Cognitive Dissidents

You know that things are getting serious when blogs normally about comics and art starts writing pieces like this - but I am not surprised - after all this was a hacker blog about computers and music once upon a time ...

In this piece "Blunting the Senses in the Name of Fairness", David Thompson speaks truth to power about many things - including "Cultural Racism, Islamaphobia, and "Moral Equivalence"

By way of further illustration, Rosie O’Donnell was happy to assert that, "radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America." But while red-faced evangelists may say, for instance, that gay people are wicked, damned to hellfire, etc, I don’t know of any internationally renowned Christian leaders who are calling for the imprisonment and killing of gay people. Unlike the supposedly “moderate” Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who insists that gay men and lesbians should be “killed in the worst manner possible.” Not condemned, ‘corrected’, prayed for, or pitied, or any of the usual nonsense spouted by Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson et al; but murdered - as brutally as possible.

Guardian regular Karen Armstrong has echoed Reverend Gaffney and dutifully reminded us that all religions have a fundamentalist fringe, and thus, apparently, no further judgment needs to be made regarding theological factors. But the size of that ‘fringe’, its relationship to the mainstream, and its specific ideological features are not the same for all religions. Jehovah’s Witnesses are extremist in certain respects, and they have some pretty bizarre ideas about blood transfusion. And the Amish might be thought of as fundamentalist, too. But where are the eighty or so groups of Amish suicide bombers? Where are the Methodist extremists who want to legally subordinate all non-Methodists as an act of religious observance? Where are the Buddhists who murdered the translators of a ‘blasphemous’ novel while chanting the words of the Buddha as absolute justification? If all religious ideologies are equal in their merits and shortcomings, and equally inclined to homicidal intolerance, shouldn’t we be seeing all of these things, or something like them, roughly in proportion to the size each religion’s following?

Right - so while I note that "Security Theatre" has not made me safer - I also note that the main reason I am not safer is that the threat doesn't seem to come from Baptists, Amish, Atheists, Hindus, Mormons, Buddhists, Gays, Transexuals, Sodomites and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all ...

"Security Theatre" refuses to address a simple point: Not all people are as likely to become suicide bombers ...

There is a skew in the statistics - and it doesn't lead me to conclude that Jehovah's Witnesses are a threat - even if they do really, really want to go to heaven ...

Read it all here - its worth the time ...

Tags: cultural fascism, cultural racism, islam, moral equivalency, fundamentalism