Savage Popcorn

Lionel Shriver on the entrenched and self-defeating nature of Western drugs policy:

Davies was dead sound in calling for an end to drug prohibition in the name of mere “harm reduction”. There’s no good answer here. But the costs of this puritanical thou-shalt-not are gobsmacking.

…

So deal with it. Regulate drugs, tax them, monitor them, just like alcohol. You’d take preying on that appetite away from elements that have grown so powerful that they constitute rival governments. You’d have far fewer drug-related deaths, because the product would be pure, its potency established. You’d clear prisons of people guilty of nothing more than wanting to feel different, and you’d free up the police force to go after people who actually want to hurt somebody else. You’d take the cultural shine off drugs altogether, depriving them of their furtive cachet.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Two thirds oppose state aided faith schools

Faith schools, a central plank of the government’s education reforms designed to increase parental choice, are opposed by almost two thirds of the public.

A Guardian/ICM poll published today shows that most respondents are against ministers’ plans to increase the number of religious schools amid growing anxiety about their impact on social cohesion.

The survey reveals that following last month’s terror attacks, the majority of the public are uneasy about the proposals, with 64% agreeing that “the government should not be funding faith schools of any kind”.

The report goes on to quote chairman of the Commons education select committee, Barry Sheerman, warning of the threat posed to the cohesion of multicultural communities by religious schools.

“Do we want a ghettoised education system?” asked Mr Sheerman. “Schools play a crucial role in integrating different communities and the growth of faith schools poses a real threat to this. These things need to be thought through very carefully before they are implemented.”

Quite

Belgian women soccer team loses 50-1-paper

Belgian women’s soccer team SK Berlaar had to stomach a 50-1 defeat against rival KV Mechelen on Saturday because their goalkeeper had opted to attend a music concert instead, a local newspaper said.

“Our keeper went to Pukkel Pop. That’s why,” substitute goalkeeper Charlotte Jacobs told Het Laatste Nieuws daily on Monday.

The line up for Pukkelpop included The Hives, The Prodigy, Nick Cave, Franz Ferdinand, Heather Nova, Bad Religion, The Kaiser Chiefs, Juliette and the Licks, and a host of other great bands.

I’m with the goalie on this one.

I’ve been signed up to BlogExplosion for some time now, although I don’t surf the member blogs as often as I once did. Primarily because of the randomness of the blogs that get served up – I much prefer to find blogs via blogrolls because, that way, there is at least a chance that I will find something interesting in what is being linked to.

However, I received an email today from BlogExplosion announcing a site re-design. So I went back to the site and had a poke around the member directory and I did bump into a few interesting looking blogs.

So hello to Movie Girl, Darkmatters, Dicky Bird and Bad Movies and Cult Films.

And did you know that Charles Band has a blog?

Convicted felon’s “Cures” tops book charts

He went to prison for fraud and was ordered by the U.S. government to stop touting health products on infomercials, but Kevin Trudeau’s book “Natural Cures ‘They’ Don’t Want You to Know About” is a bestseller.

Four million people, so far, have been dopey enough to buy a healthcare book from a convicted fraudster.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Madeleine Bunting evidently saw a different episode of Panorama to the one I watched last night.

In the episode that she saw:

A campaign is being orchestrated through the media to destroy the credibility of many of the most important Muslim institutions in Britain, including the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB). The impact of this campaign – in the Observer and particularly in John Ware’s Panorama documentary last night – will be a powerful boost for the increasingly widespread view that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim: underneath, “they” are all extremists who are racist, contemptuous of the west, and intent on a political agenda.

Whereas, the programme that I saw sought to argue that – far from speaking for the majority, or even a significant number, of British Muslims – the groups for which the MCB acts as an umbrella body represent the minority of political Islamist groups, some of whom draw inspiration from the very conservative traditions found in Saudia Arabia or Pakistan.

As such, the MCB no more represents mainstream Muslim opinion than Christian Voice represents mainstream Christian thought.

Indeed, Bunting appears to have missed John Ware’s assertion that the majority of British Muslims see their faith as something personal rather than political, she seems to have missed the expressions of concern from these Muslims at the tendency of some of the MCB affiliated groups to divide the world into believers and unbelievers and she seems to have missed the interviews with the Muslims seeking to establish a British flavour of Islam that doesn’t draw its inspiration from authoritarian regimes such as those in Saudi Arabia.

Somewhat disingenuously, she goes on to attack parts of the criticisms levelled at the MCB while ignoring the context.

First on the charge sheet were examples of the former: the “conviction that Islam is a superior faith and culture which Christians and Jews in the west are conspiring to undermine”, and a “distaste for western secular culture”. This is ridiculous; I’ve yet to meet a member of any faith who doesn’t believe in the superiority of their beliefs, while fear of being undermined is similarly common. Since when has “distaste” become a cause for suspicion?

As far as it goes, this is a reasonable enough comment. Religious fundamentalists of all stripes do tend towards both arrogance and paranoia. However, Ware’s criticism was not of the view itself, but the fact that this has led – and is leading – to some Muslim groups seeking to isolate themselves from the “inferior” mainstream society rather than integrate with it. This is a criticism that can be levelled equally validly at any fundamentalist isolationist group be they Christian, Jewish, Hindu or any other faith.

And then she gets really confused.

Ware is at his most McCarthyite when he challenges Sacranie to account for an imam in Leeds who is preaching that the war on terror is really a war on Islam. Ware insists that it is Sacranie’s job to “disabuse” British Muslims of this view and put this imam “right”.

…

Sacranie only has as much power as the MCB affiliate organisations allow him – the idea of him putting an imam right is ridiculous. The tiny, volunteer-run MCB doesn’t have the power to police the views of its disparate membership.

But if the tiny, volunteer-run MCB has no authority over its various affiliates, how can it claim to for anyone other than the tiny group of volunteers that run the MCB?

Which brings us back to the point of the programme.

Then we have a wonderful piece of doublethink.

[British Muslims] are expected to keep their faith entirely out of politics (yet faith plays a crucial role in US politics).

Does this mean – as Bunting certainly seems to imply – that she thinks that the influence exerted by fundamentalists has benefited the American political system? Does she really believe, for example, that blocking stem-cell research or levering idiocy such as “Intelligent Design” into schools is beneficial to American society?

If not, she is guilty of rank hypocrisy.

And finally, there is this piece of patronising racism masquerading as liberalism.

The MCB bears all the characteristics of a diverse migrant community’s struggle to develop a common voice.

Migrant community? The vast majority of Muslims in the UK were born or grew up in the UK. They are British. They work, they pay taxes, they vote, they go out, they stay in. In short, they do all the things that the rest of us do.

And it is this majority that the MCB doesn’t speak for.

Join Morgan in his experiment by playing the Super Size Me Game and see how long you can last on a diet of junk food.

And then click here to make a difference.

More short films from around the web, all lifted from FilmRot.

This King Kong Fan Trailer is incredibly effective.

Into the Alba, so that you can now safely ignore Into the Blue.

And finally: Zombies are Scary

This is brilliant.

Pardon me for hijacking the thread, here..

But, Brion – if you don’t want your mother to know you were up and on the computer at 3:29 in the morning – DON’T post on a forum that she reads.

Busted.
Grounded.

(via sp3ccylad)

The Herald reports on a quite appalling attempt at staff motivation on the part of Stacey – a junior manager at the Bank of Scotland.

Stacey took it upon herself to place a cabbage on the desk of the staff member the poorest sales figures which could only be moved when someone else managed a poorer performance. The most recent winner of the cabbage was an 18 year old teller, named Darren, who had just returned to work having recovered from meningitis.

Can’t think why his sales figures were so low. Neither, apparently, could Stacey.

So now Clairwil has launched a campaign…

So my request to you on this humid evening is to do at least one of the following.

1. Post a cabbage to Stacey, The Bank Of Scotland, 701 Great Western Road, Glasgow, G12 8RB.

2. Post a picture of a cabbage to the above address if your too skint/stingy to pay the postage.

3. Place as many cabbages as you can at the entrance of your nearest Bank Of Scotland.

4. Close any accounts you have with The Bank Of Scotland and write to tell them you are doing so as a result of the ‘Great Western Road Cabbage Incident’.

And if you you’re too lazy to find a picture of a cabbage, here’s one…

(via Dr Feelgood)