Archive for the ‘Religion & Politics’ Category

The recent global recession has been a real boom time for me. I’ve switched jobs several times and now gone self employed. When I was lead developer over at Buzz we couldn’t hire people fast enough, and even when we could, the often ended up going elsewhere as other companies desperately tried to attract them with ever spiraling pay increases. Kick backs for referrals started reaching four figures.

Never the less, I heard a lot in the media, and from other people, about how hard it was to get a job and about the record levels of unemployment. The news is full of headlines about how bad things are.

I put it down to the industry I was in. We must be an island, resilient to the global economic downturn, ever-expanding while the rest of the world was reseeding. Sure it was easy to get a job if you worked in software development, but everyone else must be struggling.

Then, in April, Elina moved over to the UK. She had just graduated and had no real work experience. But together we wrote her a CV, put together a “job hunting action plan” and did some interview practice. Within two weeks she had a series of interviews lined up and was offered two of the first three she went to.

In fact, they wanted to start her so quickly that she had already done two days work for one company before receiving a better offer and leaving to go another one.

This once again made me question as to whether there really were no jobs available out there. We certainly didn’t find a lack of them when looking for Elina – just trawling through Gumtree threw up dozens of local vacancies each day.

Having spent three years working at McDonald’s, I have quite a few friends still working in McManagement. Conversations with them tell a similar story to the IT industry – they’ve been pretty much continually recruiting throughout the entire recession.

Last weekend, I also spoke to my auntie who works for a charity shop. While she took the job part-time to give her something to do in her retirement, she is currently working full time because they can’t fill the two paid vacancies they have at the moment.

So if the industry I work in has plenty of jobs, the industry my friends work in has plenty of jobs, the industry my relatives work in has plenty of jobs and Elina can get a job without any real work experience in only a matter of weeks, how then can you make the case that there are no jobs available?

The answer is, I’m not sure you can. The last resort of an answer I could pull up was perhaps due to age barriers as most of my friends are young – but as I’ve already said, my auntie has retired once!

That then opens the question up as to why there is so much unemployment.

Two answers spring to mind.

First off, people just won’t take the jobs available. It’s almost certainly no coincidence that the biggest constant in recruitment are companies like McDonald’s – nobody wants to work there. Many people consider themselves too good to work there. You can argue that it is demeaning for people with a degree to go work in fast food, but I think that is a real insult to people like myself and Norman who did go work there – and we’ll both tell you that we learnt loads!

Not to mention the fact that a bachelor’s degree is far from anything special anymore. But more to the point, it’s totally reasonable for employers to want to hire well rounded people, who have some knowledge of the real world outside of academic the academic environment.

Secondly, I think there is a failure of our education system to prepare people to job hunt. When I finished school, I will put my hand up and admit that I didn’t know how to job hunt. We had gone over writing a CV at school but that is about where it ends.

Job hunting is a lot of work! Loads! I actually much prefer being in a job (although being self-employed is even better) than looking for one because it’s LESS work. When you’re job hunting you need to be putting in a full 40 hour week, you need to be up first thing in a morning, looking presentable to go round speaking to people. When I’m working I can role out of bed any time up until 10am (I like to be in the office by 7:30, but the point is I could go in at 10), and turn up in “whatever you wake up in” – that’s a quote from one of my manager’s.

But I didn’t realise how much effort was required. Nobody at school ever said to me, “it should be a 40 hour week and you need to make sure you have an action plan and a spreadsheet of who you have contacted and when you’re chasing them up.” School should be teaching that because otherwise, it is no wonder that people are unable to find themselves one of the many jobs that are out there.

I wasn’t going to write about this, but so many people have now mentioned it to me that I’ve decided it is worth while commenting after all…

It’s now been six months since Lloyds TSB started the processing of correcting the account they had incorrectly set up and then started billing our charity for. They’re still working on it. After all this time, you really have to wonder if they ever will get it done.

This is a bank of truly incompetent scale – no wonder they had to sell 77% of it to the government as part of a £37,000,000,000 bailout from public funds to the major banks. That’s about £800 each btw.

So what did such a bank do with all it’s ill-gotten gains from hard-working taxpayers?

They spent £40,000,000 sponsoring London 2012. As if the tax payer hadn’t paid enough for the Olympics already, Lloyds TSB are now taking our emergency bailout money and spending it on making itself a sponsor of London 2012!

Not only that, but this is only the money paid for the sponsorship deal – and one imagines that the expenses of having a party bus follow the Olympic torch around and anything else rack up to quite a bit. In fact, they’ve even made a website about everything their blowing money on this summer.

It’s absolutely unbelievable.

Hosting the Olympics has been a harsh affair. We’ve had to temporarily (hopefully!) transformed into a semi-totalitarian state.

But on the flip side, we get to go to the Olympics. Or do we?

The Olympic Stadium holds 80,000 people. So even if you allocate a rather large amount of 800 tickets to sponsors and other interests in the private sector, that still means we can sell 99% of tickets to the generic public. But apparently not. Only 75% of the tickets have gone on sale to the general public. When it comes to the high profile events, that already rather low number of 75% drops to 35%!

But, of course, you have to give some to the private sector. They’re paying for the games after all. Otherwise, the tax payer would have to foot the bill. But, as it turns out, and we all knew already, we are footing the bill.

According to the Guardian, sponsors have contributed £1 billion of funding. They’ve made the data available for free too. The Guardian is actually being generous here – a report by Parliament puts the figure even lower.

Meanwhile, the total cost was reported to the House of Parliament as being around £12 billion. Jules Boykoff points out this isn’t entirely accurate though and, indeed, according to Sky Sports, the figure is actually around the £24 billion mark.

So do the maths on that one. We’re footing 92% to 96% of the cost, yet we’re getting 35% – 75% of the tickets.

Earlier today, I wrote about best before dates, suggesting that one way to reduce food waste would be to ban them. It ended on a “why not?” question. But there is a reason why, which would have totally changed the tone of the blog post, so I’ve put it in a separate one.

The reason is, people actually like living in a nanny state when it comes to these things. I like the fact that it tells me on the packaging when I should throw something away and the reality is that it will probably be reasonably close to the actual time it will be past its best, so what is the harm?

Of course, you can argue that reducing food waste would be beneficial, but as Rob Lyons points out, reducing our own food waste doesn’t help feed the third world – people aren’t starving in Africa because we’re eating all their food. It’s economics that drives food production and if we weren’t buying their food, they simple wouldn’t grow it.

In fact, you can go even further to say that because we buy more food than we need and simply bin a lot of it, it actually increases the amount we buy from the third world and thereby helps to support their economy by essentially subsidising unrequired food production.

In recent years, there has been a lot made of food waste, and some of this has been attributed to supermarkets putting very conservative “best before” dates on products that result in people throwing perfectly editable food away.

This might be down to a combination of supermarkets protecting themselves from lawsuits if anyone gets food poisoning, and encouraging people to throw food away early so they will buy more. But I don’t know, maybe they have some other reason. Maybe they genuinely believe their best before dates are appropriate. In any case, it’s not important to this post.

As a solution, why don’t we just ban supermarkets putting best before dates on things?

Surely that would solve the problem, forcing people to use their own common sense. You could argue that relying on common sense is an issue, but any common sense people are lacking is almost certainly down to the nanny state situation of having too many best before dates to rely on in the first place. But even if you consider that a problem, which I don’t think it is, it’s pretty easy to work out when bread is past its best.

I often find that, on some occasions, the law works very well as a blunt instrument. Remember when they banned smoking in pubs, and lots of people said there should be lots of complicated rules and exceptions, but instead they just banned everything, and now everyone is much happier because it worked really well? To be clear, I’m not being sarcastic there, that is actually what happened. Clamping is another good example.

Just tell producers they’re not allowed, people use their common sense and food stops getting wasted. Problem solved.

Another month goes by, and, as usual, another senseless gun-related massacre occurs in the United States. Around 50 people in total were shot, 12 of them are already dead.

I was going to say “with another 12 people dead” but this would simply be nieve. Based on the statistical average, somewhere in the region of 33 people were gunned down across the United States today anyway. And yesterday. And there will be another 33 victims tomorrow.

Surely it is time to adopt a more progressive attitude towards guns? To be clear, by progressive attitude, I mean get rid of them all.

The sadistic irony of this video increases with every victim.

In the final of three blog posts I’ve written about the fall out from the recent Steve Moxon event, I wanted to comment on an interesting debate point raised on the Leeds Skeptics Facebook group, where someone claimed that some things we should just accept as true.

There are some things that should be a given in any skeptical society

I’m not making this up. Someone in a Skeptics group genuinely just said that there are some things we should just not question.

Of course, the equality of our fellow human beings is something incredibly important and something that when challenged, we would defend rigorously. But to suggest we should just same some things on faith is a violation of the very definition of skepticism. But more to the point, such an attitude undermines our own argument. Our position is that all our members are equal and we take this position because we’ve reviewed the evidence, and that is the case. To rule out a debate on it entirely is simply unskeptical.

Let us not forget that we have equality today because someone WAS skeptical about the prevailing idea that black people were inferior to white people, or that women didn’t deserve the rights as men did. Thank the god that I do not believe in, that someone had the courage to challenge these ideas that were just held as true at the time, so that today we can have equality.

After all, if we’re in the right, we shouldn’t be afraid to challenge our own ideas. As I’ve written before, I entertain the idea of cheating on my girlfriend. Why? Because I know I will never do it. I’m secure enough in my relationship, and I know I love her so much, that I can safely consider the possibility without worrying. I know this, because I’ve challenged my own beliefs, and because they still hold true, that only makes them stronger. As Norman summarises…

Not sure how anything can be a ‘given’ in a skeptical society? Surely the point of a skeptical society is that all view points are subjected to a rigorous process of critical analysis, regardless of whether it agrees with our world view or not.

One could argue that it is the very ‘givens’ of our own world views that require even more in depth challenging.

Challenging your beliefs only makes them stronger (or they turn out to be wrong – but I’m as certain as you can be that this won’t turn out to be the case for equality). But perhaps I underestimate how secure people actually are in their beliefs. I mean, are attendees worried that others are going to be won over by bigoted arguments?

Secondly go to the event, witness said MRA speech, and more than likely become angry at the shit he’s spouting. If you decide to argue with him you’d better have the support of the room otherwise you will get shouted down and feel even worse. At the very least you will be sat in your seat seething, possibly feeling upset or unsafe depending on how many other members are agreeing with the speaker.

I’m sure this wasn’t mean this to be in any way offensive, but she did just imply that that everyone else who attends Leeds Skeptics are at best are sexiest bigots who would shout her down if she tried to call someone on sexist nonsense he was spouting, and at worse a bunch of rapists would threaten her safety. Talk about promoting bad gender stereotypes. But it goes on…

What good would come out of it [the event], to balance against the aggressive sexism and racism that we’d almost certainly have to sit through and which would be at best uncomfortable for people who aren’t white males?

Is she seriously suggesting that white males don’t find racism, sexism or any bigotry offensive? It’s incredibly insulting, and sexist (and racist for that matter), but more than that, I think it shows that there is a real need for careful consideration of what we all hold to be true and bring open to the principle of challenging our own ideas.

As I’ve already said, challenging well founded beliefs only makes them stronger.

In my previous blog post, I wrote about our decision to cancel Steve Moxon’s scheduled talk at Leeds Skeptics. In this blog post, I wanted to explore the wider issues of controversial speakers, and balancing freedom of speech and proper public debate with being an inclusive and welcoming organisation.

In the discussions, someone asked if I would want to attend an event where someone had views that I found offensive. The answer is without a doubt yes. I totally would – and I did – I spent my university years while running Leeds Atheist Society, going to talks run by religious societies where speakers said some very offensive and controversial things.

I wanted to learn about their points of view. To me, they seemed like obviously wrong and bigoted. But how could I say that for sure unless I had heard them out? And if it turned out their views were as shallow as it seemed, I wanted to challenge them on it. To be honest, it never really occurred to me that other skeptics wouldn’t feel the same way.

When I asked my girlfriend about it, she said the same thing. She would have liked Steve to speak, so she could hear him out and challenge the opinions she disagreed with. As Mike points out, how else are we supposed to challenge prejudice?

The only way SITP can come out on top is if the members take him to task; it’s recorded and publicised in order to counteracts any publicity claims he makes himself. It needs to be clear that this is an exercise in critical analysis and the application of skepticism and not a sounding-off platform. That includes the common decency of informing the speaker himself to give himself a chance to pull out should he so wish.

I often try to bring controversial speakers to the group as a springboard for debate, because I have always felt that Skeptics group suffer severely from preaching to the converted. We bring in someone who rubbishes UFOs for a living, and we sit there with our pints and go “ha, ha, ha, there’s no such as UFOs, what idiots for believing in them, isn’t that funny.” Of course, it’s a good laugh for us all, but it is neither thought provoking nor challenging. As Adrian summarises…

At present we have a network of groups like SitP that invite scientists and atheists to speak to other scientists and atheists, and a network of groups like Truth Juice that invite woo-woo merchants to speak to woo-woo sponges. Thus speakers of all types are largely preaching to the converted and very little of any value is actually taking place.

For someone like Moxon to speak to skeptics groups is good for Moxon, since he gets to see that not everyone shares his point of view, and has to listen to people debunking his irrationality, and good for the audience since they learn first-hand what kind of woo-woo there really is out there in British society (and how it is rationalised) and they can practise arguing against it.

Trystan feels the same way…

You mention that there is a difference between a controversial speaker and one who attempts to pass of poorly reasoned views as science, but SitP is a fantastic venue to highlight – specifically during Q and A – what is wrong with the argument being made on scientific grounds. It is a fantastic opportunity to demonstrate skepticism at work.

If certain people at Leeds Skeptics are unhappy that the talk was booked then (a) it doesn’t mean anything and (b) I’m wondering why. I can guess. Most, if not all, SitPs I’ve encountered seem to have an element who feel each event is about having an on side preacher come and speak to the choir, doing all of the skepticism for them. I recall upsetting a gentleman in Oxford because my views on private ownership of land was at odds with his own. It rocked the boat, made him think. Why not seize the opportunity to perform some self-think rather than following group-think?

If anything, the academic-cum-philosophical-cum-skeptical platform should be opened up more for people with views that are groundless and have the potential for harm. Oxford Debating Society did a wonderful job by opening up their doors for Icke to bury himself under a deluge of his own nonsense.

Indeed, while the majority of organisers from local Skeptics groups haven’t commented either way, most of them who have seem to have similar feelings.

I have always thought that the point of a Skeptics event should be to make you think. We’re supposed to be non-dogmatic; and a group of individuals who can think for themselves and challenge ideas. If you don’t agree, that’s fine, it just means you’re not a skeptic by the very definition of the word and are unlikely to find much benefit attending skeptics events.

After all, if we’ve not providing thought provoking and challenging events, what exactly are we doing? Preaching a monthly sermon to you about something you are supposed to accept without question? That isn’t the movement I signed up.

Rather, Skeptics meetings should be a bastion for critical thinking, a place where we aren’t afraid to let bad ideas be proposed every once in a while because we have enough trust in our own critical faculties to be able to tell the difference between a good argument and a bad one. Such events are an ideal time to confront prejudice and show good skepticism in action.

This is the first of three blog posts I have coming out regarding the debate points that have been raised recently around inviting controversial speakers to Skeptics events. In my first post, I want to discuss the situation at hand in a little more depth.

At the start of the year, we booked Steve Moxon to speak at Leeds Skeptics, on the topic of “why aren’t there more women in the boardroom?” On Monday, 9 June, we announced that we were cancelling the event.

The decision was reached after we had received a significant amount of concerned messages from people who attend our events, as well as new information being brought to our attention and after review, we eventually concluded that it would not create a positive debate as we had hoped. Here is what the Leeds Skeptics officially said:

After careful consideration, we have decided to cancel Steve Moxon’s upcoming talk. As a Skeptics group we strive to host events that are both interesting and challenging, however, based on feedback from those who attend our events, and new information being brought to our attention, we now believe that it is unlikely that the event would create a healthy and positive debate on the matter.

It was a very tough decision to reach though. On one side, we don’t want people who turn up to our events to be offended, at the same time, we do want to host events on thought provoking subjects and not be limited on topics by those that are on the approved skeptics list.

In the end, the question of censorship was a moot point – even if we did cancel the event, it wasn’t a case that we were censoring anyone – it’s our forum, we can invite who we like, and we ultimately called off the event because Steve would not have been well received, nor would it have created a proper debate on the subject. The subject itself remains as a topic worthy of debate.
After this had all taken place, someone asked if Leeds Skeptics was in the habit of giving radical speakers a platform – the implication being that we didn’t, so we shouldn’t give Steve one.

So, Leeds Skeptics, do you regularly hold events where creationists are given an uninterrupted platform? Do you regularly invite anti-vaxxers to speak at Skeptics in the Pub and blurb their work in the same tone? Isn’t the appropriate form to engage with someone whose views are controversial and that you want to see ripped to shreds a debate, not a lecture?

However, the answer to this question is yes. We have previously invited speakers from the Zeitgeist Movement and We Are Change. They’re both good examples of when we have invited controversial speakers, with views at odds with those of most Skeptics, backed up with some very questionable science. Naturally, they were both taken to task in the Q&A.

That said, they are tame compared to the kind of events that Leeds Atheist Society puts on. They regularly give an uninterrupted platform to members of the religious community, who often have strong and open views against women and homosexuals. I remember one of the Reason Week debates was opened by the Islamic speaker making the following joke.

50 years ago homosexuality was a crime, today it’s accepted, in 50 years time it will probably be compulsory.

He got booed for it. So he should, it’s rare that you hear something that offensive said in public. But there was no question as to whether we should be challenging this kind of bigotry – of course we should be. That was in the context of debate, but through the interfaith talks, it’s more normal for a religious speaker at LAS to get an uninterrupted platform where they can say what they like without rebuttal. I’ve never heard of anything avoiding such events because of the controversial things the religious speaker had to say – we’re there to learn, and to challenge prejudice.

At no point throughout any of these events could it ever have been implied that they were legitimising such speakers, associating themselves with such with such groups or providing a platform for such detestable views. As Skeptics, we’re here to challenge ideas – that is the definition of skepticism.

I have more to say on such speakers, and will discuss that in my next blog post, but I hope the above helps to elucidate the thought process we went through.

In a recent interview with the Australian radio show Salt & Pepper, Major Andrew Craibe explained that homosexuals deserve death.

Of course, the Salvation Army has always been a strange organisation. For a start, they call themselves an army. They don’t have members, they have soldiers. Their organisational hierarchy is based around military ranks, hence the title Major. Now, armies normally go around killing people. So, maybe Craibe’s comments make sense after all.

Of course, these days you would expect an organisation, particularly a religious one (because they’re almost always bigoted and therefore always have something to hide) to be a bit more media savvy when it comes to hiding their abominable beliefs and outrage prejudice. Apparently, they aren’t.

But in terms of holding such unbelievable views, we shouldn’t be surprised. It isn’t just homosexuals they are targeting here, it’s part of the wider attempt by religion to take control of our sex lives.

This has always been an important part of organised religion. I wrote about this extensively recently (though I can’t remember where- so there is a new post about in coming in a few weeks), one of the best ways to control people is to make them feel guilty about perfectly natural feelings and urges – hence the church tells you that having sex with someone outside of marriage is a sin, and in fact just thinking about it is as bad as doing it, and once you’ve sinned there is only one place in town selling redemption – the Church. It’s a vital part of their stranglehold on their congregation.

So when it comes to homosexuality, of course, they’re telling us who we can and can’t go to bed with, and trying to make us feel guilty for perfectly natural feelings – the sad fact is, they’ve been doing this all along.