If you are ever going to publicly debate a religious person, I recommend that as part of your preparation you watch this 15-minute collection of clips of brutal Christopher Hitchens put-downs, referred to as ‘Hitchslaps’. The one he administers to someone defending circumcision (it begins at 11:50 and I think his victim is Harold Kushner) is a thing of beauty.
If there is one thing that the sex scandals in the Catholic Church should have taught us, it is that young boys should not be left unsupervised in the presence of clergy.
But now come reports that the Sri Lankan government, in another shameless attempt to pander to the majority Buddhist community, plans to have 2,600 boys as young as 10 years of age ordained next year as Buddhist monks to commemorate year 2600 according to the Buddhist calendar. This means that the boys will have their heads shaven, be put in robes, and made to live in temples with older monks.
People are protesting on many grounds, one of which is that the boys are too young to make such a drastic decision. The second is that there have long been strong rumors of sexual abuse in Buddhist temples in Sri Lanka, but it is a taboo subject that people are fearful to bring out in the open or investigate. Like with the Catholic Church for so long, the authorities have been hesitant to take the allegations seriously.
Poor parents often give up their children to become Buddhist monks because then they will have food and shelter and clothing and receive some sort of education. There is also apparently a bizarre belief that by ‘donating’ their children to the priesthood, the parents receive ‘merit’ that can be cashed in to get a better next life (Buddhists believe in reincarnation) or even gain nirvana, the ultimate goal. It is amazing how children are used as pawns in religious games.
It should come as no surprise that as a result of being conscripted, some Sri Lankan Buddhist priests become venal, showing little resemblance to the ideals preached by their founder Siddhartha Gautama.
In this conversation with Jon Stewart of the Daily Show, writer Philip Dray reminds us of how much we owe trade unions for improving the working conditions of everyone.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| www.thedailyshow.com | ||||
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The new media on the internet provides a way to break free of the blinkered view that the traditional media provides. What the new media offers is a vast array of informed people who are willing to do the meticulous and painstaking work to get to the truth. The traditional media cannot or will not do this either because they want to go with the superficial and sensational in their search for ratings or because they are laying off their investigative reporters or because they do not want to offend powerful interests, because they themselves are part of the corporate elite
This year, investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill received the second annual Izzy Award, named after the legendary investigative reporter I. F. “Izzy” Stone, and given for outstanding achievement in independent media. The first winners were Amy Goodman of Democracy Now and Glenn Greenwald. In an interview, Scahill talks about the potential of the new alternative media made possible by the internet.
I believe that the way independent journalists are most effectively able to conduct their work is by maintaining their independence from the powerful. I don’t hob-nob with the powerful. I don’t count among my friends executives or other powerful people. I think it’s important for independent journalists to not be beholden to any special interests whatsoever.
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I think we’re at a moment where we have a lot of really good independent journalism that’s being produced by bloggers and independent journalists, but we also need to not go far away from that tradition of peer review, editing and fact-checking.
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We live in a very exciting time in independent media. Corporate journalists are less powerful now than they were 10 years ago, but their owners are much more powerful. Still, the journalists themselves — they’re no longer these sort of regal kings on a hill. Peggy Noonan represents a dying generation of people that pontificate from a golden palace somewhere, hoping the poor will never get through her gates.The poor are now journalists around the world. The question is: how do we fund it? How do we keep it viable? How do we keep it credible? And that is our challenge right now.
Glenn Greenwald has a nice piece on the value of blogs that was displayed when the traditional media misrepresented Sonia Sotomayor when she was nominated to the US Supreme Court. The media used an original blog report as the source to present a distorted picture of her and it was the blogs that fought back to correct the record.
Another case where blogs forced a reporter to retract was when New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin indulged in some gratuitous union bashing in a TV interview, suggesting that unionized companies were all doomed to failure. The counter-examples came thick and fast and quick on the blogs, forcing him to recant. He is unlikely to make that mistake again. This kind of accountability and correction is unlikely to have happened in the pre-internet, pre-blog days.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| www.thedailyshow.com | ||||
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The shameless schmoozing of beltway journalists with the politicians they are supposed to be covering critically continues in the Obama administration. I wrote earlier about how Obama started this practice a week before he was even inaugurated. Is anyone even surprised anymore that the media is so lousy and so pro-establishment and only gets worked up over trivialities?
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The rescue of the trapped miners in Chile is a truly wonderful story. The careful plan put together by international teams seems to be working smoothly in bringing the stoic miners back to the surface and 21 of the 33 all have been rescued so far, after spending over two months trapped half-a-mile below the surface. See here for how the rescue was carried out. It is a triumph of perseverance, endurance, cooperation, patience, technology, and science.
But apparently three different Christian denominations are claiming it was their prayers that resulted in god intervening that resulted in the successful rescue and are vying to claim credit for the successful rescue. They did not explain why if god wanted the miners rescued he didn’t simply lift them out of the mine himself or why their gods were silent when the 29 miners died in the West Virginia in April. It is pathetic to see people so desperate for a sign from god that they clutch at these straws.
In another footnote to this story, NPR depended upon an al-Jazeera reporter to get an on-the-spot report from the mine site earlier this week. NPR frequently uses reporters from other news services like the BBC but al-Jazeera is used only for stories in which either al-Jazeera itself is the story or because there are some situations (like the Gaza aid flotilla) where only they venture to send in reporters. This was the first time I had heard NPR using them for a ‘neutral’ story. It signals the long-overdue recognition that al-Jazeera, which provides excellent news coverage, is being seen by US news outlets as a legitimate source.
A strange and sad story has surfaced. A person claiming to be Michael Behe’s son has said that he has rejected his family’s Catholic faith and become an atheist. Those who have been following the ‘intelligent design’ movement will be familiar with Behe. He is the author of Darwin’s Black Box, the book that became the Bible of that movement with its claims that things like the bacterial flagellum and the blood clotting mechanism were conclusive evidence of the existence of a supernatural designer.
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