Without powerful unions to protect them, the wages of ordinary workers were held in check while the cost of housing began to spiral upwards. As it became increasingly difficult for first-time buyers to get on the property ladder, a newly deregulated banking sector began offering ever more "attractive" loans. And we all know where that led.Would any of this have been different if Thatcher had lost that titanic struggle in 1984?
We have prize-winning thicko 'harryboy' with this:
If the Miner's strike was the cause of this economic crisis, doesn't it mean Arthur Scargill is the real culprit ?Yeah, harryboy, and you know who I blame for Pinochet? That bastard Allende.
Rarely has a headline seemed so mysterious, so seedy, and yet at once so ripe with promise...
Seriously. Whence did this fear of an evil pro-Hamas media come from? Why, the Zionist editor of the Jewish Chronicle, who's said some nasty (but fortunately, clearly ludicrous) things about Guardian journos over the last couple of days.
This is an excuse for a lengthy piece of navel gazing from the twits who front t'Graun's Media Talk podcast, and professional dullard Jonathan Freedland. Apparently the reason the Beeb is being so nice to the murdering Israeli government at the moment is because they were so nasty about the equally murderous Israeli assault on the refugee camps of Lebanon in 2006. Riiiiight. 'Cos normally wouldn't use the same tactics on the Palestinians as they do for Trades Unionists when there's a strike on*, normally they'd be ruthlessly reporting the facts on the ground.
I love the way the entire discussion takes place without anyone mentioning that the reason that Israel might look quite bad despite the best attempts of our media to suggest otherwise is the unseemly pile of bodies that is growing at an equally unseemly rate. No matter how many times you lie and claim that Hamas broke the ceasefire, no matter how little you mention the wider context of the conflict, so it looks like a bunch of uppity brown people with rocket launchers' fault, people are going to look at all those bodies and say 'seems a bit much, don't you think?'
Shorter the above: Twunts.
*Roughly, "we gave you a 30 second interview clip, so there's nothing untoward about asking the CBI to provide in-studio analysis about why your action is futile".
- Granting an Audience to:Bodies of Journalists - Lomax (again)
I hope that it will serve at least one of the following 2 purposes:
- to be reasonably interesting (possibly even enlightening?) in it's own right.
- to be handy for those pub conversations about politics where being a lefty automatically marks you out for derision / curiosity.
In Volume I of Capital, Marx says this of the fetishisation of commodities:
'A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things quâ commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.'
David Harvey expands this when he says (about 56 min in):
'This inseperability [of fetishism] from the production of commodities is extremely important. It says that fetishism is not something that you can just brush away. It's not a matter of consciousness. It's a matter of something that's deeply embedded in the way that commodities get produced and exhcanged.
'The argument in a way is simple enough. People under capitalism do not relate to each other directly as human beings, they relate to each other through the myriad products which they encounter in the market. But when we go into the market and ask the question "why does this cost twice as much as that?" what we're encountering is an expression of a social relation, which has something to do with Marx's view of value as socially necessary labour time. ... There are a number of ramifications.
'First off, we can't possibly know about the conditions of labour of all of the people who work to put breakfast on our table. We can't possibly know it. It's so intricate, it's far-fetched, it's so far-flung, and when you take the inputs that are going into the inputs that are going into the inputs - the coal that goes into the steel that goes into the tractor that goes into the... millions and millions of people are involved in putting breakfast on our table ...
'The point here is that the social relations between things mediate between us and everything that's going on out there. ... I've had this argument with you know, religious folk who insist on good moral behaviour or something of that kind and it's always about face to face relations - "I'm good with my neighbour, I help the person next door ...'" this kind of stuff and you kind of say "well what do you do about the people who are putting breakfast on your table? What's your moral responsibility to all those people?" and the answer is "well, no, I'm not interested in that".
'Well that is where your real connectivity to the world of labour lies.'
Today's Guardian carries this as headline (presumably because of its shocking nature) news:
'Revealed: child labour used to make NHS instruments
'British hospitals are buying surgical instruments produced in dangerous working conditions in Pakistan using child workers as young as eight, the NHShas admitted. ...
'buyers at NHS trusts - who spend £20bn each year on procurement - did not know about the problem because of the complex supply chains that bring the products to Europe. ...
'Mahmood Bhutta, a surgeon and clinical research fellow at Oxford University who has investigated the industry in Sialkot [said] ... "I have walked down a street and just in this one street there must have been 10 children working on surgical instruments. Some were certainly, I would guess, around eight or nine," ...
'It is not known what proportion of surgical instruments bought by the NHS are produced under sweatshop conditions.'
And I learn from the Graun that they recently had a hack day which resulted in this:
The Charlian! As Zero Cool might say, a truly righteous hack.
Edit:
I'd just like to point out that I'm so far ahead of the blog curve today that I didn't nick this from Chicken Yoghurt. And his source. With bleeding edge commentary like this, how long before my 'let tiny people live in statues to offset losses from the Icelandic disaster' plan is taken up by the Treasury?
Basically I'm calling Michael White a bell-end for his weirdly fanboyish coverage of Harriet Harman's nobbling of the proposed amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology bill last week, that would have made a huge difference to the 2,000 women a year in Northern Ireland who are unable to obtain an abortion in their home country.
Here's the article, and although I find it slightly weird that anyone with an interest in reform of abortion law should be labelled a 'zealot', it's definitely the Harman thing that grabbed me.
Near the top of the article:
'Vocally pro-choice MPs were furious that Harriet Harman - of all people - should be the leader of the Commons to engineer the sidestepping vote.'
Well, they would be I suppose. It certainly annoyed me and I'm definitely not an elected representative of anyone. But what you need to do Michael is leap to her defence! But how?
Skip to the end...
'Politics always divide between what the Greens call "fundies" and "realos", MPs who despise compromise and those who don't. On feminist issues Harman is one of nature's fundamentalists, brave enough to march into any minefield under enemy fire.'
What are you, her press secretary? Haven't you kind of shown, at the beginning of your 347 word article, that she did precisely the opposite? It's either that or Michael White doesn't think that abortion is a feminist issue. Bell-end.
It is in this spirit that unemployed Oxbridge graduates find relief from hanging around back at mum and dad's by being commissioned for radio comedy series that, even if too terrible for Radio 4, will probably end up being repeated on Radio 7 ad nauseum.
In a similar vein, over the last few months I've been annoyed to the point of response by some examples of drivelling bollocks on the Gruan's Comment is Free. Today we have another example from someone called Edward Lucas with this poorly-done let's-get-behind-Miliband-boys propaganda piece.
To Russia, with love: Why has an odd alliance of leftwingers, Tories and bankers come out for this fascist kleptocracy?
'On Russia, at least, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg think alike. Belatedly and perhaps emptily, all three party leaders have condemned the invasion of Georgia and demanded a tough response. Yet a different and even odder alliance is taking shape on the other side. Its members include such unlikely figures as Andrew Murray of Stop the War Coalition, David Davies, the Tory MP for Monmouth, and historian Correlli Barnett, as well as anonymous but influential City bankers and lawyers.'
Yes, why Edward, why? It couldn't be that there is no such alliance and that you're just using left-wing dog whistle terms like 'City bankers' 'lawyers' and of course 'Tory' in order to try and scare the sandal-munching, muesli-wearing do-gooder Guardianistas away from criticism of how the government have reacted to the Georgian situation and get them leaping into the arms of the parliamentary Big Three? Still, it neatly deflects the question of why our entire parliament has jumped on board the good ship Gung-ho.
So well done.
I also like the way you've lumped in mass murderer and war criminal Putin with progressive, democratically elected and notably not mass-murdering Chavez. Nice.
'A wider group is sparked chiefly by anti-Americanism. If you hate George W Bush then you may cast a friendly glance on the people who make life difficult for him, such as Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, or Putin in Russia'
Oh, and not forgetting the good old tar-brush of 'anti-Americanism'. I think you should include some Decent* lickspittle like about the West being committed to human rights in its foreign policy - you know as part of the unspoken Decent Manifest Destiny trip where we bring civilisation to the heathens. That would round it off nicely.
'Correlli Barnett praises the regime in Russia in a similar vein. In the past few days, for example, Barnett has said: "World peace? Give me Putin any day!"; and "the West should jettison moral indignation and global do-goodery as the basis of policy, and instead emulate Russia's admirable reversion to 19th-century realpolitik". The main motive here is dislike for the whole apparatus of modern diplomacy - multilateral organisations governed by international treaties and at least a notional commitment to human rights.'
Oh, yeah, like that. Cheers Ed!
What a godawful hack.
*Note for people who spend their time doing proper work - Decent appears to be a collective term for pro-war types who have or had some kind of left-wing views - Christopher Hitchins, Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch, you know the kind. Humanitarian values at gunpoint.
Edited to make even wittier. And correct a couple of typos.
Tarski's solution was the object language and the metalanguage. That is to say that a logical problem could be formulated, and this would be expressed in the object language, and a meatalanguage could be brought into play to analyse it, thus satisfactorily resolving the problem.
Thanks to this notion of analysis superimposed on analysis, the internet won't have to eat itself with this article: The discussion of religious differences online is not a game.
It is an internet article about how people on the internet misrepresent and slander others about their religious viewpoints, in which the author misrepresents some of the proponents.
Just to be clear on this Andrew: there are no New Atheists. There are atheists, but there's nothing particularly new about them. Tom Paine was an atheist you know. And when you say
'But then Myers is also the author of the The Courtier's Defence, a little essay described by Dawkins as "brilliant" because it claims that there is no need for atheists to understand what theologians say because they already know that the theologians are talking about something that doesn't exist. This dismissal, in advance, of everything your opponents might say as meaningless is the hallmark of all popular philosophical or religious discussion on the internet'
Some might accuse you of missing the point, and considering the fundamental way that you've missed the point, you could even say you misrepresented it Andrew. You see, the Courtier's Reply is an argument ad absurdum about the fundamental lack of evidence for the existence of a deity. So in it, the reason you don't need to be familiar with every theological argument is because they don't refer to the existence of God(s) in an evidential way. If you're going to evaluate claims for the existence of God, that is not a theological task. That is a philosophical task. Theology is about arguments internal to systems of belief, not about demonstrating the basis for those beliefs.
It goes like this:
I have considered the impudent accusations of Mr Dawkins with exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship. He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor's boots, nor does he give a moment's consideration to Bellini's 'masterwork, On the Luminescence of the Emperor's Feathered Hat. ... Dawkins arrogantly ignores all these deep philosophical ponderings to crudely accuse the Emperor of nudity.'
So like I say, thank goodness for Alfred Tarski, or I'd probably be picking bits of exploded internet out of my hair for a month.
So, a few highlights then, from the Man Who Would Be PM. Or more accurately, The Puzzlingly Self-Congratulatory HMV Lifesize DVD Promotional Cutout Who Would Be PM, For About Five Fucking Minutes.
Starting with the title, and moving in all possible senses downwards, it's
"Against all odds we can still win, on a platform for change"
Sounds promising Dave! What kind of change are you going for? Please bear in mind that your party's last humiliating defeat was in the Labour heartlands, a working class constituency. If you're looking to regain working class votes you're probably going to have to focus on the key issues that have affected their lives. So: food and fuel prices, wage cuts, rising unemployment, inflation, tax rises, and of course the fact that the rich are paying less and the gap between rich and poor keeps widening. (Then there's all the related issues - the cost of privatisation, imperialist wars etc.)
What have you got for us low-wage workers then Dave?
"we must be more humble about our shortcomings but more compelling about our achievements."
Oh, not a promising start! You're facing problems because of concrete tangible things. Rhetoric might, just might, not be enough to pull you out this time. What else?
"With hindsight, we should have got on with reforming the NHS sooner."
Ah, yes. More privatisation. Well that's always been popular with Labour voters hasn't it? Always been something to be enthusiastic about rather than, say, a heavy price perceived to be necessary for 'electability'?
"We needed better planning for how to win the peace in Iraq, not just win the war."
Ah, yes. Good move! Remind everyone that you're unapologetic about waging the war in the first place! Brilliant. Because that really was a popular move in the country, and particularly with Labour voters, wasn't it?
"We needed a clearer drive towards becoming a low-carbon, energy-efficient economy, not just to tackle climate change but to cut energy bills."
Do we have a winner, ladies and gents? It is after all something that a lot of people are worried about, what with it being a vitally important global issue that the Government that he has been a part of for so long have so far failed to do anything significant about, (I can't be bothered with listing all the ways we've been sold down the river here. George Monbiot can help you though). I am inclined to let him have this one, and he has spoken regularly on it. So, if I'm a generous man I can assume that it's teh evul scotchman stopping him from taking the painful and necessary action there. Alright Dave, there's one for you. I can't wait for you to dismantle Terminal 5 and cancel our massive roadbuilding plan, and enforce efficient building regulations - the sine qua non of a green PM. (I'm assuming that nationalising utilities in order to bring prices down and enforce greener practices directly is a step too far for the laser-eyed gimboid).
I think I'll skip over the stuff about the Tories being worse, 'social norms' being transformed and 'family-friendly' working, as being either
(a) not really the point
(b) hardly the Government's success but society's (assuming indeed that this has taken place in fact)
(c) not really something that should be wheeled out as a first-tier success of 11 years of Labour government, given the massive shift in wealth and power and attacks on the unions that had been endured under the Tories.
Equally I'll not be bothering with the tedious middle-class button-pushing - the bits about knife crime and da immigants (as Moes once said in the Simpsons, I knew it was da immigants. Even when it was the bears, I knew it was da immigants).
Besides I can't be bothered. New Labour Speak is like that - it wears you down through being so utterly fuckwitted and meaningless - you feel like you're playing their game by playing 'hunt the meaning'. Oh, certain calling cards can always be discerned: 'reform' means privatisation. 'Modern' means privatisation. 'vision' means 'how did I get into politics? Shouldn't I be in middle management, animating some powerpoint slides?' - but ultimately you'd have to spend 3 times the length of the original speech trying to work out what the fuck he's just said.
So, last 2 points before I give up in disgust and despair:
(1)"The modernisation of the Labour party means pursuing traditional goals in a modern way. The Tories claim the reverse. They say they have adopted "progressive ends" — social justice, better public services and fighting climate change — but they insist on traditional Tory means of charity, deregulation and lower spending to deliver them. It doesn't add up."
This from the government that invented a department of 'Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform'! The government that is seriously considering handing control of PRUs to charity! The government that lowered corporation tax and refuses to raise the top level of income tax!
(2) This "If people and business are to take responsibility" is followed by "But in government, unless you choose sides, you get found out."
I mean for fuck's sake. Time for a round of spot the paradox eh?
Edit: Chicken Yoghurt has a good post on this. I particularly like the description of the article as 'allegedly coherent'.
The Guardian appears to have started doing sarcastic headlines in its news coverage, with this story on David Davis:
Davis claims 'stunning' byelection victory
Although I do like the bit where he denies he's going to become a 'single-issues politician'. Because this is the only - you might even say single - issue that I'm ever going to agree with Davis on, ever.
"The basic idea at the centre of British political identification is the oversimplification that Labour is the party of the heart and the Tories of the head"
No it isn't, unless you're a particularly simple-minded Tory.
"Voters elect Tory governments when the country needs fixing. They elect Labour governments when they want something kinder and more gentle. That Labour is the party of the poor is what sustains it when it fails on other fronts."
No they don't. If you want the country fixing you don't get the Tories in. It was Ted Heath that started us down the disastrous road to monetarism. It was the Tories who screwed up the economy so badly that Labour needed to call in the IMF. It was Thatcher who tripled unemployment and gave us 3 recessions in a single decade. It was Lamont who destroyed the value of Sterling in a move of breathtaking stupidity. It's right-wing Labour governments like Wilson's, Callaghan's, Blair's and Brown's that try and deliver some measure of social justice within the confines of the right-wing monetarist straight-jacket.
Labour isn't the party of the poor either. Historically, it's the party of the organised working class, which is quite different. The poor are quite capable of voting Tory - historically around a third of the working class have done so. The Labour party was created so that the organised working class could assert their economic and social demands politically, through the ballot box. Labour was not established so that a group of paternalistic aristos could genially give to the less well-off of their own accord. That is called 'One Nation Toryism'. The Labour Party was established to be an emancipatory party.
Today, Labour equally isn't the party of the poor. It's top level are the same unaccountable right-wing clique that Tony Benn warned us about in the 70s. They are to all intents and purposes the practical end of One Nation Toryism (The Tories are the lunatic fringe of the same). That doesn't make them the party of the poor. One Nation Toryism is a bourgeois conceit. 'The poor' is a bourgeois conceit - it just means 'everyone else' in Tory lingo.
"In place of Labour's top-down and values-free approach, the Conservatives are offering something very different: an emphasis on the family; school choice; voluntary sector reform"
(a) what the hell does 'an emphasis on the family' mean? Is he implying that Labour want to take you away from your nearest and dearest in the manner of a Lambeth workhouse? Or is he implying that the Tories want to crack down on those pesky gays, give tax breaks to encourage marriage and all the other usual Tory pecadillos that make them so much fun at parties?
(b) 'school choice' used to mean 'vouchers'. If that's what he's talking about then what he means is a stealth dismantling of the state education system that undermines the principle of free education for all, whilst encouraging working class families to aspire to a frequently substandard private education.
(c) 'voluntary sector reform' means 'paying charities a fraction of the cost to do the job of statutory agencies'. Which means: underpaid, undertrained staff, stretched resources, poor public service and a return to the idea of public services as philanthropy, and not the hard won rights that took decades of work by the organised working class to achieve. I recently heard that a large national charity is being considered to run a Pupil Referral Unit by the education secretary. This is the kind of thing we can expect to hear more of in the future. It is an absolute disgrace.
At the heart of this realignment isn't just a concern for the material security of blue-collar workers but an understanding of the power of values issues. Speaking in Glasgow yesterday, Cameron called for "right and wrong" to return to British politics. The striving classes have suffered most from the liberal left's social experiments. They have suffered most from an easy tolerance of drugs, an indifference to the family, and trendy teaching methods. More than any other group in society they will vote for David Cameron's values-based approach to social justice.
(a) The Tories 'values' are genuinely horrific. The last thing Tim wants is to make this about 'values' - that's why he's couched this entire article - thoroughly dishonestly - as though the Tories give a flying fuck about anyone except themselves - the propertied, moneyed classes.
(b) 'blue-collar workers' is a misleading Americanism designed to convince people who do skilled labour that their interests are fundamentally different from those who do unskilled labour. They aren't. They are still being exploited in the interests of a hugely wealthy owning class and the only difference is the level of complicity in this state of affairs that white-collar workers frequently possess.
(c) 'striving classes' = not tories.
(d) No, the working class have suffered most from the Tories.
(e) Fascinating, presumably rich people never use cocaine, and if anyone wealthy spots a fellow member who does use illegal substances they have them prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Unlike softy-Labour, who would never increase the penalty for, say, marijuana use against the advice on their own experts just to appear all tough and that.
(f) What the hell does 'indifference to the family' mean? Seriously. As far as I can work out, there is no content in this proposition.
(g) 'trendy teaching methods'? What? Again, just what? Not enough learning by rote for you Tim? No one even able to use shillings any more? Too much examination of sources in history lessons, not enough listing of Henry VIII's wives? Or does he think that maths lessons begin with the teacher saying "Who can tell me the sum of the internal angles of any triangle? Come on, to the nearest 90 degrees is fine."
Anyway, this prick will be in government in 2010, so make the most you can of the fact that he hasn't got any political power at the moment. You'll remember Jim Callaghan's current escapades as a golden age, I promise you.
'Bush voices regret for macho war rhetoric'
With this choice phrase in the first paragraph:
'George Bush has expressed regret that his rhetoric in the run-up to the war in Iraq may have created the impression that he was a warmonger.'
On a completely separate note, this story was later followed by:
'Bush issues new warning to Iran'
whose first line is:
'The US president, George Bush, raised the possibility today of military action against Iran, saying his first choice was for a diplomatic solution to the standoff over Tehran's nuclear programme, but that "all options are on the table".'
Comments, queries, quists? It seems to speak for itself really...
- Granting an Audience to:Send the Marines - Tom Lehrer
I’m going to take Mark’s CiF rant piece by piece just to show how dumb it is. I’m doing this because there’s been quite a lot of this anti-rational stuff about recently, and Mark’s a prime example of why it’s really vital not to pay attention to it.
God is behind some of our greatest art
Richard Dawkins' secular army must be stopped or future generations will be denied a source of inspiration
Oookay. Here we go!
1) First things first, because you seem to be a little confused here, Mark. ‘The IDEA of God is behind some of our art’. Fixed that for you.
2.1) Richard Dawkins does not have an army of anything.
2.2) Richard Dawkins makes quite clear in The God Delusion that he is absolutely in favour of religious education. As he himself says,
A good case can indeed be made for the educational benefits of teaching comparative religion. Certainly my own doubts were first aroused ... by the lesson that the Christian religion in which I was brought up was only one of many mutually incompatible belief-systems. ... Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own conclusions about the consequences of that incompatibility. As for whether any are ‘valid,’ let them make up their own minds when they are old enough to do so. (Dawkins 2007, pp.382-3)
Now, I’m not saying that it’s a bad sign that the author of this article is wrong three times in just the title and abstract. I’m going to ask you to draw your own conclusions.
And so the stellar casting in Doctor Who continues with the news that Professor Richard Dawkins, biologist and bestselling author of The God Delusion, is to appear in the current series as himself. On Outpost Gallifrey, the definitive Doctor Who website, I read that Russell T Davies, the show's executive producer, and all the crew were delighted to see Dawkins. "People were falling at his feet," says Davies. "We've had Kylie Minogue on that set, but it was Dawkins that people were worshipping."
It's a great tribute to our age that a scientist can still be greeted with more adulation than a pop princess. But I can't help noting the irony of the imagery that Dawkins' reception has conjured up. Falling at his feet? Worshipping? It all seems oddly reminiscent of the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem in the days before his Passion; a strange resonance for the scientist who has declared himself the champion of secularism in a world where, he claims, the delusions of faith are gaining an increasing stranglehold.
Riiight. It’s probably worth mentioning that Mark has actually checked out Outpost Gallifrey. This is the only actual research he appears to have done, so it would be a disservice to his scholarship not to note that he can successfully use browsing software. It’s just that for the most part he chooses not to.
3) If you’d bothered to do more than the most cursory research, for example Google would have brought you this, you would have found that Richard Dawkins holds quite some significance for Doctor Who fans because
(a) he was a close friend of Douglas Adams, sometime script editor of the show and
writer of at least 2 serials in its heyday.
(b) He is married to Lalla Ward, who played Romana II in Doctor Who whilst
Adams was script editor.
(c) why wouldn’t you like him? It’s not like he bears any resemblance to the bizarre
character you’ve painted in this piece.
4) It is not reminiscent of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. There are no similarities except that both are scenes in which someone is liked. You might as well say that my arrival at my birthday party is like the funeral of Bishop Romero. The reason you think it’s ‘strange’ is because it’s a completely unwarranted comparison. Have you ever noticed how bubblegum is kind of like that ball from The Prisoner? Isn’t that weird?
Christianity is a myth. But it's a myth that has helped us - and continues to help us - ask searching moral and philosophical questions. Ours is an age in which a lack of belief, at least in secular Europe, is prized. Before, having one overarching belief was central to life, guiding our choices.
5) Ho hum. Still, at least you’re conceding the ground about actual facts and truth. This way I don’t have to waste any more time pointing out how little actual reason to suppose the existence of god there is.
6) Actually, I think you’ll find that discussion about moral and philosophical questions was going on slightly before the Jesus myth. I believe it was Whitehead who said ‘all philosophy is a footnote to Plato,’ and although I don’t necessarily agree with that statement I think you will find if you can be bothered to look, Mark, that most post-Christian philosophy was built on the work of the Greeks – particularly Aristotle.
But now we're all supposed to travel light, be supple, so that we can swap jobs, partners or political allegiances at a moment's notice. But this perpetual state of agnosticism, this lack of commitment, must surely be corrosive.
7) This supposition about how we’re supposed to live is yet another straw man. Well done, you must have enough to keep the cattle supplied all winter by now. Who says this? Certainly not Dawkins, who you’re supposed to be attacking (if you can remember your own abstract)
Those who are able to locate, and to explore intelligently, a system of belief, be that religious or political, are surely making a valuable contribution to our times. We may not share their beliefs, but we should treasure them.
8) What does it mean to ‘locate, and to explore intelligently, a system of belief’? If a radical Islamist takes their ideological position to its logical end and starts a bombing campaign against Muslims who have lost their way, does that count as intelligent exploration? If not, why not? Shouldn’t you be wowing me with this Christian philosophy that helps you so much, rather than chucking ill-informed and poorly defined sophistry about?
9) Whose beliefs should I treasure here? There are plenty of belief systems that I’m actively hostile to. Fascism, for example. Stalinism. Capitalism. What is there to treasure here? I should also add that if it is my belief that I don’t have to respect someone’s Catholicism to respect their right to believe it, your philosophy requires you to treasure that, even though it is fundamentally incommensurable with your own belief system. Wow, way to tie yourself up in knots there. I’d love to know how you’d react if you saw a racially motivated assault – how are you going to hug the guy on the ground as well as the guy putting the boot in?
As a child, I had a few years of passionate interest in the church. I'm not sure I ever connected with the spiritual aspect of God.
10) Does this mean that you connected with the physical aspect of God then?
I went to a Methodist church, where we were more robustly pragmatic than metaphysical, but I loved biblical stories more than any other children's literature. The great, essential dramas of father and son, mother and child, brother and brother, were fought out on those pages and gripped my imagination. I loved the sometimes mysterious beauty of the King James Bible, and I loved singing along with the great marching, proto-socialist anthems of the Methodist church.
11) You liked stories when you were a child. Thank goodness you got the ones with gods in then, because clearly if you’d had Harry Potter instead you’d have turned out much much worse.
As my teenage years hit, so did disillusion, and I retreated into my bedroom with a stack of records and John Peel for company. But I'm sure the narrative, ritual and music of the church were an essential part of my education as a writer. I'm not alone. The late Sarah Kane acknowledged that her youthful Christianity was the single most formative influence on her playwriting. It's strange to think that her Blasted and my Shopping and Fucking wouldn't have been written without the Christian church. But that's the truth. There's something about their sharp iconography and intense language that suggests a youthful experience of Christianity on the part of the writer.
12) So what if Christianity influenced you? Are you really saying that you couldn’t have written anything without it, or that what you wrote wouldn’t have been as good if you hadn’t had that influence? How on earth can you possibly justify that claim?
And I resent the possibility that aggressive secularism would deny future generations this inspiration.
13) And just to drag your resentment down to boring old facts again, Dawkins is actually in favour of R.E. so if his will were done on earth, your kids would be able to learn about a variety of religious belief in school (rather more varied than Methodism in fact). They just wouldn’t be taught that it was true. Which, since you’ve already acceded that your religion is a myth, shouldn’t really bother you now should it?
The Bible - as literature, if nothing else - should be an essential part of every child's experience. And children should study the great Christian art of the past, too. We often have a revisionist view of this great legacy of paintings, music and literature. Of course, we can't help denying the beauty and resonance of the Sistine Chapel, Handel's Messiah, Milton's Paradise Lost or the York mystery plays. But we like to tell ourselves that their creators were covert humanists, who wanted to make art and had no choice other than to make it within the confines of a church that held all the power and money.
14) Oh, really? All of it? Including the bits that condone slavery, condemn homosexuality, and require you to kill people for planting different crops next to each other?
15) Oh, really? Just the Bible then? Not the Koran, or the Torah, not the Analects or the Shruti and Smriti? Wow. For that matter, since you’re concerned for the safety of post-Christian philosophy, why not the Meditations, or An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding or Fear and Trembling or the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus or The World as Will and Representation or The Critique of Pure Reason or Twilight of the Idols? Thus Spake Zarathustra is a great piece of literature, by the way.
16) I don’t know how many people attribute humanism to Michaelangelo. Certainly being gay in Roman Catholic Italy can’t have been much fun at times, but since humanism wasn’t invented it would seem really odd to attribute that to him. Let’s check your sources for this bold assertion. Oh, right. You haven’t given any.
This idea that all artists are essentially humanists is a comforting myth for an agnostic age. There is little evidence to support it. It is, if you like, the agnostic's delusion - because the very opposite is true. The greatest artists, from Matthias Grünewald in the 15th century to Benjamin Britten in the 20th, had a genuine Christian faith: complicated, questioning, agonised at times, as any intelligent faith should be, but a very real faith all the same.
17) It certainly seems to be a myth. A myth that you just started, right now. Well done you – let’s see if it lasts as long as Jeebus, eh?
The church continues to play a largely beneficent role in the arts ecology of Britain. It maintains and restores the legacy of church architecture - an important collection of beautiful buildings whatever your beliefs. And churches up and down the country offer, as any working musician will testify, a fantastic programme of recitals and concerts of both secular and religious pieces, often for free or for a low ticket price. Areas where there is little access to live classical music are having that provision met almost entirely by the church. The more enlightened churches are still commissioning work, from paintings to sculptures and music.
18) Landlords in maintenance of their property shocker.
19) You obviously haven’t been to visit York Minster recently then. I go to the city every 2 months and I still can’t justify the ticket price to go in and have a look. To get in there and go up the tower I’d have to part with the best part of a tenner.
20) Regarding the many beautiful buildings that you can see for free. Durham Cathedral for example. Good for them. What’s your point?
Of course, we have to guard against the aggressive and restrictive fundamentalism that has poisoned so much of America. In the US, evangelicals and fundamentalists have now strangled school curricula and stunted, if not actually dictated, the agendas of arts organisations, leaving the nation culturally poorer. But we're not America. Our Christian tradition is very different.
21) Ah, so you’ve heard of the Vardys then? On the off-chance that you haven’t, luckily Dawkins has. In The God Delusion, which you’ll obviously be familiar with since you’ve attempted a character assassination of its author in the national press, Dawkins notes a lecture given by the head of science at Gateshead’s Emmanuel College in 2001. Entitled ‘The Teaching Of Science: A Biblical Perspective’(Dawkins 2007, pp.373-4) Stephen Layfield says
Let us state then right from the start that we reject the notion ... that there are ‘Two Books’ (i.e. the Book of nature & the Scriptures) which may be mined independently for the truth. Rather, we stand firm upon the bare proposition that God has spoken authoritatively and inerrantly in the pages of holy Scripture. ... the Scriptures of the Old & New Testaments ... provide us with a true account of Earth history which we ignore at our peril (ibid. pp.375-6)
So it’s a good job you actually did some research before you leapt there.
We should celebrate the Christian legacy in western art and society - and stop the Dawkins army from denying us the possibility of drawing inspiration from faith to create the art of the future.
22) Actually Dawkins does like the bits of the Christian legacy that aren’t ideologically suspect. He says, for example,
Let me not labour the point. I have probably said enough to convince at least my older readers that an atheistic world-view provides no justification for cutting the Bible, and other sacred books out of our education. And of course we can retain a sentimental loyalty to the cultural and literary traditions of, say, Judaism, Anglicanism or Islam, and even participate in religious rituals such as marriages and funerals, without buying into the supernatural beliefs that historically went along with those traditions. We can give up belief in God while not losing touch with a treasured heritage. (ibid. p.387)
So thank goodness you’ve not massively misrepresented his clearly stated arguments. And frankly, thank goodness that Dawkins is not a litigious man.
23) Create faith-based art if you want. No one’s going to stop you. The Catholic church and the C of E are both richer than Croesus so I suspect there’ll always be grants for you.
24) I can’t help suspecting that you’re not worried about an army of secularists, but that religious-inspired art is irrelevant to truth, at least as regards its religious content. Don’t worry though! If it’s good art, it will reveal the world of the artist regardless of whether they were right about their invisible friends.
25) Actually, I can’t help notice one other feature about yourself that has been revealed by this article – your monumental laziness. This has got to be one of the most poorly thought-out defences of religious thought that I have ever seen. Even John Gray went to the trouble to mis-quote Dawkins and use his words out of context – but that’s another story.
Dawkins, R. The God Delusion. Black Swan 2007.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/mar/1
"Gradually, the white face is completely covered in black ink, causing the man to disappear into the black background. The message is clear: the white working class is being obliterated by alien non-white cultures.
Immigration is not about race or colour, although the media and politicians would have us believe it is. More EU immigrants have entered the UK in recent years than people from non-EU countries (i.e. Africa, Asia and the Caribbean), yet this BBC trailer plays into the myth that immigration is a black and white issue, thus justifying the white working-class fear of being "swamped". "
Anyway, in t'Grauniad's coverage they say this:
"With the exception of monarchs, his resignation will bring to an end the world's longest reign in power."
Seems a bit of an odd exception to make, don't you think? "With the exception of other people who declare themselves rulers for life, he is one of the longest ruling rulers in the history of rulers and rulerdom"
But that's OK, clearly no one had time to think this through before it was put on the front page of a leading national newspaper.
The terrifying part comes later, when another man who has enjoyed years of supreme executive power despite not being elected to that postion spoke at a press conference in Rwanda, where he's currently showing his compassionate conservatism to better effect than it would if he had to stay in the US and sound like he could stand John McCain.
I think I have discovered the 4* most worrying words in the English language. As soon as you hear them, you know that large numbers of people are going to die, and you can't help but get a hollow feeling in the pit of your stomach.
"we're going to help."
*I'm not sure if contractions count as one word or two but I thought I'd go for the minimum.
ETA: This is my new favourite picture!
Did Raul buy him that for xmas and make him promise to wear it?
Yeah, that's it Observer, reinforce your reputation as a paper staffed by credulous imbeciles (see their non-apology over their inexcusable MMR scaremongering) by giving blog space (linked to from the front page of the site) to someone who may as well have been represented by a username and 3 lines along the lines of 'leave Max alone, and this definitely was a commision on the basis of his talent, whatever you might be thinking'.
The internet will eat itself.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/mike
For your delectation. Key quotes include:
"Last October, having spoken for the third time at a Conservative conference many influential and political figures encouraged me to stand as London mayor, resulting in many people in the party urging me forward."
"I've spoken to lots of young kids in gangs or "crews" as they prefer to be known and most want to get out of a way of life that gives them nothing."
"Create a London laureate to extol the virtues of the city in song and verse and encourage more of the colourful fabric of London to come through"
"Let's train traffic wardens to exercise common sense and reward Londoners who work hard, rather than hitting them with constant stealth taxes."
"Build extensive underground car parks. Put all car parking underground. I've discussed this with major developers and it's feasible."
from here:
"But I take Geoff's point. I was in Newcastle-Gateshead a few days back, looking round the new "flat-pack" IKEA homes that have gone on sale there - the first in Britain - and I kept thinking how fantastic the twin cities are. The fact that we, or at least I, now think of them as one place is significant in itself. Each has helped to haul the other up and turn them into places where the coolest young Londoner, or Parisian or Berliner for that matter, could happily live.
That will provoke outrage from some northerners, aghast at the prospect of our dear land of warm smiles and huge helpings turning into an outer suburb of the metropolis. But there's no way that's going to happen. It's just good to see prosperity back almost everywhere."
Thanks, London!
Not much of a post I know, but I really wanted to recommend this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/n
I don't hang around Bad Science as much as I used to but this is a fantastic, well-written, accessible, concise guide to the current hoo-ha surrounding homeopathy. Go on, have a read.
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