Sam Harris tjáir sig um vísindi og trúarbrögð

With the miasma of “Intelligent Design” slowly poisoning our intellectual discourse, it is amazing to consider that a significant percentage of scientists—40 percent!—still believe that reason and faith are compatible. Science, we are often told, “cannot prove that God does not exist”; religion and science “address different questions”; there are two “magisteria” given for human contemplation, and, as luck would have it, they do not overlap. The United States is now the most technologically advanced society in the history of the world, and yet nearly half of its citizens—45 percent—and some considerable number of its leaders will probably ignore the current debate over “Intelligent Design”—because they are old-school creationists who believe that our species was made out of dirt in the year 4004 b.c.e. by the hand of an almighty god.

Lesið restina hér: Selling Out Science

Áhugaverðar vangaveltur um uppruna trúarbragðanna

Reexamining Religion

Pervez Hoodbhoy is a well-known physicist who teaches at the Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan. He is also well-known for his frequent and intelligent interventions in politics. In an article entitled Miracles, Wars, and Politics he writes:

PervezOn the morning of the first Gulf War (1991), having just heard the news of the US attack on Baghdad, I walked into my office in the physics department in a state of numbness and depression. Mass death and devastation would surely follow. I was dismayed, but not surprised, to discover my PhD student, a militant activist of the Jamaat-i-Islami’s student wing in Islamabad, in a state of euphoria. Islam’s victory, he said, is inevitable because God is on our side and the Americans cannot survive without alcohol and women. He reasoned that neither would be available in Iraq, and happily concluded that the Americans were doomed. Then he reverentially closed his eyes and thrice repeated "Inshallah" (if Allah so wills).

The utter annihilation of Saddam Hussein's army by the Americans which soon followed, did little, of course, to attenuate this student's convictions. (Also, it is mildly interesting that Muslim conceptions of heaven focus so much on precisely the easy availability of alcohol and women.) Constantly confronted by such attitudes, atheists such as myself are often driven to hair-pulling exasperation by the seeming irrationality of religious belief, and specifically its immunity to refutation by experience, logic, argument, or it seems, anything else.

Þessa grein er vel þess virði að lesa. Fólki er líka óhætt að skella þessum hlekk (3 Quarks Daily) í bókamerkin sín, oftar en ekki eitthvað skemmtilegt og fræðandi þarna að finna.

Áróður og markaðsetning

Does Using The Word 'Propaganda' Help Corporations?

Marketing is propaganda. Positioning propaganda as distinct from other forms of marketing is state-of-the-art persuasion.

The definition of Propaganda varies greatly by source. The Catholic Church coined the word “propaganda” in 1622 within the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, which was commissioned by Pope Gregory XV. One of Pope Gregory’s accountants came to the conclusion that it was more cost effective to teach Catholicism than to invade and force conversion. The accountant had the insight to recognize that a territory could be acquired less expensively by converting people’s minds. It might take more time, but if you convert the minds, the bodies will follow. And, converting minds is less expensive than physically enforcing new sovereignty.

The word propaganda has radically changed during the 20th Century. In the Introduction to the re-release of Edward Barnays’ Propaganda, Mark Crispin Miller explains, “Prior to World War One, the word propaganda was little-used in English, except by certain social activists, and close observers of the Vatican; and, back then, propaganda tended not to be the damning term we know today.”

Many people see propaganda as marketing. Many Americans are waking up from a propaganda-induced coma yelling things like, “They lied! They packaged a lie and they sold it to me.” Great. Many of these same folks then rant about the evils of propaganda. Their anger is long overdue. But, bashing propaganda strengthens the control of the world’s greatest oppressor, our present form of world government, Corporatocracy.

Er Suður Ameríka loksins að smjúga undan hæl Bandaríkjanna?

The Rise Of America's New Enemy

To the man in the bus, and to Beatrice whose children are being immunised and taught history, art and music for the first time, and Celedonia, in her seventies, reading and writing for the first time, and Jose whose life was saved by a doctor in the middle of the night, the first doctor he had ever seen, Hugo Chavez is neither a “firebrand” nor an “autocrat” but a humanitarian and a democrat who commands almost two thirds of the popular vote, accredited by victories in no less than nine elections. Compare that with the fifth of the British electorate that re-installed Blair, an authentic autocrat.

Chávez and the rise of popular social movements, from Colombia down to Argentina, represent bloodless, radical change across the continent, inspired by the great independence struggles that began with SimOn Bolívar, born in Venezuela, who brought the ideas of the French Revolution to societies cowed by Spanish absolutism. Bolívar, like Che Guevara in the 1960s and Chavez today, understood the new colonial master to the north. “The USA,” he said in 1819, “appears destined by fate to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.”

Tómt klúður í Kansas

Kansas, Where "Ignorant" is the New "Educated"

Kansas: People say that it's flat. But to me it seems to be going downhill.

Somewhere right now in Kansas, there is a little child who may grow up to be a brilliant scientist. She may make fantastic contributions to science, and future generations may remember her as one of the brightest intellectual lights of her time. But if so, it will be despite the public education that she received in Kansas, because today six dimwits on the state's Board of Education voted to lower the standards for how science is taught.

Needless to say, they don't think they are lowering the standards--to the contrary, they think they are raising them. That's how you can tell they are dimwits.

Fréttir og ekki-fréttir

Project Censored presents the 10 biggest stories the mainstream media ignored over the past year.

JUST FOUR DAYS before the 2004 presidential election, a prestigious British medical journal published the results of a rigorous study by Dr. Les Roberts, a widely respected researcher. Roberts concluded that close to 100,000 people had died in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Most were noncombatant civilians. Many were children.

But that news didn't make the front pages of the major newspapers. It wasn't on the network news. So most voters knew little or nothing about the brutal civilian impact of President George W. Bush's war when they went to the polls.

That's just one of the big stories the mainstream news media ignored, blacked out, or underreported over the past year, according to Project Censored, a media watchdog group based at California's Sonoma State University.

Every year project researchers scour the media looking for news that never really made the news, publishing the results in a book, this year titled Censored 2006. Of course, as Project Censored staffers painstakingly explain every year, their "censored" stories aren't literally censored, per se. Most can be found on the Internet, if you know where to look. And some have even received some ink in the mainstream press. "Censorship," explains project director Peter Phillips, "is any interference with the free flow of information in society." The stories highlighted by Project Censored simply haven't received the kind of attention they warrant, and therefore haven't made it into the greater public consciousness.

"If there were a real democratic press, these are the kind of stories they would do," says Sut Jhally, professor of communications at the University of Massachusetts and executive director of the Media Education Foundation.

Fundið via GNN.TV

Börn í markaðsþjóðfélagi

Kallar eftir málþingi um markaðssetningu sem beinist að börnum

Ingibjörg Þ. Rafnar, umboðsmaður barna, segir að sér berist margar kvartanir og ábendingar um að auglýsingar, sem höfða eiga til barna og sýndar eru í sjónvarpi í kringum barnatímana, séu ótilhlýðilegar. Sumir foreldrar kalli eftir því að tilteknar auglýsingar verði bannaðar, t.d. þær sem auglýsi sætindi og óhollt fæði. Vill hún að málþing verði haldið þar sem tekið verði á þessu máli.

...

„Ég held að það sé miklu einfaldara að setja reglur eins og Norðmenn og Svíar hafa gert, sem banna auglýsingar í kringum barnaefni,“ sagði Ingibjörg í samtali við fréttavef Morgunblaðsins. Sé þar átt við sjónvarpsefni sem sérstaklega er ætlað litlum börnum.
„Mér finnst þetta eitt af því sem við ættum að skoða, við ættum m.a. að skoða það hvort við ættum að gera greinarmun á því hvort auglýsingar beinast að ungum börnum. Ung börn hafa ekki þroska til að átta sig á því að um er að ræða auglýsingar [...] þarna er verið að nýta sér trúgirni þeirra og þroskaleysi eða reynsluleysi. Við erum með ákvæði í lögunum sem banna slíkt, bæði í lögum um eftirlit með óréttmætum viðskiptaháttum og í útvarpslögum. Kannski þurfum við bara að framfylgja þessum reglum sem við þó höfum betur en við gerum,“ segir Ingibjörg.

Ég get ekki annað en tekið undir með henni Ingibjörgu, velferði barna hlýtur að vega meira en velferði auglýsenda... eða hvað?

Reiðir frakkar

Rage of French Youth Is a Fight for Recognition

LE BLANC-MESNIL, France, Nov. 5 -- Mohammed Rezzoug, caretaker of the municipal gymnasium and soccer field, knows far more about the youths hurling firebombs and torching cars on the streets of this Paris suburb than do the police officers and French intelligence agents struggling to nail the culprits.

He can identify most of the perpetrators. So can almost everyone else in the neighborhoods that have been attacked.

"They're my kids," said Rezzoug, a garrulous 45-year-old with thinning black hair and skin the color of a walnut.

While French politicians say the violence now circling and even entering the capital of France and spreading to towns across the country is the work of organized criminal gangs, the residents of Le Blanc-Mesnil know better. Many of the rioters grew up playing soccer on Rezzoug's field. They are the children of baggage handlers at nearby Charles de Gaulle International Airport and cleaners at the local schools

Þúsundir mótmæla stefnu Bush í Suður Ameríku

Mar del Plata, Argentina – A hemispheric summit meant to help create jobs and spread democracy throughout the region opened today with large-scale anti-US demonstrations and deep divisions among participating nations about the Bush administration’s expanded free-trade agenda.

Tens of thousands of protesters marched the streets of this seaside resort calling for Bush to be expelled from the country and later cheered when Venezuela President Hugo Chavez labeled Washington’s free-trade program dead and buried.

”Mar del Plata is the tomb of ALCA,” said Chavez, using the Spanish acronym for the Free Trade Area of the Americas plan backed by the White House. “We brought our shovels to bury it,” Chavez said of the plan, which would create a unified trade bloc from Alaska to Argentina.

Meira hér.