The Religidiots are Rattled

Let me lay my cards on the the table here. I think that anyone who professes any kind of religious belief is delusional and should not hold any form of public office whatsoever.

However it amuses me to see that those who profess a faith in their imaginary friend are getting increasingly rattled at the ever increasing sidelining they are getting. Of course they are upset that they can't exercise power over us, what politician wouldn't be, but for these fools the pain is even greater because it's what their god wants and of course their brand of sky fairy has a perfect plan for us, if only people could see it (and if they can't it gets imposed on us anyway). You want to marry whoever you want regardless of the collection of dangly objects between your legs? You have a painful terminal illness and want to end your suffering? Tough, I make the rules and my invisible pixie friend says no.

Now it seems the majority of us who can, you know, use logic and reason, and even those who might culturally have some lingering belief in a bearded bloke in the clouds are saying "Actually, we would like a government which makes rules based on logic, evidence and doesn't privilege one set of people because they happen to share the same delusion please". However to the religidiots like the unelected bishops who get to make laws and their fellow travellers like the odious Baroness Warsi we are "militant secularists" bent on destroying religion, throwing anyone who prays onto a big file and probably making devouring babies, buggering livestock and executing anyone over 60 with a mild sniffle into the bargain.

Well I say to Warsi, Carey, Pickles and their ilk, do please carry on. The more you rant and rave the more attention it draws to the special privileges you have and the more pressure will come to bear to have them removed.

The problem with PR is always the other guys

I was in The Netherlands over the new year and one evening went out for dinner with friends. Our walking route to the restaurant took us past a small concentration of what the Americans quaintly term "Adult Bookstores" (although books are about the one item you're guaranteed not to find in them). Now you can't walk past without having a quick look in the window can you and I noticed something seemed to be missing.

"Hey," I asked my Dutch mates, "Where's the horseporn gone?" for indeed there appeared to be a dearth of magazines depicting, as Bill Bryson once put it, "A horse receiving a certain oral service a horse would not normally expect to receive, not even from another horse.

"Oh it's been banned. It's illegal to sell it or even possess it now."

I was rather shocked. Not because I have any fondness for horseporn beyond its comedy and shock value, it's about as erotic as a wet weekend in Whitley Bay, but it, along with similar "on the edge" forms of porn, are to my mind a good bell-weather of how free a society is; a measure of a state saying "You know what, this is not hurting anyone so its absolutely none of our business." and it saddened me to see a country I'd rather admired for its socially liberal values take a lurch towards the kind of blue nosed "we know best" shite we have to put up with here.

Not only that, but my friend told me that they have made any representation of bestiality illegal, so I suppose the Rijksmuseum will have to had taken this down.

Now the reason for this is down to a small political party, the PvdD (Partij voor de Dieren, "Party for Animals") who, thanks to proportional representation, gained a couple of seats and this rather ridiculous law was their price for playing ball in the coalition that was formed (and subsequently collapsed as it happens).

Now you might think that not being able to legally buy the collected DVD box set of Bodil Joensen's barnyard movies is no big deal in the grand scheme of things* but just for a moment swap "Party for Animals" with "Party for Sharia in the UK" who, with PR, win three or four seats in a hung parliament.

What would their blood price be?

Now PR has been kicked into the long grass here thanks to Nick's university fee U-turn and some clever play by the tories but it'll come around again and you'll be asked again to vote on its introduction. Before voting ask yourself whereas you might be happy with your little party getting some power all those other little parties will as well and you might just find the pork gets banned along with the piggy pr0n.





* especially as Teh Interwebs has more or less made all forms of censorship moot.

... and by the rulers as useful.

You would have thought that politicians in the country would know to steer well clear of religion by now wouldn't you; I might not have liked the last incumbents of No. 10 but they were at least wise enough to "not do God". But nope, here comes Dishface at the weekend banging on about Christianity and "[calling] for a revival of traditional Christian values to counter Britain's "moral collapse"."

I cannot helped be reminded of the words of Seneca:

“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.”

 as yet again one of our leaders who by his own admission is ""full of doubts" about big theological issues" (read "Of course I don't believe in this twaddle") tells all the little people what's good for them; in this case they have to believe in the big fairy in the sky who, if you riot and steal TV's from Comet, will put you on the naughty step when you die. I mean it truly is pathetic isn't it that he could even attempt such a pitch. And what's equally annoying is that maybe he really does think you can't be "good without god" - failing to realize that what we call "good", compassion, altruism and so on, come about because we are social animals and we get this kind of thing from our evolution. Sure we are still savage little monkeys not very well equipped to live in together in the huge numbers we do since Civilization* kicked off 6000 odd years ago so we need policemen and jails but even in the most religious countries you'll find those institutions. 

But with that said he is right in that we do for better or worse, and even as an atheist I am prepared to say generally "better', have a rich heritage of Christian tradition in this country. It has given us art, music, architecture, jurisprudence and the poetry of the King James Bible. I would hate to see this country turn into a place where I have to start wishing people the anodyne "Happy Holidays" rather than a hearty "Merry Christmas". We do "do God" here, but Britons tend in the main to regard overt displays of religiosity rather suspiciously. As an example there American Football player who is famous for doing a full kneel down hands together prayer whenever he scores a touchdown; a display like that from a rugby or football player here would be quite rightly regarded as crass. That's why all Cameron pontificating about "what the proles need is a good dose of the Fear of the Almighty, fire and brimstone style" is going to cost him, despite how well it plays to the blue rinse brigades in his ranks.



* i.e. "Living in cities"

For now we see through a glass, darkly

Last night's Channel 4 drama "Black Mirror - The National Anthem", written by Charlie Brooker, was quite superb; by turns hilarious, suspenseful, horrifying and illuminating. It certainly lived up to its title, holding up a dark reflection of ourselves in the age of 24 hour rolling news, social networks and the hive mind.

I don't want to spoil the plot too much if you haven't seen it (you can get it from 4OD) but the story revolves around a Kate Middleton figure who has been kidnapped; the kidnappers don't want money, their demand is that the Prime Minister has sex with a pig, live on TV.

What we see is a government, and it could be any government, utterly at a loss at how to cope with the new world that's been created under their feet, unable to control their citizenry empowered as they are with the new tools of the social network age. "Why haven't you taken it down" says the PM when informed the ransom demand video is on YouTube. "We have," says a Whitehall mandarin "but every time we take one down ten more spring up in its place". This is a world where government can issue as many D-Notices and super injunctions and subtle (and not so subtle) leaning on journalists and it makes no difference. In the past the saying was that a lie could be half way round the world before the truth got its boots on , in the Twitter age an embarrassing truth can be three times round the world and have nipped down to the pub for a pint before the government censorship machine has even woken up.

In the drama even when the story leaks with Fox News and Al Jazeera (who,lets face it, wouldn't give a shit about a UK Government D notice at the best of times) broadcasting first the networks are coy, referring to "an indecent act'. "What indecent act" says a drayman to a barmaid as he makes a deliver "'e's got to do it wif' a pig" says the landlady's kid, hardly looking up from his BlackBerry. Now not only is it impossible to hide the story it's impossible to edit out the gory details.


I believe Charlie Brooker's main point he was trying to make is make us ask "well if this did happen, would you watch it, would you really watch, on live TV, a man utterly humiliating himself in a depraved spectacle... of course you would you sick fucks, we all would, we're human, this is what we do" and we see deserted streets as the minutes tick down to the deadline, crowds gathering round TV's giving lecherous cheers and "go on my son" encouragement which morphs into a sort of horrified cross between revulsion and fascination; a worldwide "Two Girls One Cup" reaction video*

But for my money what is more interesting is the what this drama says about the power we, the common man, the sixty million to their six hundred, now carry around in our pockets. We have seen this year that this shit can bring down governments in the so-called Arab Spring. Our lords and masters must be truly afraid.




* for the love of Fafnir if you are at work and you don't understand the reference  DO NOT Google that!

The Devil is in the details.

So our lovely leaders are all patting themselves on the back having "saved" the Euro and if you believe the hyperbole from the German Chancellor, saved Europe from hearing the ring of marching jackboots again.

What they have done of course is merely kick the can a bit further down the road. There's still no way even a trillion Euros can prop up the failing economies of Europe who bought into the idea you could buy prosperity with other people's money.

A couple of details behind the headlines that your average layman would most likely miss, if they could find them at all, point to what a fudge this is and which will, in all likelihood, make the problem worse. Firstly not only do the banks take a 50% hit on any Greek debt they own they are being asked to "Recapitalise" to the tune of 160 billion Euro in the next 8 months. Essentially this means the banks have to hold cash or other highly liquid asset classes on their books and they can't lend it. Get that bit, they can't lend this money. Now cast your mind back to last year and the credit crunch which was caused by, right, banks not being in a position to lend money.

The other little weasel word I spotted is the real person-of-colour in the woodpile, that word is "leverage"...

The firepower of the main euro bailout fund - known as the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) - is to be boosted from the 440bn euros set up earlier this year to 1tn euros. There is about 250bn euros left available in the EFSF, which the summit statement said could be leveraged 4-5 times.

Put simply this means that this much trumpeted 1 trillion Euro is not actually there, what they are going to do is put up the 250 billion they do have (from your and my taxes) and basically borrow 4 or 5 times that amount, that's essentially what leverage means. And of course if you borrow money, you have to pay interest on it.

So they have commited us to, yet more and more borrowing. An endless cycle of debt backed up only by the promise it can be paid back through future tax revenues, that's money out of our pockets.

All Merkel and Sarkosy have done is put us and our children in hock to the Chinese for years and years.

How long will this madness go on because as sure as I have wings and a tail it's gone on too far and too deep for it all to end in sweetness and light and I fear all Merkel and friends have done is make those jackboots even more of a racing certainty.