Turn Me On!

Thanks to Steffan for the link!

Liberté, égalité, fraternité

John Stewart explains to his American audience that, not only do other countries exist, there are also other presidential elections.

Sacre bleu!

And also this from Stephen Colbert

Oh, la la!

What Colbert doesn't understand (or maybe is simply ignoring) is the fact that the French Socialist party is actually centre-left. Their socialist party is part of Socialist International, to which even former Left parties like the ALP still belong. That's right, in France the word "socialiste" never really attracted the same stigma as it did in English-speaking countries. For something more radical you have to go to the French Communist party, which actually has a credible candidate who gets media air-time. Even more radical but still well-known are two Trotskyist parties, the Worker's Struggle and its more successful offshoot, the Revolutionary Communist League (4.08%). As a Fabian, all this revolutionary language does worry me a little. But I'm just glad to see that some countries still have a thriving left.

So Colbert's remarks are quite wide of the mark. In fact, Ségolène Royal is closer to Third Way politics, although I doubt she's as bad as Bill Clinton, Tony Blair or Kevin Rudd.

Update - 2007/5/7
Well, Nicolas Sarkozy won the second round. Here's what Étienne Colbert has to say about it:

Send 'er down, Hughie!

And now Howard is slowly bringing religious language into Australian politics - 'We should all pray for rain,' he said.

Actually, that quote taken out of context looks rather idiomatic to me. Not necessarily more religious than "keep your fingers crossed" or the title of this post. Maybe I shouldn't be so quick to jump down his throat.

Yet Phillip Coorey at the SHM has taken him at his word, 'John Howard has urged everyone to pray for rain after warning that the millions of people along the Murray-Darling Basin will have only enough water for basic domestic use from the middle of the year.' I wonder whether or not he really meant it like that.

And I wonder why the SMH would assume that it was meant literally. Don't tell me that Australia is already losing its aversion to religious language in the public sphere. That's one of the defining features I tell Americans about Australia, that politics and religion are not for polite conversation, only amongst friends. (In Australia I was considered quite outspoken on my political opinions yet here I've had a friend tell me that I'm very reserved.)

As an aside, last time I gave that spiel to Americans there was a professor there who remarked that Oxbridge High Tables are much the same. Then he went on to say something like, 'You've got to get rid of Howard next time!' And then agreed with me when I said I thought Howard would retire soon. I'm yet to find out how an Italian, educated in the UK and living in the USA knows about Australian politics.

Atheism and the Problem of Evil

Why is it in the US you can't be a conservative without also being a religious bigot?

For example:

Where Is Atheism When Bad Things Happen? by Dinesh D'Souza
Notice something interesting about the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings? Atheists are nowhere to be found. Every time there is a public gathering there is talk of God and divine mercy and spiritual healing. Even secular people like the poet Nikki Giovanni use language that is heavily drenched with religious symbolism and meaning.
The atheist writer Richard Dawkins has observed that according to the findings of modern science, the universe has all the properties of a system that is utterly devoid of meaning. The main characteristic of the universe is pitiless indifference. Dawkins further argues that we human beings are simply agglomerations of molecules, assembled into functional units over millennia of natural selection, and as for the soul--well, that's an illusion!
To no one's surprise, Dawkins has not been invited to speak to the grieving Virginia Tech community. What this tells me is that if it's difficult to know where God is when bad things happen, it is even more difficult for atheism to deal with the problem of evil. The reason is that in a purely materialist universe, immaterial things like good and evil and souls simply do not exist. For scientific atheists like Dawkins, Cho's shooting of all those people can be understood in this way--molecules acting upon molecules.
If this is the best that modern science has to offer us, I think we need something more than modern science.

What a fucking non-sequitur.

I mean, apart from the fact that it's not Dawkins' job to give his condolences to every man and his dog, I don't recall him ever saying that the universe is necessarily meaningless. Even if Dawkins did say that, most atheists are happy to admit that people's lives can have as much meaning as any individual cares to get out of it.

And surely the problem of evil is a no-brainer for atheists. The Christian has to explain that God gave us free will because that makes the world a (net) better place, and then has to fumble over why children are born with birth defects and other painful things unrelated to free will. Atheists have never asserted that there exists an all-powerfull, all-knowing, all-good being who could stop those things if he wanted. The atheist simply has to reply, "Some people enjoy doing bad things to others." There's probably an evolutionary explanation out there for most forms of anti-social behaviour (I'm sceptical of most of the explanations that have been offered so far) but with or without it, we should just try to stop it happening. Likewise natural disasters, accidents just happen. Somethings nobody can anticipate, it's sad but you just have to work through it.

There is no problem of evil if you're a atheist.

Doxastic Voluntarism

Don't know how long this video will stay on YouTube but I'd love to see footage of this woman when somone tells her that her rant is online for all the world to see.

But seriously, why do you think it is that some people go around assuming that it's a choice to believe or disbelieve? And that the opposite choice is morally wrong, not just a matter of opinion. Isn't it more plausible to just assume that the evidence strikes different people in different ways? (Sure, you can run Pascal's Wager but most intellectually honest religious people would admit that that's doing violence to one's epistemic apparatus.)

Happy Eostre!

I don't think I need to make an annual event of ranting about how Easter is based on a pagan spring festival. There's plenty of information to be found online. Suffice to say that this explanation is even more plausible when you're living in the northern hemisphere and all the supermarkets also sell toy duckies, chicks and all sorts of pastel coloured, spring themed cookies, M&Ms etc.

The Most Hated Family in America

Did anyone see that episode of Michael Moore's The Awful Truth in which he followed around a preacher named Fred Phelps who spends his time picketing the funerals of gays, reminding them that "God hates fags"?

Well, now there's a BBC2 doco available online all about his daughter, the next generation of homophobe activist.

If I hadn't heard of them before, I would have thought it was a mockumentary. It's really quite unbelievable, they even go so far as to say that they hate the USA because it is so permissive towards gays. Wow.