mundane affairs did not count. I have, as a matter of fact, known some Christians who did believe the second coming was imminent. I knew a parson who frightened his congregation terribly by telling them that the second coming was very imminent indeed, but they were much consoled when they found that he was planting trees in his garden. The early Christians really did believe it, and they did abstain from such things as planting trees in their gardens, because they did accept from Christ the belief that the second coming was imminent. In this respect clearly He was not so wise as some other people have been, and he certainly was not superlatively wise.
And there's more of that speech here.
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You didn't deny it was a 'major failure' when you were being snarky to Danielle. You wrote:
I have never heard or read anywhere that insufficient or incorrect maintenance had any bearing on the levee failures.
When the very report you very pompously and condescendingly cited:
Now I declare (on this subject, levees) , the case is most definitively closed! Danielle, now you can laugh out loud, again. At yourself.
found that the maintanence DID have a bearing on the failure.
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Other factors such as the CSX closure gate not functioning and the maintained condition of the levees were additional negative factors in the performance of the system.
Final Report of the Interagency Performance Evaluation Taskforce
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Other factors such as the CSX closure gate not functioning and <b>the maintained condition of the levees</b> were additional negative factors in the performance of the system.
- Final Report of the Interagency Performance Evaluation Taskforce
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I have every right to expect, infact I demand that the Govt do EVERYTHING in its power to keep me and my family safe.
Weren't you the guy sneering at the residents of New Orleans who failed to evacuate and complaining about how they expected the Government to take care of them instead of looking after themselves? I'm pretty sure you were.
In fact I had any civil rightds taken from me since 9/11.
I think you'll find you've lost your right to privacy - US intelligence organisations can listen to your phone conversations without any judicial oversight. You've also lost your right to a fair trial if you're suspected of terrorist related activities. You can be held without access to a lawyer and tried by a military tribunal in which evidence that you don't have access to can be used to convict you.
Our forebears didn't take Hilter seriously, or thought they could talk to him and come to some reasonable agreement. A big mistake that cost 60 million people their lives (total death toll of WWII). I hope we don't make the same mistake in our times.
You know you're deep in paranoid fantasy land when you start comparing bin Laden - head of an organisation that barely exists anymore, with most of it's members dead, hiding or in prison - with Adolf Hitler, who was head of one of the worlds largest most populous military industrial states.
It's also amusing to hear apologists for US foreign policy warn against 'the dangers of ignoring someone like Hitler'. Did anyone ignore him longer than the US did?
Islam is a religion of conquest and Osama wants to conquer the infidels. Ditto Armidinijad in Iran. There is no possible way to reason with those guys, they want our submission or our heads. All of this is not only completely justified as far as they are concerned, but commanded by the Koran. I wish it wasn't so, but unfortunately it is.
I think Islam is a crazy, evil insane religion.
I also think it's virtually no threat to the west at all, certainly in the existential sense that many Americans seem to think it is. (I'm constantly amused to hear Americans warn me that France - which is about 85% Catholic and virulently anti-muslim - is going to become a Sharia state 'within 'a few years'.)As I've said before, I don't think the US has much to fear from another attack from Al Qaeda. The goal of the 9/11 attacks was to provoke a US invasion of Afghanistan which was a 'diabolical trap' where Al Qaeda would destroy the American armies and bring an end to the US as a great power, the same way they bought down the Soviet Union (or, at least they convinced themselves they did).
Obviously that didn't work out too well for bin Laden and Zawahiri. Afghanistan was not occupied and control of the state was turned over to it's various warlords. Most of Al Qaedas members were captured or killed, or fled to Pakistan. They lost all of their training camps and redoubts. Funding from Bin Ladens old friends and relatives back in Saudi Arabia dried up.
Why does Al Qaeda want to bring down the US in the first place? It's not a question you hear discussed very often in the American media. President Bush insists that it's because 'they hate freedom'. Others talk about establishing 'a new Caliphate' but don't seem to know just how attacking the World Trade Center ties in to that. Many on the right feel it's because they want to convert everyone in the world to Islam and decided to start with the US.
The truth is more prosaic. Bin Laden and Zawahiri are exiles from their homelands - Saudi Arabia and Egypt respectively. Their goal is to overthrow the governments in those states and transform them into theocracies like Afghanistan under the Taliban.
Zawahiri has devoted his life - and spent much of it being tortured in Egyptian prisons - trying to overthrow the Mubarak regime. He's formed the reasonable conclusion that the secular dictatorship in Egypt will never fall so long as it's being bankrolled by the United States. Bin Laden has decided they same thing about Saudi Arabia. Thus their decision to attack 'the far enemy' in order to bring about the defeat of their real foes - the regimes in Cairo and Riyahd that Al Qaeda consider 'pharonic' - pre muslim.
So it's not surprising to me that that chattering classes in the US don't really discuss the harsh reality that it was financial and military support for the Monarchy in Saudi Arabia and the military dictatorship in Egypt that lay behind the rational for the 9/11 attacks.
Ayman al Zawahiri has read Paul Kennedys book on the decline of great powers and knows that empires like the US decline in relative terms due to excessive military expenditure and the damage that foreign military adventures cause to the domestic economy. He doubtless knew that the low grade commitment of NATO troops to Kabul was unlikely to bring down a power as mighty as the US.
So additional attacks were planned on the US mainland - supposedly they were going to be poison gas attacks against metropolitian subways. Zawahiri called them off when it became apparent that the US was going to invade and occupy Iraq. His goals - a large US occupying force in a hostile muslim country - had been achieved, although obviously not in a way he had anticipated.
So in that respect the US is pretty safe from additional terrorist attacks - but being safe because you're doing exactly what your enemy wants you to do isn't really a great tactical position.
So how does a democratic senate change any of this? It doesn't. Al Qaeda still want to overthrow Egypt and KSA, the US continues to support them and remains stuck in Iraq with no obvious solutions to it's doomed policies in the region.
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Why, regardless of their political persuasion, do so many residents of the USA persist in getting all riled up when others criticise their government?
'My husbands a loser, a gambler and a drunk.'
'He sure is.'
'How dare you say that? That's my husband you're talking about!'I think that sums up the attitude a lot of people have about foreign criticism of their native country and Americans are no exception.
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Privately US citizens are very generous in terms of aid donations (although the effectiveness of that aid is in dispute). But most government aid goes to three countries: Egypt, Israel and Columbia. Much of the aid is used to purchase munitions.
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Andrew Sullivan has an interesting perspective on the results.
The obvious result of last night's returns is the complete historical and geographical inversion of what was once the Republican Party. Nixon's cynical Southern strategy has now been played out to the nth degree - and, after a good period of opportunistic success, it has failed. All the states Lincoln fought against are now the bastions of his own party. And most of the rest of the country - especially the sane, common sense conservatives of the MidWest whence Lincoln himself hailed - have been forced into the Democratic camp. Formerly solid, freedom-loving Republican states, like California, are now overwhelmingly Democratic.
The GOP is now very much the party of Dixie; and the consequence of this election is that the Congressional leadership is even more Southern than it was before. The irony is that it was the moderate Republicans who were disproportionately punished electorally by the extremists in their midst. And so the party that lost because of its extremists now sees itself more dominated by the extremists. Nixon's cynical ploy - played beyond the extreme by Rove - has, in other words, come back to haunt and defeat his party in the end. Because it over-reached.