You’ve seen the Youtube mashups — now see the movie!

In which I review a much better movie about Hitler getting his comeuppance.

 

A different kind of basterd…

….which is to say “Inglourious” ones. As in the movie. Which I just watched.

OK, the plot has its comedic moments, and its thrilling moments, and the climax is satisfying (partly because I didn’t know until it all came down whether they were actually planning to re-write some well-known history there). But jeezuzkrist there’s some appalling scenes (yeah, OK: Quentin Tarantino). Brad Pitt’s character, Lt. Aldo Raine, casually tortures and executes prisoners with a sort of detached sadism that almost makes me like the supposed villain, Col. Landa, by comparison. I’m damned sure that if a bunch of American commandos were running around behind German lines pulling that kind of shit, the Nazis would tell the Allies to knock it the hell off or they’d start doing the same to a few of their POWs. There’s a reason everyone signed on to the Geneva Convention. Just a little too much suspension-of-disbelief being asked there.

So what’s the point of this? Is there any redeeming value in this silly gore-fest of a flick? Well, how’s this for a wild speculation: Raine’s “aw shucks” drawl reminds me of George W. Bush. So: Raine is supposed to be Bush as the war hero he portrays himself as, and of course he’s the President who brought back torture as an instrument of state policy. Which makes the movie a kind of slap at current American practices in Guantanamo and Iraq.

Or am I just talking out my ass?

Wakefield: Admit Nothing, Deny Everything, Make Counter-Accusations

That’s pretty much all Andrew Wakefield did on CBC Radio’s The Current the other morning. He has always acted in the best interests of his patients (The children! The poor wee sick bairns!), never did anything unethical, had no conflict of interest, the British medical establishment (enabled by muck-raking journos and no doubt spurred on Big Pharma) is out to get him, it’s lies-all-lies I tell you!, he’s a most noble and put-upon hero, yessirree.

I suppose it’s possible the self-aggrandizing fraud even believes all that bullshit about himself.

Merry Newtonmass 2010

God rest ye merry, physicists
Let nothing you dismay.
Remember Isaac Newton
was born on Christmas Day!
His gravity and calculus and “f” equals “m” “a”!
Oh, pillars of physics and math, physics and math,
Oh, pillars of physics and math!

A factor of big G – the same
for flea and giant star.
Then multiply the masses
and divide by square of “r”.
The force that keeps us on the earth
and orbits moons afar!
Oh, pillars of physics and math, physics and math,
Oh, pillars of physics and math!

Now, calculus is math for those
who change things bit by bit.
To figure out derivatives
and get the curve to fit.
Then integrate and you can find the area under it!
Oh, pillars of physics and math, physics and math,
Oh, pillars of physics and math!

Sir Isaac took a beam of light
and passed it through some glass.
“What shall I call these colours?”
was the question he did ask.
And now we live with ROY G BIV
in every optics class.
Oh, pillars of physics and math, physics and math,
Oh, pillars of physics and math!

Yet more Canadian religiots

Damn, but we seem to be on a roll lately. The Waterloo (Ontario) District School Board votes to allow the Gideons to hand out Bibles in school. The money quote, from one trustee who voted in favour:

If you deny the religious experience in your education system you open the door to the demonic experience.

Also:

All publications are supposed to be read by the trustees to make sure “such materials are for information [only] and not for the purpose of proselytization.”

I wonder how many of the trustees who voted for this have actually read the Bible? All of it.

Just to piss off Bill Donohue

…’cuz the more people see this, the more it makes li’l Billy cry and pout and stamp his feet:

I’m no art critic, but to me it looks like this film, if anything, is depicting AIDS sufferers as Christ-figures — innocent victims being outcast by the PTB and tortured to death. I can see why BillDo would find that offensive. OTOH, I doubt he even thought that deeply about it.

And speaking of Canadian religiots….

…the province of Prince Edward Island¹ decided this week to join the 21st century by allowing Sunday shopping. After the bill’s sponsor suffered a minor accident, Transport Minister Ron MacKinley, suggested — apparently in all seriousness — that God is pissed at her.

Point and laugh, people; point and laugh.

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1. For those who don’t know, it’s an overgrown sandbar in the Gulf of St. Lawrence known mostly for having given the world Anne of Green Gables. For some unknown reason, the world has not yet nuked the place to the waterline in retaliation. Oh yeah, there was also some big political shindig there a while back.

More on Dueck’s dreck

…’cuz I can’t just leave it alone.

I acknowledge the danger that, given a legal and social acceptance of euthanasia, old people will be hurried off to save scarce medical resources, or so the kids can get the inheritance, or whatever.

I approach the question as a problem in risk minimization. At present (being a healthy 53yo) I am enjoying life. However, I recognize that at some point (probably about three or so decades hence) I may come to a medical state where continued existence is a subjective burden outweighing any benefit to me. Ideally, I want to die (whether by deliberate intervention or withdrawal of treatment) as near as possible to the crossover point between life being a net positive and being a net negative. Ethically, those in authority over such things should arrange the terminal-care protocols to make that possible, and minimize the risk that my demise occurs either early or late.

Yes, the above is an engineer’s simplistic analysis — a lot of the important parameters are difficult to quantify, and I may feel very differently in the midst of the situation than I do when it’s still far-off and theoretical. But it seems like a good way to think about the problem.

Our friend Lorna of course, thinks we should ask Faith for its advice. And (quel surprise!), not just any faith:

Many faiths clearly have contributions to make to this point. But for those of us who are Christian, this is a challenge that lands squarely in our area of expertise.

For centuries, Christianity has been prime source material for teaching how to love and care for family and strangers in pain.

Of course we need to be honest with those looking to our distinct truth and what we mean by hope. [WTF? Is that even a sentence? — ed.]

For two millennia we Christians have said that this body on Earth is but a shadow of the future self that God has waiting for us after death and we need to regain our practice of how to explain and engage that truth with the reality of dying.

That belief helps us understand that there is no purpose to keeping Grandma, son, daughter or self clinging to life support when a greater beauty comes next.

In debates such as this, how great is our loss if we withdraw the contribution of faith from our collective education and view only individualism as the better way to face the perils of death.

Somewhere under that semi-literate word salad seems to be an assertion that Christianity has a contribution to make to “our collective education”, and part of that education is a brochure for the posthumous Club Med awaiting us (I note she doesn’t commit herself here to either an exclusivist or universalist view of eternal destiny).

Well, Christians are perfectly free to take that delusional belief into account when making their own end-of-life decisions. But I fail to see how telling warm-fuzzy fairy tales to those of us who’ve seen through it constitutes “education”. More importantly, I object that views based on such mythology, or on theological notions of “sanctity of life” should be used to inform law or public policy by which my own fate will be governed. We lose precisely nothing “if we withdraw the contribution of faith” from this debate — faith has not shown it has anything to contribute. Rather, we gain in the freedom to think rationally about the problem.

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PS: Yes, the double entendre in the headline is intentional.

Spiritual, compatible, drivel.

Lorna Dueck is a “writer looking for evidence of God in the news of the day”. Her contributions to the CBC front page are mercifully rare, as they’re mostly content-free drivel extolling the application of “spirituality” to some issue without generally being too specific as to how (which, one suspects, is because she really means “my kind of Christianity”, but knows that won’t fly with the readership). Today she popped up again to deliver this column on the euthanasia discussion currently taking place in Quebec. After a delivering a decent enough summary of the viewpoints and dilemmas posed by the issue, she gets down to the spiritual part, gracing the reader with observations like:

There has been pressure to isolate and keep religious views from the debate. But surely that is not realistic, given that science and faith have such deep compatibility and understanding when it comes to the arena of pain and death.

….which, as part of the science-religion compatibility debate, is not even wrong.

On the burning of books

So: The Most Reverend Doctor Dickhead¹ — perhaps satisfied that he had attracted sufficient public attention on to his previously (and deservedly) unknown self — didn’t burn his Korans on 9/11. IMHO that’s good: whatever kind of legitimate protest one might think up (I speculate below) that involves a flaming Koran, he is the wrong person to be doing it,  for the wrong reasons, on the wrong day.

But the discussion in the secularist blogosphere raised the more general question of the ethics of burning books. Ed Brayton (perhaps not surprisingly) is against it in all cases, and a number of other commenters on various blogs agree. As someone whose personal library really needs a second house to keep it in, and who has difficulty trashing even old, dilapidated mass-market paperbacks, I sympathize. But on consideration, this absolute refusal strikes me as a fetishization of books as objects. Nor am I moved by “BUT OMG THE NATZEEEEZ BURNINATED BOOKS!!!!”. Oh, please — yes, and Hitler was a vegetarian, too. Things are not evil because the Nazis did them; rather the Nazis were evil because they did things we regard as evil on other grounds. Burning every available copy of a book to prevent anyone from reading it is a form of censorship, and therefore wrong. Burning a few copies (which you legally own) of a widely-available work is not in the same category (at least, not obviously so to me).

With that out of the way (and assuming the reader assents to the above), we can ask: is it ever legitimate to burn a Koran (or any book) as an act of protest? This sort of act is symbolic in intent; a piece of political theatre intended to make a point. The question is: What symbol? What point?

One such intent might be to express our rejection and disdain for the ideas therein (in the case of the Koran or the Bible, perhaps the misogynist, genocidal or theocratic themes). The physical destruction of the book symbolizes one’s wish and intent to destroy (ie: discredit) those ideas with the metaphorical fire of one’s logic and the causticity of one’s scorn.

On the other hand, one can argue (with some merit) that the act of burning books is irredeemably tainted by its history; it can never escape its association with repeated attempts at censorship. No other symbolism can overcome the weight of history.

I’m not persuaded by that argument, but it suggests an important requirement on public demonstration: your intent (as opposed to other likely constructions) has to be clear, or made clear, to a reasonable observer (yeah, like those are ubiquitous….). That’s why the Gainesville Git’s proposed stunt was out of line: no one trusts his point to be anything other than “their religion is worser than ours” (which is a pretty low bar to set) combined with “Scarey Furriners who aren’t our religion killed 3000 of Our People”. Which suggests some further requirements on the burning of sacred books: only atheists get to do it (OK John, we’ll let in the agnostics, too, if you bring the hot dog buns). Moreover, we have to include texts from all major religions, and we also have to include non-religious works notable for their dogmatism, and being sources of oppression².

So: who’s up for s’mores? Just be sure you have a point to make….

1. I refuse to give this loser any more notoriety by name. The only Terry Jones who matters was a member of the Monty Python troupe.
2. Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book comes to mind, as does Mein Kampf. Suggest your favorites in the comments.