oneampfuse

The president's inaugural address has caused some controversy amongst whining liberal morons who hate Freedom and God.

Anyone who did not like the president's speech must hate Freedom because he mentioned it 27 times. And 'free' seven times. And you hate Liberty too, because he mentioned that 17 times. (That's freedom-luvin' at 139mph, once-per-forty-words. Let's see some of you compound-sentence-constructing pinkos match that.)


Your arguments have already been dismissed by Rush Limbaugh. How did freedom become controversial?" (See I told you! You recoil from freedom). Sample quotes:

"The complaints from the left include that Bush did not mention any specifics about his plans to promote freedom in the world..

"Lincoln's Gettysburg address did not get into the details of the Civil War and nobody complained about that."

You can't argue with that! That's why we all admire Lincoln's speech. The vapid, bafflingly repetitive quality of its abstractions, standing there over the graves & bravely refusing to mention the war. And anyway, as I said, you just hate freedom.

You should be more like the Taiwanese, who long for the freedom of being part of a greater China, according to the Bush administration: "There is only one China. Taiwan is not independent. It does not enjoy sovereignty as a nation, and that remains our policy, our firm policy." (Powell, Oct 25th, 2004).

And less like that liberal anti-president Chen Shui-bian who doesn't speak for anyone: "Taiwan is absolutely a sovereign, independent nation. It's a great nation, and it absolutely does not belong to the People's Republic of China. That is the present situation, that is the reality.."

And remember, like George said, "our duties are defined not by the words I use but by the history we have seen together". Quite.

Charles Clarke: Just like Blunkett, except without the liberal instincts.


Ever wondered how anti-drugs legislation is made? New Home Secretary Charles Clarke has a crash course.

Read the debate in the House of Commons, 18 January 2005. A black day for Labour.

Selected quotes:

Mr Jon Owen Jones: .. magic mushrooms will be made more illegal than they are currently. What benefit will that bring?

Mr. Clarke: We are looking in detail at the position on that—

Pretty basic question, right? ‘We are looking in detail at the position on that’. What, AFTER you’ve submitted the legislation? First instinct, as much thought as a jellyfish: BAN IT!

Mr. Clarke: I have obviously been guilty of misstatement if there is any doubt in the hon. Lady's mind: I am wholly against, without qualification, legalising drugs. If I was unclear in what I said, I reiterate it clearly from the Dispatch Box

Without WHAT? Paracetamol is in my bathroom cupboard, you asshole. Every year, it kills more people than all the magic mushrooms in the history of the world. People like me take it sometimes because they think it makes their life slightly better. It is not illegal. Nor does it scare me, as it is not controlled by gangsters, but by me.

Probably he meant to say: "I am wholly against, without qualification, legalising illegal drugs or illegalising legal drugs, except as chosen at random by the 'wheel of castigation'" .

Or maybe, "I am wholly against, without having the slightest idea what I'm talking about".

And in case we’re in any doubt:

Mr. Clarke: We are addressing the status of magic mushrooms in particular
because the chemicals inside them are class A drugs—they have an effect. As
a result, people are preparing products using a brand of magic mushroom, and
taking approaches designed to bypass the existing legislation, which is why
we are addressing the matter in that way.

"bypass the existing legislation" - as i am 'bypassing' the current money laundering regulations by not laundering money. There is apparently something so wrong about ‘not breaking the law’ that, as a matter of principle, it needs to be dealt with by primary legislation.

And this is the most disgraceful thing ever said in the House of Commons:

"Let me be quite candid. There have been two or three interventions from Labour
Members and from the Opposition that suggest a tolerance or understanding of
people who use those drugs for their own pleasure, or whatever they do. I do not
share that view in any respect whatsoever."

So some people are harming noone, carrying out a centuries-old pastime, not breaking the law, and you are outraged by your colleagues showing “tolerance or understanding” towards them? Fuck you right back to the hole you crawled from Charles Clarke. Can we have the other lunatic back please?

Channel 4 News reported in a 30-second item this evening that the National Intelligence Council, a body affiliated to the CIA, conceeds in a report that Iraq is the best place in the world to train as a terrorist. Just when I'm struggling to find the right tone in which to respond to this, I come across the following imbecile description, from the same report, about "globalisation", quoted in the Detroit Free Press :

"an overarching mega-trend, a force so ubiquitous that it will substantially shape all other major trends in the world of 2020."

Our priest caste evidently remains hard at work.

OTTO BEAT

Support the Early Day Motion - Write to your MP.


2004 was a dreadful year for secularism in the UK, and 2005 has started badly. I kept meaning to blog about it.. the subject looms too large. But here's a start:

Firstly, there is the outlawing of incitement to religious hatred in the Serious and Organised Crime and Police Bill. If you have any doubt about the Government's motivation for this horrid act of vote-pandering, Mike O'Brien, Minister for Energy at the DTI, will set you straight.

Read him writing in Muslim Weekly.

Then consider the Islamic ruling on homosexuality: 'Kill the one who sodomizes and the one to who lets it be done to him.'

The details of the ruling are informative. Firstly, it expresses the fear of the homophobe explicitly: "'Whoever allows himself to be used sexually (by becoming a homosexual or sodomite), Allah Ta'ala will expel from him the (natural) desire for women.' ". Ooh dahling!

And it appears that even the Learned are confused about some aspects of the Sacred Edict:

"Sahaabah, Ali (RA)... ..said, 'Only one out of the many nations had indulged in it and you all know how Allah Ta'ala had dealt with them. I feel that he should be destroyed by fire...

"..Abu Bakr (RA) said that he should be executed by being thrown from a great height.

"Another view of Hadrat Ali (RA) was that a wall should be dropped upon him.

"Hadrat Ibn Abbaas, Ali, Jaabir bin Zaid, Abdullah bin Ma`mar, Imaam Zuhri and Imaam Maalik (radhiallaahu anhum) have said that those who commit the evil deed of the people of Loot (AS) should be stoned to death,

Hadrat Ibn Abbaas did not fuck about: 'He should be taken to the top of the highest building in the town and thrown headlong from there. Then he should be pelted with stones.'

Ask yourself: who really needs to be protected from hatred? Is it the religious zealot who takes offence at the activities of others? We have to hate hatred.

Secondly, there was the enactment of a de facto blasphemy law in Birmingham when a play, Behzti (whose plot included sexual abuse in a temple), was cancelled because of death threats to the writer and violent protests outside the theatre by Sikhs claiming that they had been offended. A second theatre which planned to perform the play also had to cancel. I have it on good authority that this was due to further credible threats.

It was particularly disgraceful that the Catholic Church, in the person of Peter Jennings, the spokesman of the Bishop of Birmingham, allied itself with the Sikh theocrats and spoke in their defence: one would have thought that his institution would have had at least some decency about so blatantly attempting to judge in its own cause, given its own record of covering up sexual abuse on 'sacred' property.

Once again, as in Islamic schools in Pakistan, we had the sight of adult males in postitions of authority reacting with extreme aggression to a young person raising their voice on such matters.

Speaking on Radio 5, Peter Jennings agreed admiringly with the contention that noone would dare perform such a play if its subject was Islam. When the Satanic Verses 'fatwa' was mentioned, He also took the opportunity to denigrate Salman Rushdie (for example, saying of The Satanic Verses, 'he wrote a load of rubbish' - a preposterous statement aethestically - it contains some of finest English prose) in a manner which demonstrated a ruthless instinct for dishonesty in pursuit of his policy of blaming the victim when violence claims a religious cause.

In a horribly ironic counterpoint to Peter Jennings' comments, a Roman Catholic, Abu Masih, recently spent 6 years in prison in Pakistan and narrowly avoided execution for comments which included support for The Satanic Verses, where the blasphemy law is routinely used against Christians (as well as anybody else whom the local potentate wishes to influence). If you wish to protest against such evils, whether as a Christian or as a member of Amnesty, remember that, living in Britain, you do not have the moral high ground.

Thirdly, there has been the Christian attack on the BBC for broadcasting 'Jerry Springer - the Opera', in which Christians claimed that they had been offended, issued death threats, and appealed to the common law crime of blasphemy in their cause.

The claim of religious offence, a harm for which no evidence exists except the aggression of the victim, is a military, terrorist tactic. It is intended that the 'culprit' should be afraid. And they are. Innocent people have had to stop going about their lawful business.

This is the climate brought about by the Government's back-tracking on the abolition of blasphemy and proposal to outlaw 'incitement'. Theocrats feel assured that the force of the law, far from being brought against them, is on their side.

So tell your MP that you vote, that you will not accept any compromise with theocracy, and that they can start by supporting EDM 445

Will noone stop this rampage?

Good article from Atrios, comparing press reaction to various journalistic lapses and that of the right to the CBS ‘memogate’ incident.

Little Green Footballs is an excellent example of right wing foaming. They still talk about it daily: “It’s worse than you thought” is today’s shocka). You can also remind yourself of the original story there. . erm.. in some detail, it seems. In essence, CBS negligently used fake documents to embellish a true story, ie, that Bush did not properly fulfil his National Guard duty. This was a boon to Bush, as the fact of a media organisation screwing up became a bigger issue than his own behaviour. Read more at MediaMatters.

Without going as far as Coulter, we can take "non-liberal"/ "non-MSM" (ie, not radical right) media to be typified by Rush and Drudge. Look at their output:

Drudge: Kerry and the intern: Matt just made it up to mirror the Clinton scandal. The intern was real, but no cigar.

Rush: I’ve mentioned some previously, such "Fort marcy park", No 71 & 72 in this list.

Or anything he says about climate change.

Or his overt racism, as primitive and vile as when those Spanish football fans made monkey noises whenever a black player touched the ball.

Clearly, there are no standards on the right. Certainly nothing like those expected of CBS. If challenged, they will say that the comparison is unfair somehow: "How can you expect the little guy to face up to the networks? This is an entertainment business! Rush broadcasts every day; maybe some little errors slip out. Of course he says cheeky things to irritate liberals, and anyway we need some partisanship for balance.

All of these arguments amount to a rejection of the idea of journalistic integrity or our ability to make judgements about it. Like creationists, the right cannot seriously uphold the validity of their alternative. So their policy, screeching aside, is to claim that the 'liberal' media, with its claim to 'objectivity', is no less biased and no better.

The response is:
'Should it be more like Rush?'
'What should it be like then?'

The right hate the networks, objectivity, and journalistic ethics because their aim is total media ghettoization. They want every outlet to be like one of those shonky cable preaching channels, wallowing in ignorance & snake oil rhetoric, wailing that everyone else is corrupt, and uniting against their common enemy at election time.

Limbaugh seems to be getting more and more deranged. The post on his site today about how Democrats 'defend terrorists' by opposing torture is vile enough.

Now look at the way he represents the speech of Barack Obama, Democratic Senator for Illinois, during a very long post (warning: this link won't be there for long). I've added the previous two speakers for context:

CALLER: Well, I would hope so. I'd like to think that there's a large part
of the country that still doesn't wake up in the morning and decide, you
know, what's the politically correct way to go to bathroom this morning so I keep my poll numbers up. Some people I think like the president see further down the road
than a lot of these people, particularly some of these Democrats who claim
they've got the people's interests at heart when really all they want to do
is just pander to a handful of people to get money and get reelected. That's
the only thing they'll really worried about.

RUSH: Yeah, well, they're pandering too a fewer and fewer number of people
and a kookier and kookier bunch of people at the same time. Look, I gotta
run here. I want to warn you, Neil. We're going to go back to sound boarding
here, but I want to hear this. The savior of the Democratic Party, newly
elected senator from Illinois, Barak Obama is now speaking on voting
irregularities in Ohio.

OBAMA: -- and women, uh, could not vote and yet, uh, over the course of
decades, she had participated in broadening our democracy and ensuring that in
fact, uh, at some point, uh, if not herself, then her grandchildren and her
great-grandchildren, uh, would be in a position in which they could, uh, too,
call themselves citizens of the United States and make certain that this
government, uh, works not just on behalf of the mighty and the powerful, but
also on behalf of people like her.

RUSH: They cannot can't get over the class envy stuff.

OBAMA: Uh, and so the fact that she voted and that her vote was counted,
uh, in this election was of supreme importance to her, and it is the memory of
talking to her and shaking her hand that causes me to rise, uh, on this
occasion.

That Obama guy sure has trouble getting his words out! Probably because he's a foreign devil.

But hang on. Maybe not.. The transcript is also on Rush's site, at the top of the page. As a sample, skip to the end and listen to what Rush says before Obama speaks. Don't you hear those long 'eeeer's?.. And that caller, what about his 'er's?

It seems that Obama wasn't the only one who made non-verbal vocalizations. But he was the only one Rush recorded. Probably he doesn't like Obama, and wants to make him sound like a fool! Barbara Boxer and Hillary Clinton are also in the transcript. And they also hesitated in their speech. But even they don't get this treatment. So what's going on?

Rush is clearly attempting to undermine the obvious fact of Obama's eloquence through old-fashioned racial prejudice.

"Newsnight" just ran a story on internet "conspiracy theories" about Diego Garcia, the US military base from which we were kind enough to kick out the natives to make room for bombers in the early 70s. Diego Garcia suffered hardly any damage and the base received a warning from the frequently mentioned Pacific base about the earthquake that it did not pass to other countries. The US Navy has issued a press release explaining that favourable topography saved the base. No explanation has been offered for why no one else was notified, but I'd imagine that the absence of procedures for notifying other countries of information received by military facilities would cover that one. Fair enough. The piece was of course larded with sneering comments about the excitable cranks to be found lurking on the internet and topped off by a blurred montage of their fevered outpourings--which, we might like to imagine, would threaten to infect the nation's sanity were it not for the unswerving good sense of proper journalists.

So far so good. But what are these "conspiracy theories"? Well, having suffered a few seconds of William "Conrad Black has been a superb proprietor" Shawcross on the screen--filmed gamely finding at least some amusement in such thoroughly wicked speculation, in front of bookshelves bursting with leather-bound volumes of presumably stern and rigourosly argued texts--and a wholly contrived discussion about nothing in particular with "Britain's most vocal idiot" David Aaronovitch and George Monbiot--whose charming incomprehension at why Governments spend more on the military than on disaster relief drew loud sniggers from Paxman--I really couldn't tell you. So perhaps you'd like to tell me.

- OTTO

RealClimate.Org.

EG, post on climate change 'consensus', recommended by Balta

Worth reading in its entirety, but here's two quotes which relate to recent posts:

"The main points that most would agree on as "the consensus" are:
1) The earth is getting warmer (0.6 +/- 0.2 oC in the past century; 0.1 oC/decade over the last 30 years (see update)) [ch 2]
2) People are causing this [ch 12] (see update)
3) If GHG emissions continue, the warming will continue and indeed accelerate [ch 9]
4) (This will be a problem and we ought to do something about it)
I've put those four points in rough order of certainty.

"The skeptic attitude to consensus usually starts with "there is no consensus". That's wrong, and they usually retreat from it to "but consensus science is meaningless", and/or "consensus has nothing to do with science". The latter is largely true but irrelevant.

The NHS & stuff, according to No More Mister Nice Blog

"Two limbs good, one limb bad".

Conservatives, such as those at John Cole’s site, frequently express forthright views on ‘climate change’ and those who contend that it has been caused by human activity.

Here is a summary of the kind of arguments I’ve heard from right wing commentators on the subject. Threads of all except the first are reflected in JC’s comments section:

1) Creationism: God’s in charge. He put(s) the oil in the ground*. Scientists are out to trick you. Why else would they have got together with MSM to lie about so many aspects of science? We don’t need to do anything**.

2) Enviro-commie conspiracy: We don’t need to do anything. Except hate liberals.

3) Epistemological scepticism: We can’t know what’s happening. We don’t need to do anything
4) Climate change is natural: We can’t do anything. Sorry Bangladesh.

5) Ok, yeah, maybe: But how the hell are you going to put this genie back in the bottle, you moron? Capitalism will address it. We don’t need to do anything, although beachfront property in the Himalayas looks like a good investment.

Like Rush & co, I’m not a scientist. I can’t make a detailed response*** to all these hypotheses. However, I can see that they are mutually contradictory. If they were genuinely held, they would make strange bedfellows.

Anyone who held to 4 (eg, “the sun’s getting hotter”.) would be inclined to regard 3 as dangerous nonsense. Post-modern liberal nonsense I should imagine.

In my previous post, ‘Laugh With Rush..’, I explained how Limbaugh and his ilk talk shit about climate change, but not why. Obviously, Rush is not beating down the walls of academia with decades of theo/epistemo/metero/helio-logical research. He doesn’t care about climate change. He’s not looking at the arguments on their merits and it doesn’t much matter whether any of them are true.

His purpose is to ensure that 1-5 all remain serene on the bus together and, more widely, to ensure that the public’s capacity to absord stupidity and ignorance is at its maximum extent: No enemies on the right. A fair enough tactic in politics maybe, but we must be careful to distinguish it from a debate on climate change.


*A view recommended by Rush; with and without the brackets.
**Except hate gays. That’s important.
***1 and 3 deny the validity of science. 2 is nuts. 4 is possible, but, with regard to recent changes, the weight of informed opinion seems to lie heavily against it. 5 is a question of degree: Of course we can’t stop it tomorrow, but the suggestion that we can’t mitigate or accelerate is counterintuitive. If the scale runs from ‘OK’ to ‘bad’; why can’t it run from bad to very bad, and all points beyond?