Wherein we ask people who say "You have to look at [x] in the context of the times!" something that might make them think about their bullshit.
Let's say I have a time machine, and I go back in time to the year 1000 AD. I take with me a Challenger battle tank and some modern firearms with lots of fuel and ammo. Upon arrival in Ye Olde England I declare myself King Of The World and proclaim Alfred The Great to be a big fanny who nobody should follow because he smells like beards and dog-shit and his mum was probably a Wessex candle-maker. When his armies come to challenge my assertion, I use my modern armaments to flatten the fucking lot of them, then go about the place pillaging and raping and murdering to my heart's content. I then live in my newly-accquired Kingdom Of Fuggerland as king of everything, using my tank to enforce my absolute will on my citizens and to pull off the occasional Crusade into continental Europe and beyond.
Who knows, maybe I take it all the way to Japan, have a poke around over there for a bit. Read the first edition of The Tale Of The Genji or something. Stop off in Mongolia and lead the hordes across central Asia or something on my way back.
Would this be evil, in the context of the times?
I'm not trying to straw-man objectivism; I simply wish to understand how the fuck you can contextualise another human being's suffering. That's not a straw man, because when you say things like "You've got to look at what happened to the Tsar Nicholas' family/ the Viking thralls/ the refugees in Hara Castle in the context of the times!" that's exactly what you're trying to do.
And before anyone says "Hey look it's moral absolutism like they have in religions!"... yes. It's LIKE what they have in religions, except it's based on the empirical observation that people do not like to suffer rather than some book someone wrote a long time ago that was inspired by a volcano erupting and a desire to control the way people behaved.
Wednesday, 9 February 2011
Saturday, 5 February 2011
David Cameron's Speech: An Analysis
What he should have said:
"Hello, I'm David Cameron. You may recognise me from such posters as 'that one where I was vandalised to look like Elvis', or from such jobs as 'Prime Minister of Britain'.
There is a problem in my country, and that problem is multiculturalism.
Multiculturalism is a big pile of shit, at it's most basic level. I say this because it gives religious and cultural dogma a weight that it shouldn't and likely wouldn't otherwise have in a secular society. In empowering such nonsense it serves only to further emphasise the divisions between the various 'communities' in Britain, allowing people to place themselves apart from one another and exacerbate the problems such divisions can cause. It also stifles the ability of individuals to call into question things that they find questionable, since multiculturalism teaches us that any such questions are invariably motivated by racism, bigotry, ideological supremacism, nationalism, or some other icky form of -ism that we all are very offended by.
This was displayed quite egregiously in the recent controversy surrounding so-called "Asian" grooming. Britain, as a multicultural society, looked into it, and we saw nasty Pakistani Muslims grooming vulnerable young white girls for use as sex slaves. We heard various eminent persons telling us these crimes were motivated by an insidious strain of racial supremacism that was a pervasive part of Pakistani culture, culled from the wider beliefs of cultural Islam that white women in particular are somehow less than human and fit only to serve as whores for the faithful. We further learned that a culture of silence in not only the Pakistani community, but also within the media and indeed the authorities who were supposed to be protecting these girls, allowed this problem to fester unchecked for so long.
Some individuals from the communities under the spotlight contended that, while it was a very sad and despicable thing, and there may possibly be a few issues they needed to address as a community, the fact white people are discussing it is yet another sign that you're all Islamophobic racists and anyway white people fly out to Cambodia and Thailand to shag 11 year old Malay girls so you're just as bad and you should all shut up and stop persecuting us.
If instead we had looked at this with a dispassionate and reasoned eye, we would likely have drawn the conclusion that while it is feasible to suggest the race of the victims was a factor in their selection, the fact that the victims were not solely white, but rather dispropotionately so (which neither Jack Straw nor any of the organs who leapt upon the story bothered to note), simply reflected the ethnic demographics of the United Kingdom as a whole, and thus it is equally feasible that any racial or cultural element was incidental, that the crimes were motivated by a desire to sexually appropriate suggestible young females (as is the case when white men groom vulnerable young girls for sex), and more importantly the fact these girls are vulnerable to being groomed at all is a sign that we have failed them.
We would likely have looked at this failure, seen it's abhorrence, and worked to correct it from all angles. Not just by delving into the multifarious motivations that drive the disparate offenders who commit these crimes, but more importantly by ensuring these children are not succeptible to being groomed in the first place.
Instead we were all multicultural about it, and so after a short flurry of point-scoring and unpleasantness during which the point was completely missed we all just walked away from it when it became too heated and nasty. Allowing the wider issue to go unresolved, and the failure of the victims to continue.
In a wider context, the assumption of equality between cultures and opinions is in and of itself fallacious. I personally find the idea of non-rocket spacelaunch to be incredibly frightening because I once read a science fiction book that said mass drivers could theoretically cause the integrity of the entire physical universe to unravel. Likewise, the Catholic church maintains that hybrid embryo research is a crime against God despite there being no evidence that God himself, or any of his prophets, actually forbade pissing about with inert clusters of non-sentient cells, and takes every opportunity to expound this misbegotten nonsense whenever the issue arises.
Is it right that I be allowed to express my misgivings about mass drivers? Is it right that a Catholic priest can go onto a breakfast television program to espouse his belief that God will judge those who suck out the stuff from a microscopic collection of organic materials and then replace it with another similar yet different collection of organic materials?
It is indeed right!
Is it therefore right that our ignorance be allowed to influence the development of these technologies, the legislation that arises around them, or the wider perception of them by the public at large?
No. No it's fucking not. Just because we're stupid doesn't mean everyone else has to dignify our stupidity out of consideration for our feelings. If we feel victimised as a result then that is indeed unfortunate, however because we are not complete idiots it's likely we'll realise that the objections aren't about oppression, but are instead about empirical reason and secular equality.
Either that or we'll retreat up our own arses, claim victimisation and never speak to any of you nasty horrible people ever again because you hate us and are not nice.
At this point I am going to say 'Britain needs a stronger national identity', but because I am not a complete idiot (one was privately educated, don't you know) I know that is a crock of piss despite the fact the words are coming out of my mouth in defiance of all notions of honesty and decency.
I know, as well as you do, that the way to curb the segregation that is so damaging to human society as a whole is to simply refuse point-blank to even countenance the notion that there are differences between people, to treat each person as a person and not as a spoke in some great over-arching wheel, even if they themselves and everyone else in the world is utterly insistent that you do so; you don't do it by giving a different set of people some more stupid, nebulous and utterly irrelevant shit to clutch to their bosom and use as a stick with which to beat other people who aren't perceived to be clasping the same turd.
That way lies fascism. Not racism. Fascism.
I know, because I'm not a moron, that building a strong shared sense of national identity is one of the pillars upon which fascism - REAL fascism, not the baseball-cap wearing Jeremy Kyle "fascism" you see in Britain today - is steadied, and so to make such a suggestion as prime minister of a country as militarily powerful and wealthy as Britain would be utterly horrific in it's implications.
So I'm not going to do that. Instead, I'm going to sum up, because I was only supposed to be up here for three minutes.
If you need a codified system to tell you that treating other people as people and not as manifestations of some bullshit identity is a good thing, you're a fucking dick. Call it multiculturalism. Call it equalibertarianism. Give it a name that insinuates I'M a fucking dick if I refuse to accept it as valid. I don't care. If you need it, you're a fucking dick. If you in turn think that everyone should show deference to whatever stupid piece of moralising quasi-fascist revelatory bullshit you're waving about because you think, by virtue of it's alleged divinity, it deserves respect, you too are a fucking dick, and you can go and stand in the corner with the rest of the arseholes who want to be treated with more respect and deference than everyone else simply because they exist. In fact don't even do that; the lot of you can get on a bus and go and fuck right off.
Go on. Fuck off.
Now, to the rest of you, I say simply this; multiculturalism has failed. It is therefore time to put it in the bin alongside all the other stupid crap we have tried that hasn't worked, and move into an age where the differences people create for themselves are treated with the irreverence and contempt they deserve, that we might craft for ourselves and future generations a brighter, less divided, less... fucking stupid future. Thank you."
What he actually said:
"I need to justify more spending cuts in a way that appeals to big loud dumb people, so faith schools are bad, Islamic groups can't have any more money unless they prove they are actively fighting against terrorism, and Britain needs a stronger national identity because Muslims are evil."
"Hello, I'm David Cameron. You may recognise me from such posters as 'that one where I was vandalised to look like Elvis', or from such jobs as 'Prime Minister of Britain'.
There is a problem in my country, and that problem is multiculturalism.
Multiculturalism is a big pile of shit, at it's most basic level. I say this because it gives religious and cultural dogma a weight that it shouldn't and likely wouldn't otherwise have in a secular society. In empowering such nonsense it serves only to further emphasise the divisions between the various 'communities' in Britain, allowing people to place themselves apart from one another and exacerbate the problems such divisions can cause. It also stifles the ability of individuals to call into question things that they find questionable, since multiculturalism teaches us that any such questions are invariably motivated by racism, bigotry, ideological supremacism, nationalism, or some other icky form of -ism that we all are very offended by.
This was displayed quite egregiously in the recent controversy surrounding so-called "Asian" grooming. Britain, as a multicultural society, looked into it, and we saw nasty Pakistani Muslims grooming vulnerable young white girls for use as sex slaves. We heard various eminent persons telling us these crimes were motivated by an insidious strain of racial supremacism that was a pervasive part of Pakistani culture, culled from the wider beliefs of cultural Islam that white women in particular are somehow less than human and fit only to serve as whores for the faithful. We further learned that a culture of silence in not only the Pakistani community, but also within the media and indeed the authorities who were supposed to be protecting these girls, allowed this problem to fester unchecked for so long.
Some individuals from the communities under the spotlight contended that, while it was a very sad and despicable thing, and there may possibly be a few issues they needed to address as a community, the fact white people are discussing it is yet another sign that you're all Islamophobic racists and anyway white people fly out to Cambodia and Thailand to shag 11 year old Malay girls so you're just as bad and you should all shut up and stop persecuting us.
If instead we had looked at this with a dispassionate and reasoned eye, we would likely have drawn the conclusion that while it is feasible to suggest the race of the victims was a factor in their selection, the fact that the victims were not solely white, but rather dispropotionately so (which neither Jack Straw nor any of the organs who leapt upon the story bothered to note), simply reflected the ethnic demographics of the United Kingdom as a whole, and thus it is equally feasible that any racial or cultural element was incidental, that the crimes were motivated by a desire to sexually appropriate suggestible young females (as is the case when white men groom vulnerable young girls for sex), and more importantly the fact these girls are vulnerable to being groomed at all is a sign that we have failed them.
We would likely have looked at this failure, seen it's abhorrence, and worked to correct it from all angles. Not just by delving into the multifarious motivations that drive the disparate offenders who commit these crimes, but more importantly by ensuring these children are not succeptible to being groomed in the first place.
Instead we were all multicultural about it, and so after a short flurry of point-scoring and unpleasantness during which the point was completely missed we all just walked away from it when it became too heated and nasty. Allowing the wider issue to go unresolved, and the failure of the victims to continue.
In a wider context, the assumption of equality between cultures and opinions is in and of itself fallacious. I personally find the idea of non-rocket spacelaunch to be incredibly frightening because I once read a science fiction book that said mass drivers could theoretically cause the integrity of the entire physical universe to unravel. Likewise, the Catholic church maintains that hybrid embryo research is a crime against God despite there being no evidence that God himself, or any of his prophets, actually forbade pissing about with inert clusters of non-sentient cells, and takes every opportunity to expound this misbegotten nonsense whenever the issue arises.
Is it right that I be allowed to express my misgivings about mass drivers? Is it right that a Catholic priest can go onto a breakfast television program to espouse his belief that God will judge those who suck out the stuff from a microscopic collection of organic materials and then replace it with another similar yet different collection of organic materials?
It is indeed right!
Is it therefore right that our ignorance be allowed to influence the development of these technologies, the legislation that arises around them, or the wider perception of them by the public at large?
No. No it's fucking not. Just because we're stupid doesn't mean everyone else has to dignify our stupidity out of consideration for our feelings. If we feel victimised as a result then that is indeed unfortunate, however because we are not complete idiots it's likely we'll realise that the objections aren't about oppression, but are instead about empirical reason and secular equality.
Either that or we'll retreat up our own arses, claim victimisation and never speak to any of you nasty horrible people ever again because you hate us and are not nice.
At this point I am going to say 'Britain needs a stronger national identity', but because I am not a complete idiot (one was privately educated, don't you know) I know that is a crock of piss despite the fact the words are coming out of my mouth in defiance of all notions of honesty and decency.
I know, as well as you do, that the way to curb the segregation that is so damaging to human society as a whole is to simply refuse point-blank to even countenance the notion that there are differences between people, to treat each person as a person and not as a spoke in some great over-arching wheel, even if they themselves and everyone else in the world is utterly insistent that you do so; you don't do it by giving a different set of people some more stupid, nebulous and utterly irrelevant shit to clutch to their bosom and use as a stick with which to beat other people who aren't perceived to be clasping the same turd.
That way lies fascism. Not racism. Fascism.
I know, because I'm not a moron, that building a strong shared sense of national identity is one of the pillars upon which fascism - REAL fascism, not the baseball-cap wearing Jeremy Kyle "fascism" you see in Britain today - is steadied, and so to make such a suggestion as prime minister of a country as militarily powerful and wealthy as Britain would be utterly horrific in it's implications.
So I'm not going to do that. Instead, I'm going to sum up, because I was only supposed to be up here for three minutes.
If you need a codified system to tell you that treating other people as people and not as manifestations of some bullshit identity is a good thing, you're a fucking dick. Call it multiculturalism. Call it equalibertarianism. Give it a name that insinuates I'M a fucking dick if I refuse to accept it as valid. I don't care. If you need it, you're a fucking dick. If you in turn think that everyone should show deference to whatever stupid piece of moralising quasi-fascist revelatory bullshit you're waving about because you think, by virtue of it's alleged divinity, it deserves respect, you too are a fucking dick, and you can go and stand in the corner with the rest of the arseholes who want to be treated with more respect and deference than everyone else simply because they exist. In fact don't even do that; the lot of you can get on a bus and go and fuck right off.
Go on. Fuck off.
Now, to the rest of you, I say simply this; multiculturalism has failed. It is therefore time to put it in the bin alongside all the other stupid crap we have tried that hasn't worked, and move into an age where the differences people create for themselves are treated with the irreverence and contempt they deserve, that we might craft for ourselves and future generations a brighter, less divided, less... fucking stupid future. Thank you."
What he actually said:
"I need to justify more spending cuts in a way that appeals to big loud dumb people, so faith schools are bad, Islamic groups can't have any more money unless they prove they are actively fighting against terrorism, and Britain needs a stronger national identity because Muslims are evil."
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