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From Spinneyhead

When people start blaming “politically correct teachers” and “the doctrines of multi-culturalism” I want to reach into the monitor and slap them really, really hard. Sorry folks, but your heroine Maggie Thatcher, and the generations of politicians before and since who’ve tried to pander to the reactionary Daily Mail and tabloid readers, did an order more damage to British society than an army of multi-cultural teachers ever could.

I know I’m not the only person that parses the phrase “It’s political correctness gone mad” as “It’s not worth paying any further attention to this twit”.

I’ve been meaning to link to Slacktivist’s excellent post about the brittle nature of extreme fundamentalism for a couple of days, but I didn’t have one of those round tuits.

That’s part of the fundamentalist “worldview” — to use one of their favorite words — that only these two options exist. Option No. 1: Total and unquestioning belief in the God of the fundies’ literalist text. Option No. 2: Nihilism.

Her three young children are being taught this binary worldview. What will become of them? I’ve seen this story play out before, dozens of times. The only way to preserve the fragile faith they are being taught is to keep it sheltered from the world, like John Travolta in The Boy in the Plastic Bubble — they have to be sent to fundie school, or to be home-schooled, until they are old enough to attend Bob Jones University. In the meantime they must be kept away from Bill Nye, and the Discovery channel, and NASA.gov. They can’t even be allowed to watch The Boy in the Plastic Bubble lest they begin to ask dangerous questions about Buzz Aldrin.

Some few of these kids will somehow manage to maintain this soap-bubble faith all the way through to adulthood. They’ll marry within the bubble and teach this fundamentalism to another generation of children. But those cases are the exceptions. Reality is too hard and pointy a place for soap bubbles to survive very long and most of these kids will end up being forced by reality to reject Option No. 1. Unsurprisingly, they tend to turn to what they have been taught is their only alternative.

Read the whole thing, as the saying goes.

It does make you wonder how fundamentalism manages to perpetuate itself long-term. I can only assume there’s a two-way traffic between fundamentalism and self-destructive nihilism.

It’s not often the far left Lenin’s Tomb agrees with the rightwing Daily Telegraph. But when they do, it’s worth paying attention, as with the story of Ben Griffin, the former SAS soldier who quit in disgust last June after witnessing the Iraq occupation at first hand.

“As far as the Americans were concerned, the Iraqi people were sub-human, untermenschen. You could almost split the Americans into two groups: ones who were complete crusaders, intent on killing Iraqis, and the others who were in Iraq because the Army was going to pay their college fees. They had no understanding or interest in the Arab culture. The Americans would talk to the Iraqis as if they were stupid and these weren’t isolated cases, this was from the top down. There might be one or two enlightened officers who understood the situation a bit better but on the whole that was their general attitude. Their attitude fuelled the insurgency. I think the Iraqis detested them.”

I think it’s a waste of time to now argue about whether or not the invasion was illegal, or whether there really were WMDs. That’s all so much water under the bridge. What matters today is the occupation, and where it’s going. America’s armed forces seem to be trained exclusively as assault troops, good at blowing stuff up and destroying enemies. What they don’t seem to be trained for is the sort of peacekeeping duties Britain has a lot of experience of.

Does’s America’s political and military leadership realised the mistakes it’s making and continue to make? Do they actually care?

I haven’t posted much on politics lately, largely because other people say what I might want to say, only better. So I’m linking a a couple of posts from people on the blogroll.

First, there’s a good post by Matt Sellwood, now a Green councillor on Oxford City Council, giving an example of the sort of pragmatic compromises involved in making real political decisions. Have the online arguments with Amadán all those years ago done some good?

Second, Temple Stark gives us a thorough fisking of Donald Rumsfeld.

Richard Hall’s Economics and Theology has reviewed Richard Layard’s Happiness: Lessons from a New Science

I have to quote the introduction.

There was the “Making Slough Happy” series on TV recently. All Slough was up in arms about it: most of the miserable people interviewed weren’t locals, community groups were ignored, some of the presenters were batty, and so on. But there was some useful economics and psychology hidden away there.

Coming from Slough, I got a lot of stick from colleagues at work over that stupid programme. I responded (to the worst offender) that any attempt to create a “Make Warrington Happy” would result in the presenters getting bottled.

The review itself makes some interesting points, but I’m not sure what to make of this:

He now argues that the promotion of happiness should be a major element of government policy.

This conjures up images of Tony Blair creating a Ministry of Happiness and forcing everyone to wear his stupid rictus grins.

Harry’s Place has a post that’s spawned an interesting discussion thread on the power and pitfalls of the Blogosphere. There’s a particularly interesting comment about, well, comments.

One problem with internet social groupings such as blogs, Usenet and message boards is that they tend to deteriorate over time – obnoxious posters drive away all of the sensitive folks. Blogs have a big advantage in that the owner of the blog can moderate and throw out the yahoos, but when they don’t take that responsibility the results are always ugly.

That’s more or less what happened to Blogcritics.org, which became so overrun by the worst kind of trolls I’ve had to give up on it. Although making one of the very worst of the trolls into the Politics editor probably didn’t help. What was the site owner thinking?

I can understand why Norm doesn’t have comments. My own readership is so small that comment trolls aren’t really a problem (lthough I wish I could say the same for spam)

Orcinus tells us of the Combat for Christ course. While their supporters and apologists will no doubt claim that all it does is promote True Christian Manliness in the manner of the Boy’s Brigade, some of the course descriptions seem to betray a more sinister agenda….

Weapons Course: This course challenges the Christian Soldier to engage and eliminate his greatest enemies.

Allegory and metaphor? Perhaps. But the fundies are not known for their comprehension of allegory or metaphor. Do you think such an establishment would be tolerated if they were Moslems rather than “Christians”?

And the founder sounds like such a nice person

An Ooltewah Minister faces domestic assault charges..

Police say he beat up his own daughter.

A family argument over whom the girl was dating led to the charge.

According to Bradley County Sheriff’s reports, Community Baptist church Pastor Bryan Mowery spanked the girl with a belt first — then threw her into a closet, kicked her and hit her in the face with his fist.

Mowery reportedly also got a nine millimeter handgun from his bedroom and fired it outside his Trewitt Road home.

… For now, Mowery is out of jail on his own recognizance.

It’s the existance of things like this that make me wonder if the US Religious far-right is as big a long-term threat as extremist Islamism. What I don’t know from several thousand miles away is whether the extremists represent a tiny and largely marginalised fringe, or whether they’re the leading edge of something much larger and more dangerous.

Dave links to the application of Occrams Razor to the theory of Intelligent Design, and comes to the only possible squamous and rugose conclusion.

Jonathan Calder has a new theory to explain the popularity of the Iron Lady.

One of the factors behind Mrs Thatcher’s election victory was her act of abolishing free milk in schools.

Some people hated her for it and dubbed her the “milk snatcher”. But they didn’t have to drink the stuff. The crates were not kept in a refrigerator, so on a hot day it was already halfway to going sour by the time mid-morning break came. The trick then was to avoid drinking the stuff.

Yes, Mrs Thatcher was swept to power by a generation of grateful first-time voters who wanted to thank her for delivering them from the horrors of school milk.

I’m not sure I completely buy this, but it’s an interesting idea.

Jonathan has some more sober thoughts on the sorry Charles Kennedy affair, and I think I agree with him that it’s just about the worst possible outcome. I think Kennedy’s position is now untenable, and he needs to go for the sake of the party.

As anyone watching any UK news reports should know by now, there’s been a huge explosion at a fuel storage facility in Hemel Hempstead, resulting in a black cloud of smoke spreading across a large part of southern England. John at The England Project, who lives in Hemel Hempstead, has been liveblogging the event. At the moment, it’s looking like this was most likely the result of an equipment failure or maintenance error. Although terrorism can’t be ruled out, it’s looking unlikely. Certainly early rumours of a plane hitting the site have been discounted.

It’s a miracle that nobody was killed. I’m assuming that this means that everybody who was supposed to have been in the area at the time is accounted for.

While it doesn’t affect me directly, the location appears to be very close to the head office of my current employer. The company website is currently not accessible; this doesn’t look good.

Update. Looks like the place took the full force of the explosion. BBC News reports:

Northgate Information Solutions – the UK’s leading supplier of specialist software for human resources – said four of its employees had been taken to hospital but were later discharged.

In a statement to the stock market, Northgate said: “The fabric of the building and the fixtures and equipment inside have been badly damaged. The back-up systems that were in place have also been rendered inoperable.

“Northgate’s ability to service its customers has therefore been temporarily affected.”

The firm, whose shares fell in early trade, said a fall-back plan had been put into action, and work transferred to other offices from its main headquarters, where 400 people are employed.

“Northgate’s financial exposure is limited by its insurance policies that provide sufficient cover for the building and its contents as well as for any business interruption,” it said.