The Local writes, “Assange’s application was submitted shortly before rape and molestation allegations against him by two Swedish women were made public.”
Perhaps the idea of making Sweden his new base is not that attractive anymore?
I think someone wants to ruin Barack Obama’s peace talks.
It’s a real slap in Brown’s face Blair delivers in his autobiography. Not that anyone would say Blair is wrong, nor would any sensible person disagree with him when he urges the Labour Party not to shift to the left. Dear God, spare us the socialist madness of pre-“New Labour” Labour! Europe has enough of it from France.
Apple today announced that it drops the CD logo in iTunes because it no longer represents the main source of music.
It was eight years ago I bought a CD last. I buy all my music on iTunes Store. So, in my opinion, Apple is right on. The CD belongs in a museum.
The new iTunes 10 is out now.
I just want to say that I love “Hung”, the TV series about a well-endowed male prostitute in Detroit. I learned tonight that it now airs on Swedish state television. I encourage everyone to watch it. The greatness of the show is not so much the acting or the plot as the concept—it’s all about one man’s big penis.
I wonder when there will be show about a woman with a very small vagina who gives men that dream orgasm they always sought. Maybe they could add such a character to “Hung”? Nah, I guess that would be considered sexist and inappropriate since it objectifies women in a sexual way.
Stephen Hawking talks about the beginning of the world as we know it. He says, “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
His idea is not new. The theory of nothingness being unstable is a version of his theory of gravity. The religious philosopher will of course say that gravity is that first cause that Thomas Aquinas and other advocates of the cosmological argument hold as a proof of God’s existence.
Cartoon found here.
If you want to get married to your same-sex partner on a flight from Stockholm to New York on 6 December, this is something for you.
According to the Guardian, both parties seem to agree that it’s possible.
Update: Jerusalem Post has more here.
Isn’t it about time someone in the Palestinian leadership told Hassan Nasrallah to fuck off? The bloodthirsty terrorist organisation he heads has nothing to do with any future Palestine. It lives off war and hatred. Lebanon is a free country—or rather, it could be had it not been for the Iran-controlled Hezbollah fighters that occupies southern half of the country.
So, it comes as no surprise that Nasrallah dismisses a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.
When asked by the New York Times if he wrote his autobiography for money, Christopher Hitchens answered, “Of course, I do everything for money. Dr Johnson is correct when he says that only a fool writes for anything but money. It would be useful to keep a diary, but I don’t like writing unpaid. I don’t like writing checks without getting paid.”
It’s refreshing with a skilled writer who doesn’t try to act as if money doesn’t matter. Of course it does—it’s stupidity to think that writers should work for free. Sadly, far too many writers do and the publishers know it. That is why so many newspapers and magazines are filled with crap articles. You get what you pay for.
If I had my way, I would not do anything for free. My dream would be a life of non-stop prostitution. But my ugly mug made that life impossible, so now I have to convince people I’m worth getting paid for the writing I do.
(By the way, go nuts on the Google advertisement in the sidebar. I’m not doing this blogging for nothing.)
Sweden is full of mad communists. Here is one who posted a comment—seen in picture above—on a far-left blog (my translation):
As long as liberals refuse to take responsibility for the ethnically motivated mass murder in AIDS their defence of market economy resulted in, they have no right to demonise a contemporary socialism that neither defends nor wishes to repeat the crimes of the Stalinist regime. A catastrophe is unfolding before our eyes as a result of liberal politics. Put your own house in order—repent. Then you are worthy to take part in the discussion.
Like the mad conservatives in America, they hate everything liberal and use every trick in the book to blame liberalism for everything. Apparently, freedom causes racism and AIDS. This is something anti-liberals on the right and the left can agree on. No evidence is presented, though. It’s true because they say it is.
Update: By the way, I wonder how many bureaucrats it would take a command economy to develop medicine to successfully combat AIDS? In a socialist system, people are not paid in relation to what they do or invent. People’s abilities and efforts are the property of the state, and everybody is treated “equally” regardless. In theory, at least. The Soviet system developed terrorism against its citizens to motivate them to work, but what would the “new socialism” do to get results?
I’m jealous of the new owner. Ben Cohen is fab.
I find this interesting:
The string theorists who came up with the term have never agreed on exactly what the “M” stands for, although the words “membrane,” “matrix,” “mystery” and “magic” have all been floated as possibilities. My favorite explanation is that M-theory is the “mother of all theories.”
Hm.
The latest opinion poll looks good. But there is another two weeks to go before the general election. Who knows, maybe we wake up on 20 September and find the first ever communist in government and a bunch of racist Sweden Democrats in parliament. A scary thought.
I spent the day campaigning for the Moderate Party at Jägersro, a large horse-racing track in Malmö. It’s now two weeks to go to Sweden’s general election.
Here are a few pictures I snapped with my iPhone during the day.
The islanders are angry because alleged Mossad agents, who used stolen Irish passports, shot a Hamas terrorist dead in Dubai. Ireland is the sole member state to object to the data transfer plan, which would have recognised Israel’s data protection regime as equivalent to that in the European Union.
The national guidelines are crystal clear. Boys whose parents’ religion subscribes circumcision have the right to have the procedure done by a professional in a safe environment. But doctors in several counties refuse to comply.
“Our doctors don’t think it’s right to prioritise these operations ahead of others who need care,” says Marie-Louise Forsberg Fransson, chair of the Örebro County Council Board.
So instead, Örebro County tells the parents to travel to more liberal counties, which many of them cannot do and therefore seek an illegal procedure where the boy is at great risk. If the boys are then injured and in serious pain, the doctors must treat them—and the xenophobes will use the tragedy in their propaganda against Jews and Muslims!
This is absurd. It’s the abortion debate all over again. People get hurt because lawmakers and professionals care more about their own ethics than the people who need their help. Millions of women are unnecessarily wounded in countries where safe abortions are illegal, and now many Swedish boys risk having to suffer from illegal circumcisions because safe and legal ones are not available where they live.
What people need to understand is that religion is a very strong force. It is quite possible that Islam and Judaism will at one point stop the practice of circumcision, but we are not there yet. In fact, we are not even close. It is a far too important tradition to give up easily.
Doctors, lawmakers, and secularists can make their case against circumcision all they want, but reality is that they stand no chance against God and tradition in most families that hold circumcision sacred.
One day the anti-circumcision crowd might win the argument, but until then the procedure should be safe, legal, and available for all boys.
The poor boy likes the attention.
Dan Savage gives the background:
“I get a thrill out of being seen,” writes the boy in the video. “When I am horny, I look at that YouTube I posted, see view count, and get hard. In fact because of it I can’t really wear my purple boxers now.”
Could helping the lad count as a mitzvah? I will take it up with God at some point.
Aryeh Cohen asks the question.
In the debate about Israel and the Jewish State, far to many find it necessary to slander Muslims. It is true that Hamas and many of the other terrorist groups are Islamists and use religious rhetoric to legitimise the killing of Jews, but it is not necessary for Jews to give them right by making Israel a conflict between Islam and Judaism.
An already big government is about to become obese.
That’s the latest Catholic argument against marriage equality. They are getting desperate.
Here’s why.
The reason for this bizarre recommendation is the party’s socialist idea that family life is a matter for the political elite. When a heterosexual couple have a child—there are no gay people in communist utopia—the woman tend to stay at home as long as the child is breastfed. This cannot be tolerated in a socialist society, so last night, Lars Ohly, leader of the Communist Party, suggested on television that mothers of newborns pump their breast. It is said that society will be fairer and more equal if men and women ignore the biological differences between the sexes.
I was busy writing an essay all day yesterday, and tonight it’s the Jewish New Year. I’m celebrating with friends in Copenhagen.
In case I will not have the time to do it later, I now wish all my Jewish friends shanah tovah, a happy new year. I hope 5771 will be a good year for all of you.
The public burning of the Koran scheduled for Saturday has been called off.
They are both professional bigots, but I guess Michael Savage is a safer bet at success for a homophobia event. Ms Coulter likes to talk about faggots, but what is that compared to Mr Savage preaching that gay men are pigs who deserve to die of AIDS. The latter is more in tune with the Nazi-style Christianity World Net Daily advocates.
“About five times as many young Americans died of AIDS as died in Vietnam, in roughly the same time period,” Andrew Sullivan writes in a recent blog entry.
Meanwhile, a new study from France suggests that rates of HIV are 200 times higher in French gay and bisexual men than in heterosexuals. And a new study from Belgium says that “a considerable number” of new HIV infections occur as a result of high-risk sexual contact between young, white gay men.
The reason for the ever-higher percentage of HIV-positive people is that the infection is no longer lethal as modern treatment prevents AIDS. This is a good thing. Worse is that more young people get infected.
For some time now, I have begun to think that part of problem is that so much information is about condoms, which has left no room for other ways of reducing the risks. It has been assumed that gay men—unlike straight men—should willingly give up the pleasures of unprotected sex had they only been informed enough. This never worked for heterosexual men and their risk of unplanned fatherhood. Everyone seems to accept that a significant number of straight men have unprotected sex with many women because they don’t want to give up the better feeling of sex without a condom. For some reason, gay men were expected to be different.
The challenge of the future is how to develop as way to reduce the risk of catching HIV without having to give up great sex.
This small town in West Virginia has the perfect name for a gay ghetto.
The pastor in a tiny Florida congregation who said he would burn the Koran on 11 September announced yesterday that he would not go ahead with his plans. Now he says that he has not yet decided what to do.
In a free society, we are allowed to burn any book we want, but it is madness nonetheless to intentionally provoke people by burning their holy scriptures. The pastor in Florida is obviously completely mad no matter what he decides to do with the Koran.
This short video of a naked man and his dog is funny.
Danish People’s Party, a xenophobic Danish political party, has decided to campaign for the racist Sweden Democrats. The party wants to “experience the conditions of a Sweden election and to talk about democracy and freedom of speech”. Freedom of speech should be understood as voicing Islamophobia and homophobia in public.
Nazis are like communists—they never learn from history.
According to an opinion poll by gay newspaper QX, Sweden’s gay community would pick a socialist government. However, the most popular party is the centre-right Moderate Party.
To criticise identity politics has become something of trend in Swedish politics. Equality is relabelled as “special rights”. No one seems to realise that Sweden has always practiced a form of identity politics. The difference now is that you no longer have to be white, straight, Christian, and male to succeed.
Seen in the picture are six of Sweden’s prime ministers from the past century. They, and all other PMs, share the same identity and came from the same religious and ethnically background. As far as we know, they are all male and heterosexual.
The “problem” with identity politics arose when non-white, female, and gay people become government ministers.
When asked whether or not the Cuban economic model is still worth exporting, Fidel Castro acknowledges that it doesn’t even work for Cuba.
It took sixty year for him to realise that communism doesn’t work.
I just watched these pictures of New York on 11 September 2001 while listening to Sarah McLachlan’s “Answer”. A powerful mix.
A local politician representing the racist Sweden Democrats was attacked and tortured in his flat in central Malmö yesterday. The perpetrators carved a Nazi swastika in his forehead. I think the criminals who did this copied the Nazi killers in Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 film “Inglourious Basterds”.
Kenneth L. Marcus on how Washington justifies its refusal to prosecute anti-Semitic hate on campuses.
A witty headline makes the article.
The construction of a new, large building that will take away my sun has begun. Only a month ago, the trees were still there and I could hear the birds singing when I opened my window. Now they are gone—forever.
With only one week to the Swedish general election, a new opinion poll suggests the governing centre-right four-party government has a lead of ten per cent.
Just before she began to campaign for the racist Sweden Democrats, Pia Kjærsgaard, leader of the Danish People’s Party, said that she doesn’t like that Swedish Social Democrats Mona Sahlin meddles in Danish affairs.
God, help us!
This is not paid advertisement. I’m just so happy to see that the do-it-yourself HIV test is now available in Sweden. No more moralistic comments from heterosexual nurses with a negative attitude towards gay men, which despite all social progress is still a real problem in this country.
Kate Moss at Los Angeles International Airport. Nightmare.
The Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control wants us to reserve Mondays for testing. Who needs religion when you have such a moralistic state?
Progressive Judaism has “failed in Israel’s free marketplace of ideas”, writes Sephardic Chief Rabbi Moshe Amar in an article arguing against a free market of ideas in Israel. He says that the Orthodox monopoly on religion in Israel is justified because non-Jewish Israelis who wish to convert want the Orthodox conversion they were forced to choose.
You could make the case for North Korean communism with the exact same argument. The people don’t want another leader because they can’t pick another leader. Eh?!
A disturbing video.
The blog is not dead. I’m busy with the Swedish general election. On Sunday, 19 September, Sweden goes to the polls to elect a new parliament. I’m running for a seat and is doing what I can to secure a win for the four-party centre-right government coalition.
I have written a short text about myself and my take on liberalism for Swedish magazine Neo. It’s in Swedish.
Newly elected Republican Senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell says, “The reality of that statement is that if you don’t legislate one morality then you are legislating somebody else’s morality. So you can’t get around legislating morality.”
We can’t get around legislating morality, eh? Yes, we can! We just have to elect politicians who say no to moralistic legislation. Vote libertarian!
I have made some minor changes to the design. Reload if the website looks strange.
Tonight at sundown, Yom Kippur begins. I will then take a twenty-four hour break from all work. Yom Kippur ends on Saturday evening.
On Sunday, it’s election day in Sweden and I will spend most of the day doing some last-minute campaigning.
This journal will probably go silent until Sunday evening, when I intend to live-blog the Swedish election.
The Swedish Drug Users Union has published a short interview with me on its website.
This is odd. Why?
Here’s a clue:
Charles Darwin postulated that ethnic diversity was due to the natural selection process of ‘survival of the fittest’, and was responsible for both the ‘inferior’ and ‘superior’ races of human beings. He also taught that women were less evolved than men, biologically and intellectually. Adolph Hitler believed that the evolutionary process of humans could be directed by scientists by eliminating ‘underdeveloped’ races in order to avoid polluting the process of developing a ‘superior race’. Of course, the tragedy of this worldview resulted in millions being murdered for the sake of human engineering, while millions more were killed in the battle to defend the world against this doctrine of National Socialism.
And then:
The biggest difference between the world’s view of diversity and God’s view—is unity. The world simply doesn’t have the same foundation of common ground, which is found in the ‘oneness’ of faith in Christ. The unconditional, sacrificial love that crosses all cultural barriers is what bonds the entire body of believers.
Oh, really! Well, no:
God commands us to treat each other equally and respectfully. At the same time, He does not want us to compromise the moral foundations that He has clearly defined. There’s a big difference between civil rights and coerced acceptance. Forcing a believer in Christ to embrace behavior that God forbids is like trying to unscramble an egg.
God’s view is unity and he “commands us to treat each other equally” but at the same time exclude those who are different. Example:
The Biblical definition of marriage goes far deeper and broader than the “man + woman = children” family. God uses this image as a picture for the relationship we have with our Savior. In the New Testament, Jesus Christ is described as the Bridegroom, sacrificially and lovingly choosing the church (the entire body of believers) to be His bride.
Ah, it makes so much sense now. Because Jesus is the man and the church is his woman, no gay person should be entitled the equal and respectful treatment that God commands. And how exactly is this done? And what has this to do with the rainbow bracelets with Hebrew letters? Here’s the answer:
Whenever Revelation Rainbow wristbands kits or share cards are handed out at events, wesite hits skyrocket! Last April, hundreds of students in California wore wristbands to school and passed out cards on Day of Silence [promotes GLBT agenda at schools] and Day of Truth [promotes God’s agenda at schools]
In other words, use gay and Jewish symbols to bully people on the very events that are designed to address the problem minority groups have with homophobia and xenophobia.
This whole thing reminds me of a passage in the Bible. You know the story about the men that came to Lot’s house to humiliate and violate his guests. No respect, no compassion—only hate and self-righteous smugness. It also reminds me of the National Socialism this Christian organisation tries to blame on Darwin.
In many houses
all at once
I see my mother and father
and they are young
as they walk in.
Why should
my tears come,
to see them laughing?
That they cannot
see me
is of no matter.
I was once
their dream;
now
they are mine.
It’s the Swedish general election today. The first results are expected tonight at eight. I will blog about it then.
The latest opinion polls suggest it will be an interesting night.
01:21 – The results are in. Live-blogging ends.
| Parliamentary Seats (Total 349) | ||
|---|---|---|
| Centre-Right | Centre-Left | Sweden Democrats |
| 172 | 157 | 20 |
00:05 – Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt says he will invite the Green Party to establish a secure a parliamentary majority for the government. He will not be dependent on the Sweden Democrats. “The Moderate Party has its strongest support since democracy was established in Sweden.”
23:26 – Mona Sahlin, leader of the Social Democratic Party, addresses her supporters. “From the bottom of my hears, I want to thank you all. This is the finest day in a democracy. It’s the only day when all people are completely equal. That’s what I want to tell Jimmie Åkesson (leader of the Sweden Democrats),” she says. “However, we made a bad election. We failed. We didn’t win the support needed, and a xenophobic party has taken seats in Parliament.” Applauds. “People must know that I will never give up the fight against xenophobia.” Applauds. “The Moderates must now show how they will govern with the support of a racist party.” Applauds again.
23:24 – The government coalition seems unable to win a majority of the seats in Parliament. Two seats short of majority.
23:08 – State television tries to get the leaders of the Communist Left Party in the studio with the leader of the racist Sweden Democrats. Could be fun. In my book, they both represent about the same ideology. One of them hates Jews the other hates Muslims. Both are mad and should be treated as purely political entertainment. I look forward to a fistfight.
22:42 – The leaders of several smaller parties have addressed their supporters. The Communist leader says he wants to fight the government in the streets (revolution is so 1917). The Nazi leaders is too smug to say anything that make sense. The two leaders of the Green Party speak right now. They are sad about the success of the racist Sweden Democrats.
22:26 – Everybody talks about the Nazis. I say, “Fuck them! About 90% of the electorate has voted for democratic parties.”
21:50 – State television first prognosis about the election: Centre-right coalition has majority. The government parties stays in office. Moderate Party neck and neck with Social Democratic Party—has not happened since early 20th century.
21:33 – State television postpone first prognosis about the election another 15 minutes.
21:19 – State television makes a first prognosis about the election in 15 minutes.
20:57 – I’m still here. Nothing happens right now.
20:23 – The Local live-blogs the election, too.
20:11 – According to the exit poll, the Pirate Party wins 0.7% of the vote.
20:04 – It’s a sad day for Sweden. Both Communists and Nazis gain seats in the Swedish Parliament.
20:01 – State television’s exit poll suggests centre-right win. Government stays in power. Nazis in parliament.
19:59 – A minor exit poll from TV4 suggests no changes in government. Neo-Nazi Sweden Democrats win seats in the Swedish Parliament, the Riksdag.
19:54 – The first results are expected within the hour. The last major opinion poll are made public in a few minutes.
The Prince of Wales: “I happily talk to the plants and trees, and listen to them. I think it’s absolutely crucial. Everything I’ve done here [at his 900-acre royal estate in Gloucestershire], it’s like almost with your children. Every tree has a meaning for me.”
(I blog about this not because it’s important or interesting, but because it’s funny. Royal toffs usually are, and Prince Charles never disappoints.)
If you haven’t already read Michael Joseph Gross’s Vanity Fair article about Sarah Palin, you should. Here it is.
After all the seriousness last night, I need some stupidity. This list of badly done photoshopping resulted in some LOLs.
By the way, is photoshop really a verb?
According to Dutch police statistics, there were 209 reported anti-Semitic incidents in 2009.
When she addressed the people at the congress of the Danish People’s Party, she criticised the party for its opposition to non-Western immigrants. “I, too, am from a non-Western country; it is wrong to say that all non-Westerners can’t be integrated into Denmark.”
Good for her.
“I’m here because ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ is wrong, it’s unjust and fundamentally it is against all we stand for as Americans,” Lady GaGa said at a Maine rally against the military gay-ban yesterday.
I’m gaga for Gaga.
The Senate has voted against taking up a bill that includes a provision allowing the repeal of the ban on gay soldiers. Shame on you!
Iran’s unelected president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is once again threatening the world with war if Israel or the United States tries to halt his ambitions to develop a nuclear bomb. He has previously said that the goal of his nuclear programme is to eradicate Israel from the map. Once he has the bomb, there is no turning back. We could face a new Holocaust very soon.
A “pariah in the gay community” says the Human Rights Campaign has achieved nothing in twenty years. “They [HRC] are battered wives of the Democratic establishment.” Here’s the video.
Fidel Castro says, “There may yet be admirers of Cuban communism in certain precincts of Berkeley or Cambridge, but it’s hard to find them in Havana.”
All Swedes should read this article by Jon Voss.
Sweden’s general election is more dramatic than anyone could have foreseen. A first recount suggests the centre-right government is about twenty votes short of gaining a parliamentary majority.
In Sunday’s general election, thirty-five people wanted me to be their MP. I did not actively campaign to be elected, but my name was on the ballot paper. When asked, I encouraged people to vote for other liberals. I realised from the set out that I stood no chance to be elected. The ballot paper consists of a list of names, and the Swedish electoral system favours people at the top of that list.
Still, many thanks to my thirty-five supporters!
About a year ago, the Swedish Humanist Association ran a national campaign against God. At bus stops and train stations, people were confronted with posters of three flags with religious symbols. Only one of them is the real Swedish flag—the one with the cross. The other two are fake.
The Humanists’ intention was to make people aware of the falsehood of theism. But God was not the one affected by the campaign; instead, people associated with Islam and Judaism were. As predicted by more intelligent critics, xenophobic remarks were common amongst the people who saw the posters. I personally heard it on buses when travelling about in Malmö.
In retrospect, I think this campaign—with its portrayal of Jews and Muslim as somehow less Swedish than others—opened the gates to the flood of xenophobia that has now resulted in a Nazi party being able to win seats in the Swedish Parliament.
I’m writing this now because the Swedish Humanist Association is desperately trying to distance itself from its own political agenda. Being the toughest critics of Jewish and Muslim culture doesn’t fit well with their image now that Nazis echo it.
I feel for the misguided atheists and would like them to learn from past mistakes. I have some advice I would like them to think carefully about.
Firstly, don’t ever contrast symbols of the secular state with religious symbols. Yes, there is a Christian cross on the Swedish flag, but most people don’t see it as a religious symbol in that context. The Swedish flag is a symbol for all Swedes, regardless of religion.
Secondly, rewrite your agenda. Remove all parts that single out specific religious and ethnic minority groups. Focus on the core issue, which in your case ought to be secularism and a state with no religious affiliations.
“Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.”
From The Local:
A Sweden Democrat candidate who won a seat on the local council in Gällivare in northern Sweden has resigned from the party after reading its manifesto.
I don’t know what to say. How on earth do you become a member of a Nazi party not knowing what it’s about?
There’s something very funny and bizarre about this story. And in case you don’t know, zucchini is American English for courgette.
Now we know how they can afford all those full-page advertisement in New York Times and Washington Post.
The introduction should be enough to have the alarm bells ringing, but parents keep sending their sons to the bishop. Perhaps not for long, as it has been known that he uses his celibacy course to groom the boys. From 365 Gay:
Bishop Eddie Long’s boys’ academy guided teens through their “masculine journey” with lessons on financial discipline and sexual control, right down to a little card the students had to carry in their wallets reminding them why they shouldn’t have sex.
Long himself, though, has been accused of contradicting those virtues. The bishop—who’s been an outspoken opponent of gay marriage in the past—is being sued by two young men who attended the LongFellows Youth Academy and say Long used the program to groom them for sexual relationships.
The men, who were 17 and 18 at the time, say Long recruited them for the academy after they joined New Birth Missionary Baptist Church and lured them into trysts with cars, jewelry and cash.
Allow me to predict what will happen next. Eddie Long will take some time off, apologise in public, say he was tempted by the Devil and under the influence of the gay lobby, and then rehabilitate himself into a straight man. In a decade or so, we have young men committing suicide because they cannot deal with the post-rape trauma.
I don’t know much about him, except he’s cute and Jewish. That goes a long way in my book.
I like Richard Dawkins. He is a brilliant writer. But I don’t like his narrow-mindedness when it comes to minority groups. I just saw this four-part video he has made about faith schools in Britain. Throughout the whole film, he talks about “we” the taxpayers and “they” the religious. What is this if not xenophobic rhetoric? Considering that one-third of British pupils are enrolled at faith schools, it seems reasonable to assume that the parents of these children pay taxes, too. He wants the government to stop funding the education for children of religious minority groups. In other words, religious people should pay but not get the same service as secular and mainstream Christian people. Dr Dawkins complain about the faith schools’ institutionalised discrimination but advocate a similar approach taken by government.
This, my friends, is the opposite of how a secular state ought to behave. Of curse, it is a problem that some schools teach their pupils not to believe in evolution. It is equality a problem that some schools teach children no to believe in democracy and capitalism. But in both cases, these feelings are no ground for forcing people to believe in neither evolution, democracy, nor capitalism. Facts are one thing, but to force people to accept them as truths is an altogether different matter.
Equality and a certain amount of ideological chaos is an unavoidable result of liberty in any society made up by two or more faith groups. Enforced assimilation, which is what Dawkins advocates, is not liberalism. This is what I label cultural communism—a system where people are forced to break with family and tradition and ultimately their own interests in order to adapt to the culture and ideology established by government.
Dawkins expresses concern about children being the property of their parent. He doesn’t like to think about children in that way. I think most people agree. But what is the option? Well, as I see it, his answer is children as government property. I disagree with him. In lack of better phrasing, children are the property of their parents. That should not be understood as parents having a right to do whatever they wish to children—nor should a flat owner be allowed to do whatever he wishes to his part of the building. But children belong with their parents and not the state. That is why authorities violates people’s rights when the split up families.
So why is Dawkin so hostile to diversity. I think the answer is presented in the fourth and final YouTube video. He sees religion, culture, and family history as nothing more than a political or philosophical label. Being Jewish is somehow equal to being a Labour voter or an existentialist theorist. This is an extremely naïve way of looking at religion and ethnicity. With this naïve outlook, one cannot understand anti-Semitism, racism, and Islamophobia as anything but criticism of people who have chosen a set of beliefs. Could this be why so many angry atheists come so close to sharing ideas with xenophobes?
Now, make some coffee and watch the four videos below. Make up your own mind. Am I wrong?
“If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.” – Benjamin Franklin
Visitors at Berns Hotel in Stockholm can borrow sex toys from the reception. The police are not happy about the hotel’s liberal attitude towards dildos. “The hotel is trying to glorify something that we are working to de-glorify,” says one police officer. The police think the hotel guests’ playing with rubber toys will encourage prostitution.
How people masturbating with a plug in the bum will make prostitution glamorous is beyond me.
Canadian readers should help Mark.
“The anti-sex feminists are all gone,” she says. “And I’m still here.”
Poland’s equality minister, Elżbieta Radziszewska, is an advocate of inequality who doesn’t hesitate to out people opposing to here outrageous homophobia.
A little meteor learns the biggest lesson of life on its way down to earth.
If no one is offended, it is OK to do it public. A tip would be to ask people around you before unzipping.
There was a similar court ruling a couple of years ago that concerned sex in public. That ruling said that having sex in public is OK if it takes place in a private area (your garden) or hidden from other people (behind the bushes).
If I had a say in the matter, I would encourage people to have sex in public. And urinating is good for the plants and does make quite a few urolagniacs happy.
Yanko Tsvetkov’s project Mapping Stereotypes.
Europe according to USA:
Europe according to gay men:
More maps here.
Nigel Barber believes the only thing that could prevent the world from turning atheist would be a sharp decline in global standards of living.
He might be right, but it is worth pointing out that religion is not synonymous to theism. Believing in God—which is what the studies Barber refers to are about—may be on the way out, but that corresponds well to an ongoing process where religions are redefined as civilisations. Mordecai Kaplan was right.
A sect in Siberia makes its members take drugs, have sex, and commit suicide.
How are the Germans coping with the new laws against smoking now that beer is on the table 24/7.
I don’t think hem means it literally, but in a rare discussion about his faith, the American president declared himself a “Christian by choice”, which is odd considering he has never been anything but a Christian. “By choice” is what converts sometimes call themselves.
Christopher Hitchens spoke to Anderson Cooper on CNN:
The statistics in my case are very poor. Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long. And the other wager is, the part of the wager, it’s a certainty you’ll have a terrible time and you may wish you were dying because it’s an awful process. That you can’t escape, you’re going to get that no matter what. Then the torture may or may not be worth it or it will be torture by execution.
Reality is no good.
A survey conducted for Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs found that 63% of respondents believe those converted by non-Orthodox rabbis should be regarded as Jews. A backlash for the ultra-Orthodox movement that has done everything in its power to reject non-orthodox conversions.
“It won’t be long before Sweden Democrats show true anti-Semitic nature,” reads the headline in Haaretz.
The newly discovered planet is twenty light years away. Don’t expect any commuter space shuttle soon.
Rapper 50 Cent tweets about his philosophy of life. It’s hard not to be impressed by his advanced theories. The meaning of life is oral sex. I can relate. But why heterosexuality? It’s so very, very common and vanilla.
Nah, seriously, 50 Cent is a sad idiot.
