The tax system needs overhauled, in two areas at least. I have no power to make this happen, just a vote and a blog so here goes.
TV license: should be scraped. I should make a FOI request to see how much the admin and enforcement costs. I haven’t as yet, so I’m gonna go ahead and use hyperbole like ‘Astronomical’ I’m not arguing that the BBC shouldn’t be financed from the exchequer and should tout for advertisers, im just saying that the way the money is collected is out dated.
Way back then most people didn’t have TVs so it was unfair to charge everyone for it, but now days every one has, and in fact those that don’t can watching on their mobile phones or computers anyway. We should scrap it and just pay the BBC from the Culture budget.
Car Tax: Should be scraped. We should follow the Australian model - people must buy a yearly registration which includes 3rd party insurance. Then we should up the taxation levy on fuel.
I’ve been given a vision, it’s been sanctified and verified by god himself, I claimed his gift of faith, and i have faith that it is so.
If the New Testament of the bible is ‘on the money’ then people really need to know about it, and quickly. You might say that there are plenty of people out there trying but the fact is that they aren’t very good at it. They’ve had 2000 years to do it, and there are still a large majority not realising what happened in Judea. If it’s true that there actually is an afterlife… and unless we tell Jesus we accept his sacrifice we’re doomed to hell… then, well the race to save peoples souls should be on the news on a daily basis - we need a daily updated on the souls saved - maybe involved some sort of tracking technology. So why isn’t it?
I think, in my not so humble opinion that it’s the way go about telling others… it’s almost like we want to keep it to themselves. We’re happy to leave it to the shouty street preachers… who just come across as deranged and deluded. Or to manipulative and cheesy Alpha Course types.
So how do we do it? We need to find a Unique Selling Point, we need to focus on the things that are common to all of the other non-true religions and leave them to one side. There are millions of decent moral, right thinking, loving people who conscientiously adhere to their factually inaccurate faith. Everyone who has a faith is really convinced that they commune with their respective god, and that he answers them and guides them and has a plan for them (to some degree). Amount and depth of faith isn’t impressive at all… lest we’d all be turning to militant Islam. But they are all of course being deluded by Satan, except for Christians. Simply using manipulative phrases like ‘Jesus loves you, why don’t you accept the free gift’ gets seen for what it is…the religious equivalent of ‘when did you stop beating your wife’.
We must remember that if the NT is a reliable message from god then we know that he loves and wants us all to know about the Jesus salvation narrative. The most wonderful gift he gave us, something no other faith has, is the historical events that happened in Israel 2000 years ago. Let’s not get caught up in the mumbo jumbo and benign brain washing of the worlds churches - lets stop all this obsession with ‘faith’ - we don’t need to rely on faith, we have facts, that’s what Jesus gave us. He didn’t need to, the resurrection could have been a meta-physical spiritual battle or could all have happened in the middle of the desert so we’d never know.
We need to be confident in that, we need to put it all on the table. We need to accept that a loving god wouldn’t make it difficult for us, if we approach the evidence with an open mind and with our logical and rational heads fully screwed on then he will bless that. Logic and rationality are gifts which he gave us, and he insists we use it lest we fall for the devils seductions. In order to prove the truth to the world we have to be open to the idea that the Jesus stories aren’t in fact real, and that the Jewish messiah could still return and ask why we fell for the devils trickery re: the Jesus church.
Let’s not peddle this self-defeating nonsense that Jesus doesn’t want to make it too obvious too us so we can have free will. This belittles our lord, and threatens to be a barrier to salvation as it makes people rightly suspicious. Jesus could have been a lot more subtle if he’d wanted to - maybe appearing for a moment in each of our dreams and giving us the salvation choice. Instead, if we’re to believe the NT he appeared to lots of people doing magical signs to convince them - sometimes 5000 in one go. Are we saying he respected these peoples free will less than ours?
God won’t punish you for applying your reason and rationality and assuming Jesus wasn’t who it’s reported he was… until you’ve assessed the evidence and decided he was (or wasn’t).
It’s like when you were a kid and your dad said… don’t get into a car with any strangers even if they say they that I sent them to pick you up… make sure you are 100% convinced they are who they say they are. I’d rather you rejected someone I might genuinely have sent for you, than get into the car with the wrong person, that’s the actions of a loving parent.
I’m not talking about getting a bishop with a doctorate in theology and an obvious agenda to write a book packed full of ultimately true, but logically very dodgy assumptions. This is the definition of preaching to the choir - this will be accepted with the same open minds that we read Dawkins! Maybe we should sponsor a panel of the worlds smartest and most qualified people, a cross section of the intelligentsia (perhaps those who are currently non-aligned to any religion but who have proven themselves open minded) and get them to carry out a thorough investigation and publish the results at the UN for all to see, where they can be challenged and assessed.
How could anyone object to that? Let’s make sure they report back before the rapture.
Just a Monday morning nugget really. During a drunkin chat with a mate last week he brought up the (surprisingly) interesting topic of what makes a species.I would have assumed that these things are set in stone, but apparently no, different cultures have different rules on what differentiates a species.
In our culture we say that all creatures with sweat glands and give birth to live young are mammals (is that right?) , so therefore a whale and a dolphin are mammals. In other cultures they say, no, don’t be silly whales and dolphins are fish because they live 100% of the time in the water and have fins (say).
Just one of those things I thought was set in stone, only to find out that its not.
One tragedy of the drive for a low carbon economy is the emphasis (whether right or wrong) on less travel. I’m not sure there has been an open debate on the cost versus benefit of encouraging the inhabitants of earth to travel less.
First of all, my personal view is that there is way too much talk about air travel being a premier league environmental evil. The best estimates are that air travel accounts for between 2% and 5% of carbon emissions. Does it really feel like air travel gets 2-5% of our environmental indignation?
I worry that there is a lot of self righteousness at work, and not a little reverse snobbery. The guy who sits beside me in work has a bit of an SUV, not exactly a Chelsea tractor, but enough of a ‘gas guzzler’ that he gets a lot of banter and jibes from my more eco work colleagues. He recently took the time to investigate on t’internet and found that his SUV, over its life cycle was more environmentally friendly as eco colleague’s 20 year old VW camper, which she drives to Cornwall every other weekend. I can’t help feeling that she just doesn’t like the fact that he can afford to, and chooses to buy himself a nice big car. Is it anti capitalism in another guise?
Arguments are never advanced by tagging opponents with easy uber-insults. Support Palestine? You must be anti-Semitic. Want to control immigration? Must be racist. Want more air travel? Must be a global warming denier.
I worry that this sentiment is evident in the demonising of air travel. My (rambling) point is I think, that we need to prioritise. Ambulances have a carbon footprint, but I’d rather we keep using them as opposed to having the paramedics arrive on a hemp powered bicycle. Similarly travel, whether business or pleasure is a massive addition and enricher to the human experience, global warming is going to happen, and we need to reduce our carbon emissions, but we need an adult debate about whether we should accept 2-5% more global warming and keep our foreign holidays, youthful exploration and inter-continental business trips.
To early man, the sun rises from its hollow in the ground, processes over his head before submerging into the earth in the other direction. The wind randomly gathers and calms to power his fishing boat to feed his children. Flowers and vegetables emerge magically from the soil every spring bringing with it nurturing life and sustenance. All tempered by the random terror of earthquakes, volcanoes and hurricanes.
Not only where there unknown unknowns like nuclear physics, but there were lots of known unknowns such as basic anatomy, circulation and respiratory as well as the ins and outs of animal and human reproduction - the miracle of life itself.
How did we as a species, summon the courage to even leave the cave never mind to survive and thrive? I read a book some years ago now, by the anthropologist Pascal Boyer - I don’t think it would be too much hyperbole to say that it was a turning point. It is called ‘Religion Explained’ and I read it to learn more about how ‘other’ religions emerged. The can of worms was probably open before I read it, but this book spilled them out all over the floor.
He riffs on the idea that ‘Blind Faith’ is a healthy and natural human phenomenon. It’s perfectly acceptable and desirable that before Galileo worked out how earth isn’t the centre of things, and in fact the earth rotates around the sun… that people had to just have faith that the sun would rise every day (some still did a morning dance just in case). They had no tools or knowledge to rationally determine how or why it would. They had to make some assumptions just to get on with the business of living. It’s completely helpful and normal to see it as a mystically defined ‘black box’ or even personify it as a deity.
The point is I suppose that this is blind faith, and it’s ok, and in fact helpful. The Greeks gave names to the black boxes (Aphrodite, Apollo, Thor, and Zeus). The problem surely comes when after a few generations people start to take these gods too literally, develop dogmas and then when a bright mind inquires how the stars fit in the sky - people call him a heretic for daring to deny the authority of Apollo.
Likewise Adam and Eve is a perfectly helpful algebraic black box until it causes people to limit their investigations into the origins of man. The ‘universe instigator’ god is helpfully algebraic until it colours our investigations into universal origins.
Perhaps the unhelpful kind of faith is that which allows for acceptance of supernatural claims based on less than convincing evidence rather than the kind that helped Newton explain the natural world. It’s the kind of faith which a makes a suicide bomber believe that he communicates intimately with a loving Allah or for a Christian who lives his life in the light the resurrection and virgin birth of Jesus, not because he is necessarily convinced by the evidence but because he has faith in the dogma.
I don’t see this kind of faith as a virtue; it’s not blind faith, its blinding faith.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices. - William James
It’s a difficult thing, but I have more respect for commentators, bloggers, politicians and pub philosophers who can step back some times and find something good to say about the person, country, party, tribe they usually disparage.
I’m not saying that we need to look at Hitler and say, well he built good roads (though he did), but we need to be able to see that people aren’t caricatures and by and large are just trying to do the right thing as they see it. Here’s a couple of obvious ones in the news at the moment (QM with his finger on the zeitgeist!)
A while ago when all the chat about whether or not Prince Harry should go to Iraq a number of commentators (not mentioning names… Guardian CIF!) waxed lyrical about how the rich and privileged never send their kids to war and what a rouse and public relations stunt it was to suggest that he was ever going to go. Skip forward 3-4 months and these same people are talking about how selfish it is for him to go, and sneering at him ‘playing soldiers’ and gung-ho bombing of Afgans etc. My respect drains from these people, it’s easy to find a job as a professional cynic these days.
The other one is President Bush’s African Legacy. I’m on board with the “GWB is/was a disaster of a pres” narrative. But, it is undeniable (read Geldof is Time this week) that his contribution to the plight of Africa has been greater than any president before him… and in fact there’s a reasonable argument that his contribution has and will lead to millions and millions of lives being changed and saved…which, it could be argued, dwarfs the legacy of his aggression abroad and right wing agenda at home. It sticks in the thoat of those who dispise him (most people!) but it doesnt mean it shouldnt be said.
In this information overload of an age are we now incapable of understanding nuance? Is all we want to be told… This person is the devil incarnate!! And this person is a magnificent saviour!! Questions questions questions…
A bit of classic West Wing, from the final series… the worst series certainly… but still great.
This episode was actually broad cast live, apparently they only had a basic script and pretty much did a live debate… it was great at the time, and is still pretty good on YouTube. I think i ended up wanting Vinick to win the election in the end, which said a lot that the show managed to keep ‘the oposisition’ so likable.
Well, the time has come. The lead story on the news at ten tonight will no doubt be “BONG:Question Monkey breaks his silence on the Archbishop Sharia row”. Doubtless some of the lesser informed hacks won’t even realised that I WAS keeping a silence.
My take on it is this, it very much depends on what he meant (duh), either it was a completely run of the mill comment which actually didn’t need to be said and it’s just an obvious truism, or it was a shocking affront to democracy and the rights of man.
I have a private members club, let’s call it Fight Club (patent pending), in this club all the members consent to occasionally having seven bells knocked out of them. According to the law of the land GBH is illegal, but the way we enforce law in these matters is very much down to consent - if you consensually choose to have someone staple your privates to the floor, then the law isn’t involved, if you don’t consent then it very much is.
I would though expect the police to keep a close eye on it to make sure every one really is consenting - and there should be no question of what the over arching law is.
So is this what the Archbishop meant, that we should respect and recognise marriages, annulments and arbitrations? If so, then I’ve no problem with it - and I really don’t know why it’s been such a big deal. I fear though that he meant more than this, that he’s suggesting that the law should in some way take into account peoples ‘faith’ and beliefs. The words ‘Thin edge’ and ‘wedge’ come to mind… I do respect people who stand up for what they believe in, like for instance when Quakers refuse to fight in WW2, but its entirely right that they should go to prison for a while… the law has to apply fairly to all no matter what hocus pocus you say you believe.
A better way for the Archbishop to make Muslims feel more respected and equal would be to disestablish the Church of England! It’s an anathema that a Muslim MP has to swear allegiance to the Queen when he or she enters parliament - as opposed to just swearing to fairly and honestly represent his or her constituents. I await the Archbishop’s response to my challenge
There is quite a push at the moment, on TV at least to encourage us to be more ethical in our consumption of meat and eggs. The latest sermon was given by Jamie Oliver last week in a live audience presentation and debate about battery chicken farming. It’s unfair to call it a ‘sermon’, I like Jamie Oliver and think its great when a star like him is willing to trade in a bit of his credibility to draw attention to causes he believes in, even if it does mean that arm chair sitters like me get to call him preachy.
My better half is a veggie, which you’d think would make for much debate in the house, but it doesn’t really. QMonkey isn’t as narky and argument-baiting in real life (I hope), if it’s not too cheesy to say - we respectfully disagree. The only thing she insists on is that I buy ‘quality’ meat, preferably organic and certainly free range. I’m happy to do this as I do subscribe to the moral of treating animals with respect. At least I think/thought… you sense the unsurity don’t you?
The problem with the TV show is that I was troubled by something, not by the images of the battery hens (although that was shocking in some cases), but I was more troubled by the audience reaction. People were hiding their eyes and shrieking at the scenes of substandard farm conditions, wincing and ugghging at the sight of processed meat. Then came the real revelation for me anyway. Jamie had with him an organically farmed chicken, the kind he is promoting, he had been recently trained and qualified as a slaugherman and was kitted out with state of the art equipment. He showed the humane method of killing the chicken with an electric shock to the neck, then cutting its mouth to let it bleed before butchering.
Here’s the reveal… THIS was the event the audience were most shocked by, they turned away, and some yelped and shouted. I was honestly taken aback by this. The audience were all meat eaters who I presume have no problem dicing a nice chicken breast for their stir fry or tucking in to a tikka masala. They seemed almost surprised that an animal needs to be killed in order to make this happen.
This completely undermined the rest of the program for me, or at least turned the message on its head. In my view if you eat meat then you should be willing if necessary to do the killing yourself, and certainly should be able to watch without feeling any sorrow or guilt or squeamishness. If you don’t like killing animals for meat then become a vegetarian. I have to admit to having never killed a chicken but I have killed fish and eaten them and although I don’t want to, as it’s a bit gruesome and messy, I would have no moral twinges about killing an animal for food.
So having come to the conclusion that these audience members needed to either become vegetarian (for which I think there is a decent moral argument) or harden-the-f***-up, then what is the moral with regards to the treatment of animals before we kill them?
Jeepers, ‘her indoors’ isn’t gonna be happy … but I think I might actually be moving in the opposite direction to Mr Oliver. I think there’s a reasonable case that if these animals are bread for food, the life experience we give them is the life they know, are they really distressed/disappointed to find out that they aren’t wild birds (where a fox will mercilessly tear it apart anyway)? Isn’t the moral question - to farm and eat animals or not to?
Is it right to spend say £1 extra on your chicken fillets to give them a slightly more sanitized 54 days before we slit its throat… as opposed to using that £1 to keep an African child alive for a day longer? I don’t know the answer to that, I’m the question monkey, but if it’s a choice between keeping my child alive for a day or giving a battery chicken a foot more space in his cage, then it’s less of a difficult moral to wrestle with.
Paste that into your iTunes postcast bit… the best one, i think, if the Stephen Fry/Hitchens one on blasphemy - interesting as always. The theos among you will like his references to CS Lewis. If only that tw*t Hitchens would shut up a bit, which he does, after someone in the crowd shouts at him .
I think Stephen Fry is great but i think, as i say, Hitchens is on of the most annoying arrogant people on earth. Even though i agree with the large part of what he says - which just shows that sometimes it about ‘how you say it’.
You can listen to the MP3 here. The first ten mins and the last ten mins are the best.
It’s not exactly a ‘debate’ as both are in more or less in agreement. It reminds me somewhat of those Greenbelt ‘debates’ i used occasionaly attend (but in the other direction).
A relative of QMonkey, lets call him Answer Chimp wrestled with a question this morning, the question of when is it ok to make a citizens arrest. Let’s put his case
There were a number of people walking ahead of me as I came out of the train station this morning, when a chocolate wrapper floated its way towards me (much like in a toffee crisp advert, except I think it was a lion bar).
..
I looked ahead (in the way that all the best witnesses look up after they hear the bang) and realised it had been dropped by a fairly professional looking bloke, who was walking along with a girl, who was also smartly dressed and a grown-up. I considered tackling him about it, and I even prepared my answer to the predictable defence I was sure he would use about him keeping someone in a job. Then I didn’t and I just sort of stared at him in a weird way when I overtook him.
..
Should I have picked up the wrapper and tried to give it back to him? Should I have performed a citizen’s arrest?!
If I were writing this story, I would probably just go ahead and say that I DID make the arrest as it would add some spice to the tale. Has any one out there ever made a citizens arrest? What kind of offences does it cover?
As an addendum, GH (bloke who sits opposite me in work) actually made a citizens arrest last year (I just remembered). A local hood was trying to nick a car outside his house, so graham called the rozzers, then went outside to apprehend him. It should be noted that Graham is a hooker for Clifton Rugby Club (I advise you to follow the ‘hooker’ link to avoid confusion). He did of course, ‘give him a few digs’ before the constabulary arrived, leading the arrested crook to threaten legal action (no further news). A warning maybe.
[moving swiftly on from my 'faith' post which incurred much abuse ]
I was burning the midnight oil last night, catching up on some Prison Break and Family Guy. When I turned back to BBC it was a late night politics show with Michael Portillo and Diane Abbott. The opening montage was a bit of bluster from a guy called John Bird, he looked like a rough and tumble sort of geezer and I didn’t really pay attention until he started to debate with the two politicians (left and right wing is should be noted)
John Bird is the founder of The Big Issue, so is a real doer and it turns out a thinker as well. There’s a fair argument that he’s done more for the homeless than any politician, so i was interested in what he had to say. I was expecting him to be berating people for not caring more about the poor and giving more money. He was quite passionate and articulate - let me give you some of his quotes (I rewound it on sky+).
This government is not about social mobility… what I want, is for the poor to become wealthy and middle class. Make people have an investment in life and it will stop social decline.
We spend so much money, maintaining people in poverty, we have the most expensive poor in Europe. We still haven’t worked the magic of social mobility.
I take the view, I LOVE paying taxes. I spent most of my life not paying them. I love them because it means I’m earning money. What I don’t like about the left, and don’t like about the right, is that they don’t like the poor ever getting what they’ve got.
My obsession is, lets get a whole class of people into the problem of having to pay tax. Lets do what Margret Thatcher did, which was to give the working classes a chance to own a little bit of property, that was a magnificent step to bring about a move to social mobility.
Inheritance tax is a great thing, it only taxes the dead, its not money that’s already been taxed. If someone buys a house in 1970 for £8k and its now worth 300k, they haven’tbeen taxed on that. The rises in property prices are instilling an underclass of have-nots.
We need to turn the welfare system into a trampoline, not a death trap, wholesale reform. I go into prisons and the people in there were on welfare, I visit street gangs and they’re on welfare.We riad a drugs den and they have thousands of pounds and they’re on welfare, not to mention the july 7th bombers. It’s a new form of social slavery.
Interesting stuff i thought, coming from Mr Bird. He’s standing for mayor of London, maybe he’s worth a vote.
All I’ve got so far is a title… I’m awaiting inspiration
Premise: Most times it seems people are more comfortable being in a majority, group experiments have shown (as in, I saw it on a documentary once!) that people will say they the most ridiculous things which they know to be untrue, just because everyone else in the group says it. Other times though people seem to strive to be considered ‘different’. I think its rare that people strive to be in a minority of one, but as far as music, culture and society go the smaller the subculture the better, and when a music group or cultural totam becomes too popular and ‘mainstream’ people abandon it for this very reason (although they rarely admit it). Why?
In a recent post, i gave myself the lofty task of deciding on the nature and causes of good and evil. Then realised that i know nought, so left it.
But i think I’ve found out that someone has already done the job for me. Alfred Nobel. His prizes set out to reward those who advance knowledge in areas of certain human progress - maybe these are the definitive areas of goodness - and the cause of this advancement, is ‘Good’.
So… Physics, Chemistry, Literature, Medicine and in recent times Economics.
Now, all i need is someone to start giving out prizes for evil … oh yeah, thats the Big Brother final.
(will really have to think of a better ‘pay off’ gag than that!)
The tax system needs overhauled, in two areas at least. I have no power to make this happen, just a vote and a blog so here goes.
I think, in my not so humble opinion that it’s the way go about telling others… it’s almost like we want to keep it to themselves. We’re happy to leave it to the shouty street preachers… who just come across as deranged and deluded. Or to manipulative and cheesy Alpha Course types.
rather you rejected someone I might genuinely have sent for you, than get into the car with the wrong person, that’s the actions of a loving parent.
First of all, my personal view is that there is way too much talk about air travel being a premier league environmental evil. The best estimates are that air travel accounts for between 2% and 5% of carbon emissions. Does it really feel like air travel gets 2-5% of our environmental indignation?
Not only where there unknown unknowns like nuclear physics, but there were lots of known unknowns such as basic anatomy, circulation and respiratory as well as the ins and outs of animal and human reproduction - the miracle of life itself.
limit their investigations into the origins of man. The ‘universe instigator’ god is helpfully algebraic until it colours our investigations into universal origins.
Well, the time has come. The lead story on the news at ten tonight will no doubt be “BONG:Question Monkey breaks his silence on the Archbishop Sharia row”. Doubtless some of the lesser informed hacks won’t even realised that I WAS keeping a silence.
I have a private members club, let’s call it Fight Club (patent pending), in this club all the members consent to occasionally having seven bells knocked out of them. According to the law of the land GBH is illegal, but the way we enforce law in these matters is very much down to consent - if you consensually choose to have someone staple your privates to the floor, then the law isn’t involved, if you don’t consent then it very much is.
There is quite a push at the moment, on TV at least to encourage us to be more ethical in our consumption of meat and eggs. The latest sermon was given by Jamie Oliver last week in a live audience presentation and debate about battery chicken farming. It’s unfair to call it a ‘sermon’, I like Jamie Oliver and think its great when a star like him is willing to trade in a bit of his credibility to draw attention to causes he believes in, even if it does mean that arm chair sitters like me get to call him preachy.
and some yelped and shouted. I was honestly taken aback by this. The audience were all meat eaters who I presume have no problem dicing a nice chicken breast for their stir fry or tucking in to a tikka masala. They seemed almost surprised that an animal needs to be killed in order to make this happen.
] 
But i think I’ve found out that someone has already done the job for me. 