Following announcement of his resignation, Taoiseach Brian Cowen paid tribute to Mr O’Donoghue’s “commitment and integrity” in his position as Ceann Comhairle.
Let’s just remind ourselves of the “committment and integrity” that he brought to the position:
02/10/2009
By Styrer
(No fictional baths, dogs or cats were harmed in any way in the angry typing away of this piece.)
Don’t berate me just yet as an environmentally-unfriendly tosspot, but yesterday instead of my usual shower, I had a bath. I had some time to kill and so I simply watched the bath filling from the single tap, checking every now and then to make sure that the hot and cold streams were mixing nicely. Just for me.
I was suddenly struck by a mildly interesting impression. Thinking of the two streams coming together to make a comfortably warming third, I imagined the hundreds of miles of unseen piping required to permit little old me to wet his toes. Just for me.
During this utterly idle couple of minutes, by some metaphorical co-incidence I remembered the pathetically straw-clutching and risible story of Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project, and now NIH director of the US, falling to his knees in theistic ecstasy before the wondrous sight in the Cascade Mountains of…a big frozen waterfall, divided into three separate streams. This peculiar fellow accepted Jesus on the spot because of what he’d seen and what he thought had been given by this sight to him. Just for him.
As various unsympathetic phrases popped into my head as I thought about this, I thought I’d have a bash at generating a little more empathy than usual for theists, at least for this particular world-renowned scientist. Not having a frozen waterfall to gaze upon just at that moment, I had a good old stare at the stream of water filling my bath (admittedly only two streams, but surely I could push a third in there, for the sake of an empathetic match-up with Collins if not also for the sake of this piece), imagining the two streams coming together to create a third and thinking ‘this should do the job’. More staring.
Perhaps it wasn’t working because it wasn’t grand enough, perhaps not ‘natural’ enough. But what of all that ingenuity, skill, time and effort, all that financial and collaborative commitment that had gone into getting this water to me? Was this not just as impressive as a big old waterfall, admittedly frozen, simply doing what waterfalls tend to do? Perhaps if I had dragged in a couple of shrubs to green things up a bit, I’d have felt something akin to Collins’ own curious experience.
If you are finding the metaphorical link I’ve made between my ablutionary non-revelation and Collin’s theistic epiphany unconvincing, then I’m happy to take it on the chin as an illustration of my point. For what can be more unconvincing, more absolutely smothered with inanity than Collins’ own metaphorical linking of a waterfall and the supposed realisation of the truth of one incoherent and vacuous doctrine (the Trinity) from one particular slavish and dignity-denying belief system (the Catholic Church/Cult)?
It is theistically-inflicted casualties flagrantly abusing their innate capacity for the metaphorical, rather than those of us who properly engage with and enjoy for themselves their metaphorical and rational capacities, who laughably create the warm fuzzies which lead seemingly inexorably to the assured assumption that a deity considers them to be the very centre of existence. Must we commit our brains’ capacity for metaphor, in this case, to the sinbin of irrationality against which there is consensus that it is highly advisable to fight?
Not at all. It is my contention that this noble part of us – the metaphorical capacity – has been wantonly and indecently usurped by theist and superstitious supernaturalist alike, such that it is now of supreme importance – as Christopher Hitchens wisely noted that he could have done more of in his theistic encounters up till last year – to wrest back the numinous from the belittling minds of the faithful and reclaim it, together with our concomitant gift for metaphor, as the ennobling, beautiful, and ultimately rational phenomenon that has its rightful place in humankind’s awe-inspiring array of talents. If theists were actually any good at this whole metaphorical game, then it might not be quite as bad as I’ve suggested, but they really are, when it comes to their religious interpretations, just so stunningly bad at it. There are different interpretations of metaphor, of course, but at least one – cognitive metaphor – supports my point here in its holding that metaphor is not only a mode of language, of linguistic usage, but a mode of thought. If this is true then theists everywhere should consider thinking a good deal more about the enormous disservice they are doing both themselves and the rest of us by selling out so promiscuously this worthy capacity we all possess. Frances Collins, and all the multiple ignorant cunts who promoted this Santa Clause-level believing eejit, should be properly ashamed of themselves, at the end of it all, with Collins particularly required to say: ‘Yes! I’ve become a wanker and so I can no longer be the representative of all of science in the US, the most powerful nation on the planet! I must recuse myself immediately. For I like metaphors more than evidence!’
Next week: why cats and dogs don’t actually cause multiple concussions when it’s raining heavily
Styrer
Words just can’t do justice to the nauseating, cloying, fake cameraderie in this series of “Windows 7 Party Tips” videos.
Yes, Microsoft are quite seriously expecting you to throw “Windows 7 Launch Parties” with your real friends in your real home, and have even released a set of videos to show you how. Now I must bend and puke under my desk before going drinking heavily to get the taste out of my mouth.
In light of the country-demeaning, progressing-defying and hell-bent reason denying signing into law by way of the greatest Cunt in Ireland, Dermot Ahern, I offer some thoughts on reason Versus unreason. Sorry it’s long.
George Pitcher, Religion Editor of the UK’s The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph, recently wrote in his blog: ‘So much of human life is irrational, but a central tenet of the secularist faith is that if it’s irrational then it can’t be allowed to exist.’
An epic fail, and not only because of the reference to a secularist ‘faith’ (faithoholics employing terms from their own sphere to denigrate atheists always tickles me, as they unwittingly and laughably express suspicion and criticism of those very terms on which their own daft claims to veracity lie). But Pitcher’s repetition of the tired, trite and unfounded charge that secularists are hell-bent on eradicating irrationality in all its forms is a useful reminder of the moronically blinkered response theists often regurgitate in the face of any challenge from atheists to their unevidenced beliefs.
There is a sliding scale of irrationality, between benign and delightful unevidenced beliefs on the one, Santa Clausian hand and unevidenced, anti-human and murderous religions, topped by a huge margin by Islam, on the other. The tooth fairy story is an entirely irrational belief but is delimited in precisely the same way as are many children’s experiences of ‘imaginary friends.’ Kids simply grow up and are highly unlikely to take up dentally-invoked jihad as a consequence.
But there is a panoply of irrationality between these extremes, not only religious in nature, and it is with the crucial notion of harm, both physical and psychological, caused to others that Pitcher’s words can begin to shed their mendacious duplicity and take on a real point of substance with which any secularist and atheist should be happy to agree.
Witness, on what at first may seem a harmless enough part of this vast spectrum of unreason, the case of the distinguished science writer Simon Singh, sued by the British Chiropractic Association for exposing their spine-bashing ways as nigh-on useless pseudoscience. In his co-authored book, ‘Trick or Treatment’, he concluded that traditional physiotherapy worked just as well as gentler forms of chiropractic treatments and without any of the euphemistically termed ‘side-effects’ of the ‘fundamentalist’ chiropractors. The UK’s Private Eye reported: ‘As well as dizziness and headaches, there were 700 instances in the medical literature of patients suffering spinal compression fractures and other serious complications, and four reported deaths in Canada’.
Let’s add to this deadly mix of unreason the case of Jeremy Sherr, Fellow of the Society of Homeopaths, who recently embarked on a campaign to treat AIDS sufferers in Tanzania not with proven and effective anti-retroviral drugs but with… homeopathy. This pseudoscience has produced no definitive results in any clinical or double-blind trial it has ever undergone and that this pernicious purveyor of nothing more than the placebo effect is now preying on desperately ill people in Africa, keeping them away from traditional medicines which are proven to work, is a disgrace of the highest magnitude. Real people are dying because of this unproven ‘science’ and both secularist and theist alike should join in as vocal a condemnation as possible before more people die because of sheer wilful ignorance.
Irrationality, then, is not the sole preserve of the theists. But they can and certainly do rise to the challenge. Theists often try to castigate the scientific method as just another ‘faith’ or ‘belief system’, one which can make mistakes just as much as they claim religion can be misused for evil ends. I’ll play along just for a moment. The vital attention that global warming is receiving because of scientists’ buttoned-down findings is encouraging governments and individual citizens to re-think their stance on how to live on our one and only planet. But an equally devastating threat to the planet, which scientists have been slow to cotton on to, is ocean acidification, the so-called ‘other CO2 problem’. Left unresolved it will, according to some experts now speaking up, have catastrophic impact on Earth’s eco-systems in less than 60 years. As Jason Hall-Spencer, research lecturer at Plymouth University, stated on this: ‘The whole scientific community was caught with its pants down’. The newsflash is therefore that scientists can make mistakes just as much as anyone can. But, as absolutely distinct from the theistic and the pseudoscientific, the solution to scientific error or oversight is not less but MORE scientific inquiry. As unbending and unheeding as theism and pseudoscience remain when faced with evidence gainsaying their positions, the solution to their anti-human, destructive failings is, by contrast, not more but LESS ‘faith’ and unevidenced assertion. Tony Blair’s Faith Foundation, for example, sees the solution to the problem of destructive and ‘extremist’ faith as the encouragement and promotion of…yet more faith (Terry Sanderson, of the National Secular Society, tersely and wittily said last year: “Mr Blair’s call for religion to play a bigger role in world affairs is like trying to douse a fire by showering it with petrol”). Until this no-brainer distinction is properly grasped, then the future looks pretty damn bleak.
The good Mr. Pitcher and those whom he is parroting should re-visit, then, their closed-minded thinking on this whole topic of secular attitudes to the irrational and realize that we are objecting properly and morally-soundly to irrationality being empowered and celebrated to such a degree that it disfigures and destroys other people’s lives, other human beings who are often at their most desperate and most vulnerable. Though he perversely and proudly says in his very same blog, albeit in no doubt ironic but inappropriately frivolous manner, that: ‘Christianity is mad. Madness is at the heart of our faith. It is a completely mad notion that an artisan from an unfashionable province of an oppressed nation could emerge with a message of the simplest self-sacrifice, get himself executed in humiliating failure, and then change the course of human history forever’, he and his ilk should surely be running to join all of us atheists and secularists in condemning the destruction of innocent lives at the hands of unreason, rather than gleefully and shamefully promoting irrationality as a virtue, as fast as their little theistic feet can carry them.
The Holy Stump of Rathkeale
Straight out of a Father Ted script, people in Rathkeale, Co. Limerick are now worshiping a tree stump.
According to a local interviewed on ‘Morning Ireland’ this morning, over 400 people spent up to 2am praying at the stump, which, according to local shopkeeper Séamus Hogan:
“shows a clear outline of Our Lady”.
He goes on to say
“…it’s bringing people together from young and old to black and white, Protestant and Catholic, to say a few prayers…”
Worshiping tree stumps…? Protestants praying at an apparition of the virgin Mary…? (Have I missed something or has Mary snuck into the Church of Ireland?)
Brian Cowan must be pretty pleased – this will at least distract people from the utter bollix his party has made of the country (at least in Rathkeale). They must be pissing themselves Europe!
Rowan Williams 2007
He’s up to his old tricks.
One year ago the Archbishop fucked up royally by publicly stating that Shariah law was inevitable in Britain and there was growing support for its introduction in the UK.
Shariah is the full body of Islamic law and is about as misogynistic, homophobic, unfair, cruel and anti-reason as any set of ‘laws’ could possibly be. Political Islam revels in each moment where it thinks it has succeeded in moving another step forward in prosecuting its war against the infidel, and so Williams’ utterly batshit crazy public announcement was music to every Islamist’s ears.
Trounced in the press, ridiculed in nearly all quarters, the fellow should have been quietly taken off to a place for some, shall we say, peace and quiet, and that should have been an end to it.
But nope. This maniacally hell-bent multiculturalist is back again in the media, pontificating that he was right all along and that it is abundantly clear that there is increasing public demand for Shariah in the UK, despite there being absolutely no evidence in favour of his assertion whatsoever.
So what’s really going on with this peculiar fellow?
He studied at both Oxford and Cambridge, and so is no intellectual slouch. Perhaps he really has lost his mind, though it seems unlikely. Perhaps it is the case that, with huge downturns in Church of England ovine membership, any faith at all is more worthy of support than none, simply to keep alive at whatever cost a theistic rather than a secular attitude to life. The worst possibility is that he genuinely thinks that he is right. The creeping dhimmitude his bizarre support for Shariah represents is extremely dangerous, not only because it gives encouragement for additions to be made to the already five Shariah courts known to be in operation in the UK, but also because of the succour it grants to every Islamist whose end game ambitions are to see Western civilization brought to its knees under the absolute control of the House of Islam.
Shame on him. It’s high time that superstitious supernaturalist muppets like Williams be ignored and marginalised away from the public eye when it comes to all matters which are not explicitly concerned with some arcane theological hair-splitting. Let him carry on with the latter to his heart’s content, but he should not be permitted to have any further media attention in his official clerical position for any of his utterly dippy and dangerous political ideas ever again.
UPDATE: The cunt of Westminster strikes again: you may have heard of the ‘expenses’ scandals which have elevated the UK press to, for the first time I can recall, a decent reporting institution, giving out hell to the utter gobshites who have been living it large at taxpayers’ expense. Now the faith-drenched fucker rolls up his useless, twatting archbishopal sleeves to say ‘Aw, lay off the politicians, they’re having a hard time’.
The clue that he’s going to talk some shite is his clothes and his open mouth. This sorry fucking Catholic country must have something similar. Or so I thought. When Dermot the cunt Ahern started on his recent ‘anti-blasphemy’ campaign, I tried to work out which was worse – Rowan Williams or Dermot Ahern. There’s not much to choose. At least the UK gets a noisy, shit-filled cunt of a religious commentator distinguished by his bizarre clothes. We are lucky that we have, er, a noisy, shit-filled cunt of a religious commentator in Ahern, who has clearly saved us taxpayers a few bob on clothes. We should all be fucking grateful.
Styrer
what are these strawberries doing on my nipples i need them for the fruit salad
The Autonomous Language Learning (ALL) project mission statement (my emphasis):
The Mission of the project is to create a blended learning system, online and offline, with materials for learning and teaching in five languages (Turkish, Romanian, Bulgarian and Lithuanian) and a procedural methodology, which can be transferred to the learning and teaching of other languages, as well.
Ehhhh… that’s four languages…
The eedgit hadn’t even arrived in Cameroon when he came up with this beauty:
You can’t resolve (AIDS) with the distribution of condoms… On the contrary, it increases the problem.
Of course the potty old fart is completely missing the point. From the WHO page on Cameroon:
Life expectancy at birth m/f (years): 50/52
Healthy life expectancy at birth m/f (years, 2003): 41/42
I met a guy last year who spent an enlightening 6 months in Cameroon. Over a few beers the topic of women, sexuality and AIDS came up. His point:
If you expect to die in your 40’s – why would you use a condom?! Hunger is the problem for these people, not AIDS.
There you go Benny, problem solved (as long as life expectancy remains at those pitiful levels.)
