yeesh
December 11th, 2019
This is the story, from the summer. “The Valley of the Homosexuals”!
There’s a new Jesus & Mo book out! Volume 8 contains over 200 strips from 2015 to late 2019 – and a foreword by biologist and author Jerry Coyne.
Order now and you’ll be just in time for Xmas:
Thanks! My first laugh in days.
Interesting account on Wikipedia, here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_TV.
I wonder how they came up with the name “Peace TV”. Apart from anything else, they are giving peace a bad name.
I’m wordspinophobic. And sorry that another good term is coopted by the rage community.
I’m not islamophobic, I just can’t respect a set of bizarre fairy tales being forced on people and retail retail religion managers like imams demanding fastidious compliance with the bullshit. And they define the bullshit.
Probably because Islam is the “religion of peace.” That’s why Islamic extremists are extremely peaceful.
Seems like a good time for that old Bill Maher gag.
“Islam is the religion of peace….
…a piece of you over here…
… a piece of you over there…”
There is a great misunderstanding about free speech. It only means that the government will not prosecute someone for making political statements. Free speech does not provide an audience, it does not furnish a platform, and it does not protect against rebuttal, criticism or ridicule.
hah! right on! stick it those hypocritical bums!
I’m pretty much a free speech absolutist — I believe that anyone should be free to say anything that is not an immediate call to violence, and I don’t believe they should be “deplatformed” for doing so. Still, I have to wonder: why is a TV channel based in Dubai being broadcast in the UK? I’d be interested in knowing who’s paying who, and how much.
jb, I’m pretty much in agreement with you there. I wholly support gays, and have family members of that ilk, but don’t think that the TV programme crossed the line, as far as I can see from the linked report. Banning TV broadcasts is a dangerous route to take. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
It has been said many times that freedom of speech means dealing with speech you may not like. In J&M’s case, though, if they were any more snowflake material than they already are, they’d have all television networks and the internet shut down for blasphemy, I suspect.
Thankfully, their influence doesn’t reach that far … yet. With luck, it never will.
The entire point of freedom of speech is to protect “hate speech.” If nobody hates what you have to say, then your speech doesn’t need protection!
One man’s hate speech is another man’s inspiration…
And anyway, what is wrong with pigs? Intelligent, reasonably cute if you like a damp snout and they taste great…
Michael. Exactly. “Free speech” doesn’t mean “consequence free speech”, no matter how much “1st amendment absolutists may think it does. Its like that weakest of claims “I’m entitled to my opinion”. Says who? Who gives this entitlement? If its a necessary truth then why state it?
1) No-one, 1st Amendment champions included, seriously think that (say) a new recipe for weaponized anthrax, or details of how to get away with sexually abusing children should be freely shared. Go on–disagree with me. I dare you. I double-dare you.
So, they dont think its absolute, or the only right. Rights have to be balanced. It’s an important one, and when it comes to politics, its important that we get to see into each others souls. Bloody awful though that often is.
2) “Free speech” can, as is, be weaponized by self=consciously bad actors to undermine liberal democracy.
Brandolini’s law isn’t a joke.
Its not about giving people propaganda, or views you don’t like.
If you fill the interwebs with enough disinformation then you destroy trust in sources, institutions, and eventually, nations. We are watching this actually happen in front of us right now. Are folk suggesting that I have to cheer as Putin et al. fill the ether with utter crap designed to undermine democracy, all in the name of “free speech”?
Well, I wont. So there.
So–I ask the 1st amendment absolutists, whats your solution to these two issues?
Brandolini’s law
The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
Hitchen’s razor helps here.
That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
As with Jim , I too.invoke hitchins razor….and luck would have it that those religious fook wits are usually (totally) handicapped by their intellect to weaponise seriously complex means of destruction …if it was otherwise we would already be looking at islamic mass murder on the scale of hiroshima or dresden…
Poulsen’s Law
When anything is used to its full potential, it will break.
a right to speak your mind is one thing. a right to a megaphone to shove those opinions down others’ throats? not only is that laughable on its face, it is in immediate conflict with the right to free speech. consider: these media orifices have _owners_. those owners have a right to require that communication using their facilities conforms to their views (or anyway, policies).
de-platforming is an aspect of the social feedback mechanism that makes government non-intervention possible. it is badly, selfishly, corruptly applied, because we live in a _plutocracy_ and not a _democracy_, but it’s the least bad solution available.
Jim: Lets see you do it then.
Lets see you “refute” an airhorn in a debate, or a flow of sewage into a water supply.
We aren’t talking about “wrongthink”. We aren’t even talking about propaganda (though that’s still a thing)
We are talking about the deliberate flooding of the airwaves and infosphere with crap and disinformation.
The aim isn’t persuasion, its confusion.
And confusion destroys trust.
And without trust you don’t have institutions, and without institutions you don’t have societies.
This isn’t MY discovery.
This is the absolutely explicit tactic of Putin’s pet philosophers Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin, and his successor Aleksandr Dugin.
Remember–Putin is a canny judo fighter and he literally (I have a copy) wrote the book on destabilising opponents preparatory to using their own strengths against them.
Our strength is freedom of speech. Its being used against us
helenahandbasket: I did say a help rather than a panacea.
Unfortunately each person hearing BS has to apply Hitchen’s razor individually.
Do you have any ideas on what might reduce the problem?
My wife always equates my anti theist stance with telling 5 year old kids that there is no father xmas….Clearly my rationalism is very upsetting for people whose wish thinking is patently so preposterous it deserves derision…religious feeling is somehow protected as a special kind of delusion…
it’s really not such a crime
for a limerick to lack meter or rhyme
but deliver a seiche
the likes of NBH
inscribed on the net for all time
Jim: Looking around are you seeing an electorate eager to bring critical skills, nuanced thinking, and a grasp of what counts as good evidence, to the issues at hand?
I don’t exclude myself here.
I rely on being able to trust certain institutions, not necessarily to be correct, but to be honest and self-correcting. Do I understand climate change science? No. But I do know what science generally looks and sounds like and I know what consensus looks like. I know what liars look like. But there’s a lot of grey area because there’s always a lot of uncertainty in science and this honest uncertainty can be exploited by bad-faith actors.
The scientists could be wrong (of course) but I also know what a fight looks like within the field and it doesn’t look like the right wing talking points on it
The right wing talking points (its all a hoax, its communism, scientists get to pocket their grants–yes someone with a masters degree and history books published actually said this last one to me once etc) are put there quite cynically, by a vested interest group.
Their goal is to move the overton window and sow misinformation because the costs of such confusion don’t fall evenly.
They didnt fall evenly when they did it to asbestos, sugar, tobacco, lead in petrol, and all the other things that deliberate misinformation campaigns were run on. Often they were run by the same bloody people.
So, what to do about this? I genuinely dont know. My instinct is that censorship is almost always dangerous and I’d rather have my enemies in front where I can see them. But this makes large demands on the recipients of information and on the journalists who supply and curate information.
We are seeing this in the UK at the moment where both sides are accusing the BBC of bias. Well, everyone blames the ref–the winners too, to keep the ref on their toes.
But the BBC wasn’t so much biased as asleep at the wheel. They held no-one to serious account–at least, not until it was too late.
And it gets worse when we have totally uncurated garbage flowing in (Twitter), deliberate misinformation (Russia Today, Fox news) or the gibberings of mad people (Alex Jones).
The average punter, even the above average punter, cant tell one from another.
I have no solution to this by the way. But I don’t think “more freedom” solves it any more than “more guns” solves America’s gun problem.
Thanks for listening.