Quotulatiousness

May 19, 2011

“Brave stuff indeed, mocking a man of God who is clearly a few clowns short of a circus”

Filed under: Environment, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:37

Brendan O’Neill wonders why we are all happy to pour scorn on Christian predictions of the end of the world, yet treat similarly apocalyptic Green claims seriously:

The eccentric Californian preacher Harold Camping, who claims that Jesus will return this Saturday and bring the world as we know it to an end, has been the subject of much Twitter-teasing and ridicule. “The Rapture? If it comes near me this Saturday I’ll kick its arse through its neck”, says Charlie Brooker. “I expect everyone who thinks so-called Judgement Day is on May 21st to support science and reason from the 22nd onwards”, says Professor Brian Cox. Brave stuff indeed, mocking a man of God who is clearly a few clowns short of a circus. But what I want to know is this: why don’t these Camping critics, these alleged challengers of bunkum and defenders of reason, also stand up to the far more mainstream yet equally batty predictions of End Times emanating from the environmentalist lobby?

Perhaps Camping’s real crime is that he has got the date of the Rapture wrong. After all, according to the green writer Andrew Simms’ countdown to doom, which is published monthly in Brooker’s own newspaper the Guardian, we have 67 months left to save the world. Camping you idiot! The world’s not going to end this Saturday – it’s going to end in December 2016!

Of course Simms, who runs the ominous One Hundred Months project, is not so crude as to talk about Apocalypse or Judgement Day or Rapture. No, he simply says: “We have 70 months to save our climate. When the clock stops ticking, we could be beyond our climate’s tipping point, the point of no return.” Which of course is just a more PC, more sciencey, less instantly insane-sounding way of saying exactly what Camping has said: that there is an endpoint to the world, it is arriving soon, and it will involve some judgement of mankind for his sins against God/overuse of carbon. Where Camping says our sinful behaviour has precipitated Saturday’s rapturous showdown, Simms says it is the “global suicide pact” of human greed and nature-wrecking that gives us only another 70 months. Both of them sound mental.

Happy 60th day!

Filed under: Africa, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:58

Jim Geraghty notes a special day arriving:

Happy 60-Day anniversary, War Kinetic Military Action in Libya! You’re now… pretty much illegal, but almost all of Washington will avert their eyes and pretend you’re legal. It’s kind of like how all the big people there treat their nannies.

Bruce Ackerman and Oona Hathaway are professors of law and political science at Yale, took to the pages of the Washington Post to point out that for a president who was elected by angry lefties chanting about an illegal war, it’s pretty ironic that we’re now fighting what is, pretty much, an illegal war: “This week, the War Powers Act confronts its moment of truth. Friday will mark the 60th day since President Obama told Congress of his Libyan campaign. According to the act, that declaration started a 60-day clock: If Obama fails to obtain congressional support for his decision within this time limit, he has only one option — end American involvement within the following 30 days.”

Making light: are LED flashlights now “tacticool”?

Filed under: Randomness, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:51

Chris Dumm has a bit of fun reviewing an LED flashlight:

Remember back when Mag-lite was the last word in aircraft-grade aluminum illumination? Those old incandescent Mag-Lites weren’t any brighter than ordinary flashlights, but their indestructible machined-aluminum bodies made them the choice of police, private security, Elvis and burglars. They were “tacticool” before people had a chance to learn to hate that word. The longer D-cell Mag-lites resembled aluminum billy clubs; they delivered a more devastating blow than any Monadnock PR-24 police baton ever could. Despite their size and weight, however, they still weren’t all that bright.

Then new technology arrived in the form of noble gas (Xenon bulbs) and heavy metal (Lithium batteries). SureFire and Streamlight built flashlights bright enough to temporarily blind and disorient a target without having to bash his brains in with five D-cell batteries wrapped in an aluminum Little League bat. And they were tough enough to drown, drop and attach to the hardest-kicking riot shotguns in the SWAT unit’s arsenal without fizzling out at the worst possible moment.

The new flashlights were rugged, dazzlingly bright and incredibly compact. Their only drawbacks: astronomical prices (for lights, bulbs, and batteries) and battery run-times of one hour or less. They quickly became the law enforcement standard, until LED technology took the lead and never looked back.

Nathalie Rothschild: Britain’s debate on rape “is demeaning to women”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:10

There is much sound and fury in Britain this week over some remarks by a Tory cabinet minister in a BBC interview. The leader of the opposition has demanded that he be dismissed from the government for suggesting that there are ‘other categories of rape’. Nathalie Rothschild wrote this article in response to a 2010 review of the rape law.

In 2007, Camilla Cavendish of The Times (London) found that rape allegations had jumped by 40 per cent between 2002 and 2005. While this can partly be put down to improved support for women, which facilitates the process of reporting rape, Cavendish argued that a widening official definition of rape also played a big role. Since the Sexual Offences Act 2003 came into force, the definition of rape has been expanded to include oral sex. But there has also been a profound attitude shift with roots in the second-wave feminist idea that heterosexual sex is an inherently violent and degrading act that women subject themselves to against their better judgement.

More than four out of five rape allegations are made against friends or acquaintances. As alcohol and/or drugs were involved in over half those cases, Cavendish puts this down to ‘the culture of binge drinking’. But this avoids the more complex picture. Today, various rape-awareness activists and state feminists are themselves helping to blur the boundaries between sex and rape, encouraging women to regard themselves as violated, abused and traumatised for having gone to bed with a man without thinking it through in minute detail.

The Sexual Offences Act 2003 declared that consent must be ‘active, not passive’; in rape cases, consent is now taken to mean agreement rather than the absence of a refusal. So if a woman goes along with sex, but doesn’t make it explicitly clear that she is actively consenting to it, it can be deemed to be rape. The government has even moved towards ensuring that no agreement can be taken as consent if it is given under the influence of alcohol. As Cavendish pointed out: ‘In our zeal to protect women, are we going to legislate so that a drunken man is accountable for his deeds, but a drunken woman is not? Why do we encourage women to see themselves as victims?’ Absolving women who engage in sexual liaisons — whether drunk or sober — of responsibility for their actions is not liberating; it’s demeaning.

There is no doubt that forcing someone to have sex is a heinous, violent and degrading act and victims of rape should indeed be treated with dignity and respect. But in the name of protecting women, the government is insisting that rape cases be treated differently from all other crimes, while interfering with the course of justice in a way that undermines defendants’ rights and undercuts the power of juries.

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