Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘damian penny’

For everyone who keeps claiming that there’s “no proof” against Iraq, this diagram from the London Daily Telgraph summarizes Hans Blix’s report:

Via Damian Penny, who has this to add:

In a sane world, this would be more than enough to make the case that Saddam has not stopped trying to develop weapons on mass destruction, and that he never will do so. But some nations simply aren’t going to be satisfied until Iraqi VX has been released in the New York subway, and Iraqi missiles are raining on Tel Aviv. (This being the UN, maybe that’s the point.)

For God’s sake, how many more “second chances” are we supposed to give these guys?

Right on. To that I’ll just add that the strategy of these people has been to look fact straight in the face and make up a lie. It’s like a guy whose wife catches him having sex with another woman, and yet despite the evidence staring her in the face, he tells her she’s mistaken and makes up a lie so ludicrous, she believes it.

Well, the world has to start to trust the evidence. Saddam Hussein is winning by lowering expectations. Everyone expects him not to comply with the UN inspections. Everyone expects him to be developing forbidden weapons. But he’s managed to put forth the lie that there’s no justification for attacking his country, no matter what he does. What will it take for people to see the obvious?

My heartfelt condolences to Damian Penny on the loss of his grandfather.

Damian Penny quotes a Jerusalem Post piece by Edward Alexander about intellectuals and philosophers and their moral justification of Palestinian terrorism. The article highlights examples of people from academia who have become the intellectual voices of suicide bombers.

This particular form of atrocity has not only failed to disturb the equanimity of our heavily petted professors but has elicited from many of them a stream of rhapsodic admiration, sympathetic identification (with the murderers, not their victims), and high-toned apologia. A few examples, among many–a philosopher, a literary critic, and a theologian–should illustrate the pattern.

The article gives examples. Ted Honderich, who actually said that Palestinian Arabs have a “moral right” to blow up Jews. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who claimed that the 9/11 attacks were a justifiable response to “state terrorism”. And Karen Armstrong, who tosses out the comparison of Israelis to Nazis like it was water.

Needless to say, reading some of these quotes made me sick to the stomach. But Damian’s reaction was “Why I hate philosophers”, and I’m not quite ready to go that far.

Sure, I’d be more than willing to say I hate these particular people who call themselves philosophers. But anyone can bang out chopsticks on the piano; that doesn’t make us all Mozart. Similarly, anyone can use words and twisted rhetoric to justify heinous acts of murder. They might even get hired by a university and given a vehicle for these views. But that doesn’t make them philosophers.

To write off the entire field of philosophy – which, at its core is a basic search for truth, meaning, and values – because of a few bad apples is unfair, at best. It is precisely when people stop thinking that our world falls apart.

Honest Reporting points to some pretty disturbing hate speech on the Raelians’ website. This is what Damian Penny has to say about it:

I used to think the Raelians were just a bunch of cranks with some wacky ideas, but basically harmless. Than I found the Rael-operated “Subversions.com”, a “politically incorrect” “news” website which features one of the most shocking blood libels I’ve ever read: that the Israelis murdered 1,000 Palestinians, “most of whom were women and children” in Jenin. Not even the Palestinians themselves, nor the most hysterically “anti-Zionist” segments of the British media, wrote anything this vile.

Mind you, the Raelians don’t just pick on the Jews. They say say the U.S. Secret Service killed John Lennon and the followers of “Reverend” Jim Jones, and they even accuse the French of murdering members of the “Solar Temple” cult in 1994-95 and planning their own “concentration camps” for minorities. Still, the front page, which rants about “Americano-Israelian terrorism” and purports to show a Palestinian baby murdered by the IDF, makes it clear who their main target is.

Fuck you, Rael. Fuck, fuck, fuck you. Fuck you and the spaceship you rode in on.

Damian, I couldn’t agree more.

It’s scary as hell. Sure, the announcements of this week’s cloned babies are almost certainly hoaxes, but even the idea of them being true is frightening. Is this really who we want owning the technology to clone people? Imagine what kind of people these bigoted freaks would create. A world full of Raelian clones is not the planet Earth I want to live on, that’s for sure!

Go submit your nominations for the 2003 bloggie awards. If you feel like you absolutely must vote for me, well, I won’t be too opposed (via Damian Penny, who, by the way, I also voted for).

Damian Penny has compiled an interesting reading list of articles about Iraq. Anyone who wants to learn more will find this list an excellent starting point.