Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
When it comes to jokes, I prefer one-liners and other short gags to the long form that requires an elaborate set-up. The BBC recently reported on a joke contest and here are some of the one-liners that I found funny.
“Why did the chicken commit suicide? To get to the other side.”
“How many Spaniards does it take to change a light bulb? Juan.”
“As a kid I was made to walk the plank. We couldn’t afford a dog.”
My personal favorite was: “Hedgehogs – why can’t they just share the hedge?”
The joke that won the contest (“I’ve just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I’ll tell you what, never again.”) I did not find particularly funny, while two of the above jokes were selected by the judges to be in the worst jokes category, which shows that when it comes to humor, there is no accounting for tastes.
Labor Day used to be the traditional kick off for political campaigns though we now live in nonstop, year-round campaign mode. But as we approach election day in November, we should steel ourselves for an even increased focus on the trivial and sensational.
If you want to better understand why election coverage is so vapid, see Michael Hastings’s excellent GQ article Hack: Confessions of a Presidential Campaign Reporter on his experience in the 2008 elections.
Hastings is the reporter whose story in Rolling Stone resulted in General Stanley McChrystal being fired from his job in charge of the war in Afghanistan. In 2007, he was assigned by Newsweek to cover the front runners in the 2008 election and although this was considered a plum high-profile assignment, his increasing disgust with the kind of access politics that was required resulted in him quitting midway through and moving to another beat.
Richard Dawkins takes on Pope Ratzinger’s absurd charge that Hitler’s crimes grew out of atheism at the Protest the Pope rally in London which drew about 10,000 people. Hitler was baptized a Catholic and never renounced it.
Dawkins really lets the pope have it. And he deserves it.
In her regular column in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on September 15, 2010, Connie Schultz demonstrated once again the curious sense of entitlement that religious people have. She began as follows: “Years ago, I criticized atheists who wanted to dissuade believers of their faith. My argument was always the same: Why don’t you just leave us alone?”
In response, I wrote her a personal email:
Dear Ms. Schultz,
I read with interest your column today that started by saying that years ago you criticized atheists who did not leave you alone but wanted to dissuade you from your faith.
What exactly were these atheists doing to bother you? Were they coming to your door? Were they stopping you on the street to hand out their literature? Do they have TV and radio shows that preach their viewpoint and warn of dire consequences if you do not convert to their point of view?
As an atheist myself, it doesn’t bother me when people express their ideas in the public sphere, or even in the private sphere. Those people think they have the truth and want to convince me and that’s their right. Similarly atheists think that they are right and seek to convince others of it. These kinds of exchanges are no different from debates over politics or anything else, where the goal is to win hearts and minds.
It also does not bother me that your newspaper provides almost saturation coverage of religious matters, especially concerning the recent closing of Catholic churches or religious festivals and parades in Little Italy. In fact, after an initial swipe at a few religious people, your entire column today was a paean to the virtues of religion. Despite the cutbacks in the size of the paper, it still has a Saturday page devoted to religious matters, with a column dedicated to advancing religious views. Do you think atheist views get anywhere near that level of coverage? Would they even consider allowing an atheist regular use of that Saturday column space?
So I find it a little odd that when atheists speak out about their disbelief, religious people feel as if they are being imposed upon, as if they have the right to be shielded from opposing views. Are they so insecure of what they believe that they need to be surrounded only by affirming views?
There is no reason why religious beliefs should be privileged and shielded from criticism. Surely we all benefit from a full airing of a wide diversity of views on issues?
Sincerely,
Mano Singham
No response yet.
Now that the primary season for the 2010 mid-term elections is over, it might be good to revisit the question of where the Democratic and Republican parties are. While the basic pro-war/pro-business one-party oligarchic nature of politics is still intact, there have been some interesting developments in how the two factions have evolved.
The Democrats are still pretty much where they have always been, trying to faithfully serve the interests of the oligarchy while pretending to be concerned about the rest of us. As I warned a couple of months ago, it is the Democrats that the oligarchy use to really stick it to the poor. In this case, we see that Obama has stacked his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform with people determined to reduce social security benefits. The commission will deliver its report on December 1, conveniently after the elections. The plan seems to be that the Democrats can campaign on ‘protecting social security’ and then cut the benefits after the election is done.
Republican Party politics has been more turbulent. Immediately after the 2008 election I wrote a series of posts about what its future might look like. In December of that year, I wrote that there were four groups vying for leadership in the wake of their election debacle.
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Over at Slate Timothy Noah writes about the growing income inequality and the reduced social mobility that now characterize the United States.
In 1915, the richest 1% of the population obtained about 15% of the nation’s income. “This was the era in which the accumulated wealth of America’s richest families—the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies—helped prompt creation of the modern income tax, lest disparities in wealth turn the United States into a European-style aristocracy.”
But now the top 1% gets 24% of the income. The rising share of the oligarchy can be seen in this graph of the income share of the top 10% over the last 100 years.
As Noah says:
When it comes to real as opposed to imagined social mobility, surveys find less in the United States than in much of (what we consider) the class-bound Old World. France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Spain—not to mention some newer nations like Canada and Australia—are all places where your chances of rising from the bottom are better than they are in the land of Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick…
According to the Central Intelligence Agency (whose patriotism I hesitate to question), income distribution in the United States is more unequal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador. Income inequality is actually declining in Latin America even as it continues to increase in the United States.
(Thanks to Norm.)
This book is the story of Lenny, the 39-year old son on Russian Jewish immigrants to the US, who falls in love with Eunice, the 24-year old daughter of Korean Christian immigrants, though neither of them are religious. On one level this is the familiar story of cross-cultural tensions: between parents brought up in the traditional cultures of their country of origin and their children who have grown up in the US, and the difficulty for Lenny and Eunice to overcome the cultural baggage of different immigrant backgrounds and ages. (Fresh Air recently had an interview with Shteyngart which is where I heard about the book and was interested enough to read it.)
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