The “Right” To Offend

 Politics, Religion  No Responses »
Jan 172015
 

In the wake of the murders of the Charlie Hebdo journalists there is a continuation of the debate over free speech (and expression). Amongst those making a contribution are those who say things like “I believe in free speech, but …”.

As soon as someone sticks a “but” into a sentence like that, you begin to wonder if they are really in favour or not. Usually it turns out they are not.

And one of the points raised after the stereotypical “but” is the issue of offence. Which is a tricky area because who likes being offended? Or to be more precise, who likes their personal sacred cows to be offended? And perhaps that is the tipping point – if your intention is to offend someone or a group of people, perhaps you should re-consider.

But if you are intending to criticise someone’s beliefs – religious or otherwise – it is perfectly justifiable. And yes using humour to make fun of someone’s beliefs is just as much criticism as a long, tedious, and boring blog posting. Any offence caused is a byproduct of the criticism, so perhaps this blog posting should be “The right to criticise includes the right to offend.”.

And in most cases the criticism comes in response to offence caused – if you create a religion that requires human sacrifice, you can expect a Charlie Hebdo cartoon mocking your religion.

And all religions include ridiculous and offensive aspects. After all the depiction of a mythical sky-daddy and impugning the godless nature of the universe causes offence to atheists.

So if you want free expression like the cartoons of Charlie Hebdo banned because they are offensive, I’ll be asking for all those religious tomes like the bible and the koran to be banned because they are offensive – to me. Your rights as a believer in fairies, angels, and other imaginary and infectious friends do not trump my rights as an atheist. Just as my rights as a godless and amoral unbeliever do not trump your rights as a believer.

 

Catastrophic Sense of Humour Failure at Fox News Regarding #foxnewsfacts

 Media  No Responses »
Jan 122015
 

For those who are not aware, Fox News is a cartoonish “news” channel best regarded as a comedy channel. Today they managed to make themselves ridiculous when a so-called “expert” claimed that there are hundreds of “no go” zones across Europe including the whole of Birmingham, and that London had gangs of religious police roaming around beating up anyone without appropriate attire.

In response, there have been thousands of tweets published to a twitter hash tag (#foxnewsfacts) mocking Fox News for this mistake. To be precise they have been posting ridiculously over the top “facts” in the style of Fox News without claiming that they were really statements made by Fox News.

The so-called “expert” has apologised, although after calling Birmingham “beautiful” you do have to wonder about how much research went into his apology. Birmingham is a great city that can be described in many ways, but beautiful isn’t the most obvious adjective to use.

Fox News on the other hand seem to have lost the plot (if they ever had one to begin with), and have been issuing legal threats in response to some of the tweets :-

Epic Idiocy!

Just for the benefit of the idiots at Fox, the Black Country is a long-used phrase used for the region to the north and west of Birmingham. As could be found out with a few clicks of the mouse. And …

Nobody is claiming the ridiculous statements tweeted were made by Fox News; they are merely taking the piss. And by making pointless legal threats, they are prolonging the ridicule.

Or was it all a fake? Perhaps.

The Charlie Hebdo Killers Were Not Muslims

 General, Politics, Religion  No Responses »
Jan 102015
 

(Stolen from a Facebook posting)

Sounds daft doesn’t it? Because the killers themselves would have claimed they were doing it for islam. And of course there are plenty of feeble-minded bigots who are now attacking muslims and islamic places of worship.

Now don’t get me wrong: I have no patience with organised religion and think anyone who believes in an imaginary infectious friend in the sky needs their head examining. But they have a right to believe anything they want.

They just don’t have the right to inflict it on the rest of us.

Within any community (religious or otherwise), there are two sorts of people, and yes I’m being overly simplistic here. There are the majority who go along with the community and obey the dictates if they are not too inconvenient. And there are the zealots who take it to the extremes. And amongst the zealots there is a deranged minority who want to inflict the standards of their community on everyone. Some of them use violence to do so.

Now there was some idiot on the news today who claimed that despite Charlie Hebdo publishing a cartoon insulting to christians, that it wasn’t christians shooting journalists. True enough, but it there are christians murdering abortion doctors and harassing those entering abortion clinics, so it is not as if there are no christian terrorists.

Now comes a bit of a leap of faith: These terrorists whatever their faith, have more in common with each other than their co-religionists. They all espouse an extreme form of their faith, are compelled to inflict it on everyone, and resort to violence to pursue their goals.

Their most significant attribute is terrorism and not their religion. Their crimes overwhelm their faith and make their religion irrelevant.

An alternative way of looking at it is a quantitative approach. There were 3 killers involved in the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket. The number of muslims in France is not known precisely, but a figure of about 3 million seems a reasonable approximation for this sort of calculation, which if you work it out makes the number of killers in this incident just 0.0001% of the muslim population of France.

So why were there only three killers? Because muslims as a whole are not terrorists.

Besides which, there is nothing we could do to annoy the killers more than to deny their islamic nature.

Ebola in the UK: Don’t Lick Any Strangers!

 General, Media  No Responses »
Dec 312014
 

Which is ridiculous of course. You could lick every person (including the nurse who was incubating Ebola) on flight AT800 (the plane from Casablanca to Heathrow that carried the nurse) without catching Ebola; plenty of other things! But not Ebola.

Ebola is hard to catch. You have to come into contact with infected bodily fluids which isn’t likely to happen if you share an airplane cabin.

So of course the press is overreacting in it’s usual way resorting to scaremongering to push sales. It is pretty obvious given some of the wild stunts they have come up with that we cannot trust the mainstream press to accurately tell us what is going on :-

  1. The Daily Mail wants the planes involved to be disinfected. Why? Without going into graphic details, unless the nurse was exuding bodily fluids on her plane journey there is no risk from getting on a plane that previously carried someone who was incubating Ebola.
  2. They wonder why returning health care workers were allowed to travel onwards using crowded public transport. Ignoring the fact that treating returning heroes as pariahs is contemptible, there is in practice no risk in allowing people without symptoms to travel in public.
  3. The nurse was allowed to travel onto Glasgow after raising concerns and after being tested for raised temperatures. Apparently her raised temperature was not considered to be significant (there’s lots of things that can cause a raised temperature) and she had no other symptoms.
  4. They are making contact with fellow passengers and are testing two other patients “just in case”. Well of course they are – with something as nasty as Ebola, you take precautions a step or two further than is strictly necessary but you don’t wander off into the realms of the ridiculous.

The press is of course announcing the review of procedures for dealing with those arriving from West Africa whilst implying that things were not up to scratch. Well of course they are reviewing procedures – procedures should be reviewed regularly whether or not there is a problem.

In practice, the only people in this country at risk from Ebola are those who have worked with Ebola victims – either in West Africa, or by nursing those who have caught the disease there. In reality, the rest of us currently are at a risk so low as to be negligible. Even everyone on flight AT800 and the BA flight to Glasgow.

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