DAVID MITCHELL IS ACTUALLY A COMPLETE MORON

It's a sad time when you realise one of your comedy heroes is actually nothing more than a clueless cretin, but alas!

Bad Bad Atheist Thinking

I was accidentally going through the entire internet, when I came across a few youtube videos that really ground my gears of war. It buggers me silly when both atheists and unsophisticated Christians use bad thinking to support their beliefs.

This girl is some sort of atheist which is rather jolly. I don't know about her other claims, but in this video she makes the common, and rather annoying, 'problem of suffering and evil' argument. These sort of arguments are ridiculous, as any religious studies or philosophy student should be able to tell you, in their first year. This atheist argument is worth dismissing out of hand; however, I am quite fond of this counter-argument to the problem of suffering and evil. It simply states that all suffering, whilst horrific for us temporarily, is insignificant in the greater scheme of things. That's why Christians let themselves get eaten by lions by the by. Or by the way. Should it be by the by, or by the way? Anyway, one religious position, which is also a Christian position, is that the natural material world of experience is not actually the real plain of existence, which would be the divine plain of existence. Thus the world of 'human suffering' is essentially a dream. When you feel pain in your dreams, does that invalidate the existence of God? Nope. Likewise, for suffering in the natural world. The world is one big test for us, it's not real, even though we might think that suffering is real. What is real, is the choices we make, when we respond to the suffering we see. That's the kind of stuff a deity might be inclined to judge us on. This is no 'apologetic', but simply logical – if you accept the existence of a Christian-like God. The real 'self' is the soul, not the physical body. At the end of the video she makes a totally crazy claim that her existence, and Richard Dickwad Dawkins' existence, is proof of the atheist position … because if God really existed, s/he would come down and smite her. Which, if God did just that, he would be a God desiring worship through fear etc, which has nothing to do with real free-will and so, insert your standard free-will argument.

Now this chap makes another bad argument, this time in advocating the existence of a God. He's correct to a point. Existence does demand a first-cause, a prime mover: which is a 3000 year old observation. Everything that exists, has a cause, but the cause cannot be endless therefore the universe demands a first cause as shit just doesn't appear out of nothing. This is no doubt true, however, this Christian makes the irrational jump from a first-cause to an anthropomorphic deity (I assume that's his argument). I recall Hume dealing with this quite effectively. Just because, as goes a standard cosmological argument, that the universe must have had a first-cause, whose existence is necessary, a priori, and self-sustaining, etc., does not mean that that 'first-cause' is moral entity or a creator. In fact the first-cause could, logically, merely have existed to start things off. The cosmological argument tells you nothing about the nature of a deity, or if it even, presently, exists. If he does even have consciousness outside the 'first thought of creation', he could quite happily be the Blind Idiot God of Lovecraft's literature. These sorts of arguments for the existence of a god are the product of bad thinking.

Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane - like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell - mouths mercy and invented hell - mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him! . . . - Mysterious Stranger, Mark Twain

Media Lie: Norway Shooter was a Christian

In a display of collective dominance, and testimony to the sheer scope of power the left has,  the gears of the machine that holds up liberal hegemony were working perfectly, maximising the political gains to be made out of the recent Norway massacres. One can only imagine the kind of degenerate, sick mind that could utilise such an outrage for political gain but it's standard practice for liberals. The mere fact that conservatives and right-wingers – instead of condemning the acts of a madmad - are being forced to defend themselves from supposed thought-crimes makes me sick to my stomach.

The Myth of Gender and Heterosexuality

HAH, headline grabber, sorry. 6,000 words bitches so stay cool. Because I believe everything one does should be as a response to Star Wars, the actual title should read, " THE MYTH OF GENDER AND HETEROSEXUALITY - Thoughts on Butler and the Logic of Gender: The Possible Origins of Authentic Masculinity".. 

Thoughts on Butler and the Logic of Gender

The Possible Origins of Authentic Masculinity

Judith Butler, from what I can gather in Gender Trouble, has a straightforward argument. Gender is socially constructed, it is reproduced and reconstituted (through discourse, especially) to reaffirm itself. The constructed nature of gender means that masculine and feminine behavior is a lived illusion.

   Butler denies a causal link between gender and sex distinction, and from here decides that the sex distinction itself is a social/cultural construct. Her reasoning is that we cannot perceive the distinction between male and female without appealing to gender. Once we grasp that there is no meaningful differential quality between what we claim to be the two sexes, this, and the reality of intersex, somehow renders sex distinction unstable. Using this reasoning, heterosexuality is revealed to be a social/cultural construct as well. Sexual identity for heterosexuals, then, is only real when you internalise the discourse. Gender and sexuality is thus, technically,  existentially arbitrary.

   For Butler all notions of masculine and feminine, and the heterosexual, are constructs of discourse which are self-perpetuating, and have no cause other than the power structures of heterosexual domination (heterosexist social orders).

   The implication of Butler’s thought, at least from my understanding of her, is that genitalia differences are content-free; sex distinction and gender are socially constructed (along with heterosexuality). I feel it is an awfully big coincidence that the same structures of oppression and domination (heterosexist, phallocentric, whatever you like) appear almost globally across time, and seem to create the same discourses. Perhaps Butler has an answer to this, but I feel that the independent formation of heterosexist social orders, across continents and diverse peoples, demands a universal cause.

Test

Let's see

The Public Sector and Pornography

Are all public sector workers stupid? No, obviously – only the ones who listen to the deceptions their unions spout. What does baffle me, however, is how certain workers in the public sector are completely clueless as to how they are actually paid. I swear some of them think money grows on trees.

The state now directly spends 53% of the kingdom's wealth, 53% GDP (this figure was 40% before Tony Blair was elected). That's more than communist china (COMMUNIST CHINA!). The public sector absorbs 53% of the wealth Britain generates, yet generates no wealth in return. It's a parasite, in other words. A teacher or politician may insist that she earns her salary, but she does so not in the same manner as a private sector worker. Their relationships to the economy are entirely different. A teacher, or politician, or doctor, or soldier, is entirely dependant on the private sector for her pay packet. Some might chip in and say, 'I'm paid by government, not the private sector, actually', which is quite hilarious. Government has no money. Any money a government has, it takes by taxation, taxation of the private sector: from bankers to waitresses. The public sector worker may then, bizarrely, protest that she pays her taxes just like everyone else. No she doesn't, girlfriend! Her entire salary is generated by the smaller private sector. Whatever she pays in taxes goes into the government spending pot – and straight back into her salary.

Seriously?

You are a bastard...