Lost Worlds

Nobody Expects The Spanish Inquisition

A little under two thousand years ago some narratives claim (as people like George W Bush and Tony Blair believe, and want us to believe too) that the sanhedrin gedola or "Great Council" in Jerusalem tried, on the charge of sedition, Yoz Asaf, a.k.a. Issa bar Yussuf, a.k.a. Jesus the Messiah a.k.a. The Christ.

Yoz Asaf was found guilty and sentenced to death. But Mosaic law forbade observant Jews from killing. So the 71 men of the Assembly -- twenty-four Sadducees, twenty-two Pharisees, twenty-two clerks and the High Priest -- handed him over to the occupying army for execution.

The result was Christianity.

Now the traffic is heading in the other direction. In effect, the self-intoxicated pietist Bush and his moist-eyed sanctimonious friend Blair, handed Saddam Hussein over to the similarly obliging puppet government of Nouri Maliki which, in an act of marvellous symmetry, hanged Saddam at dawn on the day of the Eid of the Hajj -- in intention, if not in theology, an equivalent of Christmas.

But they went one better. They released videos of the noose going around Saddam's neck. The BBC chose to publish stills from this obscene footage on their website (which is compulsorily funded by a tax on television-ownership, non-payment of which is punishable by imprisonment).

(You might expect a link here. No.)

Obscene, because it demeans us as much as Saddam demeaned his own people.

Obscene, because the pictures of a man seconds from his own death surely appeal to a repugnant, quasi-erotic voyeurism in us all.

Obscene, because it depicts the raping, in public, of the assertion that a civilized nation does not inflict the death penalty.

Obscene, because it is a visual relic beyond price for those who would establish Saddam as a martyr (can we even imagine how Christians would fetishize a video of the crucifixion?).

Above all, because, in the fluid test of British law, obscene because it has a tendency to deprave and corrupt the viewer.

Bush and Blair, for all their pietism, are seemingly depraved and corrupt beyond redemption. Bush lied about Iraqi involvement in the September 11th attacks on Manhattan; Blair... do we need to say more than that Blair is having a lovely holiday in the Miami Beach fuck-pad of a Bee Gee?

You know, Bee Gee? As in "Stayin' Alive"?

Say Thank You, But To Whom?

Even atheists like a bit of a blessing on a solemn occasion. And those dreadful non-sectarian woolly humanist pseudoliturgical spasms are too ghastly for words. We want a bit of continuity, a bit of justification-through-history, and what better than this one:

Salue parens omnia rerum natura

That's how that old naturalist and Stoic Pliny the Elder ended his monumental Naturalis Historia (1st Century AD). Translation: "Hail mother of all things: Nature" and while we're fouling it up -- motherfuckers -- a nod of acknowledgment over the Christmas turkey wouldn't be out of place, just to remind us that we were all got here by the same inexorable logic, and could be got out again just as quickly...

Justice, Georgia-Style

Infantilism also includes considering your dignity above your reason. "Use every man after his desert, and who should. 'scape whipping?" asked Hamlet. Certainly not the Justices (the term is an honorific, not representative of what they actually do) who confirmed that a teenager should be sentenced to ten years in prison without parole for fooling around -- entirely consensually -- and be registered as a sex offender for life.

The fooling-around was a blow-job. Now if he'd had sex with her and got her pregnant, that would have been a different matter. (But then God likes babies, which is why he tolerates sex. God does not like blow jobs, though, which is why Jesus condemned them explicitly. He did condemn them explicitly, didn't he? In the bible? Somewhere? He must have done; we can't just have made it up and pretended Jesus said it, surely? That would have been blasphemy, wouldn't it?)

"Use them after your own honour and dignity," Hamlet continued. The extent of both the honour and dignity of the Georgia Supreme Court are now clear, even if they weren't before. (And if you should believe in God, you might think that his honour and dignity are pretty badly impugned by these grandstanding Cro-Magnon blowhards, too.)

(via Mark Bernstein)

But How Does An Atheist Swear?

I don't know what sort of minority this puts me in -- not one that gets government protection or funding for a No Faith School, that's for sure -- but I'm an emotional theist, an instinctive deist, a rational atheist and a philosophical agnostic (I am also a pretty poor philosopher, so my Huxleyite agnosticism isn't really worth the sacred holy text it's not included in).

And, of course, just like you are all going to do, I'm reading Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion. It's magnificent polemic and of course has holes in. (But bread has holes in, as does Gruyère, and bread and Gruyère and Dawkins are all equally nourishing.)

But suppose I reject that dual episteme that permits us to declare ourselves agnostics. Suppose I rephrase it from my own non credo ("There are some propositions which are undecidable by the scientific method because they belong to a different episteme", which I think I probably mean in the 'New Historicist' sense) into a paraphrase of Dawkins's ("To suggest that there is an episteme which is unaddressable by the scientific methodology is to misunderstand what science actually is")?

Then I'm stuck with Category Six atheism. That's to say, in the spectrum of possibilities of the existence of god, I take the position that there is a "[v]ery low probability, but short of zero. De facto atheist. 'I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.'" [1]

There's a hole there. "I cannot know for certain" is what my definition of agnosticism declares. Dawkins, overall, comes down in favour of the proposition "I do not know for certain," with the possibility (however small) that we may one day know -- that's to say, the thing is not undecidable but, rather, the evidence isn't in. (Look at the world and what religion has done in the world, and you might say an awful lot of evidence is in already, albeit only in one category.)

But Dawkins's great achievment is not settling the question for once and for all; it's getting a serious book about religion to the top of the bestseller lists at a time when more and more people in the post-Humanist west -- most disturbingly in America, but also here in Britain, particularly among the young -- are returning to the idea not only of a sacred religion but, more horribly, a sacred book.

A sacred book, of course, from which they select only those passages which appeal to their morality. As Dawkins points out, this begs the question of where they derive that morality from: a morality with such a strength that it overrides the morality in their "sacred text". What Jew or Christian, for example, would put someone to death for gathering sticks on the Sabbath?

"Why not," asks Dawkins, "cut out the middle man and go straight for the moral choice without the religion?" [2]

One suggestion, which Dawkins touches on, but only incompletely, is proposed in Douglas Adams's allegedly extempore speech of September 1998, given to the Digital Biota conference in Cambridge. If you haven't read it, for god's sake go and read it now. (And I say "allegedly extempore" because, like a jazz musician, he had rehearsed many of his central arguments and images over some years, both with me and with others. They all came together in this magnificent improvisation.

But the previous paragraph raises a trivial problem of everyday importance. I said "for god's sake go and read it now" but that's a meaningless exhortation for an atheist to make. Jesus Christ! Mary mother of God! In God's name! Hell's teeth! Jesus Mary and Joseph, how the hell is a man to swear, for heaven's sake?

And in whose name may he go out to kill others, for God's sake?

---
1. Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. London: Transworld, 2006, 50-51.
2. Ibid., 57; see also 235ff

"Gonna Miss You Loads" My Ass

Oh lord. Oh god. Shall I... no. Further comment would be otiose and we all kno otiose comment's like gunna make Kong like totally crap on the rug, right?

Technorati Tags: culture, infantilization, web

Fat: The New Smoking (Cont'd)

The new NICE "guidelines" on obesity in the UK - download them here or read a -- hahahaha -- pre- digested version just confirm that being fat is the new smoking. Worse than smoking, even.

Well of course anyone can give up smoking if they have the willpower and are ostracised and nagged and made to feel repugnant so I suggest we probably should do the same to fat people. Don't let them be fat on aeroplanes or buses. Have No Fatties sections in restaurants and No Sweating sections on public transport and Thank You For Not Wheezing And Puffing signs everywhere. Make it legal for employers to specify No fat people need apply. Make them stand outside in the rain if they want to be fat at work.

But of course they wouldn't mind being outside in the cold and rain. Being fat keeps you warm.

Technorati Tags: culture, health, Medicine, Nanny State

Drug Company Behaves Reasonably Well, Considering, But They Can Afford To

Won't remind anyone of the story of the widow's mite because I wouldn't want to detract from Bristol-Myers Squibb's donation to the World Aids Fund, which you can increase by lighting a candle. Beautifully-designed page, too; sometimes (but only sometimes) Flash is worth using. (Thanks to my good friend the drummer Timothy Bye -- move your ass, Gadd -- for pointing it out to me.)

Technorati Tags: Aids, Medicine, society

Irony-Free Zone, If Only Briefly

In 1994 the British conductor Paul McCreesh reconstructed a Lutheran Mass as it might have been sung on Christmas Morning 1620. The music was mostly by Michael Praetorius, with some by Samuel Scheidt and Johann Hermann Schein.

He recorded it in Roskilde Cathedral, Norway.

The 1640 organ at Roskilde

Praetorius is better-known for his secular and deliciously sexy Terpsichore, a collection of Renaissance dance music. This shows his other side, as a composer who delightedly embraced the new opportunities of Lutheranism. The recording is an astounding achievement -- certainly for me one of the finest recordings of the 20th century of anything, by anyone -- and a marvellous corrective to the seasonal sludge of sleighbells and hooting, viscous carols. Whether or not the Incarnation celebrated at Christmas was in any sense true, or whether the religion whose heart it lies at has any claim to validity, Praetorius's music and McCreesh's flawless and joyful interpretation make it all too clear why so many wanted, and want, to believe it. If the final In Dulci Jubilo -- a "macaronic" hymn which swings between the German vernacular and the pre-Lutheran Latin, and which, in doing so, sums up the spirit of Martin Luther's reforms, does not leave your heart singing, then there is no life in you. Imagine the cold morning, the filled church, the town trumpeters waiting (by Praetorius's own recommendation) outside in the snow, and then the doors thrown open, and the sound flooding in on a tide of light as they sing of heaven

Where the angels sing
New songs
And the bells ring
In the court of the King
Oh! to be there; Oh, to be there!

Bah? Possibly. Humbug? Perhaps. But a wonder all the same.

(And faintly, though unseasonally, pleasant to think that General Pinochet probably never heard it, nor ever will, even if there is no purgatory waiting to scour him or hell to gape.)

Technorati Tags: music, Baroque

And You Thought It Was More Dangerous in The Dark...?

Scarborough (oh God help us) has cancelled its switching-on of the Christmas lights because people were coming to watch. Which gave rise to concerns on -- all together now -- "health and safety grounds".

And how (according to the inevitable spokesman) was the decision not taken?

"Lightly," of course.

Technorati Tags: health & safety, tragedy

Oh THOSE Training Purposes...

From the Daily Telegraph email disclaimers:

Emails sent and received may be read by people other than the intended recipient and may be monitored to ensure efficient operation of our email systems.

Ah, "efficient operation". I see. So... if I send someone an email and it doesn't arrive -- i.e., the email system isn't operating efficiently -- nobody will know. Very good.

Incoming and outgoing telephone calls to our offices may be monitored or recorded for training and quality control purposes and for confirming orders and information.

Training whom? To do what? Controlling quality of what, come to that? My accent? Grammar? Excuse me? I mean to say, is this how stupid you think we are?

Technorati Tags: computing, journalism

This Is Your Captain SpeaKABOOM

Thinking of flying RyanAir? A recent report from the AAIU into an incident in which a collision (with the ground, at Knock) was "narrowly avoided" has shown up so much corner-cutting, toothless regulation, bad cockpit management and just about everything else you mightn't want to happen on an aircraft you were flying on, that you might want to think of flying on another airline or maybe just not going at all.

Some of the comments on PPRUNE, the Professional Pilots' Rumour Network, that are really disturbing. Anyone who's ever flown RyanAir knows that its management are cost-cutting pricks who have nothing but contempt for their passengers, headed by the prick-in-chief, Michael O'Leary - who allegedly has threatened to move his entire operation to Eastern Europe if the toothless old whore of a clapped-out "regulatory" body, the IAA, don't co-operate.

There's too much stuff in the PPRUNE forum to quote here. But when you see the pilots sitting at the sharp end of your next RyanAir flight, you might like to know how their day began:

Well yes, believe or not we do have pre flight briefings but just try to do them in 45 min. for a 4 sector day including:
* gathering all the info. (aircraft reg, pax numbers, stand, etc.)
* printing your own plogs
* printing your own met & notams
* ordering your fuel
* brief cabin crew
* collect jepp. fotocopies of all the destinations, alternates and of course checking that each single plate is up to date.
* Fill our container with water for the day (I am embarrassed to even tell that one)
* long walk to the aircraft
* and nowadays we do fuel supervision as well.
Throw on top of that printers that don't work, zero wind plogs, missing jepp. plates and a total chaotic crew control with only one person to control 45 flights during the first morning wave and you will see the recipe for a disaster happening very quick.
Of course you always have the option to show up well before and break the IAA approved 10 hour minimum rest that we get.

Reassuring, yes? Nice to know the regulators of the Nanny State are looking after us so well. For, of course, our comfort and safety...

Technorati Tags: air crash investigation, aviation, RyanAir, travel

They Just Don't Learn, Do They?

Another perpetual-motion scam (with the usual it's-not-quite-perpetual-motion scam provisos in its corporatist huffing) has demanded that all websites remove all references to it.

Oh men of Nikkogen, don't you realise that that sort of blowhard nonsense is only going to make more of us plaster references to Nikkogen, together with possibly (though probably not quite) unrelated phrases such as "pull the other one" and "bollocks, if you ask me", all over blogs which wouldn't have mentioned Nikkogen (although we might well have mentioned other annoyances, entirely unrelated to Nikkogen, such as people who think we're idiots, and grandstanding assholes who think that by sending out stroppy letters they'll get us to do exactly what they want.

Doesn't work any more, Guys At Nikkogen. The estimable Tim Worstall explains why. But if you want to read the stuff for yourself -- the horror! the horror! -- have a look at what seems a little slippery, in the way that snake oil is slippery: a slipperiness which is explained at the excellent Ministry of Truth.

The War On... What Was It Again?

Miles Davis would be in prison in the USA today; as a felon, he would be stripped of his right to vote; when released, he would be unable to get a student loan. His driving licence would be revoked and he could not travel to work.

So would Samuel Johnson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Gladstone, John Keats,Jimi Hendrix, William Wilberforce, Dorothy Wordsworth, W C Fields, Elvis, Sarah Bernhardt, Sigmund Freud, Florence Nightingale, Johnny Cash, Edith Piaf, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ray Charles, Wilkie Collins, Janis Joplin, Bella Lugosi, Sir Walter Scott, Marvin Gaye, Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Eden, Branwell Bronte, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charlie Parker, Chet Baker, Lenny Bruce, Jean Cocteau and Tim Buckley.

Quite right too. They were all drug users. And the state must punish drug users. Ideally, the state must mostly punish black drug users, and the USA is doing well at that. As are we. But white drug users will do at a pinch.

Or you could look at it this way: if you are a black woman in America and you have a son, there is a one in three chance that your son will end up in prison.

Aren't we doing well, with this war on drugs?

Now go and have a look at Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, and ask yourself: What have we learned?

(Nothing. Absolutely nothing.)

Dies Irae, Adonai Elohenu al-Hamdalillah

The Sunday Times reports that

Thousands of dying patients are being denied the last rites because hospital chaplains are not being given access to their personal records to establish their religion.

Why? The Data Protection Act -- foreseen by Aeschylus in the Oresteia; in which the watchman says "For them as knows, I'll speak. For the rest: my mind's a blank."

Another. Damned. Disclaimer.

The Burger King "I'm a man" commercial? Where Men in muscle vests and hard hats show how Manly they are by eating 20,505,321 calories of meat? Have you noticed how, halfway through, a subtitle flashes up which says:

"FILMED ON A CLOSED ROAD

?

What it should say is:

Most MEN in muscle vests and hard hats are actually GAY ICONS and
LOOK AFTER THEMSELVES and
eat LETTUCE

Careful, Or Someone Might Be SCARED

Can't recall where I snipped this, but it's true:

Working on a recent project to develop a website supporting the Danish launch of a new coldsore treatment (a medical device by definition), the lawyer who was checking our content prior to launch advised us to remove a photo from the site. The image showed a herpes sufferer with a painful looking cold sore on the corner of his mouth. Apparently, images of wounds or injuries which are targeted at ordinary consumers are not to be shown for fear that they may frighten people.

Vista™®™™®™®™™™® - It's™ sublime®

The image of Windows™®©™ Vista©™®:

What are they looking for, this cosy adventurous couple perched in a Rousseauiste landscape of uncompromisingly pure sublimity? A computer that works, perhaps? But this has nothing to do with computing, and everything to do with not-computing.

And whatever it is they are looking for, they haven't yet found it.

But let's remember that Rouseau found it necessary for the™ sublime to make him afraid.

Technorati Tags: computing

It Was The Voices In My Head That Made Me Do It, Honest

If the corporation is a legitimized psychopath[1] then the advertising industry is a schizophrenic; behaviour associated with schizophrenia includes confabulation (making up stories to fill in the blanks), associative looseness, neologisms, clang association, word salad, and echolalia...

ADDENDUM: The redoutable Seamus McCauley accuses me of supporting the film of The Corporation and Bakan's thesis in general. Just to clarify, I haven't seen the film [2] and I think Bakan's thesis is, in essence, bollocks - largely because it houses, at its very core, a nasty little category mistake.

[1] Bakan, Joel. The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power.(First published in the USA by Free Press - Simon & Schuster, 2004). London: Constable, 2004.

[2] But am now going to have to see, thanks to McCauley's attack on it and me. Sodding blogosphere.

Technorati Tags: film

Sorry, But You Are So Stupid You Need It To Rhyme

I bought some miso. It is perfectly decent miso. You squeeze it out of the little plastic packet (which is itself satisfying) and add hot water and lo!, miso, and LO!, bits of seaweed.

But they can't just sell miso. No; they need a little rhyme. Here you go:

Sushi made Japan-easy™.

Is the terrible thing

(a) That they think a little rhyme will make us think "Gosh, I'll buy that stuff, which I wouldn't have otherwise"? Or
(b) That the little rhyme itself is so inane? Or
(c) Grown-up people with families and hopes and lives actually sat round thinking it up? Or
(d) They were prepared to take the money? Or
(e) Some asshole actually trademarked the little rhyme, filling in all those forms and putting a suit on and being important? Or
(f) The trade mark people didn't say "Oh for heaven's sake grow up and fuck off."?

Or is the terrible thing, as usual, that that's what they think we are like?

The Post-literate Society

Mark Bernstein blogged this pictogram:

One of the very few which doesn't fall foul of the Utterly Bloody Pointless Pictogram rule, which goes as follows:

(1) Not everyone can read.
(2) Therefore we should give them notices -- NOTICES! We need LOTS OF NOTICES! -- in pictographic form.
(3) But the pictographs are often incomprehensible, so
(4) Underneath the pictogram, we write an explanation. Which means that
(5) A significant number of people can neither understand the pictogram nor the explanation. Which in turn means
(6) They are just ignorant (from the Latin ignoro, 'I do not know') while we are fools (from the English fools, "fools".)