Die Harry Potter, die, die.

The fourth cinemtaic turdfest in the Harry Potter series begins besmirching the screens of mutliplexes across South Africa today. Let us all observe a moment of silence to honour the passing of intelligence and maturity.

There are lots of reasons to give this cinematic abortion a wide berth. I don't agree with some Christian zealots that Harry Potter is harmful because it features occult/Satanic elements. Clearly, this Christianity fad has NOT made people more compassionate or tolerant, so lets give the other side a chance. Maybe if we all become Satanists, we would begin to act more like Christians. I know that Satanism can render you loony but lets face it- you certainly can't be more fucked up than some of the Christians I have met.

No, the reason that I think adults should steer clear of this tripe is that they are adults. When I was growing up, many adults recommended books like the Famous Five to me ( a gravely disappointing work, given that Georgina the lesbian never quite understands that Anne wants more than just companionship). Rarely did they say things like " Son, this book is so good that I read it' because it was understood that some books were for adults and some for kids. If any adult admitted that they had read a Famous Five novel, most people would have thought of them as morons. Yet today adults will gladly fess up to having read HP novels six or seven times ( how fun it must be to spend a holiday with someone who has read Harry Potter and the Ingrown Toenail seven times).

The spread of the popularity of HP among adults mirrors a general dumbing down of our society. Learning Greek, Latin, music and an appreciation for poetry are no longer considered part of being a well-educated and well-rounded adult. Instead we have legions of cretins, breathing through their mouths, yearning for the next installment in this travesty.' Oooh' they chorus' Harry has got his first pube'. Honestly, I might have cared about which house wins the Interhouse Quidditch ( or however the fuck you spell it) cup when I was seven but as an adult I should have better things to woory about.

What's next? Looking forward to the next 'novel' in the Ben the Dog series? Adults rereading the adventures of Mark and Kathy multiple times? Spare me!

Sixteen days against bollocks.

White ribbons adorn every possible space in South Africa at the mo, to mark the '16 days against violence against women' campaign. The hope is that by festooning everything with the ribbons, men will stop treating their women like property ( or at least wait until the end of the 16 days to beat their wives/girlfriends/daughters up again). The campaign is bound to have all the efficacy of a Jehovah's Witness in Tehran.

The problem is that most people don't understand real rights for women must be founded on two pillars. Laws must exist to protect women. But the means for enforcing these laws must also exist. There are plenty laws that protect women from abuse ( some by depriving men of their right's to due process). Women, however, continue to be abused because the average policeman tasked with enforcing these laws is as bigger mysogonist as the abusers.

What needs to change is the mindset of the average policeman, who needs to be convinced that women deserve the protection of the law. A white ribbon campaign targets lots of civilians, but I remain unconvinced that it does much to change the attitudes of the boys in blue.

I don't know much about crack whores, but I know what I like.

I am not opposed to nannying in general, especially when such is carried out by tall amply bosomed Nordic nannies who punish naughty boys by bending them over knees and spanking them. But when the government tries to play nanny, not only does this induce vomiting because you might accidentally conjure up the mental image of Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma in nannyesque fishnet stockings (resist the urge to pluck your eyes from their orbits), it also really does not make any sense.

Our government is not unique in dictating to adult citizens what they may or may not do. There are two activities I would like to see legalized forthwith: prostitution and drug use ( and not just because some of my best friends are crack whores).

We live in a country where being a criminal carries with it a certain prestige and where criminality is rampant. Everybody knows of someone who was murdered in cold blood so that a piece of human shit could make off with their car/cellphone/wallet. I would submit that one of the reasons we live in a latter day version of the Wild West is because our government has its head up its arse. Clearly, our resources are stretched to their very limits. So instead of wasting valuable time and money pursuing hookers and drug users, why not put cops to work actually stopping real crimes that really have a very deleterious effect on the lives of SA citizens? Of course, there are drawbacks to such a course of action. Cops won’t be able to use the threat of jail time to elicit freebies from hookers and will have to start paying for their nookie like the rest of us while they will also have to start buying drugs instead of just using those that they confiscate. I am sure, though, that we will all learn to get by.

The way in which the system is set up at the moment has benefits for two groups only: pimps and dealers. It is a matter of simple economics: when the supply of a commodity is limited (in this case because of seriously flawed takes on what the government should and should not do), the price of that commodity increases. So by keeping drugs and whoring illegal, we are in effect swelling the bank accounts of the very people that the war on drugs/prostitution hopes to eliminate. If the system is brought, kicking and screaming, into the light of day, prices of hookers and hits will fall. Good news anyday of the week!

But aside from these very astute practical reasons why drugs and prostitution should be made legal, there are also compelling philosophical reasons. When you begin to ask questions about what makes a particular action criminal, most people will concede that such an action has to harm somebody else. If I take a dump on my neighbours stoep, he has to wake up to the smell of poop. I have harmed him. Therefore I have committed a crime.

Where is the wronged party in a drug/prostitution transaction? If a hooker wants to sell that which she owns (i.e. her body and time) to me, at a price that we both agree on, who is the victim? The answer is that there is no victim. Drugs may well harm those that use them. But the modern liberal democratic state is based on the idea that you have sovereignty over your person. You are allowed to harm yourself if you so wish by smoking, getting body piercings, or even attending a bondage party ( nothing to do with discussing bank mortgages, for the uninitiated). Why not extend such freedom to the use of narcotics?

There is a certain sickening hypocrisy in the why in which our collection of parliamentary clowns and charlatans purport to run this country. On one hand we are told that drugs are naughty because they might harm our brains and livers. Yet, in the self same breath, the sheep and blockheads who warm the benches of parliament allow booze merchants to peddle their wares. If you want to protect us from something, then surely it makes sense to protect us from alcohol? The cause of our very high road accident death toll every Christmas is not shrouded in mystery. The reason that the highways flow red with blood is because South Africans drink and drive. And the reason that we drink and drive is because the consumption of alcohol is punted to anybody who has ever read a magazine, seen a movie or watched the insipid drivel that passes for TV on SABC 1, 2 and 3.If one drug is truly harmful, it is liquor. Yet Satan’s urine is freely available to anybody tall enough to thrust money over the counter at the local bottle store.

The same can be said of gambling. Gambling is nothing more than an attempt to get at other’s money without working for it. When you use the services of streetwalkers, you receive a very definite product. The same cannot be said of pissing your money away at the nearest faux Tuscan village/imperial roman palace.

It is utterly inconsistent to say that we need to be protected from the ravages of prostitution and narcotics, and then to allow alcohol and gambling to be freely available.

Why I don't like quackery II

For those of you who think that we should just let wackos and nutjobs be:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Jones#Jonestown_and_mass_suicide

Today is a very special illustration of why we should combat charlatanism wherever we find it.

Is eating meat ethical?

I recently read 'The Lives of Animals' by JM Coetzee, which is really just a rather lucid defense of vegetarianism. Reading the book motivated me to do some thinking on the issue of whether or not it is moral to eat meat.

I don't buy the argument that simply killing an animal is cruel. Animals get killed in their natural habitats all the time and in ways that are often more painful than the (relative) mercy of slaughterhouse. Death is a natural part of live and is in itself not inherently cruel or aborant.

What does disturb me ( and Coetzee, judging from his book) is the conditions under which the animals are forced to live. Take the example of pigs- extremely intelligent and sensitive creatures, so near in nature to us that their organs can be used in certain transplant operations. In many industrial farms pigs are kept in very small places, forced to live in their own muck. The only time that they see the light of day is just before they are slaughtered. Living in an industrial pig barn must be as close to Hell as we are ever likely to see- hot, noisy, lightless.

By buying meat products we are complicit in this crime. The fact that it is committed against animals might be rationalized away. But I believe that any human being, with a functioning conscience, cannot but be moved ( on a very primal level) by the sight of an animals forced to live in a dark, crowded deathcamp. The revulsion is devoid of intellect- there is no good reason why we should want to help the chicken forced to live in a post box and be force fed. But for some reason we do.

I think that the moral path lies in eating only free range produce- i.e. that produced sans the use of the sorts of methods made famous by Auswitz.

On his blindness

I recently reread the poem 'On his blindness' by John Milton and picked up on something that had elluded me. There is a line in the poem in which Milton says that people who bear God's mild yoke serve him best. Here 'yoke' means 'the harness used to cohere cattle to ploughs, carts, etc'. For the first time the portent of this metaphor became clear to me and I think illustrates some of the worse aspects of Christianity ( and by implication , most religions).

A yoke is used to tether an animal to a cart. Does Milton really have the temerity to compare human beings to cattle? This seems to be a typical Christian mindset- human beings are little more than animals and must cower in the sight of an Almighty God.

Those who compare themselves to cattle will eventually begin to think like cattle. Belief in an external, all powerful force that determines the nature and direction of your life can only encourage apathy. And thus we see Christains, who believe that God will make their lives better, spending time in church, asking God to help them, when they should be spending their time helping themselves.

It is difficult to be a get-up-and-go Christain. Afterall, if your fate rests in the hands of God, surely other forces can also control your fate? How about the government? Surely, if God can make things peachy for you, then the government can too? So why bother helping yourself- there are plenty of helping hands out there to make sure your life gets better.

I am not an ox and I control my own destiny. I do not bow before man or God. And unlike many Christians, I am more concerned with living this life than currying favour for the next one.

Why I am not a Christian.

Recently, a student of mine asked me what religion I believe in. When I told him that I was an atheist, he seemed more than a little shocked and betrayed.

Let me use this oppurtunity to explain why I think Christianity ( and most other religions) are just not a good idea.

One the social level, religions are kind of like restaurants. Just like House O'Ribs and Sir Filthy's Burgerland compete for your moola ( a limited commodity), so Islam, Christianity and Flying Spaghetti Monsterism compete for souls ( and the cash that such are willing to tithe to celestial causes). Every hymn loving Christian who decides to start worshipping cows ala Hinduism means less green stuff in the collection plate which in turn means more members of the clergy having to look for real jobs. The more consumers/worshippers spend at other outlets/places of worship, the less is left for you and your barnd of disillusion.

This scenario ( roleplayers competing for scarce resources) gives rise to advertising - 'Eat at Sir Filthy's! It's better and cheaper than that other place'- of a certain type. No business magnate is going to pay for advertising that sends the message that his product is equal to ( or worse than) that of his competitors. Ditto religions- most faith systems have a vested interest in portraying their path to Heaven as the only true and dependable one. If Christian missionaries preached that believing in Jesus was one way of getting to the giant harp ensemble in the sky but that continuing to worship the Feathered Serpent would also work out okay in the end, no one would convert ( afterall, you own believes are just as effective but you still get to wear loinclothes and have sex doggy style, which JC seems to believe is a big no-no).

It's a short leap from saying that only you and your brethren have the keys to everlasting life to saying that the people across the river/mountain/sea, who happen to look different to what you do, are evil. Afterall, you've tried to convince them of the error of their ways. But they just don't listen. How can they reject the loving grace of the Flying Spaghetti Monster? They must be evil! They need to die! (cue the Crusades).

It is no accident that the bloodiest and most unreasonalbe wars have always started because of religious questions.