Quote of the day

A Hoffman win would have been the much needed shot into the bows of the GOP establishment.

Perry de Havilland

What do the mosques make of Hallow’een?

Last night in West Hampstead a notable minority of the children “trick or treating” were Asians. The older ones (some of whom I recognised as being related to some of the local Islamic families) were running around on their own, without parental supervision and generally getting into the spirit of things.

I’m not convinced that revelling in Satanic regalia (most of them held plastic tridents and wore demonic make up) to celebrate a pagan festival is quite the sort of assimilation that moderate Islamic scholars have in mind.

And I’m pretty sure their more religiously observant parents would not have been amused.

Ironically, the reason Hallow’een took off in France (despite its supposedly American roots [French people only heard of it via the movies]) was that the day after Hallow’een is All Hallows Day, a Catholic holiday. This means that everyone has the day off so a drunken pagan bacchanalia the night before is not tempered by the need to go to work the next day. A perfect instance of unintended consequences, one might imagine.

Thoughts on Twitter and Facebook

I’ve done a podcast with Brian Micklethwait about Facebook and Twitter for people who may not have worked them out yet (I know…).

Two thoughts I didn’t develop fully in the talk [link]:

1) Twitter is where the news is at and is the vehicle for creating newsworthy events. Two examples, the plane crashlanding in New York harbour and the Iranian protests over the recent election.

2) I don’t understand *how* these people used Facebook to link up. It doesn’t strike me that random paedophiles would set up a contact group on Facebook (What would it be called? How would members know who was a police informant and who wasn’t? Surely such a group would get spotted rather quickly I hope and its members investigated promptly?). I’m assuming that some other network is where such people first communicate and they then use the strong privacy settings on Facebook to exchange communications.

My point is that I can imagine how criminals might use Facebook to plan and coordinate criminal activities, but not how they would make initial contact. This matters because if I advise a parent that Facebook is broadly safe (and the whole point about the networks of friends and status updates is that a trail exists of where they are and what they’re doing, with whom), then it would be good to know what the real threats are and to expose them.

However, this was a tangent from the discussion so it was right of Brian to get us back on track with how ideas and news are spread through social media.

Comparisons are odious

The dangers of social media #432: nowhere to hide from being compared with the rest of humanity.

My latest “Compare people” scorecard on Facebook would be really depressing, if I hadn’t had a generally productive week:

#12 best companion on a desert island (lost 1 place)
#29 bravest (lost 2 places)
#41 cutest (lost 1 place)
#43 hottest (lost 1 place)
#43 person with the prettiest eyes (lost 2 places)

At least it’s consistent, not like here.

Creationist victory on Facebook?

UPDATE: WordPress has been crashing on Firefox for some time, with not just mine but lots of other WordPress blogs too.

So far, no one at WordPress seems to care enough about this to let me know why it happens or how to fix it. The result is that the post below crashed in the middle of posting, so it didn’t appear two weeks ago as planned. I apologise for this.

For what it’s worth, ONLY WordPress blogs seem to crash, and they do so less frequently on Safari or Internet Explorer than Firefox.

I’ve just voted in a poll on Facebook as to whether I believe in evolution or creation because I was curious to see the results.

With just over 40,000 votes in (a lot more than any market research company is likely to commission) the results were 39.5% in favour of evolution and 60.5% for creation.

Facebook did not previously strike me as the sort of forum where relious zealots were dominant. So either there is a silent majority that rejects Darwin (I’m guessing this is a reaction against school), or the poll is unrepresentative.

Either way it reminds of this comment I left on Brian Micklethwait’s blog:

I caught snippets of a two-part documentary on twins which made the interesting claim that a belief in God is likely to be genetic (identical twins were a lot more likely to agree the existence/non-existence of God than non-identical twins).

If true, this again raises one of my favourite paradoxes, whether Darwinism as a belief system is viable on strictly biological reproductive grounds. I suspect it isn’t.

If it is true that people carrying the God gene are more likely to reproduce (partly because they believe they’ve been told to by God “Go forth and multiply!”), then it stands to reason that over time the number of people carrying the God gene is likely to expand relative to the non-God gene carrying population.

This could curiously result in a paradigm shift where a Darwinian process (evolution) generates a Creationist hegemony.
Posted by Antoine Clarke on 07 October 2009

As for my own opinion, I can find good reasons to doubt both points of views. What is particularly striking at present, is the stridency of some calls to accept as orthodoxy the Darwinian position and the intolerance of any questioning one might make of it.

I don’t think the fossil evidence is sufficient to demonstrate whether evolution is a gradual or an abrupt process. I cannot see how it is possible to logically demonstrate that the Big Bang (if that theory isn’t shown to be wrong, or incomplete by further research) wasn’t something like a switch being thrown. At the very least, there might be a genetic basis for people to be theists or deists. All of which make me ask: why?

What I am certain of, is that evolution, as a scientific theory, is on the way out for practical purpposes. In 50 years I expect fewer people to believe in it than do today. One reason for this is that the creationists reproduce. Another is that some of them have learned to argue from scientific principles. Leading advocates of Darwinism, on the other, have reverted to name-calling and hectoring. Which, if they don’t procreate, suggests they’re not going to win friends and influence people either.

Quote of the day

I suppose if one can bury bad news, one can also, conversely, unearth amazing news. Truly, this middanġeard is full of marvels, even now.

Fugitive Ink

The only person I know who would include middanġeard and charmingly forget to include the translation in a blog post.

BBC smoking crack

Someone at the BBC has overdone the magic mushrooms or taken a puff on a crack pipe if this report of the German elections is anything to go by.

Also possible, though less likely, is the Christian Democrats teaming up with both the Free Democrats and the Green Party – creating a so-called Jamaica coalition of black, yellow and green.

And what about the reds – the Social Democrats? Well, their candidate, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the current foreign minister, is dreaming of a red-green government, in a tie-up with the Green Party. That is the combination that led Germany under Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder between 1998 and 2005. But opinion polls suggest that neither red nor green will get enough support to make that possible this time.

They could try to persuade the Free Democrats to join them, in a red-yellow-green government, a so-called traffic-light coalition.

I take it the drugs wore off a little, because we then get a disclaimer:

But the Free Democrats claim they are not interested.

Speaking of traffic lights, I hope whoever came up with this entertaining fiction didn’t drive home without having a lie down followed by several cups of coffee.

Tough sanctions threatened against Iran

Violet Elizabeth Bott, the UN Secretary General, announced a terrible sanction regime against Iran over its covert nuclear weapons programme:

“I’ll thcream and thcream ’till I’m thick.”

The wisdom of crowds. Ouch!

It’s just as well I retain something of a sense of humour, even if it seems to go unrecognised…

Changes in your ranks:

#14 most attractive (lost 1 place)
#14 nicest smelling (lost 1 place)
#19 person with the best sense of humor (lost 1 place)
#20 best catch (lost 1 place)
#20 most enviable (lost 1 place)

From the Compare People application on Facebook. I’m hoping this is some jealous guy.

“In the long run we’re all dead”

It seems that book burning is necessary for the public good.

First there was the embarrassment caused by the Italian translator to Karl Marx’s Das Kapital Volume III (a certain Benito Mussolini, who was NEVER a Socialist, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER…). Clearly the forgeries must be destroyed.

Now it transpires that the very name of the General Theory of Money and Credit (which inspire the policy adopted by the present governments of the U.K. and the U.S.A.) was inspired by National Socialism.

This is a translation of part of John Maynard Keynes’ introduction to the 1936 German edition of his book:

The theory of aggregate production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state than the theory of production and distribution of a given production put forth under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire. This is one of the reasons that justifies the fact that I call my theory a general theory.

Obviously, this should be checked for accuracy.

But I ask myself why none of the authorized biographies of Keynes mention the publication of this book nearly FOUR YEARS into the Third Reich?

I conclude that the deliberately evil claim that the long-term harmful consequences of Keynesian economics don’t matter because “in the long run, we’re all dead,” is no fluke.

Keynes was wrong about inflation and credit, both practically and ethically. I hope he was wrong about Hell too.

I enclose the original German text for interest.