Friday 16 July 2010

Dumb News: Raoul Moat Cash-in

"Online traders cashing in on killer Raoul Moat's 'popularity' by selling sick T-shirts for £8"

From a paper which has literally not shut up about Raoul Moat since he shot his girlfriend and killed her partner (oh, and an unarmed policeman), and is still flogging the dead moral panic horse long after it's croaked.

More often than not the Daily Mail has had two or even three Raoul Moat stories per day during the height of the events, and now they're trying to make one final cuppa out of the dregs of this farce by finding obscure groups on facebook and trying to make it into an article.

From the body of the story....

"Unscrupulous traders are cashing in on the sick wave of support for killer Roaul Moat by selling 'commemorative' T-shirts, it emerged today.

On the website Ebay, one selling was offering garish orange T-shirts emblazoned with the murderer’s face over the word ‘Moaty’.

The shirts were selling for £8 each and came in a range of sizes - including one aimed at children aged nine to ten."

So the Daily Mail is talking about the audacity of traders making £8 on a t-shirt whilst they rake in thousands covering the guys actual public execution. Talk about double fucking standards; I'm more on-board with the shirt people.

And this isn't even the only 'horrible people worship a killer' story today. Well, I think that holding him up as a nigh-on Devil figure and painting anyone who sympathizes as satanic cultists (like people who actually believe in satan they're simply idiots) is closer to worshipping him than anyone hocking a t-shirt or crapping out comments on facebook has done.

However to call the right-wing newspapers of Britain the only people cashing in on Raoul Moat would be a dramatic understatement; David Cameron himself, our dearest leader, has personally taken it upon himself to try and force facebook to remove the group that was set up in tribute to Raoul Moat (Facebook told him to suck a massive dick, which is fair enough as they are a much larger nation than Britain).

Anyone who remembers David Cameron before he became prime minister will remember piggy-backing on moral panics as one of his primary campaigning strategies, and this was true to a lesser extent of his deputy Nick Clegg (I've run into two people now who still think the prime minister is Tony Blair and one who didn't know the elections had finished. I didn't check, but I bet all of them knew the names of all the Big Brother housemates).

This is, of course, an obvious load of bunkum to anyone with half a brain; if David Cameron really were so dumb that he thought a man killing a single person then having his head blown off by a shotgun was anything significant, he'd spend 99% of his name twirling in circles trying to name all the similar and much worse events happening all around the world faster than he could possibly deal with them.

If we fixated on the Middle East along he'd presumably vomit uncontrollably until his intestines sat in his lap, as there are almost 300 bodies this week alone, and that's only what has appeared in the news.

I digress; maybe I'm the type of oldie who cares more about the ongoing mass slaughter of Jews, innocents and women than a single steroid addled fuckwad in the UK (Robert Mugabe still in charge of Zimbabwe? Where's David Cameron's fury at him?). If anyone in this country wanted gun-wielding maniacs to stop being a problem (and, on a personal level, to just feel safer with the fact all criminals can get a firearm easily) they would be lobbying for the legalization of guns, otherwise everyone should just shut up and admit that they enjoyed watching a guy get his skull blasted in two on live TV and have the decency not to feed the media anymore on the issue.

If I had the energy I'd tackle female vicars. Maybe in another post, seeing as it's the obsession of my actual go-to news source, The Guardian, who seem to want to have their cake and eat it on any issue to do with religion. Write about how good the Bible is? Sure. Write about how anyone who actually takes its advice on anything is an evil sexist dickhead? YES!

No wonder the religiously dumb of this world as so confused; nobody will tell them where they stand on anything, which is terrible for a group of people who are essentially unified by an inability to think.

* Tanya Gold of the guardian has written more on the David Cameron Raoul Rage thing. And I'm Raoully glad she did. It's a Raoulief to be able to Raoulfer you to a Raoul journalist everyone once in a Raoul.

9 comments:

  1. I'm not going to argue with your main point that the media and its unquestioning consumers are little more than hooting monkeys. However, I will note this:

    If I had the energy I'd tackle female vicars. Maybe in another post, seeing as it's the obsession of my actual go-to news source, The Guardian, who seem to want to have their cake and eat it on any issue to do with religion. Write about how good the Bible is? Sure. Write about how anyone who actually takes its advice on anything is an evil sexist dickhead? YES!

    The fundamental problem with religion is that spiritual people find solace in it, but at the same time the Bible (and most every other scripture) gets certain things obviously wrong. When I was a Christian, my response was simply "the Bible gets some things wrong, so what?" It was much easier to be religious when I didn't insist on being right about everything. Every time I deal with Fred Phelps' ilk reminds me how much of a disaster it is when people take the morally objectionable parts of the Bible literally.

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  2. "he fundamental problem with religion is that spiritual people find solace in it"

    The fundamental problem is that it's not true. If it were true there'd be absolutely no problem with believing in any of it. And if it was true AND you got solace from it well; party at God central.

    .."but at the same time the Bible (and most every other scripture) gets certain things obviously wrong"

    Um, wow. You're a bit high and mighty aren't you? There is a cosmic, all-knowing universe creating being but some of his stuff is wrong?

    "When I was a Christian, my response was simply "the Bible gets some things wrong, so what?"

    I read the Bible when I was 11, after my grandfather died, under the assumption that it got things wrong. However the sheer volume of murder and slaughter in it allowed me to ask myself questions, like 'How do we know this is god?' and 'If God keeps murdering babies, how can he be good?'.

    The smart thing to do is go "Is it possible this God doesn't even exist?". And the fact is; yes it is possible. Now, if we were to look at the evidence, with our new mindset, and go "If we assume god is a completely human-invention, does the world as it exists support that?" and the answer is yes, 100%. It confirms that every place it can, much like any look at nature confirms evolution; when you have the right model it will explain all observations.

    A less smart thing to do is go "Well, I'll strip away the bits I don't like. Those 'words of god' aren't correct. God gets the bits I want him to get right correct. God is wrong on the stuff I don't like".

    This is doing what religion has been doing for years; it's changing the 'man in the sky' theory to remove the error. But this is not how the universe works; if we changed the "flat earth" theory to remove the error of the fact that the earth isn't flat, and changed it to "The earth is flat, but the further away from it we get the more God bends light, causing it to appear spherical" then we could convince ourselves that this was so.

    But the universe doesn't work this way; there is a single correct explanation that has to be rooted out from among an infinite number of crappy ones.

    If you change the 'God' theory to fit the evidence, in this case by removing the murdering, slaying, raping and pillaging he was involved in, you're doing what a flat-earther is doing; rather than recognizing the existence of a single explanation and trying to find that, you're agreeing to infinitely push back one of the 'infinite possible number' of explanations every time you encounter an inconsistency.

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  3. Now, if my prediction is true that changing the Bible, and eventually taking the Christianity away at all and just leaving a God or another religion, is an example of choosing a bad explanation and infinitely changing it, we'd predict that lots of things about Christianity would have been changed to 'push back' the idea of a God?

    Well. Recently purgatory was removed to avoid the 'god is ruthless to babies' problem, they're introducing female bishops to avoid the 'sexist god' problem, the catholic church has backtracked on aids to avoid the 'scientifically illiterate' god problem, they've removed the 'anti homosexuality' law to avoid the 'god is a homophobe' problem.

    And each believer individually removes and changes infinite aspects of it simply to remove logical fallacies, this is not how the universe works; this can be done for all incorrect explanations and it doesn't make your theory anymore accurate. It makes you, as a person, less able to intellectually deal with the problem.

    Consequently what you're doing here is an infinite 'pushing back' of god until you push him right out of christianity, not because this improves the chances of god existing but because it makes it too difficult for you to comprehend the new problems.

    "was much easier to be religious when I didn't insist on being right about everything."

    If you cared that much about being right you'd not be religious.

    "Every time I deal with Fred Phelps' ilk reminds me how much of a disaster it is when people take the morally objectionable parts of the Bible literally.

    Isn't this rampant arrogance? You believe in god, they believe in god, you're both equally without foundation and yet you're going

    "ahaha these foolish idiots, taking the Bible literally. I've editing my Bible until it's not even Christianity anymore!".

    And what? You're now more rational? No you're not; your believes are random, as are theirs. Religious belief could be anything, dictated by a million variables.

    You're not better than, in many ways you're worse; Fred Phelps believes in a god, so he follows God's book. I think you believe you are God, which is why you re-wrote God's book, and eventually re-wrote God himself, which suggests to me that you are the God at the center of your belief system.

    So don't snarl at Fred Phelps like he's somehow a bad person and you're not. If it did turn out there was a God you know who'd be going to heaven? Him. You'd be going straight to hell.

    Unless you're CoE; they just removed Hell. Nobody goes to hell anymore, according to them. You're not the only one whose God dances on human puppet strings.

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  4. I was going to add some error-corrections, but I smacked that out so fast there are too many.

    Basically, dictionary.

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  5. The fundamental problem is that it's not true. If it were true there'd be absolutely no problem with believing in any of it. And if it was true AND you got solace from it well; party at God central.

    How can you say so confidently that it is untrue?

    Um, wow. You're a bit high and mighty aren't you? There is a cosmic, all-knowing universe creating being but some of his stuff is wrong?

    I suppose with my defenses of religion I did not make my own views clear. I'm an atheist. I do not believe in God. I do not, however, think God cannot exist. I just have no reason to believe He does.

    The key to understanding such revisionism is to separate the doctrine/scripture from God. Belief in the inerrant Bible is foolishness. It's very clear to secular Biblical scholars that the Old Testament breaks down into a few categories: the Pentateuch is a functional set of laws with which a priestly sect can essentially act as the judiciary for a society, in this case the Jews. It is also a record of a history that, before written down, was (probably) the oral history of the Jewish people. It reflects a great deal of influence from the common ancient religion of Mesopotamia and the Levant (famously demonstrated in the story of the Great Flood.) It also, in the books of the prophets, shows a pattern of Jewish desire to resist assimilation by the empires that occupied their lands, and an attempt to codify a distinctly Jewish culture while in exile.

    I read the Bible when I was 11, after my grandfather died, under the assumption that it got things wrong. However the sheer volume of murder and slaughter in it allowed me to ask myself questions, like 'How do we know this is god?' and 'If God keeps murdering babies, how can he be good?'.

    This work is 2000-2500 years old. There are a lot of cultural differences. The Evolution of God is not a great book, but does a good job of giving examples of these differences and how they got lumped into the Good Book.

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  6. The smart thing to do is go "Is it possible this God doesn't even exist?". And the fact is; yes it is possible. Now, if we were to look at the evidence, with our new mindset, and go "If we assume god is a completely human-invention, does the world as it exists support that?" and the answer is yes, 100%. It confirms that every place it can, much like any look at nature confirms evolution; when you have the right model it will explain all observations.

    That's why I stopped believing in Christianity. I came to the same conclusions, and absent any personal apprehension of a divine presence in my life, stopped believing in God.

    Apologetics is rather more complex and less idiotic than you make it sound. At its worse, it is sophistry, an attempt to justify a complex system of belief after logic and evidence have failed them. At its best, it's abductive reasoning. The cause is the perception of a divine presence, and the resulting religion is an attempt to explain and come to terms with said presence, while acknowledging the objective truth of science/reality.

    The words of God are almost always flexible. This is because God rarely ever said anything himself. Generally the matters of dispute (creation vs. evolution, gay rights, abortion) are multiple levels of abstraction from the actual text, or based on the Bible, rather than things God said (obviously, as I have said, one must differentiate between the two or your point is essentially valid.)

    But the universe doesn't work this way; there is a single correct explanation that has to be rooted out from among an infinite number of crappy ones.

    The trouble is, any empirical explanation leaves room for God. It's always possible that the death of a child, though caused by leukemia, was "God's will." Omnipotent, omniscient beings are tricky like that. It's a terrible position to take as a scientist, but if it makes the grieving parents happy, it doesn't do any harm. I am excepting here the ongoing resistance of people to evolution and other "antireligious" science, but that is because I know enough religious people who accept science to see that the two can work together.

    Purgatory is not biblical. Refusal to ordain women is not biblical (regardless of what that asshole on the BBC said this morning.) Anti-homosexuality and opposition to contraception in the Bible, meanwhile, is easily explained as a byproduct of a society that was terrified of being exterminated/conquered and had to reproduce as much as possible. That's likely the same reasoning behind the prohibitions of masturbation and contraception.

    These are not revisions of God. Those revisions come much more slowly and are reflective of their respective cultures. Whether that is still God is a matter of opinion. These things are revisions of religion.

    And, as I said, I'm an atheist. I don't have a God. I snarl at Fred Phelps because he is hateful and because my job means I see him (and hear his bullshit) on a regular basis. Perhaps he is right. I think he isn't, and I think most interpretations of the Bible agree with me.

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  7. P.S. According to Fred Phelps, I may be going to heaven and he may be going to hell. Unconditional election's a tricky thing.

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  8. "
    How can you say so confidently that it is untrue?"


    How can you say confidently that Norse Mythology is untrue? Or Irish mythology? Or Lord of the Rings? How do you know there isn't a middle-earth?

    If you don't consider the fact that God is as likely as other culture's mythologies, for instance "fairies" of Irish mythology or Dwarves of Norse Mythology, as allowing "confidence" that something is a human fabrication then you must live in a bizarre world where mythological creatures are hiding behind every corner waiting to jump out and turn you into a toad.

    "
    This work is 2000-2500 years old. There are a lot of cultural differences. The Evolution of God is not a great book, but does a good job of giving examples of these differences and how they got lumped into the Good Book. "


    You're completely missing the point. It's irrelevant how things got into the bible; the fact they're believed as true is all that's important.

    The bible wasn't written as a cultural book; it was written to be taken literally true by everyone.

    "These are not revisions of God. Those revisions come much more slowly and are reflective of their respective cultures. Whether that is still God is a matter of opinion. These things are revisions of religion.
    "


    Yes they are. The bible was not written as a 'cultural book'. The Bible is nothing but claims about divine beings, magic, witches and demons.

    If you change any of it you're re-writing what "God" allegedly said.

    It makes no difference at all whether their culture influences it. Of course it did. So what? It doesn't change anything; I know it was their culture to be ignorant. That doesn't mean you change the book to make it less ignorant, not only is that arrogant towards the culture of a dead people as you're 'updating' them, but it shows a mental dishonesty as you're trying to censor a book to make it appear less stupid.

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  9. "The Bible is nothing but claims about divine beings, magic, witches and demons."

    "I know it was their culture to be ignorant."

    The key thing I've learned in my religious studies is that cultures that are scientifically ignorant can still muster a great deal of social/personal wisdom. Jesus's teachings on how to treat others, on humility, and on social justice are still relevant today, even if certain claims to divinity make him harder to take seriously. If I can use a person's biblical belief to show them how to be a better person, then I do not care about their positions on magic, witches and demons (unless they are members of that certain sect we deal with over here that want that part taught in schools too; fuck those guys.)

    I know God probably isn't real just as the Norse gods probably aren't real. But being open-minded about His existence makes it a lot easier to emphasize the things religion gets right. I believe that the world is starting to move past religion. That's not something that happens because people wake up and decide religion is wrong. It's because they learn a new moral framework that doesn't need a supernatural aspect. Building that framework within Christianity (or Islam, for that matter, though it's a bit harder to swing) is much like Wittgenstein's ladder: "My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)"

    P.S. You'll find that most Christians will agree that the Bible is true in some sense. But you'll also find that they usually disagree with the bits about demons and witches and whatnot. They aren't necessarily dishonest, they're just separating the spiritually nourishing bits (the wheat) from the superstition (the chaff).

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