Chris Worfolk's Blog

I attended Leeds Atheist Society last week. At the event, they were screening the Intelligence Squared debate, “Islam is a religion of Peace”, which is available to stream online if you haven’t seen it.

Overall, though, I’m not sure I would bother. The arguments weren’t put particularly well on either side, although perhaps slightly better for the side against, which swung the audience from being slightly for the motion, to significantly against. I get the feeling that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, as great as she is, is primarily on there because she is an ex-Muslim who isn’t afraid to speak out, rather than the cogency of her arguments. Douglas Murray was a better speaker for against, but didn’t say too much. Despite the victory, I cannot help but feeling that if the late Christopher Hitchens had been with us, he could have delivered a simple unbeatable defence.

What was far more interesting was the discussion afterwards, in which I thought the arguments put forward were far stronger than those featured on the debate. I find arguments such as The Qur’an being directly the word of Allah and the fact that it’s very hard to misinterpret all 524 verses of intolerance in The Qur’an far stronger arguments than anecdotes about how a small minority of Muslims blew up the London underground or the Twin Towers.

Because of course, this is a very small minority. Yes, they were clearly Islamic extremists who perpetrated 9-11, but this was a handful of people in a country which has millions of Muslims – the majority of Muslims are peaceful people.

But it clearly isn’t because of Islam, it’s in spite of it. To understand this, you can’t judge the entire world population of Muslims by the actions of a small radical minority. You can only say this is accurate because when you go back to the core of the faith, you find facts like The Qur’an having 534 intolerant verses, and only 75 verses containing good stuff. Or look at Sharia law states which still have appalling treatment of women, homosexuals and non-Muslims.

It’s important to remember that when discussing such topics, we’re not talking about whether Muslims are peaceful. That is obvious – the overwhelming majority of them are, and although there is a radical minority, this is true of many groups. But the question of whether Islam is peaceful is a question and answer that is detached from the attitudes of the people that identify with it. Unfortunately, the answer here is far less reassuring.

We’re very pleased to simultaneously announce the launch of the SocietasPro website and version 1.0 of SocietasPro! We’ve been busy over the past few weeks preparing SocietasPro to be a deployable application – tidying everything up, getting rid of the bugs and creating an easy to use installer.

We’ve also launched the SocietasPro website which contains an overview of it’s features, videos, support forums and more. You can also find documentation for using the software on the project’s GitHub wiki.

Having been invited for a surprise dinner party by Chris & Cara, we headed over to The Greenhouse – a large apartment development located in Beeston.

If your not familiar with Leeds, you might have heard of Beeston anyway – after all, it’s where the 7-7 bombers came from. It’s also where the football team Leeds United are based, and their accompanying Leeds United Service Crew, often described as the most notorious football hooligans in English history. That explains the two metre high security fence that runs around the perimeter of the complex then.

The idea behind the development is that it is supposed to be eco friendly – which is basically an excuse not to provide any of the tenants with a dishwasher or even a microwave, or anything useful like that.

But enough of bashing where they live. The food itself was outstanding. Individual Beef Wellington’s are always going to work because however much pastry you wrap something up in, you’re still basically serving us steak and there is simply no bad way to do that. Add chocolate cake to the end of that and you have a winning combination. Thumbs up all round.

Having had a long debate about what time Panic would come on, I decided to head down there for 9:45. Kick out is at 11, so they will probably finish fifteen minutes before that and based on an hour set, that means they will come on at 9:45. Seemed sensible.

As it happens they actually came on at 9:30 and I didn’t get there until 10 🙁 . Still, this did have the advantage that I got to piss most of their new stuff and arrive safely in time to hear I Write Sins Not Tragedies and their cover of The Darkness’s I Believe in a Thing Called Love, so I’m going to chalk that one down as a win 😀 .

One utility Mac OS X seems to be lacking is a simple text editor such as Notepad for Windows. It comes with TextEdit but the problem is that this uses rich text format (RTF) which is very annoying when editing system files or code.

Thankfully, you can reconfigure it to use plain text.

Simply go to TextEdit on the menu bar and hit Preferences. The top option should allow you to toggle between Plain Text and Rich Text.

Last weekend I headed over to Thai Edge for lunch with Si and Sarann. On Sundays they do a buffet, so you’re forced to have that – but being a buffet they have everything, so it’s not particularly restrictive.

It was good food and a nice selection. Though I think having spent so many years going to Spice Quarter and Red Hot World Buffet, I think my view of what the average buffet has to offer is in all other circumstances going to leave me disappointed.

They did have a chocolate foundation though there seemed to be an emphasis on taking fruit and dipping it in the chocolate – I just put my bowl under the foundation as that seemed like the only effective way to get a sufficient quantity to feed my habit. It was a bit disappointing though, as the chocolate itself tasted of the cooking variety.

All in all, it was OK, but I think I would prefer to go when they are serving their regular menu.

We were discussing earlier in the day how the idea of the alternative scene is that everyone is alternative – yet everyone dresses the same. I’m not sure I quite surprise to this – Alternative is more like a movement, like Postmodernism. But in any case, I decided it was time to embrace such ideas, and so I shunned the regular black outfits in favour of my bright red American Football jersey.

It was also great to see Mike from Bristol put in a guest appearance, as well as Norm and Maths Chris get their disco on, and we even finished the night with a very retro trip to Pizza Milano’s. Good times.

I’m 25, and it’s still funny.

There has been much discussion about the benefits cap recently – on one hand you don’t want to put families into poverty, but on the other hand you can argue it’s perfectly reasonable to expect a family to live on a £36,000 salary – especially given the alternative, often a minimum wage job, pays only a third of that.

One of the biggest portions of this benefit is child benefit and the argument is made that this is required because parents cannot afford to go to work because of the prohibitive cost of childcare.

One solution to this problem however, would be rather than spending all the money on child benefit, to spend the money on free, or at least heavily subsided childcare.

This would mean that parents could get access to affordable childcare and therefore be free to work. It also means that lots more jobs would be created.

Of course you could argue that if you’re going to spend money paying people to look after children, you might as well just have child benefit so parents can stay at home. But this doesn’t stack up because it’s far less efficient to have everyone staying at home looking after a small number of children.

We recently moved the Chris Worfolk Foundation office to a different business centre in Leeds city centre. Given that we are in serviced offices, you would imagine that this would be a simple process. After all, all those adverts talk about getting a new office overnight so what could be simpler?

Of course, it actually isn’t that simple.

Firstly, when we tried to cancel our existing contract with Forsyth, we were told we couldn’t, as we had to give at least two months written notice and it was too close to the deadline to do this – that means that we had to sign a new agreement with them, otherwise we would go onto what was referred to as their rack rate, which had never been mentioned before, but was apparently very, very expensive.

Instead, they proposed that we simply re-sign a three month agreement, at an additional cost of £22 per month because rent is higher for short term contracts. Interesting, I say rent, but it isn’t actually rent as part of the agreement is that you’re not actually a tenant, you’re a “service user” so allow them to get round a lot of the laws set up to protect tenants.

They also insisted on a higher deposit, which meant we had to make an additional deposit payment of £69.60.

They also charge a “minimum flat fee” of £60 per workstation (we have two in the office) for redecorating the office into it’s original state, even though as part of the agreement, you have to return it to them in the originate state, or they charge you extra for this.

So, when you add up the maths, it comes out like this:

• Extra three months enforced office rent: £914.40
• Extra business service fees incurred for those months: £215.94
• Extra business rates incurred for those months: £57
• Standard repair bills for a pristine office: £120

That makes a total cost of £1,307.34. Of course, this wasn’t a huge surprise to us, as it’s all detailed in the agreement that we signed when we took on the office. What is more of a surprise is just how much it all adds up when you actually do the figures.

On top of that, when we got the office the door lock wasn’t working properly. I spoke to the centre manager and sent numerous emails over the course of the year to get it fixed and every time I was promised it would be, but it never was.

As a result of the problem, the door handle ended up breaking and still nothing was done about it. Yet once we had moved out, we were then given an extra bill for £120 to fix the door we had apparently broken (this is on top of the repair bills, which don’t actually repair anything).

That makes a total cost of £1,427.34. A bill the charity certainly did not need!