Alan Jones, Broadcasting Bigot
And while I'm up here on the goat, I'll just say that there was never a
man so evil, so hateful and so black in character as Alan Jones. There
was a good article in a magazine I read today about Jones, a man who
only once has actually turned up in court to defend his slanders and
defamations of people - and that only because the prosecution subpoena'd
him as a witness (probably just to piss Jones off - it was Stuart
Littlemore, the man behind Media Watch). The brief quotes from Jones
about the Cronulla riots, which were taking the racist hatred of the
people and pretending that this was just "the voice of the community"
while broadcasting them, would turn your hair. Evil stuff.
One question that they ask in the article is: why is there no book on Alan Jones? He's one of the top broadcasters in the country, he's led the South Sydney Rabittohs through a Grand Slam (whatever that means), and he was at the centre of the "Cash For Comment" scandal. No book? Why not? Because he's threatened to sue anyone who publishes something about him. So much for "fair hearing".
In the documentary "Outfoxed", they pointed out that there was an interviewer who the Fox network has as one of its top presenters - I can't remember the name - who was slandering and lying and reporting biased, bigoted misinformation; yet you couldn't sue him for slander since it's only slander (in the USA) when the other person know's that they're not telling the truth, and this person was basically so deluded and so perpetually biased in favour of the Republicans that it was impossible to prove that this person didn't actually believe what they said. Jones, I think, is in the same mould - a person who is so well aligned with the broadcaster's aims that their latent insanity and refusal to accept the reality that the rest of us live in is forgiven in the face of their manifest excellence at raking in tonnes of money.
I don't know what to do about him, though, short of proposing curare
on his razor or a high-powered rifle from a good vantage point. You
can't take them out, you can't out-speak them, and they have thousands
of people who will back them up every step of the way because they
share the same delusion. If you listen to Jones, I beg you to regain
your sanity and join us in the real world. Switch off the radio and
don't listen to the bigotry.
posted at: 15:23 | path: /personal/goat | permanent link to this entry
Why not copy a computer?
Saddle up the goat, I'm going for a ride, thanks to
Leon's article referring to the
"Copy The
Cat" article.
OK, here's an even easier challenge than that: Copy a computer. It doesn't have any biological stuff, so you aren't going to require nanotech or complex chemical laboratories to even start making one. A lot of the parts are readily for sale - PCB, chips, capacitors, etc. You've got a complete blueprint of one inside your computer. It shouldn't be that hard. Let's leave aside copyright issues here. Go on, copy it.
What, you say you can't do it now? That it would take months of time to disassemble the board, to source all the parts, to check the design actually worked the way your now disassembled board used to? And you'd need big complex stuff like wave soldering machines and seven-layer PCB printers? Well, the original board manufacturer's got all of that, why don't you?
The "Copy the cat" argument is absolutely bollocks. Its primary fallacy is Irrelevant Conclusion: "if we can't do it, only God could have" assumes that everything we can't do must be explained by God. That's These people probably don't have the first notion of what a potato does and its role in the overall survival of the potato plant, let alone how to synthesise starches and amino acids and cellulose in a lab. "Oooh, we can't copy a potato, that must mean God exists!" has to be right up there with "God must exist because I can conceive of God existing!" in the realm of "Stupid ways to justify the existence of God."
Because that's what these people are doing. They use "Intelligent Design" because people are weary and cynical of hearing that "God created it all". "Intelligent Design" never means "Aliens created us." It never means "We don't know what created us." It means "And I have this book here that tells us that God is the Intelligent Designer." I do not wonder why these people are trying to hide their stupid, contradictory, hermetic little religions behind the airy sophistication of the "Intelligent Design" moniker: because they know that "Creationism" died back in the fifties. They just can't let go, and their circular, bigoted beliefs tell them to go out and proselytise; like good little marketing executives, they've just simply rebranded it. Claiming that "Intelligent Design does not require the espousing of any religious belief" is really just blushing, just preaching, heh, to the choir.
The fact that they're prepared to play word games with "Fortunate Mutation" - using the popular cancer-derived, eugenics-forming idea that mutation moves 'away' from some 'ideal' - is just further proof that these people have abandoned any "Intelligence" in the "Design" of their arguments and are just relying on sophistry to carry their arguments. Further down they argue that just because we can't create a cat from non-cat materials, there must be an intelligence in the universe. Just another fallacy, carefully wrapped up as a logical deduction. And they have the absolute hide to then ask that ID "be examined on a scientific basis" - as if this hasn't been done countless times before and every examination proved that their arguments are specious at best and absolutely wrong at worst.
You may wonder why I'm so angry. It's simply that these people are the worst kind of hypocrites. They lie, they twist facts and words and arguments, they deny any proof that they're wrong - and then they claim that they're right anyway. They are prepared to do this to weasel their way into an education system that continues to cast them out. Their believers just lap up these 'proofs' in slack-jawed self-confirming agreement, refusing to listen to any of the arguments that might prove that they're wrong. I would be prepared to conclude that belief in God required the sacrificing of ones logical faculties if I didn't know a couple of believers in my local Linux group who are, in every other respect, intelligent, logical and well-read.
It really does make me despair.
posted at: 13:18 | path: /personal/goat | permanent link to this entry
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