According to the City of London police, it is an arrestable offence under the Public Order Act to carry a placard describing Scientology as a 'cult'. Anyway, according to today's 'Guardian', they have arrested a 15-year-old boy for doing so.
The 1936 Public Order Act was aimed at Oswald Mosley's Jew-baiting Fascist thugs and banned the wearing of unauthorised military-style uniforms and disorderly behaviour. Its 1986 descendant provides that
"5.—(1) A person is guilty of an offence if he —
(a) uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or
(b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting, within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby."
It would appear, therefore, that the City of London police consider that a placard carried by a teenager at a peaceful demonstration outside a Church of Scientology saying "Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult" is likely to cause "harassment, alarm or distress" to Scientologists.
Unless Scientologists are far less robust than their usual behaviour leads one to think, they are far more likely to feel irritation, and maybe indignation, than alarm or distress.
Anyway, do we really want to live in a society where the expression of even mildly critical opinions of others' beliefs is treated by the guardians of the law as a potential breach of the peace?
If so we might as well shut our traps, cease blogging, and restrict our public comments to such uncontroversial observations as "Aarrgh" and "Gfrrrubh".
Roll on, brave new world!
Tuesday, 20 May 2008
How barmy can you get?
This way to the sheep pen!
New Labour has a grand plan for solving the few remaining national ills it hasn't yet eliminated.
Read all about it here.
As someone who grew up during WW2, when we thought we were fighting totalitarian tyranny and regarded even British government snoopers - let alone Nazi secret police - with utmost contempt, I find it incredible that the citizens of this country are now under heavier official surveillance and eavesdropping than any others in Europe. The age-old English tradition of personal and domestic privacy, let alone the notion that governments are the servants of the people and not their masters, has been wantonly strangled by our rulers under the spurious pretext of fighting a terrorist threat which has pretty obviously been deliberately and grossly exaggerated in order to subject us all to electronic servitude. To what end?
Even George Orwell didn't foresee this happening in real life.
Political joke of the year
This comment, posted on an article by George Monbiot in today's 'Guardian' by someone calling themself 'Martin Smith', has given me my biggest laugh for ages:
"now that most problems in society have been solved, voters hold parties to a far higher standard. These days it's mainly judged oin [sic] the quality of the spin and presentation, as we can see with the jump to Cameron since Blair stepped down.
New Labour is a victim of its own success; by solving most of the nation's ills they now have created a country full of shallow ungrateful voters who follow the wind. This is the biggest problem they face."
When in a hole of your own making, blame the gormless voters! Who else?
Sunday, 11 May 2008
No room for moral relativism
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/11/iraq.humanrights
My response is that beliefs and behaviour such as this show up the moral relativism of 'multiculturalism' for the humbugging sham that it is.
Far from 'political correctness' being a socially benign salve to 'hurt feelings', there are times when spades need to be called bloody shovels, and the only term to be applied to religious and cultural beliefs such as this is Barbarism.
The self-delusion of someone who, after murdering his own daughter, can say "everyone knows that honour killings sometimes are impossible not to commit" is not only appalling; it is utterly disgusting and downright wicked.
Where are the voices of the once strident feminists on this issue?
Thursday, 20 March 2008
Easter thoughts
I shall be taking a break from blogging, or at any rate I shall cut down the time I devote to it, for the next few weeks at least.
Easter is a good time for personal and social stocktaking. Regardless of any specifically religious message, it is the yearly harbinger of new birth, new life, and new growth.
Such renewal was never more sorely needed than in this diabolical first decade of the 21st century. With a memory stretching back to the 1930s, I cannot remember any other decade which has so filled me with fury, loathing, and dread of the purblind pigmies who are leading the world recklessly to political, economic, and ecological destruction in the name of their false creeds and dogmas. Of necessity, politics is always a matter of small, loud-mouthed tails wagging large, too-quiescent dogs. This has never been more the case since the millennium.
We were told that the
So far, the 21st century has resounded to the empty lies, braggings and boastings of Western politicians who purport to champion ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ while trampling on both, not only overseas but in their own home countries where traditional civil liberties have been blithely swept aside in the name of ‘security’. Can we really be surprised at the bitterly anti-Western tirades of Middle Eastern and Asian peoples who feel themselves the victims of double standards, or at the criticisms of our hypocrisy emanating from the Russians and the Chinese, whom we so love to lecture loftily about their disregard of human rights?
We are living through times dominated by what Jung called the ‘dark shadow’ – the collective negativity bred by anger and hatred of real or fancied injustice. The only really important – indeed, urgent – question is: how to reverse this trend? Genuine peace will only come about when all parties desire it, and stop striving for dominance. There is no lack of conflict resolution know-how, but these skills can only be applied when circumstances are favourable because increasing numbers of people realise the futility – and unwinnability – of fighting.
We – everyone in the world – need to make a sincere effort of heart-searching if things are to improve. We must all abandon the stale old “We are right and you are wrong” attitudes which falsely teach us that our ‘truth’ is the only correct one, and seek, through the exercise of empathy, to understand better how our opponents and critics feel about us – and about themselves. This calls for a daunting amount of candid self-criticism but it can – it must - be done.
Almost half a century ago, the convener of a pioneering conference on the still ongoing topic of religion and sexuality opened the proceedings with these words: "Forget who you represent. We represent the human race. Let's start there." The urgent search for world peace must proceed in that spirit.
The Easter message is that God is Love. Whether or not we believe there is a God, and regardless of which God we believe in, It is only Love, and not Hate, that is going to heal humanity’s self-inflicted wounds. We must love one another or die.
Thursday, 13 March 2008
What is real?
Here is another piece of vintage Anticant, which originally appeared in the Burrow:
Each of us perceives the world, and everything and everyone else in it, through our senses. Our personal imperfect mind-body composite mediates our experience of reality. So what is reality? Is there something ‘out there’ which is immutably real whether or not you and I are aware of it? This has been a disputatious field for philosophers and theologians down the ages. Religious believers hold that ultimate reality is a supernatural Being. Most philosophers, whether religious or not, accept that the universe exists. There is a story that Dr. Samuel Johnson asked a lady who had announced herself to be an extreme sceptic what she did believe in. When she replied “the universe”, Johnson retorted “By God, Madam, you’d better”.
Disbelief in the reality of anything or anyone outside oneself is solipsism. It is obviously difficult to ascertain how many people are solipsists, though a good many self-absorbed egotists behave as if they were. Bertrand Russell relates that someone once wrote to him asserting that they were a solipsist, and expressing surprise that there weren’t more of them. Russell replied “I am surprised at your surprise.”
Even though not solipsists, large numbers of people - if they are adult enough to consider them at all - regard other people’s realities as being less real than their own, and therefore deserving of less respect. It is the way of the world that the realities of the powerful trump the realities of the weak. The inflamed realities of George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld have devastated the humble realities of hundreds of thousands of anonymous Iraqis. The Islamic realities of Osama bin Laden and growing numbers of fanatical jihadists are increasingly impinging upon the less hubristic realities of multitudes in the West who don’t want their lives to be disrupted by fantasists, and just want to be left alone by all the godbotherers of assorted stripes.
But there seems little hope of this for the time being. Reaching out to the Other is no longer fashionable in this self-obsessed age. Empathy – the wish and ability to stand in another person’s shoes without stepping out of your own – was a fashionable aspiration in the 1970s but is nowadays widely scorned as namby-pambyish. Conflict resolution is rarely a priority; most combatants, military and mental, are more intent on victory than on compromise. Their respective realities brook no rivals.
When the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu dreamed he was a butterfly and woke up wondering whether he was a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was a man, he was opening himself to possibilities beyond the armour-plated ego which so many 21st century people barricade themselves into. What the world needs is many more butterflies, and far fewer blowflies.
Will we ever grow up about sex?
The latest crop of serio-comic incidents around the ever-interesting topic make me wonder at the sheer lack of realism of so many otherwise intelligent and publicly responsible people.
The tragic death of the Chief Constable of Manchester, Mike Todd, is very sad. If emerging reports are true, he took his own life because an extramarital affair was about to be exposed. Surely this should not have been necessary, or even thinkable. But evidently he had a punitive personal moral code which told him that this was the only way out.
The case of Mr Eliot Spitzer,
Finally [for now] we have the Conservative MP for Castle Point, Dr Bob Spink, who has had the party whip withdrawn [when he threatened to resign it] because of shenanigans within his local constituency party and attempts to de-select him arising out of an affair he has been having with a lady described [in The Times] as the ‘long-term partner’ of the local Conservative association’s deputy chairman. According to the article, the MP also uses his Commons staffing allowance to employ as ‘assistants’ both his ex-wife [who does this ‘work’ 150 miles away from Westminster] and the student daughter of his lady friend and her ‘long term partner’. The latter is, unsurprisingly, Dr Spink’s bitterest enemy – they have been involved in unseemly scrimmages [in one of which the ‘long term partner’ ended up on the floor], and complaints to the police of ‘criminal harassment’. This MP – I scarcely need add – is a “hang-em-and-flog-em” rightwinger, favouring
In my younger, more sanguine, days I hoped that as a result of the liberalising work which some of us achieved in the 1960s and ‘70s, public and private attitudes to sex would evolve into a more mature, relaxed acceptance of what is, after all, one of the most basic universals of human existence. But I did not reckon with the hypocrisy, prurience, and venality of the gutter press, which [rightly from its viewpoint] sees sexual titillation as a money spinner, and spares no effort to vulgarise the subject, mislead its readers, and vilify the minority who are brave enough to speak and behave in a more honest manner.
That great British pioneer of sex research, Havelock Ellis, said over a century ago that sex is the human activity which above all others generates vast amounts of vehemently held opinion founded upon little – if any – basis of facts. In his Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Freud said that people are in general not candid over sexual matters. “They do not show their sexuality freely, but to conceal it they wear a heavy overcoat woven of a tissue of lies, as though the weather were bad in the world of sexuality. Nor are they mistaken.”
A great friend of mine who was a brilliant trainer of sex educators, the late Dorothy Dallas, used to say that in teaching sex, you must begin by clearing morals, like you clear trumps in Bridge. Only when you have established a clear ethical framework based upon mutual respect, honest dealing, and rejection of cheating, can you proceed to deal with the physical details [which Dorothy used to call the ‘plumbing’] and the health issues involved in sex.
It’s a pity that Mike Todd, Eliot Spitzer, Bob Spink, and many other twisted, self-deceiving moralisers about sex who behave on the shabby old “do as I say, not as I do” principle weren’t her pupils. If they had been, they might have led happier lives and avoided damaging others.
