You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June 2012.
Finally a great picture of my dog. :) Shadow says “Hi” and is happy to meet all of you.
Who says you cannot have fun with classical choral repertoire?
Singers: Anita Rywalska, Renata Drozd, Marcin Pomykała, Kamil Pękala tackle Orff, Mercury and ABBA. :>
Let us sent out a big thanks to the Ontario Swing Voters that brought us this monstrosity known as the Harper Majority Government. The Omnibus bill is the latest poke at the mouldering corpse that is Canadian Politics.
Debate? Defence of ideas? Compromise? Not happening in our House of Commons. The light at the end of the tunnel is coming though and the French NDP contingent is gnawing at the bit waiting to lead the charge to expel the current plutocrats from power.
“The French chant “2015” started in the upper reaches of the NDP backbench and soon cascaded into a common, desk-thumping chorus just before midnight Thursday in the House of Commons.
The tone from the official Opposition was oddly celebratory, given that they’d just faced 22-plus hours of consecutive spankings by a Conservative majority government voting to protect its omnibus budget bill from hundreds of amendments.
Bill C-38, the sprawling Jobs, Growth and Long-Term Prosperity Act, survived the ordeal untouched and now goes to third and final reading in the Commons on Monday.
The bill — and the literally dozens of significant statutes it comprises on everything from environmental assessments to old age security, employment insurance rules, government contracting and cross-border policing — should clear the Conservative-dominated Senate by the end of next week.”
Of course Bill C-38 was going to pass, like a javelin through the heart of Canadian Democracy. But we can save hope that things will change as the NDP back bench clearly intoned in the House of Commons.
“Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said as he emerged from the chamber with his budget bill intact.
“We have our view and our view is supported by the mandate we got from the people of Canada last year, so we’re carrying out the mandate that we have — which is about jobs and growth and economic prosperity.”
The majority of Canadians did not vote for you or your mandate Mr.Flaherty, it would be good of you to remember that. You can feel the scorn from Conservative benches, actually having to show up and vote on legislation, having to deal with this nasty messy idea that people should have input into how their country is run. The nerve of Canadians who clearly do not know their place.”
“Green party leader Elizabeth May was the author of hundreds of the substantive amendments shot down Thursday and one of about a half dozen MPs who didn’t miss a single vote. She said it was far more than “theatrics or … a waste of time.”
“This was democracy,” said May, still feisty and coherent after 22 hours of voting.
“This was parliamentarians stepping up to our obligation and our duty to Canada, to parliament, to the people who sent us here from our constituencies, to behave like parliamentarians.”
“It was a sign that democracy in Canada has a spark of life,” said May. “We found the pulse.”
This was democracy indeed. The electorate will remember how the Harper Government slapped the democratic process in the face. Prepare for more jaw dropping, commonsense defying attacks on our environment, labour and the social fabric of our society though because Harper needs to get all the damage done quickly so he can begin sucking up to the Canadian public in time for the 2015 election.
Oh the legions of butthurt MRA’s and Nice Guys are trolling the comments on this particular video. “Dear God!,”they say,”what about the men?” can be heard reverberating the intertubes. Wednesday is going to be an examination of the series on video games from a feminist perspective. Enjoy the ride.
“It is music’s capacity to take over your mind and invade your inner experience that makes it so terrifying as a potential weapon.“
– Thomas Keenan, the director of the Human Right’s Project at Bard College
Hey, surprise we’re not the good guys. Ever. This is all from Al-Jazeera and I guarantee it will not brighten your day.
“In 2003, it transpired that US intelligence services had tortured detainees at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib with music from Sesame Street.
Human rights researcher Thomas Keenan explains: “Prisoners were forced to put on headphones. They were attached to chairs, headphones were attached to their heads, and they were left alone just with the music for very long periods of time. Sometimes hours, even days on end, listening to repeated loud music.”
“The music was so loud,” says Moazzam Begg, a former detainee at Guantanamo Bay and Bagram. “And it was probably some of the worst torture that they faced.”
Stunned by this abuse of his work, Cerf was motivated to find out more about how it could happen.
“In Guantanamo they actually used music to break prisoners. So the idea that my music had a role in that is kind of outrageous,” he says. “This is fascinating to me both because of the horror of music being perverted to serve evil purposes if you like, but I’m also interested in how that’s done. What is it about music that would make it work for that purpose?”
We’re missing yet another capitalist experiment go bad. Chile self-destructed earlier under the watchful eye of the IMF and its neo-liberal reforms. Mexico, geographically, is much closer to us and you would think that its slide into anarchy would garner a little more attention in our news media.
Nah.
The breakdown of Mexican civilized society continues unabashedly while the important powers that be continue to make their money. The unravelling of the social fabric of Mexican society is chilling reminder of lawlessness actually is.
The North American Free Investor Agreement (NAFTA) was the harbinger of the demise of Mexican society. Austerity and cost-cutting denied the government the funds necessary to do what governments are supposed to do, serve and protect their people. Not industry, not finance, not capital – the people of Mexico. The inequality and insecurity are so entrenched, the people so desperate, people will do anything to survive. Morality, ethics all go down the shitter when you struggling just to survive the day. Consider the police situation:
Watch closely and you can see our future written in the blood of the poor of Mexico. We mourn for them, yet fail to see the precursors (neo-liberal reforms, etc.) that are shredding the social fabric of our societies.
“Do you believe in god?”
“No.”
“Well, do you believe in love?”
“Sure.”
“Then you must believe in god, as god is love”
“Wha…?”
I’ve heard the ‘god is love’ bit quite a number of times, but never as a proof for its deistic existence. When it is merely an assertion about a god already presumed to exist, it is easy enough to show that ‘god is love’ is an absolutely ludicrous notion. One merely needs to point to deeds/positions attributed to the god in question that cannot be seen as loving. In the case of christianity, the bible helps us out immensely with tales of murder, rape, slavery, genocide, and human sacrifice, all in the name of their god, to make this a very easy task. In addition, one could also point to the innumerable atrocities committed by those closest to god. Indeed, the degree of horror believers can enact seems directly related to the level of zeal they possess. Or, if one took ‘god is love’ to be a part of omni-benevolence, then one could point to the problem of evil to show how god cannot exist. But in this conversation, all this doesn’t work yet.
It doesn’t work because a particular god has not been identified. The only characteristic mentioned is that ‘god is love’. To be sure, the person who presented this argument to me had a specific god in mind. If they were to have gone so far as to start describing other attributes of their god, then the thoughts in the previous paragraph would surely destroy their position. But that’s not the point. While the posited syllogism is vague, maybe even a bit flaky, if it works, then the belief in god is validated and the little details about the surrounding nature of god (everything he is that isn’t solely love) can be hashed out later. The important thing is that god has been proven and all us atheists are just being fussy about superfluous factoids.
The thing is, the details may be superfluous, but that these details exist at all is not. If one wants to say that ‘god’ is exactly synonymous with ‘love’, then the concept of ‘god’ is completely useless. There is no reason for there to be two words when one will do. And as ‘love’ is a much more flexible term (how weird would it be -even for theists – to replace the word love and say something like “I’m deeply in god with you, darling”), the term ‘god’ ought to be discarded. Of course, the theist resists this, not only because they don’t want to give up their delusion, but also because, at some level, they are aware of the little dishonesty in the assertion ‘god is love’.
It is dishonesty in omission. No theist ever would ever say ‘god is love and only love’. If they did, as I showed last paragraph, ‘god’ would be rendered meaningless. What they are not saying is “god is love and some other things I’m trying to illegitimately sneak into this argument so I don’t have to go through the impossible task of justifying those extra attributes.” Even if the only thing they wanted to add was ‘god is love and a sentient entity that exists outside of humanity’, they would be right back where they started, with no evidence, no proof, and no reason to think that god exists. Nothing addresses always-unmentioned second half. But theists are never that honest, least of all to themselves.
But hey, I was wrong that one time before. It could happen again. What if some theist comes up with some brilliant argument that refutes what I just said, so brilliant that I cannot answer those refutations? Does ‘god is love’ work then? Not hardly. Consider an exercise in consistency.
Do you believe that the sea exits? You do? Great! That means you must believe in Poseidon, for Poseidon IS the sea. The tides reflect his breathing, the waves his mood. Thus, we can learn a lot about Poseidon just by looking at the sea. As any seafarer will tell you, conditions out on the briny sea can are uncertain at best, displaying how temperamental Poseidon is. Therefore it is always good to offer a sacrifice to Poseidon before any travel by sea, in order to secure safe passage.
Are you convinced? Will you now pray to Poseidon? Not a chance. Why? Because you just can’t attach a real life thing to an imagined being and have it pop into existence, that’s why. If this method worked, you would have to believe in Apollo because you believe in the sun, Thor because you believe in lightning, Gazunga because you believe in cheese, and Eros because you believe in love. Wait! What was that? Love was for that christian god, wasn’t it? Yup, this line of reasoning can bring into existence multiple deities for the same real life phenomenon.
In fact, it can pop into being an infinite amount of gods, an infinite amount of whom require that they be the only god. That either means that this line of reasoning is necessarily incoherent, or it shows that each god concept has an equal chance of being true, which, in this case, is literally infinitesimally small.
‘God is love’, like all such fanciful tripe (eg. ‘God is beauty’, ‘God is truth’, ‘God is justice’, etc) either renders god meaningless and the idea ought to be discarded, or it is dishonest and the idea ought to be discarded. Even on the minuscule chance that I’m wrong on this, the same method could then be used to validate an infinite number of mutually-exclusive gods and the idea ought to be discarded. No matter what, theists using this line are not being deep, spiritual, other-worldly, or mystical. They are just being wrong.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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