Apathy Sketchpad

In order to keep an eye on things, I keep the news feed of the Christian Institute in my Google Reader subscription list. They’re normally surprisingly even-handed, reporting on news events relevant to Christians (assuming that Christians mostly hate the gays) in a relatively impartial way. For example, their coverage of the £35,000 grant given to the British Humanist Association was far less insane than the Telegragh’s. But today I think they must have got bored of that or just snapped or something because this ‘report’ is at best thinly veiled propaganda.

Elderly Christian woman surrounded by gay mob

I’m pretty sure that was a ‘mob’ of liberals of all sexualities, albeit angry shouting ones.

An angry crowd of pro ‘gay marriage’ protestors surrounded and frightened an elderly Christian woman in Palm Springs, California – live on TV. The group was protesting against the democratic result of a state-wide vote which defended the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman.

I love that last sentence. It’s the poorest attempt I’ve seen in a long time to appear balanced. It opens with an implication that anyone who opposes gay marriage also opposes democracy and then lurches straight into abusing the word ‘defended’ where clearly the right word to use is ‘amended’. And to top it all off, it’s not democratic, because the whole point of the system of democracy used in California is that the people can’t simply enforce any random prejudice they like just by voting for it — that’s why there’s a constitution in the first place, and it’s why there are strict procedures that have to be followed in order to amend it, which in this case were completely ignored.

The incident, which occurred earlier this month, was sparked when a pro ‘gay marriage’ protestor attacked a styrofoam cross being carried by 69-year-old Phyllis Burgess. The cross was yanked from her hands and stamped on, leaving it in tatters on the floor.

Poor styrofoam cross.

Angry protestors surrounded the elderly lady, shouting abuse within inches of her face.

Yes, well, I’m not going to condone that, but if you are going to tell someone they can’t get married for a really stupid reason and then turn up at their protest with a massive foam symbol of that really stupid reason, how do you think they are going to react?

Really, the Christian Institute has no business even reporting this story. It’s about an event that happened 5000 miles away, and it’s not as if it’s representative of a wider problem facing Christians: it’s not really persecution if you deliberately walk into a large group of people who are understandably very, very angry at you for taking away their basic rights and hard-won equality because you think that the made-up opinions of an invisible wizard who lives in the sky are more important. And I notice she escaped entirely unharmed.

Palm Springs Police Department spokesman, Sergeant Mitch Spike, told American news network, FOX News, that no arrests had yet been made. ”The investigation is proceeding as it should,” Sgt. Spike said. Asked if the charges could be elevated to include hate crime penalties, he told FOX News: “That’s a possibility. That’s one of the things we’re looking at.”

From this we can conclude that despite having a clearly demonic name, Mitch Spike is a devout Christian. We know this because only a Christian could ever think that shouting at someone for hating gay people could possibly be construed as a ‘hate crime’.

The incident is the latest in a spate of disorderly protests by supporters of ‘gay marriage’.

Nice inverted commas there. I don’t even know why it’s such a big deal. It doesn’t remotely affect Christians, except for some gay ones who it actively benefits. It’s not as if the churches will be expected to conduct or recognise these marriages: it’s an entirely secular, legal contract. It has nothing to do with the wholly separate religious ceremony also called marriage. The tax status of homosexuals surely can’t be an issue to Christians? Aside from anything else, I’m pretty sure it’s mostly the sex that they object to. Hint to crazy Christians: it’s only you that abstains from sex until marriage. Irreligious folk and most of the less crazy religious ones don’t bother with all that stuff.

The protestors are angered at losing a vote on the definition of marriage, known as ‘proposition 8′.

“Angered at losing”. Nice. Classy. Certainly that’s the only possible reason for them to be upset. It’s not as if they’re being treated like second-class citizens or anything.

American religious liberty legal group, the Alliance Defense Fund, has released a YouTube video giving a flavour of the protestors behaviour during the past month.

…which you have uncritically reproduced even though it’s utterly moronic. Seriously, it plays threatening music the whole time and ends in the phrase “whose rights are really being violated?” as if that’s an argument for their side. And for the record, the Alliance Defense Fund are not a “religious liberty legal group”, they’re a bunch of bigoted Christian thugs.

Come on. This isn’t good enough. When you report news like this you become part of the problem.

I just read that Barack Obama, while in the Senate, used Robert Kennedy’s old desk. Then he went on to be President. This is, of course, eerily similar to that character from that US serial drama about a junior politician who goes on to be President despite a relative lack of experience and a question about an illegitimate child.

What was his name?

Thing.

Oh yes, that was it. Nathan Petrelli, who also picked out Kennedy’s desk (mostly to annoy Linderman). He repeatedly becomes President in eerie alternate futures.

I’d say it was a magic desk, but it didn’t work out so well for Robert Kennedy.

(Oh, and the poll on the second link is great: “Who Can Stop Arthur?” So far, “nobody” is losing with no votes, Claire, Peter, Hiro and Noah are on 2 each, Sylar has 15, but the runaway winner with 34 votes is Matt’s Turtle.)

So I was reading a blog-post called Fuck Shit Arse Twat Paedophile Coprophile Custardcopulatory Cuntwad. As you do. It’s about a Guardian article (thanks to the Internet, what newspaper is in my house and what newspaper I read are almost totally independant variables) that says:

Web providers to be named and shamed over offensive content

Politicians are ready to introduce league tables naming and shaming the speed with which internet service providers take down offensive material. The culture minister, Barbara Follett, and her Tory shadow, Ed Vaizey, have backed the idea that web providers must be embarrassed into dealing with violent, sexually explicit web content.

Fuck right off. Essentially, your suggestion is that in order to protect children from porn, there must be no porn. That’s ridiculous. If we ban anything inappropriate for children, we’ll all be stuck watching The Lion King over and over and that will be considered relatively edgy.

We allow adult films and TV shows and computer games. It’s always been the parents’ role to decide what’s appropriate for their children and to filter it for them. The companies should do whatever they think best. The state has a role only when there is good evidence that actual harm will be caused if they don’t (although it gives parents a hand with film ratings, and that’s fine because the parent is free to then show the film to their kids anyway). I’m unaware of any evidence that pornography is harmful to anyone. ProtectKids.Com claims to have some, but ironically the whole site is hidden by a 403 error. I can’t find any. It may exist, but the people who try to stop it never seem to mention any, and it would seem to me that children will probably grow up best if you let them basically do what they want in most cases. When you read a sentence like “exposure to pornography shapes children’s sexual perspective by providing them information on sexual activity”, it’s easy to think that the writer might not be arguing rationally for the child’s best interests. Heaven forfend that anyone should base their perspective on something as dangerous as information.

The article does say “she also insisted there was not yet compellingly persuasive evidence of a link between watching violent video games and subsequent acts of violence”, but all that proves is that Follett hasn’t quite understood the point of videogames or pornography, or equally possibly that Patrick Wintour at the Guardian sometimes just pastes in sentences at random.

Follett said she wants to see the pre-screening of material on sites such as YouTube, as occurs at present on MySpace.

That sounds like a relatively small and feasible job and an idea which has been totally thought through. MySpace is the Censorship Capital of the Internet. It’s not a good model.

Follett said: “Many people have said that the internet is like the wild west in the gold rush and that sooner or later it will be regulated. What we need is for it to be regulated sooner rather than later.

It already is. What you’re asking for is censorship. That’s not the same at all. That said…

The proposal for a “take-down” league table is backed by Vaizey. He said: “The government is in a position to put out the information, and it is up to the internet service providers to react to it. If they are happy to be 55th in a league table of take-down times so be it.”

I’d be all in favour of this, though. I chose my webhosts in no small part because of their extremely liberal acceptable use policy which basically says ‘if it’s legal, we’ll host it’. It’d be handy to have a list of all the companies that could be relied upon to actually do their jobs instead of wussing out and pulling your content to avoid offending idiots.

If this happens, I will personally write a script to regularly download that league table, flip it on its head, and host the corrected version under the title ‘ISP Credibility Ranks’.

That’s right, two Crackpot posts in a row. And they said it couldn’t be done.

This month, it’s everyone involved in the most pointless argument I have ever heard of:

Holocaust survivors said Monday they are through trying to negotiate with the Mormon church over posthumous baptisms of Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps. … ”We ask you to respect us and our Judaism just as we respect your religion,” [Ernest Michel, honorary chairman of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors] said in a statement released ahead of the news conference. “We ask you to leave our six million Jews, all victims of the Holocaust, alone, they suffered enough. … Baptism of a Jewish Holocaust victim and then merely removing that name from the database is just not acceptable,”

Essentially, among the less insane beliefs of the Mormon church is that in order to be reunited in the afterlife, you need to retrospectively baptise your ancestors. A group of Jews are angry at this, even though they presumably believe that a Mormon baptism is just a meaningless set of rituals that has absolutely no effect on reality. The Jews say this isn’t good enough because according to Michel

100 years from now, how will they be able to guarantee that my mother and father of blessed memory who lived as Jews and were slaughtered by Hitler for no other reason than they were Jews, will someday not be identified as Mormon victims of the Holocaust?

It seems to me that the clue is in the question there. I wonder if Michel routinely identifies people in the most passably-accurate-but-misleading way he can think of, referring to his family the way I might summarise a random internet contact if I want to pass on something from a blog that amuses me… I wonder if he has children and if so whether they tell their friends that they can’t come out to play because the honorary chairman of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors says they have to do their homework first. He should go on QI.

But no. According to the link I just posted, the standard Mormon defence is that the soul of the dead person doesn’t have to accept the baptism.

This just seems too surreal to me. I would have thought that Jews would ignore any rituals the Mormons did, believing them to be nonsense. I wouldn’t care at all if they wanted to baptise me. I’m pretty sure I’m already baptised into something, though I can’t for the life of me recall what exactly it is. Something with Jesus. I’d have thought that the Jewish faith, which teaches that the soul is already in heaven and not, as the Mormons think, in God’s waiting room watching the Holy Goldfish amble about for centuries on end and reading millenium-old magazines and cardboard books for four-year-olds, and so they wouldn’t even be told about the offer of baptism. I would have thought that, being dead, if the baptisee still has any existence then they’d have a pretty good idea if they’d picked the right religion by now and be in a far better place to make this call than their surviving relatives. This is like watching children try to argue semantics.

In fact, you know what this is like? I think I’ve found a parallel. (Bonus for regular readers: you may recognise the poster.)

First of all, I realise that technically it is November.

I had vaguely intended to give October’s award to this guy, a crazy US evangelical type who calls himself “The Hon. James David Manning, PhD” as if that’s a remotely plausible title and operates under the impressively crap slogan “All Jesus, All the Time”. I was shown the site by Friz, who linked me to a delightfully silly video of Manning explaining that the best way to defeat Obama was to refuse to refer to him by his real name, and instead to call him “TAAARZAAAN!” every time as if anyone at all would know who or what you were on about if you did. My second favourite part of the clip was his utter failure to follow his own rule even for the few minutes of video. My favourite part was the way he kept repeating the phrase “half-black, half-white, raised by an ape” as if people were going to believe that Barack Obama was raised by an ape if he did. (Strictly, of course, Obama was raised by a human, and a human is a type of ape, but Manning doesn’t strike me as someone who will accept either of those things.)

Sadly, the video has been taken down. So I thought maybe I’d give it to Tim Hastie-Smith, who thinks that we need faith schools to defeat the X-Factor, because of course policy that makes a modicum sense is so 80s.

But then, Hastie-Smith seems (other than his name) to be a rather dull man, whereas Manning is relentlessly mad. For one thing, he’s written a pamphlet called “Focus On Purgatory”, which is the same pamphlet as “Focus On Heaven” but it takes ages to download.

Actually, I can’t read Focus On Purgatory, because it costs $12 and there’s no amount of dollar devaluation that could make that sound like a good deal. Presumably, charging $12 for a shitty pamphlet is one of the tips in his other book, “God’s Business Plan”. Which is a shame, because apparently the pamphlet “offers concrete proof to the validity and purpose of purgatory”.

He also seems to have a hand in schooling. (”All Excellence, All the Time”. Honestly, it’s only slightly less stupid than Mr Burns starting a religion.) Here is the timetable (PDF):

• Monday – Write the Dictionary Day
• Tuesday – Remember the Dictionary Day
• Wednesday – Learn the Hymns Day
• Thursday – World Knowledge Day
• Friday – World Events Day

Sounds awful, doesn’t it? And yet I’m not going to use it as an argument against faith schools, because what we really have here is an argument against idiot schools. There does seem to be one advantage for the students, though.

The line between parody and reality is thin and it’s caught me out before (although I would argue that once something is indistinguishable from that which it aims to lampoon, that makes it a bad parody), but this would seem to be real even if lesson three is a rickroll. So I’m giving him the award anyway, hilarious Tarzan video or no.