You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June 2010.
A map depicting levels of military spending.
Grabbed from Worldmapper.org – many neat maps to look at there if you have the time.
You would think the international laughter echoing through the halls directed at poor befuddled Pakistan would been a large enough hint for other countries to avoid looking foolish. I was wrong.
“Bangladesh has blocked social networking website Facebook over caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad and “obnoxious” images of the Muslim-majority country’s leaders, officials say.”
Take that! We will take down facebook to preserve the honour of our omnipotent sky-daddy who is all powerful and all kno… wait… Apparently ‘Mo can’t do squat to a measly collection electronic of 0’s and 1’s on a facebook page. Perhaps the Mighty GOD of ISLAM is all powerful except when it comes to facebook (reasonable actually, even Superman had his Kryptonite) .
“The Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (BTRC) said the site was blocked on Saturday because cartoons of the Prophet “hurt the religious sentiments of the country’s Muslim population”.
“Some links in the site also contained obnoxious images of our leaders, including the father of the nation, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman; current Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, and the leader of the opposition,” Hasan Mahmud Delwar, BTRC’s acting chairman, told the AFP news agency.
The move comes a week after Pakistani authorities banned access to Facebook for similar reasons. They also blocked the video website YouTube and 1,200 web pages over a row about “blasphemous” content on the internet.
Muslims regard depictions of the prophet, even favourable ones, as blasphemous.
Delwar said Facebook would be re-opened once Bangladesh had permanently blocked the offending pages.”
Not to write the same story, but wow guys, do your really think blocking facebook is going to save your pathetic delusion of a religion from the forces of rationality?
“Drawing caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad is an attack on Islam and is extremely humiliating for Islam,” Hemayet Uddin, a Dhaka protest organiser, told thousands of cheering supporters.
You know what? Good. Show your opposition to Freedom and Reason. Show us how your particular religious delusion treats reasonable criticism. I say: Good for free speech, good for rationality, good for all the people who possess enough intellectual capacity to see your religion for what it is: a ludicrous, mendacious fantasy that ultimately hurts and impoverishes your society. Feel free to ignore modernity and progress. Happily flush your society down the batshite-crazy-swirly commode known as religion, just do not be surprised when we laugh at you.
Underage? Mo' says: "It's a go!" I'm holy after all!
Hey, if it worked in 1955 why shouldn’t it apply now…?
*headdesk*
I write this post out of a shared personal experience with a religiously addled graduate from university. Let’s call him, to be charitable, douche-nozzle or DN for short. As with most of the risibly sanctimonious religious turds out there DN believes he has a relevant, informed opinion on a myriad of topics. It must be nice to be able to answer the hard questions of life with the unctuous “goddidit” and not be laughed out of the room by your peers. DN seems to think that he can bloviate on about Especially Easy to understand topics ones Feminism and Post Modernism. Now DN, with his above average score in verbal rectaltude decided to strike up a conversation with my partner based on the All-Star thesis that “feminists have “gone too far” and really need to take a hard look at the direction of their movement.
Feminism has gone too far… Oh ya right! Magically, since DN was warming up to mansplain exactly how frakking peachy the womenz have it now. DN, despite a few inconvenient facts such as that the patriarchy, rape culture, rape, the pro-kyriarchy biased social, economic and political systems, not to mention ingrained cultural misogyny and….et cetera are still all going on full stream, began to explain how right the world was and how feminism had gone wrong. It was as if all the institutions that enslave, depreciate and and destroy women somehow disappeared, seemingly overnight and more importantly, are inconsequential because he is white and male and he frakking says so.
DN, even jebus knows you fail.
DN carries his privilege well. He is middle class and literally has both sides of the family falling over him to ensure a soft landing in what we like to call reality. One of his more egregious assumptions is that Intransigentia is just a mere girl and therefore does not have much going on in the grey matter. Not many things can be further from the truth. She possesses a quick wit and near encyclopedic memory of facts and argumentation which she often calls upon to dissect and dismember fuckwittery of a much greater calibre than DN could ever hope to offer.
DN got lucky though, as my parter was bereft of sleep and had a magnitude 8 headache. Even with her size 8 brain packed into a size five skull she put an end DN’s douchery. Simply by asking which feminist authors he was referring to and to back up his claim with some sort of reasonable example. It was amazing to watch how fast the conversation shifted.
“Uh-oh this one uses her lady-brain for more than just house cleaning, praising jebus, and bearing children to brainwash in order to propagate the frakking bloody car-wreak that is christianity.” – I’m sure this didn’t cross DN’s mind, but I’d like to give his withered rationality at least the benefit of the doubt.
I look forward to the day when the Feminist movement is no longer necessary. I work toward furthering the rights of women and educating people about the assumptions they take for granted, that necessarily hurt women but remain unexamined. There is a long way to go, I just hope we can take another step by firmly slapping down the mealy mouthed privileged mendacity that regularly spews forth from mouths of people like DN.
CBC reports -BARRIE, Ont. – A skateboarder in his birthday suit upset people at a beach in Barrie, Ont.
The naked man apparently was planning a skinny dip in the bay at Centennial Beach Friday evening.
Irate parents confronted him, and police were called.
The man put on his clothes.
Police responding to the calls gave him a warning.
They then drove him home.
No harm, no foul. Just funny :)
First published in 1949 in the Monthly Review.
I republish the second half of the article as it deals more directly with socialism and why it should be implemented.
“I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production—that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods—may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals.
For the sake of simplicity, in the discussion that follows I shall call “workers” all those who do not share in the ownership of the means of production—although this does not quite correspond to the customary use of the term. The owner of the means of production is in a position to purchase the labor power of the worker. By using the means of production, the worker produces new goods which become the property of the capitalist. The essential point about this process is the relation between what the worker produces and what he is paid, both measured in terms of real value. Insofar as the labor contract is “free,” what the worker receives is determined not by the real value of the goods he produces, but by his minimum needs and by the capitalists’ requirements for labor power in relation to the number of workers competing for jobs. It is important to understand that even in theory the payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
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