Here is a news report on the demonstration that took place last Sunday at Quantico base in Virginia to support Bradley Manning that ended in some arrests.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Here is a news report on the demonstration that took place last Sunday at Quantico base in Virginia to support Bradley Manning that ended in some arrests.
Yesterday, the Libyan war had already been shifted to the inside pages of my local paper The Plain Dealer, with the news from the other ‘old’ wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The current war on Libya was sanctioned by United Nations Security Council resolution #1973 that was passed on March 17 and authorized “all necessary measures … to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.” It should be noted that the resolution expressly excludes “a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory” which means that another resolution will be required if bombing alone does not result in the removal of Gadhafi from power and they want to send troops in.
The resolution passed with ten votes in favor and five abstentions. It is noteworthy that apart from Germany, the other four abstentions consisted of Brazil, Russia, India, and China, countries that constitute the newly formed so-called BRIC bloc, that is emerging as an economic counterweight to the US and Europe.
Immediately after the vote both Russia and China issued very critical statements on the bombing campaign. Since either of them could have vetoed the resolution, it seems highly hypocritical for them to complain now since they had to have known what was coming. (Even if they had vetoed it, the US, Britain, and France would have found some other pretext for bombing, but that is not the point at issue here.)
So why didn’t China and Russia veto the UN resolution? I wonder if they want to lure the US and its NATO allies into these wars so that they will simply bleed themselves dry by one misbegotten military adventure after another. Russia, in particular, learned this painful lesson first hand when the US lured them into a long, costly, tragic, and ultimately losing war in Afghanistan. Maybe this is their revenge.
Stephen Walt discusses how the neoconservatives and liberal interventionists in the US, supposedly on the opposite ends of the political spectrum, are actually very similar when it comes to taking the country to war.
The only important intellectual difference between neoconservatives and liberal interventionists is that the former have disdain for international institutions (which they see as constraints on U.S. power), and the latter see them as a useful way to legitimate American dominance… So if you’re baffled by how Mr. “Change You Can Believe In” morphed into Mr. “More of the Same,” you shouldn’t really be surprised. George Bush left in disgrace and Barack Obama took his place, but he brought with him a group of foreign policy advisors whose basic world views were not that different from the people they were replacing.
Libya is another example of how we really have just one pro-war/pro-business oligarchy that rules the country.
Walt also wonders if whether China may not be the ultimate beneficiary of the Libyan war, saying “And who’s the big winner here? Back in Beijing, China’s leaders must be smiling as they watch Washington walk open-eyed into another potential quagmire.”
It might seem to a naïve or conspiracy minded observer that there is some plan being implemented, aided by the political leadership, to deliberately drive America into the ditch. Look at all the efforts currently underway to defund the government and thus destroy public services so that libraries cut back, regulatory agencies are made toothless, public schools are undermined, workers are impoverished, retirement funds are looted, national parks are destroyed by development, logging and mining, roads and bridges fall apart, police and fire protections and other social services are reduced or eliminated, all the while waging more and more wars on other countries that not only cost a lot but breed anger and resentment against the US.
Of course, such an explicit plan is unlikely and is unneeded. All these things are happening as a logical consequence of an oligarchy run amok that seeks only to advance its immediate short-term interests by cutting taxes on the wealthy and eliminating any form of government oversight and restraint and doesn’t give a damn about anything else. When coupled with outside forces that seek to draw the US into expensive overseas military adventures and overblown internal security measures (these are, after all, the stated goals of al Qaeda), we are well on the path to the implosion of a once powerful country.
I will be on a panel discussing WikiLeaks on Thursday, March 24 at 5:30 pm in Nord 310 on the Case quad of the CWRU campus. The other panelists will be Laura Tartakoff and Pete Moore from the Political Science department.
The event is organized by the CWRU chapter of the Young Americans for Liberty and is free and open to the public. Pizza and drinks will be provided.
Let the euphemisms begin!
Customized freedom packages depending on the country!
The BBC reports on a new paper presented this week at the annual March meeting of the American Physical Society (of all places) that used mathematical modeling on religious affiliation trends over the last century and arrived at a conclusion that supports my thesis in the recent series on Why Atheism is Winning that religion is in a state of rapid decline.
A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction, say researchers.
The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation.
The team’s mathematical model attempts to account for the interplay between the number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one.
The result, reported at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, US, indicates that religion will all but die out altogether in those countries.
The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.
A former preacher turned atheist, Loftus has published two books Why I Became an Atheist and The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails (winner of the 2011 About.com Reader’s Choice Award). His blog is ranked in the top 5 atheist/theist blogs on the internet today. He has three master’s degrees in the Philosophy of Religion and is a graduate of the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
His talk is at 6:00 pm on Saturday, March 26, 2011 in Wickenden Hall, room 322 on the CWRU campus. The talk is sponsored by the CWRU chapter of the Center for Inquiry.
All are welcome and refreshments will be available.
Wickenden Hall is on the Case quad. It is likely that the parking lot 1A right behind Wickenden (entering from northbound MLK Drive) will be open. If you park there, go up the steps and Wickenden Hall is the building on your immediate right.
(Note; Loftus will also be speaking on Thursday, March 24 at 7:00 p to the Northeast Ohio Center for Inquiry. More details can be found here.)
It is a well-known phenomenon that people overestimate their capacities on traits that are deemed to be socially desirable. In the US, since being religious is seen as a good thing, people seem to feel obliged to put on a facade.
But it is becoming increasingly clear that Americans are less religious that they claim to be. The Pew survey of religious knowledge in the US says that 4/7 (about 55%) attend church once a week but a University of Michigan examination of actual time diaries kept by people indicate that the figure is only about 25%, much like many European countries, while self reports were about 35-45%. The gap between self-perception and reality in the US was around 18% whereas the highest gaps elsewhere in the world were only about 4-8%, and these were in Catholic countries.
Given that fact, should we believe the Pew results that say that “more than a third (37%) say they read the Bible or other Holy Scriptures at least once a week, not counting worship services”? I find that really hard to believe. The Bible is not a great read, frankly. There are a few occasional well written and poetic passages but most of it consists of turgid prose dealing with dreary lists of rules.
My guess is that even if we use the same inflation factor of two that exists for church attendance to arrive at about 20% for weekly Bible reading, that would still be too high.
I watched this documentary yesterday. The filmmaker and narrator Roger Nygard is looking for the meaning of existence and his method of finding out is to travel the globe and pose questions on god, the soul, happiness, sex, the afterlife, etc. to people from various religious groups and from scientists and just record their responses. There is no attempt to challenge the stated views or to analyze or to create some kind of synthesis. What we get are snippets of people’s views from all across the spectrum.
The documentary is fairly entertaining but not deep. The filmmaker seemed to spend a lot of time on two particular groups. One group consisted of serious scientists whom, as far as I could tell, were all atheists, and the other group consisted of people from more exotic religious groupings, people whom we would not normally encounter, such as druids, new-age spiritualists, Indian mystics, and the like. There was one supposedly very popular Indian guru named Sri Sri Ravi Shankar who got a lot of screen time who had a twinkle in his eye as he delivered his banal fortune-cookie aphorisms that suggested that he knew he was perpetrating a con and was delighted that all these saps around him were buying it.
Mainstream Catholics and Protestants were represented by sober clergy and intellectuals while the evangelical Christians got the short shrift and were largely represented by a preacher who rails at people on university campus grounds, a wrestling ministry that uses wrestling bouts as a means to evangelize, and drag racers. A lot of time was given to an Orthodox Judaic rabbi in Israel who spouted deep-sounding but meaningless words about the finite and the infinite.
The best segments were of a 12-year old girl, the neighbor of the filmmaker, who in a few pithy words dismissed the idea of both god and the afterlife.
Although Nygard did not have any overt point of view and ended with a somewhat trite statement of the ‘why can’t we all get along’ sort, I thought the film had a definitely anti-religion subtext by contrasting sensible atheist views with the mumbo-jumbo of religions.