Archive for the ‘Religion & Politics’ Category

Earlier this year, Leeds got it’s own Speakers’ Corner. Thanks to Elina is now has it’s own website too. If you want to keep up with all the latest updates by subscribing to the mailing list, see the Speakers’ Corner Leeds website. It’s one of the few groups I’m not running lol.

Following the popularity of his poem on his blog, Jonni committed it to video last weekend. Here it is…

The warm weather has got me thinking about hose pipe bans. I’m not sure whether they are instigated by the water companies themselves, or by a statutory instrument of government, but either way, it is at the hand of the water companies themselves, complaining about the lack of water. Sometimes this can be attributed to exceptionally dry weather, but often it can just be the case of the private sector cutting water reserves in an attempt to extract more profit.

Therefore, in my opinion, if a water company fails in this way, they should be fined. And fined heavily, because water is quite important.

But extending this, we could regularly fine them, and restrict the profits, for the greater good. Utility companies, and indeed many other natural monopolies that were previously nationalised and have since been sold off, often report large profits. This is just more money passing to the rich, from the poor. Which is bad.

However, we privatised them anyway, because we’re told that private companies run more efficiently.

But why do we let them make such high profits?

Consider if we bled them dry. We hardly let them make any profit because of the price caps and fines we imposed on them. Would this make them less efficient? I suspect not. I think, if anything, they would be forced to run themselves more efficiently in their desperate bid for survival. It would encourage the very efficiently we originally privatised them to bring.

The consequence however was that private investors were less likely to invest in infrastructure. But how much money actually ends up being invested in infrastructure now? Clearly a lot less than could be given the profit given out to the shareholders.

More importantly, if you have just skimmed most of the profit from a private company and taken anything they have left back in fines, you suddenly have a lot of spare money. Money that can then be used by the government to subsidise investment in infrastructure.

Straight Pride UK promotes the idea of having a straight pride, alongside a gay pride. Fine, no problem with that. Not sure I see the point, as situations where I feel discriminated against as a heterosexual are reasonably infrequent, but each to their own.

In fact, their wording starts off quite nicely.

There is nothing right with being homosexual, there is nothing right with being bisexual, and there is nothing wrong with being heterosexual

But then it says this.

being proud to be of natural orientation

To me, that implies that being homosexual is not a natural orientation. Which is where I start to take issue with it. Any sexual orientation you are born with is a natural orientation.

And if it is natural, why should we be proud of it? Sure, it’s great being straight. The majority of people in our society are straight and this being straight gives me a large selection of potential partners (ideally I would be bisexual but you can’t choose how you’re born), but surely something I have no control over, and was given randomly at birth is not something I should be proud of?

Their Twitter strap line is worse.

A voice for those practising traditional lifestyles & relationships. Those who want to celebrate being of natural born orientation & traditional family values.

To call the homophobia experienced in the twentieth century traditional relationships does a rather large disservice to extensive periods of history. And what are these traditional family values they speak of? Presumably a time before martial rape was criminalised because I can’t think what else is different between a loving couple marrying and adopting today to one of fifty years ago.

Then, as you reach their aims page, you begin to suspect the entire thing might be a troll.

Heterosexuals do not have equality, homosexuals have more rights then any sector of society. They have the right to take over city streets, dress ridiculously, and parade with danger and contempt, invade hotels and B&B’s run and owned by people who object to homosexuality, and then sue them when refusal is given.

Surely it must be, because no intelligent person could believe this, could they?

As Richard Littlejohn would say, you couldn’t make it up. Credit.

A bill is currently making its way through the various structures, to pardon Alan Turing.

What a load of nonsense.

Alan Turing was guilty of homosexual activity. He was. Of course nobody for even a moment would pretend that is something that should be a criminalise offense! But to pardon one person is essentially saying “you did wrong, but you did a lot of good so we’re going to let you off”.

Is this the message we want to put forward? If so, I think it’s time we pardoned Julian Assange for those rapes he may or may not have committed. Clearly, we’re not going to be doing this.

What we we should instead by saying is “this law was nonsense, and anyone convicted of it is now exonerated of any wrong doing, regardless of how many German codes you broke”.

Don’t pardon Turing – pardon everyone. They never did anything wrong.

Last Saturday there was supposed to be a Leeds Speakers’ Corner.

However, a couple of days before, the council pulled the plug on the event because they said the area was in use for Sky Ride, a large cycling event. Or so I was told anyway. So just to clarify, freedom of speech in Leeds is cancelled, in case it interrupts Rupert Murdoch’s bike ride.

What I think is more concerning however, is that the organisers of LSC, decided to accept this and call the event off. Not turn around and say in a polite voice “do fuck off, we have freedom of speech in this country and if we want to turn up to a public space and speak our mind, we will do”, but say OK, that’s fine, we’ll just stay at home and keep our traps shut then.

Perhaps we can stay in and watch some serious analysis on Sky News instead.

Last Sunday the UK celebrated the first Brit to win Wimbledon in 77 years.

Except it wasn’t. It was 77 years since Fred Perry won the men’s singles title, but the last winner of a women’s singles title was Virginia Wade, a mere 36 years ago in 1977. The Guardian sums up the newspaper headlines:

Times: “Murray ends 77-year wait for British win.”
Telegraph: “After 77 years, the wait is over.”
Daily Mail: “Andy Murray ends 77 years of waiting for a British champion.”

You can argue that it was implied that they were taling about the men’s singles title, but that is as much the point – we forget about our female players because the men’s game is considered more important than the female one.

Many people have taken this is a commentary on how we should reflect on our attitudes about women and care more about the women’s game. But this is a universal problem – nobody cares about women’s football. Or women’s golf. Or women’s rugby. Or indeed almost any sport! The men’s game is almost always considered more important.

The simple solution, therefore, is to stop segregating sportspeople by gender.

Do away with men’s and women’s tennis, and just have tennis, where everyone is allowed to complete on the same terms. No more would a female winner of Wimbledon be related to merely being the “women’s title winner”; she would be crowned the greatest tennis player of them all!

I first wrote about this in 2011 while nobody was watching the women’s world cup final that was being shown on BBC3, instead of BBC and ITV simultaneously as the men’s game is. Japan won, by the way.

Combining the competitions into one would stop the second class treatment of women’s sports and allow them to achieve to the highest heights, rather than being restricted by a very opaque non-metaphorical ceiling.

You can argue that women would not be able to compete with men at the same level, but this is, I’m sorry to say, the very definition of prejudice. You have to treat people as individuals and give them the same opportunities are everyone else. Saying “women are often weaker than men, so we’re going to prevent all women from competing” makes no sense in civilised society. Try telling Venus Williams she is too week and feeble to play against you – she’s 70mm taller than I am!

If you should still insist that it would be unfair on women who never get a chance to win, consider that most people don’t. I’m never going to win a Wimbledon tennis title; I an entitled to special circumstances that allow me to win despite not being the best also?

Switching to a characteristic other than gender quickly makes you realise how silly the split gender argument is. Imagine if we decided to split long distance runners based on their skin colour. Have a black marathon and a white marathon. How ridiculous! But when it comes to gender, we find it perfectly acceptable, almost certainly because that is what we have grown up with.

In the modern day, as we strive towards an equal, fair and just meritocracy, everyone should be allowed to compete in the same competition – regardless of skin colour, sexual orientation, or gender.

I’ve done the political compass loads of times over the years, but I thought it would be interesting to see how my views change over time, so I’m going to post my result here for reference.

For comparison, here is a bunch of political leaders mapped out too. Click to enlarge.

Today is Armed Forces Day. A event that I am sure we will all agree to be a very important one.

After all, it’s easy to overlook the armed forces. Too often we think about heros who save likes, likes doctors and firefighters, and forget about those people who do just the opposite – take lives away. In exchange for money.

It’s not easy to shoot in Iraqi civilian in the face. That’s not a joke – it’s genuinely very difficult. And even if you manage it, you then have to live with the fact that you’re a murder for the rest of your life. Even if you leave the military in good physical health, veterans often suffer from post traumatic stress disorder.

So let us take the time to remember those who accept our tax money in exchange for killing other people. The sad reality is that they too are a victim of the military venerating brainwashed society we live in.