Bashing the Bishop Pete of Willesdon

Bishop Pete of Willesdon, bloody Willesdon? Do they have an Archbishop of Wythenshawe? A Vicar of the parish made up of the Burger King on the Northbound Trowell Services on the M1? -. I digress. Bish Pete is officially the most horridest man in Christendom after he made some stupid comments on Facebook about the royal family, Katie and Williams wedding likely lasting seven years, Chas's ears, the royals being a bunch of philanderers -and a tasteless joke about a princess and a bridge column in a tunnel in Paris (I made the last one up by the way). Why do I mention this preposterous story? Well Melanie Philips; Peter Oborne; Richard Littlejohn, and some prat no-ones ever heard of on the Torygraph blogs are saying that this [Anglican] godbloke; who has made republican comments as well - should be sacked as technically the Queen is a sort of his boss (what about God?? Is she like the Department manager and he's the MD or something?), and he swore an oath of allegiance to her, so technically he has committed the ecclesiastical equivalent of slagging his boss off online. This is all interspersed with how republicans are just a bunch of mean minded; disloyal killjoys, blah blah -who should just shut their faces. So much for the ostensibly libertarian Torygraph, yeah free speech if you sing to the right songsheet more like.

It's not the unedifying and slightly weird "reverential" forelock tugging that seems to be going on with some of the conservative commentators response to our royal betters tieing the knot, that bugs me about this story, though I do hear "get a fucking grip it's 2010 for gawds sake!" screaming in my mind with some of the coverage this weddings getting. No it's how they are reacting to an institution [The C of E ] they supposedly revere as an essential part of our "Judeo Christian bedrock values". In case they haven't noticed the C of E is dying on its arse a bit at the moment. The guys comments were a bit in bad taste yeah, but come on! The C of E is losing followers. Joe public loses interest with stuff like this. It's trivial. It really highlights the bubble some of these people are in in regards to the role of the Anglican church in regards to modern Britain. It is almost pitiable to see these guys getting worked up at the "harm" this is doing to the church. Yeah it causes harm, it shows how out of touch it is, getting worked up about it. People won't want to know. Kick this bloke out! Yeah it's not like the C of E is having staffing crises is it? Do get a grip.

And on a final note. As I said his comments were a bit of a case of republican sour grapes. But I know that some of the homophobic comments from that same institution are a lot worse, and are directed at people who don't have the material trappings of bishop Petes targets either. I wonder why these commentators (I'll let Oborne off the hook) don't get half as worked up about that sort of sentiment?

Melanie Phillips Knows Even Less About Unemployment than the MMR Vaccine.

The Mail is in its element with the Tory plans to send the long term unemployed onto "community work". That'll teach the scrounging bastards, stop them spending zillions of pounds on cider and plasma telly's, and watching Jeremy Kyle all day, and so on. Christ, they even began one article with the adjective "feckless unemployed". Now I'm not naive - I know not everything is ticketyboo with welfare payments, and it is a difficult balance to achieve. But what really gets on my steaming wick about the rhetoric around this story is the implication that everyone who is unemployed is A) better off that way, and too lazy to look for work and B) chose to unemployed. I cannot stress how unfair these assumptions are. I've had a tough year employment wise, and I can assure you that in my experience A and B are completely opposite to what I have experienced, and I doubt I am alone in that regard. I got so fucking wound up about this labeling of those who were out of work as a bunch of idle layabouts, by people who had been fortunate enough never to have experienced the cold winds of unemployment -that I actually was moved to write a letter to the local paper in response to some prat who had written in mouthing off about something he knew nothing about. (I made headline letter too) Such is the fog of ignorance around this much maligned group. So with trepidation I have been keeping up with the commentary on the issue, and lo and behold Melenie Phillips was only too willing to spout complete bollocks to the target audience, and; my God it's a masterpiece.... of shite.

"There is a rough rule of thumb that if the wrong kind of people are ­opposed to what you are doing, then you must be on the right track."

No Mel, that's just blinkered thinking.

"So what is he doing to provoke such fury? Why, making the outrageous ­proposal that instead of ­sitting at home on benefits doing nothing, people who are out of work should actually give something back to society in return."

What? Are all people doing that? Is looking for jobs, filling in application forms etc.. doing nothing. What about people who worked and paid N.I, but were made redundant, and will pay it when they get a new job. That is sort of "giving something back". Not everyone unemployed and on benefits is automatically a lazy scrounger, why can't people fucking see that?

"According to advance reports, IDS will be requiring the unemployed to ­undertake community service projects such as gardening, clearing litter and other menial tasks."

Couldn't this threaten some of the people who already do this for a paid living? Why pay someone a good wage, if you can pay people peanuts to do it for them. It could actually put more people out of work. At least they could give gardening advice to their new "co-workers".

"Following the example of U.S.-style ‘workfare’, they will do such jobs for 30 hours per week for four weeks at a rate of £1 per hour, under the threat of being stripped of their Jobseekers’ Allowance for three months if they fall short."

The plan for this scheme is that Job Centre advisers will "assign" long term jobseekers to these placements on their own discretion if they feel it would "benefit" them. A worry I have about this scheme is that the job seeker is under compulsory obligation to attend a specific location and time, no ifs and no buts. What if they can't fit childminding around them? What if their kid is ill one day? What if it is driving distance and they have no car, or can't afford the fuel for the journey, or the bus fare? Are they to lose three months of JSA for even a minor transgression? Let me repeat that, there may be people who have no access to a source of allowance for 90 days!

"Shock horror! Such is the outrage on the Left, you’d think IDS was proposing to send little children up the chimneys."

Oh boo hoo, some people think differently to Mel on a controversial plan. The monsters

So far so bad. But this being a Mad Mel article, the stupidity and mindfuck swiftly gets turned up to eleven. Check this utter brain melt out:

"They [the leftys] whine, for example, that the unemployed can’t be expected to find work, as there are no jobs to be found. At the very same time, they splutter that having to do such community work will give the ­unemployed no time to look for work.

They don't literally mean there are NO jobs at all! Anywhere! There are few jobs to go round relative to the levels of unemployed, that's why people are struggling to find something. As for her second point, if the work corresponds with the opening hours of the job centre, anyone without access to their own computer (which means a lot of unemployed people who tend to be skinter than the whole) will find it difficult to look for something.

"Well, which is it? If there aren’t any jobs, what’s the point of looking for them?"

You know Mel, credit where credits due. I thought you were just a slightly barmy right winger, but I now realise you are in fact the worlds greatest satirical genius. I mean no one could intentionally be this moronic and not just secretly taking the piss, undermining the values you claim to espouse.

"IDS is, indeed, the one person against whom that particular smear of ‘heartlessness’ cannot be made to stick. The patent decency of the man is plain for all to see. He is motivated by the ­highest possible concerns to rescue the poor"

That's her opinion I suppose. IDS' "compassion" always strikes me a bit like the heavy handed patrician attitude to the poor in Victorian times, a compassion that can disappear if you don't accept it on their terms. Not helpful.

Mel now starts changing tack, pulling out straw men to show how it's the left who actually hate poor people.

"under the guise of ­‘compassion’, the Left traps people in ­permanent poverty through treating them as less than human."

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"For what drives ‘progressives’ absolutely wild is the moral concern at the heart of the IDS project — to encourage the poor to take some responsibility for themselves and for others. But it is an article of faith on the Left that the poor are helpless tools of circumstance; and so it is outrageous to expect them to behave as anything other than victims, who accordingly can only ever take rather than give."

This kind of sentiment is what worries me so much about this kind of stuff. Mel and IDS don't seem to grasp the fact that - let me spell it out for those at the back -

"PEOPLE DON'T ALWAYS CHOOSE TO BE UNEMPLOYED AS A LIFESTYLE CHOICE"

They don't seem to tumble to the possibility that people can be poor and unemployed because of arbitrary factors like pure bad luck. Their attitude seems to be "anyone who is unemployed is too lazy and idle to get a job." Mel is guilty of the things she accuses her opponents of. She can't see them as victims in any circumstances! She can't see them ever giving, only taking! If this punitive philosophy is espoused by the guy tasked with sorting unemployment. Yeah people are going to worry!

"This is tantamount to saying that the poor are a breed apart — incapable of ­displaying the same human dignity as the rest of society."

said someone who said this:

"to encourage the poor to take some responsibility for themselves and for others."

Call me cynical but doesn't this imply that the poor generally don't do these things willingly? Thus implying that they don't have the same sense of dignity as other members of society?

She then blames the entire left for creating a poverty layer as part of a plan to keep themselves in work. No, really.

"Their resulting entrapment in permanent poverty then gives the Left their own meal ticket for life through the enormous industry they run to manage the lives of the poor."

With that in mind it is heartwarming to see Mel's own solution to welfare recipients.

"But there was one important element of the U.S. scheme from which the Coalition is flinching. It set a cut-off point for benefit payments if the claimant hadn’t found work by the end of a set period."

"But it seems that the IDS proposals will not contain that crucial ­welfare cut-off point. So one might say that, far from being unprecedentedly harsh and cruel, these proposals don’t go far enough."

Setting a specific time limit for finding a job and then cutting their benefits after that time is up is seven shades of stupid. Finding a job is dependent on so many external factors. Availability, the whim of an employer, the economy, the time of year and so on. You cannot put a time limit on something that owes so much to pure chance. Yeah you can cut the benefits of those who obviously aren't looking for work (that's why you have to sign on in the first place), but to put a set limit for everyone regardless of circumstances is brainless and actually downright evil.

This kind of sentiment to the unemployed and those on benefits is what worries me so much, especially now that those in power share them. We never hear of the problems of the collapse of traditional manufacturing base jobs, outsourcing, the service sector orientated jobs market (that is why many young men with poor communication skills find job hunting difficult), the reliance on agencies that deflate wages and allow employers to lay off agency workers at a moments notice when things are slack. That job security is wretchedly low these days. As for people who are better off on benefits (and I admit it can happen.), is it always out of laziness, or down to low wages that don't reflect the cost of living? Or due to the large numbers of part time entry level jobs? Is it moral to cut child benefits to children who had no say in their parents circumstances?

But all this would be both hard to convey and would require a lot of reflection and self analysis, which isn't really the turf of Melanie Phillips. I mean why do you have to bother with all that shit, when unemployment is all down to people being to lazy to get a job. You don't have to tackle the root causes, because there aren't any. People choose that life, and we'll punish them for it. It's all their own fault and not down to say something like bad luck or the butt end of a very free market orientated jobs sector. We don't have to change anything because they brought it all on themselves. That kind of attitude is growing, and if we judge a society on how it views those on the lower rungs, that isn't something to be proud of.

In Wakefields Defense Pt 1. Mel Phillips.

I was - for once; pleasantly surprised. Former doctor Andrew Wakefield being struck of by the GMC has attracted rather little media hoo haa. I at least expected a Jeremy Vine segment on the issue, it's the sort of thing he gets foisted on him - on his radio 2 talk show, with a defender there to stick up for him, but no. Not even Wakefields pal Peter Hitches had anything to say on his blog about it. Have they decided to leave him to it (and ignore their own role in the whole fiasco). Well no, Melenie Phillips has stuck by him with this small, vague on the ins and outs of the affair - blog entry. It's worth repeating in full. :

A TRAGEDY AND A TRAVESTY.

"Following the risible kangaroo court set up by the General Medical Council Andrew Wakefield, the doctor at the heart of the MMR controversy, has now been struck off the medical register while his colleagues have yet to learn their own fate. This is a tragedy and a travesty. I believe a monstrous injustice has been done here, which has crucified the one doctor who tried to alleviate and prevent the suffering of a particular group of children and which has also betrayed their parents. The full story of how this sinister travesty was accomplished and the full range of people who were complicit in it -- along with what it means for both medicine and public safety -- has yet to be revealed. Over time, I hope this will eventually be achieved."

It has to be vague on the details, because claiming Wakefield was acting on "patient welfare" is like saying Richard Nixon was "safeguarding the democratic process" when Watergate broke out. I mean come on! Safeguarding children by giving them bowel exams they didn't need? [GMC outcome] Betraying Parents, because they wouldn't tell them what they wanted to hear, despite all evidence saying that it was not so? The last sentence about the "sinister travesty" is ironically circular in regards to her point. I (for once) agree with her that the people who were complicit in the whole affair, and the ones who put children at risk because it suited their story in effect got away with it. But where she points at the GMC, I point back at her and all the others who spawned this nonsense without a shred of evidence to back the scare up, and got away with it. So yeah let these people be revealed in the role they had in the whole debacle.

Melanie Phillips Just Doesn't Get Science.

I chanced upon this completely bizarre article by Melanie Phillips, on the Science / Religion schism. I don't actually know why I actually even have to describe it as bizarre. I mean what else did I think it was going to be? I was alerted to it by a blurb on a conservative leaning magazine, whose name I've forgotten in Sainsburys today. (Northernbloke inspirations can pop up pretty much randomly.) It was as delightfully full of holes as I expected. I think Mel could be described as a "cargo cult intellectual." She tries to use the right words to dress it up as a serious academic expose on the hypocritical entrenched irrationality of the new atheists / rationalists /the left/ supporters of anthropogenic climate change. Tick whoever fits the thing she disagrees with in the respective point in the article. But in the end it is just a hodge podge of superficial straw men, tortured logic, double standards, and passive aggressive intellectual buck passing. (count how many times she uses the "Anyone who disagrees with X is branded a bigot by X argument. NB Try and argue your corner a bit more then!) What also strikes me is her complete scientific illiteracy, and ability to turn the article from a diatribe against militant atheists, to an anti euthanasia screed, to a climate change denial piece, to a Britain's going to the dogs rant. It really boils down to a "The liberals are the real bastards" piece, with the standard "guilty as charged." right wing memes chucked in. It is a staggeringly silly article!

Ready for the knockdown? Here goes:

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that reason and religion are mortal foes. Reason deals a death blow to religion; religion is clearly irrationality on stilts. "

They can be mutually exclusive, and often are. But reason (the ability to use rationality and a systematic outlook to assess a thing) and religion (the belief, and belief structures in place, in a divine force that controls the destiny of the material world / humans) can go hand in hand. It was; when the major religions formed, ostensibly reasonable to believe in a force that created the universe (for want of a better explanation.). Religious doctrines can have rational origins (the Islamic taboo against booze is sensible for a religion founded in a desert region.) The real, bare bones schism of analysing the universe is between "science" and "faith" and "knowledge" and "belief ". Science is a methodology, a way of looking at the universe, by hypothesis and objective observation of evidence. Faith is a belief (it could be drawn from a rational analysis.) system. It sets out with a presumption of truth. It may even survive things that disavow this truth, or it may shoe horn parts of evidence to bolster a truth. These two doctrines are utterly different ways of looking at the universe (this doesn't mean they are automatically hostile. And that the "other" camp is "bad". A thing that Mel has not taken to heart.). And really are a meeting, - not of opposites, but of two incompatible paradigms, that are of two worlds. (I emphasise they are not enemies. Just totally different.)

"If only religion didn’t exist, reason would rule the world and there would be no more wars, tyrannies or murderous hatreds. It follows therefore that religious people are either stupid or unbalanced and are inimical to progress, modernity and happiness.

Well, this universal truth isn’t true at all. In fact, reason is underpinned by religion — at least the Biblical variety. Without Genesis there would have been no Western science, no equality and human rights and no liberal belief in progress."

Religion doesn't cause these bad things. Human nature does. Irrationally based world views and exclusive religious doctrines can (and do) compound these things. That is the real root of reasonable objections to doctrine and faith based analysis. (not always the domain of the religious.) True reasonable thinkers are above such generalisations about religion being solely the cause of human ills.

The claim that the bible has naturally brought about modern science and "enlightenment values" is also very dubious as well. The Genesis creation myth is; even by the standards of its own time, a pretty poor hypothesis about the creation of the world. There is no mention of ancient Greek disciplines such as those of Aristotle and Plato, which if anything (it would be hard to say one specific thing created "Enlightenment values.") contributed the most to establishing modern scientific paradigms. Or other great cultures that predate the New (and Old in some cases.) who seemed to have both grasped science and culture. Indeed the "golden rule"* (Treat others as you wish to be treated.) was likely external to the Abrahamic faiths.

She continues on:

"Indeed, the paradox is that some of our most noisy advocates of reason say a lot of things which are demonstrably absurd.

Take those scientists who promote not science but scientism — the belief that science can deal with every aspect of existence. The scorn and vituperation they heap upon religious believers is fathomless. And yet their materialism leads them to say things which are just… well, nutty.

For example, Professor Richard Dawkins told me he was ‘not necessarily averse’ to the idea that life on earth had been created by a governing intelligence — provided that such an intelligence had arrived from another planet. How can it be that our pre-eminent apostle of reason appears to find little green men more plausible as an explanation for the origin of life than God? "

Mel drops herself in it a bit here. She has for once, cited an example of one of her "accusations" against the Antichrist of atheism himself no less. It is fairly easy to hypothesise that life may exist off Earth. The fact that life exists here is proof that life exists somewhere. This means that given the right conditions and chemical raw materials that it could be hypothesised that it exists elsewhere. Extrapolate up to sentient life (though your perhaps best to wait before evidence of life off Earth before seriously doing this.) and them seeding life elsewhere. Hypothesising the existence of a superbieng (who can break the laws of physics) with no real physical proof of its existence is a bit harder. Melanie Phillips cannot objectively analyse varying hypothesis, and relies on personal opinion. A bit of a bummer, for an article on assessing the scientific method.

"Contrary to popular myth, Western science was not created by Enlightenment secularism. It grew out of the revolutionary claim in the Bible that the universe was the product of a rational Creator, who endowed man with reason so that he could ask questions about the natural world."

That doesn't really stand up. For a start most people can figure out that the world seems to obey some kind of natural laws, and lots of things consistently behave in a routine way. There's an order in place, (though most revealed religious beliefs fall a bit flat on trying to figure out what this order may be.) and that people can study that order to figure it out. Hey Mel, that applied even back then.

I'm not going to slate the Bible totally. I think Jesus had a few good ideas, and smoothed over some of the sillier cruelties of the Old Testament. Although not a believer myself, Christianity has given nice hymns and churches. It can be inspirational and uplifting. It is also often intolerant and divisive to the point of inciting hate, and hypocritical. But one thing that is consistent about it (and it's Islamic and Jewish cousins) is it's inherent irrationality. These three faiths are concerned with the parochial. They are didactic, revealed from authority and are (to the practitioners) exclusive to the truth, to the extent of the contrary (in English this means they are self evidently the truth, and contradictory things should be ignored /revised accordingly.) This doesn't provide an atmosphere clement to rationality.

We get these nuggets that pretty much speak for themselves.

"This is because ideology [secular], by wrenching evidence to fit a prior idea, is inimical to reason and sacrifices truth to power. That’s why environmentalism’s most famous offspring, man-made global warming theory, is totalitarian gobbledegook. There is no evidence to support it, plenty of evidence against it and even more evidence that much of the ‘science’ on which it is based is fraudulent."

None? None at all? Even though Carbon Dioxide (even natural CO2) is a well documented greenhouse gas? No evidence?

"But like other ideologies, it appears immune to challenge, however compelling the case against it."

Circular logic.

She then comes out with this.

"It can’t be [why "militant athiests" dislike religion] that religion has committed terrible atrocities, because atheism has committed terrible atrocities too. Maybe it’s the fear that Biblical morality fetters the freedom to be footloose and fancy-free. After all, if genes are selfish why should they alone have all the fun?"

Oh look, it's the "Hitler and Stalin were atheists too" canard. It's been debunked better elsewhere, so what about the "selfish gene" comment? Its a misunderstanding on her part. The "selfish" only means that a species genes have no "purpose" beyond being perpetuated. It doesn't mean that selfish genes (they're mindless protein chains, and physically couldn't "feel" anything anyway.) beget selfish species. Jeez someone by this woman a science book!

"But since Biblical religion actually underpinned reason and morality, the decline of religion means the erosion of truth and conscience. If religious totalitarianism was rule by the Church and political totalitarianism was rule by the ‘general will’, this is cultural totalitarianism, or rule by the subjective individual.

In Britain, the effects are plain to see. Everything is upside down: the transgressive becomes the norm while the normal is discriminatory; victims become aggressors while aggressors are indulged; education leaves children in a state of noble savagery; broken families are promoted as lifestyle choice.

And a brutal utilitarianism means elderly or coma victims are starved and dehydrated to death, with anyone who dares to mention the sanctity of human life dismissed as a Bible-bashing nut-job."

Let's put aside that religion and morality are somehow physically intimately bound at the seems; - my brain is really starting to hurt now. Seemingly completely interchangeable right wing memes are being mashed up together with tortured logic to produce a horrid anti - science mess.

I realised that in the end I had to throw the towel in a bit with this stuff. I mean how can you possibly counteract an article that berates its opponents for treating the world as divided into two impermeable factions, their opponents being horrid bigots. - By splitting the argument into two utterly opposing camps. The other side being horrid bigots. I mean for Gods sake:

" In Manichean fashion, the left divides the world into rival camps of good and evil. Anyone who is not on the left is ‘the right’ and thus beyond the moral pale. But much that is demonised in this way as ‘right-wing’ is simply an attempt to uphold truth, reality and liberty against the distortions, fabrications and bullying of ideology."

Takes one to know one Melanie.

I need a bloody drink now.

*There is some evidence to suggest that Jesus may have been influenced by Hellenic disciplines. It is thought that Joseph was no humble carpenter, but a master tradesmen, with JC as his apprentice, travelling around the world, and immersing himself in foreign disciplines (even perhaps what is now England). The "son of God" thing may have been Jesus applying Helenic systematics to a local religion. Him seeing himself as a gateway between God and ordinary "Joe Palestinians" A kind of Bronze Age mathematical out the box thinking.