Hizbullah versus Lebanon

I’m at a loss over who I’d like to see win in the recent fighting between Hizbullah and supporters of the Lebanese government.

On the one hand, although Hizbullah say they no longer want to make Lebanon into an Islamic state, there are no doubt still some very dodgy people in the Hizbullah leadership, with very dodgy religious agendas. And the more religion gets out of politics and retreats into the private sphere, the better it will be for the entire human species.

On the other hand, the fighting statrted because the Lebanese government wanted Hizbullah to scrap their secure telecom network, which provided telephone and Ineternet communications independently of the Lebanese government. I think everyone should have access to secure telecoms networks that are independent of governments.

The RIAA are worried

The RIAA are worried. Worried that someone, somewhere might still not hate them, after they’ve treated music fans and musicians alike with contempt for years. To rectify this, they’re trying to pass a law that would allow them to seize people’s houses (in the USA, at least) if they’re caught with unauthorised music:

I was just alerted that the House of Reps has passed HR 4279, with the lovely name, PRO-IP (Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008). Like the doublespeak PATRIOT Act and Peacekeeper missiles, PRO-IP puts local law enforcement in a position to demand the forfeiture in criminal proceedings of stuff used to violate copyright. Which means that instead of the RIAA simply trying to collect fines, they can also incite local authorities to collect all the computers and related gear that was used to pirate.

If this bill is passed in its present form by the Senate and signed, that means there’s no more pro forma RIAA lawsuit payoffs, because if you wind up settling with the RIAA, you could still lose all your stuff in addition to any fee you paid them.

In fact, you could lose your house even if you haven’t pirated music:

This is particularly irksome in light of the MSN Music shutdown, about which the EFF has written a strong and powerful letter. It is increasingly likely a normal person could have purchased music legally from an online site, burned it to an ordinary audio CD, and in the right set of circumstances be branded a pirate because the original “granting” authority no longer exists to prove that the consumer was a legitimate purchasers.

If this law passes, I’m sure a few well-publicised cases will turn everybody against the RIAA and their increasingly desperate tactics, not just in the USA but in other developed countries. And then the backlash will begin: politicians will find they can’t get re-elected unless they stop sucking up to the RIAA, and they’ll start enacting sensible copyright laws, ones that recognize that the Internet, with it’s ability to instantly, effortlessly copy and transmit information, isn’t going away.

A platform for the BNP

Adam Bienkov thinks that the policy of “no platform for the BNP” is a mistaken one, because when they’re given a platform and allowed to speak for themselves, they tend to show themselves in a light that isn’t at all appealing:

I have always thought that the ‘no-platform’ approach is wrong. To deny the far-right a voice is to give them a status that they do not deserve.

But as it is, the vast majority of the almost 200,000 people that gave Barnbrook a first or second preference vote, have never seen him speak in public. For these voters, the fact that their man has seemingly been hidden by the media, will only have hardened his appeal.

Now if over the past few months Barnbrook had instead occupied the seat of Lindsey German at the various hustings and TV appearances, then his appeal could have been dramatically reduced. Rather than being seen as the maverick outsider speaking for the ’silent majority,’ Barnbrook would have been exposed as the racist loudmouth that he is.

Unfortunately, the media enabled Barnbrook and the BNP to pose as victims of a vast conspiracy intent on hiding and destroying them.

He posts a YouTube video of Richard Barnbrook, the BNP’s candidate for London Mayor, demonstrating the man’s utter lack of charm or credibility. See it here.

Why people go anti-science

Mark Hoofnagle at Denialism Blog hits the hail on the head:

In fact, if there is a unifying theme of denialism, it is that any extreme of ideological thinking leads to the necessary denial of fact. When one considers the causes of denialist worldviews, one sees again and again some form of fundamentalist belief. Fundamentalist religion leads to the rejection of evolution. Free-market fundamentalists are the leading source of anti-global warming denialism. On the liberal side, a mixture of technophobia and neo-luddism leads to paranoid suspicions about everything from GM crops causing non-existent illnesses to fear of harmless radio technology such as wifi to the fear of vaccines and medicine innovations exemplified by the HuffPo cranks and the evidence-based medicine/HIV/AIDS denialists like Mike Adams and Gary Null.

Any dogma that gets any followers is likely to be (a) simple and (b) emotionality satisfying, at least to some people. In fact any belief system must be simpler than reality, since reality is vast and probably not fully comprehensible to the human mind anyway. Once people become adherents of a dogma, they are likely to hold tight to it, since it’s their intellectual comfort blanket. And when reality proves that their dogma is at least partly wrong — as all dogmas must be, even though they are probably partly right, too — then the adherent is drawn into conflict with reality, and resolves that conflict by simply pretending that the uncomfortable truth isn’t there. And then the more serious of the adherents erect whole intellectual edifices, founded on bullshit and wish-fulfillment fantasy, as to why reality isn’t real.

What’s the cure for this? Simply to realise that any simple, pat, belief system isn’t going to be the whole truth, even if it does have good points. Put simply, no belief system about how the human world works is entirely correct, or is any widely-held belief system likely to be entirely nonsense. For example:

Religion: God may not exist, but nevertheless it is still bad for people to murder or steal from each other.

Free markets: are an efficient way of allocating scarce resources, under many circumstances, but they are not the solution to all human-organisation problems.

Medicine: some medicines have genuinely harmed patients, but most do good, and by spreading panic about vaccines etc one is almost certainly doing more harm than good.

Technology: most technology leads to humans living longer, more fulfilled lives; but some technologies have lead to a diminution of human happiness (e.g. telemarketers and spammers)

Nazi Germany and the Olympics

From a pro-Tibet rally in San Francisco, reproduced without comment:

(Via Mr Eugenides)

Why should religion get a free ride?

Chris Dillow notes that Gordon Brown is privileging religion:

What is a conscience? This is the question Brown opened when he said that “exercising your conscience will mean for Labour Party members a free vote” on parts of the embryology bill.

But, as Janine asks, why should conscience only permit a free vote here? To take just one example, many Labour MPs consciences might - or should - stop them wanting to put people in jail for 42 days without charge. But there’s little hope of a free vote on the Counter Terrorism bill.

What Brown means by “conscience”, then, is “religious belief.” Which raises the question: why should religious beliefs have a special status in politics that allows MPs free votes when they don’t get them on other grounds?

Why should religion be privileged above other belief systems? Dillow says it shouldn’t be. I go further than that: religious beliefs should be accorded less respect, less status, than for example secular liberal beliefs.

There are about 6 billion people in the world, and about 100 million of them die every year. Most of these people die of diseases, many (or all) of which could be curable over time with medical research. So medical research saves lives, and being against medical research — which opponents of the embryology bill are — kills people. Hitler only killed 50 million or so; these people want 100 million potentially preventable deaths to happen every year.

Most of the religious people who oppose the embryology bill are I suppose in their private lives good and decent people; certainly the vast majority don’t personally go round killing people. Which leads me to the conclusion that although good people do good things, and bad people do bad things, it takes religion to make good people do bad things.

Free our bills!

MySociety (the people behind They Work For You, The Public Whip, etc) want parliament to publish bills in a better way electronically so that citizens can more easily see what’s going on in Westminster. They’re calling this campaign Free Our Bills:

Writing, discussing and voting on bills is what we employ our MPs to do. If enough MPs vote on bills they become the law, meaning you or I can get locked up if they pass a bad one.

Bills are, like, so much more important than what MPs spend on furniture.

The problem is that the way in which Bills are put out is completely incompatible with the Internet era, so nobody out there ever knows what the heck people are actually voting for or against. We need to free our Bills in order for most people to be able to understand what matters about them.

They need this information so that they can make information about bills better available to the public:

Unless Parliament produces better bills:

• We can’t give you email alerts to tell you when a bill mentions something you might be interested in.
• We can’t tell you what amendments your own MP is asking for, or voting on.
• We can’t help people who know about bills annotate them to explain what they’re really going on about for everyone else.
• We can’t build services that would help MPs and their staff notice when they were being asked to vote on dumb or dubious things.
• We can’t really give a rounded view of how useful your MP is if we can’t see their involvement with the bill making process.
• We can’t do about 12 zillion other things that we’re not even bright enough to think of yet.

The actual technical changes they need to do this are fairly simple, and appear to be well thought out.

If you think this is worthwhile (if you live in the UK, you should do) then you can join their campaign via the form on their web page.

Kenny MacAskill

Mr Eugeniges writes, regarding Scottish National Party politician Kenny MacAskill:

Only one of us has ever been arrested for antisocial behaviour, and it was not me.

Read the rest.

Israel = Nazis, says Israeli minister

Israeli deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai threatens Palestinians with “Holocaust”:

An Israeli minister today warned of increasingly bitter conflict in the Gaza Strip, saying the Palestinians could bring on themselves what he called a “holocaust”.

“The more Qassam [rocket] fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves,” Matan Vilnai, Israel’s deputy defence minister, told army radio.

Shoah is the Hebrew word normally reserved to refer to the Jewish Holocaust. It is rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi extermination of Jews during the second world war, and many Israelis are loath to countenance its use to describe other events.

The minister’s statement came after two days of tit-for-tat missile raids between Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip and the Israeli army. At least 32 Palestinians and one Israeli have been killed since the surge in violence on Wednesday.

I guess that means that Israel has no right to complain any more when others compare them to Nazi Germany. (Not that people have, in general, any right to complain when others make unflattering analogies about them. In general when people respond to criticism with outbursts of synthetic rage, it’s a sign that the criticism was well-founded.)

What now for Cuba?

Castro steps down:

Cuba’s ailing leader Fidel Castro has announced he will not accept another term as president, ending the communist revolutionary’s 49 years in power.

Either the Communist Party will stay in power, or there will be some reform, leading to multi-party elections. Especially in the latter case, the question is which of the world powers will have most influence there:

Washington has called for Cuba to hold free elections, and said its decades-long embargo would remain. A senior US state department official, John Negroponte, added that the 1962 embargo would probably not be lifted “any time soon”.

The European Union said it hoped to relaunch ties with Cuba that were almost completely frozen under Mr Castro, while China described Mr Castro as an old friend and said it would maintain co-operation with Cuba.

Europe has two advantages over the USA and China: (1) unlike the USA, Europe hasn’t been harming Cuba with a trade embargo, and (2) Cubans are linguistically and culturally a European people. So if the EU doesn’t do anything incompetent, it will have a lot of influence over the new Cuba. Maybe it could offer Cubans the status of an EU colony — like Bosnia and Kosova currently are in effect — in return for a fast-track to EU membership?