I used to be a huge fan of Richard Dawkins. His masterpiece, The Selfish Gene, was massively significant in my life. When I read it in 1986 I recognised a man who was able to express in clear, concise and scientific terms, beliefs that I had nurtured for some years. Almost everything he wrote thereafter was eagerly consumed by me. He struck me as being a brilliant, gentle and humourous man who simply wanted to tell the truth without pushing any personal cause. So strong was my admiration for him that I would sometimes say in conversations about him, “Dawkins is wrong to say there is no God. Dawkins is God!” Childish perhaps; designed to provoke, probably; sincere, certainly. So when a friend of mine who had met him described him as a self-satisfied prick, I felt personally insulted. Continue reading “Richard Dawkins loses the plot”
Category: Politics
Do we Care?
Sometimes it is worth stopping to think how much more real things become when one knows, loves and cares about individual people caught up in some of the situations we are discussing on various internet sites.
I remember my anguish over the conflict in former Yugoslavia; we have friends who live there. We were close to their children and they have visited us often. In all the confusion of this war the lack of communication from this family was hard to bear. Continue reading “Do we Care?”
Some people never grow up.
These sweet young things were stupid enough to think that Gordon MacDoom was pretty cool at Uni. They are now in their 50’s and still, apparently, as batty as the article in the link describes. Some people never learn, do they?
Taxpayers’ Cash Paying for Politicians?
This is another of my earlier blogs – which seems quite forward thinking, two years after the fact 🙂
Not with my bleedin’ cash they ain’t! We are now informed by our lords and masters that the way to avoid any more scandals like the recent cash for honours nonsense is to fund political parties from general taxation. Let’s examine this proposition. At bottom it means that the government will confiscate a sum of money from me and give it to a political party which I might otherwise not support. It is a forced donation over which I will have no say. Since I must work to get this money, what is being proposed amounts to the imposition of forced labour on behalf of the largest party, with no say in how that party should represent me, or what policies I am prepared to support – unless that is, I happen to be a supporter of that party. It seems to me that this is in direct violation of the rule; ‘No taxation without representation,’ whcih, if I recall correctly, led to an insurrection by British citizens against the then government in the 1770’s and early 80’s, (1775 – 1783, to be exact.)
Continue reading “Taxpayers’ Cash Paying for Politicians?”
Slavoj Zizek – A Philosopher of Our Time
Until recently I haven’t found many that impress me among contemporary political and social theorists, but Slavjo Zizek is cut from an entirely different cloth.
At first glance the man is hard to listen to, he has a slight lisp, an East European accent and an over active mind that his ability to relate can’t keep up with. Physically he is a bear of a man, looks like an unkempt slob and could easily be dismissed as a total crank.
Here is a man who believes in the purity of film as a medium for social aspiration. An uncluttered dreamsacape in which anything is possible, given the right articulation. He believes it is the purest form of aspiration.
Zizek is also a man who against the flow predicted the economic crash based upon the greed of capitalism and the intensive farming of shareholders. He is a man with many confounding and conflicting ideals but he is right.
The Afghan Chronicles
The Afghan Chronicles
I was struck by how MyT has re-filed all of my blogs and any page references to stories on ‘Afghanistan’ have been suppressed and tucked away in obscurity. In locating them and reading back I am amazed at how relevant and fair these accounts are of some of the key issues of the day and how they continue to be topical points of discussion in the war on terror. I thought it would therefore be worth publishing the back catalogue here for DNMT (Dynamite) bloggers to enjoy, so I have grouped the page links together in date order and I hope this will help to stimulate our own debate in light of the current London conference. If you are going to attempt these all at once, get yourself a nice coffee and allow yourself a bit of time – you have been warned!
Questioning the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949
I have given some thought to how I can promote my new political reference database and give my full support to the blogging content and community here at Definitely Not MyT (DNMT or ‘Dynamite’, as I fondly refer to the acronym!).
I therefore intend to post a short notice of new political blog content here, with a link to my site and a related blog for those interested in serious political debate about issues of UK political reform.
Any non-political blogging will be done here directly.
Release information:
New content has been added covering the UK Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949 and related political reference information; for those interested in them and their content and their effects on the British Constitution.
The Blog: “Questioning the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949“, is now also available for comment.
The content of the blog and supporting site reference material can be found at:
http://wordpress.enfranchise.com
Political blogs will be copied over to this site after a week or so of exclusive preview and then will be available for general comment, discussion or ridecule. I will try to leave links thereafter leading to this location from elsewhere after that. This means original content will still appear here, so you won’t miss it (as if, you’d care to! LOL!)
I intend to support this as the main blogging site for the ‘Dynamite’ community, waifs and strays. My site isn’t designed to compete or act as ‘Blog Central’.
Do We Have a Right to Self Determination?
The original concept of Athenian Democracy was to give the citizens of the City-State a say in key policy decisions of the nation.
Should we have that same right today? Or is it right that parliamentary democracy acts in what others believe are our best interests?
Let’s have your views.
I hope this makes for an interesting debate.
You can read background source material on the structure and methods of Modern Parliamentary Democracy and about the Athenian System on my http://wordpress.enfranchise.com political site resource.
Boadicea's Chariot 
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