551. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #136446 by Cartomancer on March 1, 2008 at 8:43 am

And the winner of the 2008 Charlton Heston Award for Self-aggrandizing Macho Posturing is...

552. Berlin gallery in Islam art row

Comment #136443 by Cartomancer on March 1, 2008 at 8:30 am

I think Rowan Atkinson said it best - The right to offend is infinitely more important than anyone's right not to be offended.

And we all know that the Kaa'Ba was originally a pre-Islamic shrine anyway, which the Mahometans took over for their own use. I think I read somewhere that it was originally consecrated to the Arab god Hubal and filled with 360 small idols representing the days of the year as well as the piece of black meteorite they currently worship. Oh how the priests of Hubal would be fuming at the iconoclasm of the place these days, with that ridiculously gaudy Masjid al-Haram built around their star shrine...

Still, I like the implication of the poster "touch the stupid stone and be filled with all the transcendental stupidity of Islam".

553. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #136442 by Cartomancer on March 1, 2008 at 8:27 am

And a wonderful, if somewhat belated, step in the right direction they are too!

554. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #136440 by Cartomancer on March 1, 2008 at 7:59 am

Funnily enough I rather like delegating responsibility for my health and safety to those far better equipped and trained to protect it than I am. I wish the state would take far more initiative to protect people from themselves and from each other. Life is so much more enjoyable when you don't have to worry about that sort of thing yourself and can get on with the fun stuff, like exploring the world, reading books, hobbies, talking to interesting people and shouting down pernicious godbotherers in the street.

555. Fleabytes

Comment #136248 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 3:11 pm

Awww, aren't we allowed a little RichardDawkins.net Friday night love-in from time to time?

556. Fleabytes

Comment #136245 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 3:08 pm

Oh pshaw! I can't take any credit for saying intelligent things on this particular thread.

Still, I agree entirely - if it is by the calibre of his admirers that a man shall be known then Richard Dawkins is certainly one of the finest people to grace our modern age.

557. Fleabytes

Comment #136228 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 2:40 pm

There is very good evidence for the existence of goblins actually. I can think of no other way to account for the food in the Wadham college refectory at lunchtime...

558. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #136220 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 2:31 pm

Al-Rawandi,

I did not assume that you approved of the National Guard, or of state militias in general. When the subject was state militias you brought up the National Guard yourself, so I don't think I can be held too culpable for thinking that you meant it as an example of one.

My point was merely that the second amendment of the US Constitution is a piece of historical legislation that has now become an anachronism. As such it should either be repealed because it is pointless and unworkable or left to glide slowly into obsolescence like so many other laws across the world that are still on the statute books. Unfortunately the degree to which the constitution of the United States is unthinkingly fetishised by so many US citizens makes the first option very difficult and the second very unlikely, especially given the common misunderstanding that it grants a carte blanche for possession of weaponry.

I think this is one big disadvantage of having a single-document constitution like the states, rather than having a shifting constitution contained in the body of case law and government legislation as a whole. In England defunct laws are ignored and disregarded all the time with little fuss - as those among us who own crossbows and have a post-midnight animus against the Welsh know all too well...

559. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #136191 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 2:05 pm

So... I might be missing something here, but what does the practice of recruiting troops for the army at state rather than country level have to do with a personal right to own weaponry? Are the National Guard responsible for acquiring their own equipment? Is that how they got so "well armed"? Moreover, how is the National Guard going to prevent the tyranny of the federal government while they're half a world away in Iraq, save by writing strongly worded letters home?

560. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #136178 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 1:54 pm

In retrospect, perhaps giving my prized antique crossbow a name was an unwise decision...

561. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #136175 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 1:51 pm

But surely no citizen militia, however well-trained, could withstand the armies of a modern totalitarian state such as your putative American central government might become? Hasn't the rule about forming state militias become superfluous? Surely they would simply devolve into guerilla separatists and end up bloodily wiped out by the well-armed stormtroopers of the Central Tyranny? Hasn't this phase of our military history well and truly passed by now?

562. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #136142 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 1:29 pm

CROSSBOW! NOT TROUSER FURNITURE!!!!!

563. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #136132 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 1:21 pm

I have just gone red with embarassment. Cecil is a crossbow, that's all he is, a CROSSBOW - a fairly nice silver-inlaid sixteenth century arbalest actually - and in no way should he be construed as a euphemism for my genital endowment. I will admit that mention of my "physical proportions" in the context of my outlandish party clothes might have got some people thinking along the wrong lines there, and in retrospect it was probably a less than ideal choice of wording...

So, to recap - CROSSBOW. NOT TROUSER FURNITURE.

Thank you all.

564. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #136114 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 1:16 pm

Apologies most gracefully accepted Alexander.

565. Fleabytes

Comment #136100 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 1:12 pm

As an added incentive I'll even do my special somersaulting "evidence dance" when we get some good evidence for the existence of god. It's something to see, really it is...

566. Fleabytes

Comment #136077 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 1:02 pm

Oh no Paula, of course not. For that I've got just the outfit, as everyone over on the Treaty of Tripoli thread can attest with a shudder...

567. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #136073 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 1:00 pm

I only wear the thigh boots and get Cecil out on special occasions. I wouldn't want anyone to think that I habitually stalk the streets of Oxford in revealing fetish attire with a fork-firing crossbow...

568. Fleabytes

Comment #136068 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 12:57 pm

Hey, Paula, no fair! I spend most of my life wearing mass-produced polycotton tracksuits made in China!

569. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #136049 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 12:45 pm

Thigh boots for a 6'4 man with size 12 feet don't come easy you know! (Wow, and to think this thread started off with the Treaty of Tripoli!)

570. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #136034 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 12:36 pm

I can lend you the hot pants, thigh boots and ridiculously tight vest to complete the ensemble if you want Steve, though they probably won't be in your size given that my physical proportions are somewhat unusual...

571. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #136027 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 12:30 pm

Would you like to borrow Cecil from me Steve? I'm sure you can take down a few of the homophobes before they get you, for the sake of putting up a decent show. And if you're lucky they'll be too puzzled at the prospect of fighting a gay man with an antique crossbow that fires forks to open fire themselves...

(I don't actually have any bolts for Cecil, seeing as how they don't make them anymore, but forks seem to work pretty well in the absence thereof...)

572. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #136022 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 12:26 pm

I suspect that armed resistance would have made the onset of the "final solution" all the swifter for the Jews of the Third Reich. I doubt Hitler would have been keen to let that go unpunished. Goebbles was probably praying for it to happen so he could get his propaganda machine into overdrive.

573. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #136010 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 12:16 pm

I think I agree with Anna on this one - I can't see how a ragged militia of gun-waving citizens could possibly stand up to the armed might of the American state. And if the military didn't support the government then you'd end up with anarchy anyway. European nations would be exactly the same - there would just be fewer deaths during the uprisings because we'd all be using kitchen knives, antique crossbows and chair legs rather than firearms. I have all three primed and ready just in case, so if anyone comes to me without a weapon when the anarchy hits I can arm two of you. Any more than that and you're on your own. The crossbow is called Cecil out of interest.

574. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #136002 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 12:10 pm

That said, I am an avid hunter myself. I generally hunt attractive young men in bars with all the wit, charm and good looks available to me. As you can see, I don't seem to pack nearly enough firepower to do the job...

575. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #135994 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 12:01 pm

Very true ThoughtsonCommonToad, that was pretty much what I was talking about to start with - exploring unusual cultural differences tends to interest me far more than bashing out practical political solutions I'm afraid. I guess it's the ivory-tower mentality...

576. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #135984 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 11:53 am

When I said "the remotest chance that such a measure might work" what I meant was "the remotest chance that such a measure might be enacted into law in the first place". There are far too many people who would oppose both, but that does not mean that, should they be enacted, there would be no reduction in smoking or alcohol related deaths.

And I agree wholeheartedly that the major issue is social deprivation. I have never said otherwise. I just think that much tighter gun controls would help a bit until we've sorted the deprivation out.

577. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #135977 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 11:48 am

And I must say everyone is being very kind! I just wish I got as much appreciation on Gaydar as I do on here!

578. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #135973 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 11:44 am

As I am on record having said before, I would approve the banning of smoking, and of drinking alcohol, in the interests of public health and safety if I thought there was even the remotest chance that such a measure would ever work.

Similarly with cars, though a cost-benefit analysis would have to be done. Cheap and effective public transport is the way forward here I think.

Admittedly these things are easy for me to say given that I am a teetotal non-smoker who cannot drive. Were I someone who partook in any of them I can well imagine that personal self-interest would colour my appreciation of the rationale, and therein lies the problem with introducing and enforcing such measures.

And Al-Rawandi, I think I said pretty much what you did about hunting for food versus hunting for pleasure in my own post. I used the term "sport hunting" to mean killing things like foxes and badgers that you don't eat, but I don't know if that's the standard meaning. It's the killing things for pleasure that I find repellent.

579. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #135965 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 11:36 am

Admittedly the concept of sport hunting is one which gives me significant pause. Viscerally I do not like it one bit - the idea of killing other animals solely for one's own pleasure repels me - but I understand that there are very strong cultural and even instinctive factors behind it, and I am always wary of telling people that they can't do things just because I don't like them. One raised to treat it as normal, unremarkable and harmless fun is not to be criticised for their upbringing. Rationally I can find no justification for it, unless one's pleasure is to be rated higher than the lives of the animals one hunts. Hunting for food is, I guess, much easier to rationalise since we farm and kill animals for that anyway, and the wild existence of a deer is probably much more comfortable than that of a caged venison calf at any rate.

Drag hunting, or clay pigeon shooting, or some other non-lethal alternative which provides similar ballistic challenges (maybe using paintballs, I don't know) seems to me the way forward.

580. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #135951 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 11:23 am

Alexander,

Once again I reiterate that I was not trying to imply causation, merely point out correlation. Since you failed to notice this I must come to the somewhat uncharitable conclusion that you were deliberately reading my posts with an eye to finding something to disagree with.

Continuing in this vein I must also note that you have quoted what I said but failed to read it properly, and in so doing come to a somewhat distorted appreciation of my sentiments. I was merely pointing out that there are prevalent negative stereotypes of the military in this country, not that I necessarily believe those stereotypes to be accurate. You might have noticed that I said "they're seen as" rather than "they are", and I followed up with "It's an unworthy and outdated stereotype I know, but it's the one many of us have". Quite how this can be interpreted as me assenting to the stereotype I am at something of a loss to understand.

Furthermore, none of this has even the slightest bearing on my main point, which is that firearms are, de facto, more lethal than pretty much any other type of weapon, and reducing the overall numbers of them available in society will therefore reduce the overall lethality available for consumption. It might also help to breed a culture where firearms and violent methods of problem-solving are not fetishised, and thus improve the overall stability, civility and pleasantness of society.

And, yes, the successful criminals will inevitably manage to acquire the illicit firearms for themselves, but a) with fewer available the less adept and more amateur criminals, who make up the majority, will not, and b) in a culture where firearms are considered unecessary for criminal activity (such as among the Japanese Yakuza) they will be less frequently employed and loss of life will be much lower.

Furthermore, Alexander, I would like to chide you on your terribly bad form. Resorting to base insults when my own post was nothing but civil - tut, tut, how rude. Assuming that I "must have known" about crime statistics for places like Sweden and Mexico is a leap too far on your part - I did not, and I thank you for pointing that out to me as much as I upbraid you for trying to tar me with the brush of dishonesty. I would be the first to admit that my knowledge of the issue is not that great, and if there is proper, well-founded statistical analysis which substantiates the claim that reducing the number of weapons available will not reduce their employment, then I would be more than willing to investigate it and change my mind. On a site like this I believe that goes without saying. Such contemptible incivility as you have demonstrated does you little credit.

581. Fleabytes

Comment #135875 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 10:11 am

I don't believe in god because I have seen the difference he has made in people's lives...

582. Fleabytes

Comment #135867 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 10:03 am

Atheism is not a choice - it's an inescapable conclusion

583. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #135847 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 9:46 am

I am all for a sophisticated and thoughtful approach, based on careful, in-depth studies, to the reduction of violent crime. I agree that there is no logical path from simply having guns to actually using them on people.

But in societies where there is a tendency for violent crime, I think that limiting the potential for lethality is a helpful stopgap measure until the underlying tensions can be resolved. If this results in us permitting the Swiss and the Japanese free access to guns but not the Americans and Israelis then that seems a perfectly pragmatic and sensible solution to me, and to hell with the macho posturing and whining of the Charlton Heston crowd...

584. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #135833 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 9:38 am

Actually, Al-Rawandi, I was not making any statements about causation. I simply said that there was a correlation between easy availability of weapons and incidence of violent crime. This might be the availability causing the crime, or the desire for crime causing the production and hence availability of weapons, or it could be (and I think it almost certainly is) a complicated nexus of factors resulting in this particular phenomenon. My point was that the opposite assertion - more guns makes society SAFER - doesn't even have the evidence of a correlation that MIGHT indicate causality. Switzerland is a very peculiar outlier as far as the general trend goes.

Of course the incidence of violent crime is mainly linked to societal stability and economic disparity - I wouldn't claim otherwise - but if so and the availability of guns has nothing to do with it then what advantage can there be to having them all over the place and exacerbating the problem by increasing the deadly power each criminal can possess. Without guns violent criminals would use whatever weapons they had to hand, and knives, fists, coshes, chair legs and what have you are far less deadly than machine-tooled modern instruments of death.

And, actually, no, I don't own a car. In fact I am petrified of road travel and generally walk wherever I need to go if at all possible. I use public transport when this is not possible. I think a massive reduction in the number of personally owned vehicles would be a very good thing for both safety and environmental reasons, not to mention the reduction in oil dependence that would emasculate the power of the Middle East oil barons, so yes, if I had my way cars would be banned or severely curtailed. But cars do have a function apart from killing people. Guns don't.

585. US Treaty with Tripoli

Comment #135785 by Cartomancer on February 29, 2008 at 9:11 am

Ugh! What is it with Americans and their guns?

Why is it that people who live in the civilized nations of Western Europe, most of East Asia, Canada and probably many other places don't seem to feel the need for copious quantities of firepower in every home, yet for the belligerent tribes of Merica it is considered vitally important?

Well, actually I can answer that question to my own satisfaction. I'm more pointing it out to flag up the vast difference in the tone of the debate either side of the World Pond. It has an awful lot to do with historical devlopments, social memory and self-identification. It probably stems from the fact that we Europeans acquired firearms in the late middle ages and had a strong tradition of centralised governmental control over force following the medieval experience of rogue barons and feudal underlings trying to challenge the power of the king with their armies. Contrawise the United States had a settler mentality, and in many ways still does, where armed citizen militias were considered the order of the day.

I have spoken to numerous Americans about this, and it never ceases to amaze me just how unremarkable the possession of deadly weaponry is taken to be among them. In England at least, and I suspect in most of western Europe, most people are frightened of guns. I know I start to physically shake in the presence of them, even in museums. They are seen as sinister and sordid tools of brutish violence - the preserve of the criminal underclass, the thuggish paramilitaries and the only slightly less thuggish scions of the military itself.

I guess the military is rather more respected over there too - here they're seen as a bunch of thick, interfering buffoons who are ill-suited for anything other than mindless square-bashing and causing international relations disasters. It's an unworthy and outdated stereotype I know, but it's the one many of us have. In modern Britain it's only really military families and the far right who laud soldiers as "heroes". That mentality seems far more common in the states. As far as I can tell the soldiers themselves just see it as a job to be done.

Mind you, it seems that we Britons are far more enamoured by the archetype of the dashing James Bond style spy than the yanks, most of whom see spies as deeply sinister and corrupt, so we do have some gun-friendly popular images in our national consciousness.

As for widespread gun ownership making people safe from violent crime, I think the statistics firmly confound that assumption. Just look at Japan, where violent crime rates are among the lowest in the world, and private gun ownership is both illegal and considered deeply suspect. Even the Yakuza, the Japanese organised crime syndicates, hardly ever use guns. I remember my brother telling me once about a Japanese criminal who held up a bus driver using... his fist! Obviously there are social and cultural differences, but generally speaking the most violent societies are the ones where weaponry is freely and readily available.

586. Fleabytes

Comment #134485 by Cartomancer on February 27, 2008 at 9:44 pm

The bible is like hollywood - it takes in obscene amounts of money every year but very rarely produces anything worth watching twice?

It's rapidly being challenged by gaudy, culturally-specific Asian alternatives with a more conservative attitude to sexuality...

It only mentions gay people four times in its entire extent, and all of them negatively...

It's all crass special effects these days (mostly computer-generated crowd scenes and fire-and-brimstone explosions) with no appreciable character development or emotional engagement like it used to have...

Well-spoken British people are always cast as the bad guys (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Rowan Williams...)

The sequels keep getting worse and worse, with more violence and gaping holes in the plot...

587. Church is paying a high price for its celibacy rule

Comment #133511 by Cartomancer on February 26, 2008 at 9:11 am

The Avignon period, as far as I can tell, did not see a great deal of change in matters of doctrine, rather, the concessions to the French Kings were mainly about temporal authority. The period of papal dependence on French support really started toward the middle of the fourteenth century when the temporal power of the popes was much reduced - in 1305 the papacy still had strong ties to most christian rulers in Europe and significant temporal assets of its own on which to draw. The original move to Avignon was mostly about the interests of the new French popes and getting away from the dynastic disputes between the Colonna and Orsini princes in Italy who were both trying to get as firm a grip as they could on the papacy, much to the chagrin of the conclave. Nevertheless, even at the nadir of their authority the popes tried to garner support from the kings of England, and oppose moves within the Empire to reject temporal dependence on the pope as the French king had done. The main doctrinal and spiritual concerns of the fourteenth century papacy seem to have been with the increasingly luxurious lifestyle led by the Avignon popes and their households, and with stamping out Catharism and its like. The hypocritical life of luxury led by the Avignonese popes seemed a stark contrast to the apostolic simplicity they preached, and the filthy, squalid conditions of the plague years for the majority of their followers.

Incidentally Jacques D'Euse (pope John XXII from 1316) was the one who excommunicated this site's favourite razor-wielding scholastic thinker William of Ockham, along with the similarly critical Marsilius of Padua and Eckhart von Hochheim when they criticised the excesses of the Avignon papacy. Doesn't seem that our friends at St. Peter's have learned very much in the intervening centuries about the effects of living in opulent splendour while their subjects suffer from deadly killer diseases does it?

588. Richard Dawkins on five of his favorite books

Comment #133195 by Cartomancer on February 25, 2008 at 7:49 pm

Mitchell Gilks, comment #38 -

Yup, that's me on both counts. Where do I pick up my copy?

589. Church is paying a high price for its celibacy rule

Comment #133187 by Cartomancer on February 25, 2008 at 7:09 pm

Castration. They definitely don't like that one. Origen tried it. Nobody liked him after that and it cost him a place as one of the great Doctors of the Church. Peter Abelard tried to rehabilitate the Christian Eunuch in the twelfth century too, after his own unplanned castration incident, but nobody liked him either, so it never really caught on.

It's got a lot to do with ideas about the wholeness of the body and the value of resisting sin. If you disarm the tempter then it doesn't quite have the same spiritual value, and if god had wanted people to go chopping off bits of their genital anatomy he would have made them jews. Besides which, in late antiquity the majority of castrati were temple eunuchs and prostitutes from the blasphemous east, and it didn't help that Augustine had a thing against the flouncing, transgendered priests of the Magna Mater in classical Rome. Stern Roman moralists were generally always disdainful of anything which reduced male virility, and Augustine had drunk deep of that particular tainted amphora.

Mind you, much later on when the castrato voice came into vogue among church music fans, the more problematic aspects of pudendal butchery were quietly swept under the carpet. Sometimes castrato choirboys would grow up and want to become priests, so their testicles were saved and kept in a jar, which they could then carry around with them - to prove that they were all there after a manner of speaking...

590. Church is paying a high price for its celibacy rule

Comment #132927 by Cartomancer on February 25, 2008 at 12:11 pm

As always there is a combination of factors at work in the whole clerical celibacy thing. Al-Rawandi has covered a number of them already. The earliest evidence we have for the prohibition seems to be the discussions at the Council of Elvira in 305 AD, where it is considered a matter of holy continence and the need to lead an elevated lifestyle. Later councils in the fourth and fifth centuries came up with similar conclusions. Theologically it is often justified by the old testament story of the inheritance of the tribes of Israel - the tribe of Levi were given no land (and hence unable to go and raise families like the other tribes) so they became the priests, with god as their inheritance (now that's what I call a bum deal).

The catholic church before the mid 11th century was nowhere near as powerful and organised as it became after that - the later eleventh and twelfth centuries saw a massive entrenchment and professionalisation of church institutions at all levels. This goes hand in hand with greater bureacratic sophistication in most other areas of society, increasing economic prosperity, growing populations, etc. Prior to the eleventh century this sort of business was conducted on a local basis - big centralised proclamations from the pope were rare, and the issue wasn't one which it was felt necessary to have a definitive policy on. In practice it seems most priests did pay some lip service to the ideals of celibacy, shored up by the very ancient and powerful european association of virginity and celibacy with special supernatural status. As far as inheritance is concerned the lack of descendants certainly helped the church to maintain a hold on its lands and possessions. The church pretty much insisted on the non-division of its property when it had the power to do so, and this central canon law fiat technically had legal precedence over the civil laws of the land, but individuals might be tempted to go against the church's wishes to feather their own nests, so celibacy was certainly a convenient tool to prevent this. The struggle between the papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor abated toward the end of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the process of establishing the legal rights of canon versus civil law began in earnest. This is the time of the great decretal collections of Ivo of Chartres and Gratian, where canon law was codified into a coherent form, and the church began thinking seriously about its institutional presence for the first time.

Actually the eleventh and twelfth centuries saw a considerable rise in concern over the lax morals of many of its celibates - particularly monks and nuns but the secular clergy too. The crackdown is perhaps best seen as the church getting its act together and beginning to behave like the multi-national corporation it had become, rather than leaving everything up to local initiative.

As far as I am aware, however, the injunction on celibacy is not a doctrine, which even the pope could not overturn, but a matter of papal policy, which he could do away with at any moment.

591. How he was sentenced to die

Comment #132506 by Cartomancer on February 24, 2008 at 9:54 pm

I am rarely outraged, but this kind of thing makes me furious. Sentenced to death for downloading an article on Women's Rights? Even the Nazis or Soviet Communists would have balked at something like that.

How can people live this way? How can this sort of thing happen in the twenty-first century? I am at a total loss to grasp just how differently these people think from the way I do, just how skewed and twisted and poisonous their minds have become. I simply do not understand this.

Why?

592. Evidence can't shake your faith if your faith excludes it as evidence

Comment #132428 by Cartomancer on February 24, 2008 at 6:34 pm

Incidentally, I am amused that many atheists still call those individuals whom the catholic church has beatified by their title "Saint", when there really is no good reason for still doing so apart from the fact it is culturally ingrained. I've even caught staunch protestants doing it too, when they of all people have a good reason not to buy into the church dogmas.

593. Evidence can't shake your faith if your faith excludes it as evidence

Comment #132419 by Cartomancer on February 24, 2008 at 6:20 pm

Literary and legal theorist? I smell the cloacal whiff of postmodernist claptrap here...

I do wonder, though, how this man thinks he can catch Richard out with the baseless assumption that he is impervious to any contrary evidence? It is a nasty thing to do, tarring Richard Dawkins with the same brush as Aurelius Augustinus - the latter claimed quite openly that he would interpret his evidence according to his preconcieved notions, the former claims just as openly that he will not. The only way this could be used to accuse Richard of hypocrisy is if he actually had dismissed something of the magnitude of a direct celestial visitation as hallucination. He's pointed out that hallucinations are commonplace, sure, but has he explicitly said they do account for everything and there is absolutely no empirical evidence which would change his mind? Not to my knowledge he hasn't.

Surely this man is not saying that there are no objective empirical standards of evidence at all is he...?

594. Fleabytes

Comment #132392 by Cartomancer on February 24, 2008 at 5:32 pm

Parchment and Quills! Papyrus and brushes! Working it out in your head!

595. Fleabytes

Comment #132384 by Cartomancer on February 24, 2008 at 5:15 pm

I have yet to have my computing virginity popped it would seem. What a relief, then, that I have a working knowledge of Medieval Latin verse composition - otherwise I would have nothing to say on here at all...

And I laughed out loud at Geoff's comment about wooter. Thanks for that.

596. Fleabytes

Comment #132376 by Cartomancer on February 24, 2008 at 4:52 pm

Well done Brian, by the way, I would have let you carry on if I had seen your post before I began mine...

Your memory of the Lingua Latina is obviously not nearly as corroded as you make out!

597. Fleabytes

Comment #132374 by Cartomancer on February 24, 2008 at 4:45 pm

Well, given that part of the conceit was that Mr. Beale is very unlikely to understand what I have written, I am a tad loath to furnish a translation, but, well, my vanity has got the better of me...

The vicious flea wrote a book,
In which he says nothing new,
He gives us now, this inept poet,
Sophisms, not truths,
He thinks he has refuted
all the arguments put to him
yet he has committed a culpable act,
in his fatuity,
His book is, in the end,
the ad hominem attack of a complete wanker*
He hates our Richard Dawkins too much,
heedless of the bounds of reason,
Why he thinks this way I do not know,
unless he carries a delusion,
a virulent virus in his mind,
which suddenly makes him
become arrogant
all the while his head fills with air

Goodbye flea, you worthless man,
your book is incredibly vain!

* I have professor Andrew Lintott of Worcester College, Oxford to thank for the translation of "Nugator" as "complete wanker".

I should really try getting the English version to rhyme as well to be consistent, but I do theoretically have other things to do with my time...

598. Fleabytes

Comment #132364 by Cartomancer on February 24, 2008 at 4:24 pm

The modern usage may prefer the C, but all true Romans know it is a dirty foreign word, and thus spelled with a distinctly un-Roman K!

599. Fleabytes

Comment #132360 by Cartomancer on February 24, 2008 at 4:18 pm

Karthago Delenda Est!

600. Fleabytes

Comment #132358 by Cartomancer on February 24, 2008 at 4:12 pm

That's not a version of history. History is written by the victors...