The Prestidigitator

I really don’t want to contribute to the hyperbole that this debate has already created but I can safely say that this is the finest one hour of debate, one-sided as it is, I’ve seen in a very long time. Two amazingly articulate intellectuals take on Catholicism and religious hypocrisy. To be fair, I do wish that the two proponents of the Catholic church would have been a little more, I don’t know, Christlike instead of pretending that (institutional) child abuse and homophobia are urban myths.

Stephen Fry makes an especially brilliant case against the so called ‘force for good’. Nod along or throw stuff at your computer but this is what good television is all about.

Go watch. Now.

Like most people, I thoroughly enjoyed Jon Stewart’s drawing and quartering of Jim Cramer on The Daily Show last week. It tells you something about the cultural zeitgeist when a television comedian is the one who ends up taking the mantle of journalism.

The episode, despite being immensely uncomfortable to watch, was catharsis in many ways. It was also refreshing to see Stewart finally come down on Cramer (unfortunately, a scapegoat for the real problem – financial news networks) in an expletive laden interview/skewering.

But isn’t that part of the problem? Selling this idea that you don’t have to do anything. Anytime you sell people the idea that sit back and you’ll get 10 to 20 percent on your money, don’t you always know that that’s going to be a lie? When are we going to realize in this country that our wealth is work? That we’re workers and by selling this idea that of “Hey man, I’ll teach you how to be rich”…how is that any different than an infomercial?

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I gotta tell you. I understand that you want to make finance entertaining, but it’s not a fucking game. When I watch that, I get, I can’t tell you how angry it makes me because it says to me, “You all know.” You all know what’s going on. You can draw a straight line from those shenanigans to the stuff that was being pulled at Bear and at AIG and all this derivative market stuff that is this weird Wall Street side bet.

How come journalists back in India never hold our politicians’ feet to the fire like Stewart did?

(PS: I did feel sorry for Cramer.)

Brilliant article by Salman Rushide on what makes a good literary adaptation. 

What are the things we think of as essential in our lives? The answers could be: our children, a daily walk in the park, a good stiff drink, the reading of books, a job, a vacation, a baseball team, a cigarette, or love. And yet life has a way of making us rethink. Our children move away from home, we move away from our favourite park, the doctor forbids us to drink or smoke, we lose our eyesight, we get fired, there’s no time or money to take a vacation, our baseball team sucks, our heart is broken. At such times our picture of the world hangs crookedly on the wall. Then, if we can manage it, we adapt. And what this shows us is that essence is something deeper than any of that, it’s the thing that gets us through. 

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But those who do not know who they are, are doomed too: individuals who sacrifice themselves for the sake of pleasing others, comedians who stop telling jokes because they find themselves in a humourless world, serious people who start trying to tell jokes because they fear being thought humourless, people in a new situation, a new relationship, a new university, who act against their natures because they think that’s the way to make things easy for themselves.

Whole societies can lose their way through a process of bad adaptation. Striving to save themselves, they can oppress others. Hoping to defend themselves, they can damage the very liberties they believed to be under attack. Claiming to defend freedom, they can make themselves and others less free. Or, seeking to calm the violent hotheads in their midst, societies can try to appease them, and so give the violent hotheads the notion that their violence and hotheadedness is effective. 

[Tip of the hat to The Mute Oracle and Kalafudra]

All people deserve respect, but not all ideas do. I don’t respect the idea that a man was born of a virgin, walked on water and rose from the dead. I don’t respect the idea that we should follow a “Prophet” who at the age of 53 had sex with a nine-year old girl, and ordered the murder of whole villages of Jews because they wouldn’t follow him.

I don’t respect the idea that the West Bank was handed to Jews by God and the Palestinians should be bombed or bullied into surrendering it. I don’t respect the idea that we may have lived before as goats, and could live again as woodlice. This is not because of “prejudice” or “ignorance”, but because there is no evidence for these claims. They belong to the childhood of our species, and will in time look as preposterous as believing in Zeus or Thor or Baal.

When you demand “respect”, you are demanding we lie to you. I have too much real respect for you as a human being to engage in that charade.

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But a free society cannot be structured to soothe the hardcore faithful. It is based on a deal. You have an absolute right to voice your beliefs – but the price is that I too have a right to respond as I wish. Neither of us can set aside the rules and demand to be protected from offence.

Read this beautifully articulated argument by Johann Hari in its entirety here.

Update: We live to die another day.

The LHC gets switched on in a few hours and contrary to what lunatics may want you to believe, the world will not be swallowed by a black hole. What interests me more is as to what *will* actually come out of this 6 billion dollar science experiment. Will they find the Higgs boson? Or will Hawking win that wager?

In Carl Sagan’s Contact, governments cooperate to build this giant dodecahedron (after receiving step by step instructions from a very ambiguous extra-terrestrial intelligence). After spending trillions of dollars on a project that many believed would shape humanity’s future, remember what happened?

Nothing.

“The land of Mahatma Gandhi has been bloodied by terrorists whom we shall not spare; Terrorists are waging a war against India. We should be prepared for a long battle against terrorism.”

- Narendra Modi in response to the recent Bangalore and Ahmedabad blasts

There is only so much bullshit you can take on any given day.

The faculty at St Stephens, Delhi is apparently conducting a boycott (although the brother was still rushing to class when I last checked) in an attempt to protest againts the ludicrous move by the college to enforce a quota for Christians in faculty recruitment.

What is bound to really rile people up is a statement by the  spokesperson for Delhi Catholic Archdiocese, Father Dominic Emmanuel on CNN IBN’s Face the Nation. He goes onto say that academic excellence is not as important when compared to (wait for it) following the ‘call’ of Jesus Christ. Coming form a christian minority institution (that infringed on almost every fundamental right) myself, it irks me to see that one of the premier institutes in the country has to bear the brunt of illogical and neanderthal decisions made by the f*ckwits (thankyou, P Z Myers!) who actually have a say in matters that concern them in no discernable way. Add to that, Stephens is a publicly funded institution; so basically everyone gets to sow but few reap. Go figure.

Source: Minority quota in colleges a huge mistake

This Valentine’s Day, the Law Commission of India is thinking of all you hormonal, barely out of school, socially challenged 18 year old boys. As if board exams and sparse facial hair weren’t problems enough, the government of India may very well grant you the right to finally propose to that girl you’ve had your eyes on.

http://www.ibnlive.com/news/law-panels-knotty-idea-let-boys-marry-at-18/58277-3.html

”There is no rational, scientific basis to why boys who may vote or take other decisions after 18 must wait to be 21 to marry,” commission member Kirti Singh told UNI.

So rejoice all ye who have been waiting to turn 21. Women however have it tougher; the age of consent is now 16 instead of 15.

How does the Law Commission decide on what laws to change? Aren’t there more important amendments to be made like, say, I don’t know…banning urban ‘gunda’-ism?

If there’s one breed of vermin that deserves zero respect/sympathy/empathy, it’s the one that comments without abandon on sites like YouTube and Redditt. Going through some of the comments on YouTube (as entertaining as some of them are) is pretty much all the proof we need for dysgenics. For the average internet junkie, sitting in the confines of his/her room is all the empowerment he/she needs to air his/her retarded views onto an unsuspecting world. Most of the time they end up being just plain ridiculous and sometimes marginally offensive.

(Click to view)

There is a comment that shows up beneath an article on Wired,

I want to destroy young generation of India Delhi is the best place to do bomb blast in SouthDelhi mainly in Mohammad Pur, Nehru place buildings, Vasant vihar flats, RK Puram Lodhi Road, Sarojani Nagar are the best place to do the bomb blast and do lot of casualties. Lot of Colleges are are also the best place to do bomb blast if anyone will do bomb blast here then there are maximum casuilties done and ISI will become happy. I want to Tell that if anyone want to carry bomb laptop leather bag is very good for this.
Put the bomb in the leather bag.

Include punctuations where necessary to make sense of what you just read. How exactly do you react to something like this?

Additional Links:

• An interesting read by Andrew Chen
• What You Tube comments really mean

Every time an Indian with a Y chromosome delivers a tirade fueled by patriotism, he is bound to tell you that the Indian culture stands tall amongst all else because of it’s unrivaled respect for women, for the female form, for the working woman, the daughter, the sister, the mother. He will tell you how fortunate a woman in India is for she is not subjected to the evils of an amoral western society. He is the epitome of hypocrisy.

• Guwahati men strip, beat up women protesters: Local men strip and molest protesting tribal women in broad daylight while the police watch. What is most bothersome is that journalists managed to click photos whilst the atrocity was in progress. Are we so passive? The government feels that a 1 Lakh compensation will make up for the emotional and physical torture these women were put through.
• An Infosys employee in the US pushes his 23 year old wife out of a moving car for being unable to come up with enough dowry. Apparently, you don’t have to be uneducated to be an imbecile. The news came to light thanks to a Pakistani doctor.
• 26 year old Ashwini Mohite from Pune gets raped and murdered on her way back from work.

Add to that, a 300% increase in violence against women in Kerala, Taslima Nasreen being harassed for her views and reports that suggest violence against women is at an all time high in Asia.

The blame for these lie not with the victims, like most claim but with a judicial system that unabashedly sides the insecure ego maniacs who perpetrate such acts and let them go away with punishments hardly befitting the crimes. Isn’t it sickening when the moral brigade sticks it’s head out to uphold the culture and tradition of the country while doing nothing to check violence against the fairer sex? Isn’t it high time to stop making lame excuses by blaming films and the media? Is not every woman someone else’s daughter, wife or mother?

(Picture sourced from The Hindu: Online Edition)