Messages

I somehow don't think that glow in the dark Dracula fangs are going to increase rapidly in value, Mark.

All my free gifts from Solar Wind had a habit of mysteriously disappearing shortly after I got them home, which leads me to suspect that it was all some kind of temporal con perpetrated by Cosmic Ray...

"I think one could use Richard Dawkins as a very good excuse for murdering Richard Dawkins."

Yeah, but it'd only serve to encourage him...

;-)

"Byron, please try to stay on-topic and avoid the ad hominem attacks."

Go fuck yourself, you mentalist cock.

Being that you randomly accused me of saying that it was okay to commit mass-murder, don't you think that's something of a case of the pot calling the kettle black?

"My statement, which you still have not refuted, was that communists and other socialists killed more people in the 20th century than religion did in the preceding 20 centuries."

Except that I wasn't trying to 'refute' it, I was saying that I did not agree with your statement, and that you had to judge the events on their *proportional* effect on the world in which they occurred, not simply on the numbers of the dead, which as I mentioned before is an utterly crass and childish way to behave, presumably born out of the fact that you're so insecure in your own beliefs that you are unable to engage in a *debate* that you yourself instigated without throwing your dummy out the pram.

Also, I still don't understand why you're only localising your argument to 'Communists of the 20th Century'. And why you still seem to insist on including the Nazis as a socialist/communist organisation.

"Now tell me again, how much "better" atheism is than religion."

I would, except that I never said that in the first place. Personally, I couldn't give a shit if you believe in God or you don't. However, despite his many rights or wrongs, I don't think anyone's every used Richard Dawkins as an excuse for murdering a great number of people.

"Sorry, Byron, but how does your logic work? Are you saying that it's less evil to kill a person today, because there are more of them around?"

What?! Sorry, but are you being deliberately obtuse, or is it just a happy accident? It's common historical practice that when drawing comparisons between one event and another, one must establish a workable set of proportional values by which they can be compared. So if there were less people alive a hundred year ago, a war, say, might result in fewer casualties but have an equivalent effect on society as a larger-scale event in the present day. That has nothing at all to do with the relative 'importance' or otherwise of the dead - as Usher pointed out, any institution that can number its victims in the millions is hardly to be considered benevolent, and to be honest I find the idea of somehow 'ranking' events on a kind of Tragedy Table to be offensively idiotic. It doesn't matter how many died under Stalin, because *any* number is too many. Just because more people are recorded as dying in WW2 than in WW1 doesn't make those boys who threw away their lives in the shit and mud of the Somme any the less horrifying.

"Regarding the numbers: How many deaths can you really attribute to religion?"

Well, this is the point that we start getting into semantics - is religion to blame for events like the Crusades or the Jonestwon Massacre, or is it opportunistic individuals/organisations taking advantage of their credible followers? However, if we take that approach, we can then ask the same questions of China or the USSR; was it the ideas or the people who were the causes of significant loss of life? You also have to take into account the fact that events in the past influence events in the future - arguable, the death toll of the Nazis' Final Solution would not have happened had it not been for the pogroms across Europe that can be traced back as far as the First Crusade (indeed many of the same villages in parts of Germany and Romania were all-but wiped out on both occasions).

"Then, we can talk about the number that can be attributed quite directly to communism *and* socialism (which would include the death toll from the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NAZI))."

Right. But you do realise that, though the German Workers' Party (as was) originally was a legitimate socialist organisation, the party under Hitler and his allies became a more fluid creature, without a static ideology in opposition to that of most socialist forms, though it did incorporate elements of socialist and conservative thinking, combined with antisemitism, anti-communism and an extreme form of nationalism based on certain spurious notions of ethnicity, which has led it to most commonly be ascribed as a branch of fascism (though of course several of fascist and communist dictatorships could be said to share a number of parallels).

"Just as a side note with reference to stalin I read somewhere recently that the death toll of Stalins Reign of his own people is averaged at 20 million, this doesn't cover the 10 million+ that died during the famine and every now and again they still come across unmarked mass graves in the russian empire."

There used to be a number of wild claims that Stalin (or rather his regime) was responsible for the death of some 40 million, however since official records became available to both internal and international researchers and were examined in the post-Soviet era, it seems that the figure is rather closer to 3 million, though some argue that, as you say, these figures don't take into account those who died during forced deportations or under torture, and some include those who died during the famine in the Ukraine in 1932-1933. However, most realistic estimates don't go beyond 20 million, whilst the general consensus seems to be somewhere between 3-8 million dead.

Also worth pointing out that it wasn't a 'Russian Empire', as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a notinally distinct entity from that of Russia, and unlike what we generally accept as an empire, it was not ruled by a hereditary monarch, though as the definition of empire itself is pretty lose, it can lend itself to describing the block of nations under the purview of the USSR.

"Sometimes Scientists put as much faith in Science as most people ( Still do)put faith in God but their faith is in a belief that is limited and is still growing , how do we know in a hundred years someone may work out an afterlife exsists , is it as ridiculous as the scientists who first said it could be possible to split the atom?"

But we can't accept a notion simply because supporting evidence may or may not turn up at some unpecified time in the future. I don't think that anyone's specifically saying that the afterlife definitively does not exist, just that give the current given the facts that we hold to be true about the way our universe works, the concept would appear to be a somewhat unlikely one.

Of course this conclusion is open to revision, since science is itself constantly self-revising in order to match new discoveries and differing interpretations. That's where science is arguably an improvement over religion as a means of explaining the world that surrounds us, since it is a constantly changing systematic practice, whereas organised monotheistic religions tend on the whole to be composed of an imposed set of shared notions in the form of a closed belief system that remains static and unchanging. Also unlike religion, one of the main drives of scientific method is the questioning of established 'facts', and an openess to accept and incorporate new information as it becomes available, reinterpreting previously held 'beliefs' to fit our greater understanding of the way we currently see the universe functioning. The point of science, at its best, is that everything is open to inquiry, including the scientific method itself.

Science, we might say, is a means of explaining life's punchline in a manner open to a number of interpretations or subsequent revisions as further evidence comes to light, whereas religion is simply the promise that they'll tell us the joke after we die.

"might one point out that the various 20th century attempts at socialism and communism killed far more people than religion did in the previous 20 centuries, and most of those responsible were atheists!"

Erm...is that strictly true? I'd agree that atheists are just as capable as the religious of committing acts of violence, but given the number of religious wars, murders, stonings, public executions, pogroms, massacres, state persecution, and so on, that I find it hard to imagine that the preious collected total for history prior to the 20th Century could really be beaten by specifically non-religious actions involving communists of some form (a slightly disingenuous idea anyway, as non-communists seem just as capable of killing on a mass level). If we take into account the 3 million killed during Stalin's reign, 5 million suspected under Mao (we leave out the 11 million killed by the Nazis, as the organisation is obviously not a communist one, they notionally embraced a bastardised form of Lutherism and were extremely beligerant towards atheists), we have to take into account the fact that population levels have increased over time, so you have to examine the number of fatalities in terms of the total population level of which they were a part during the historical period you were examining and compare them proprotionally. And it's worth considering that more people died of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic (50m) than did during World War One (20m) - of course there is a certain level of crossover, in terms of causality, between the two events - though that total was later topped by the 72 million of World War Two. We do need to remember too that religious conflicts have, to this day, still been fought across the globe, from Africa to Europe.

Link: http://www.boocook.com/" target="_blank">Active link

Link: http://thesurrealist.co.uk/standard.php" target="_blank">Evening Standard Random Headline Generator

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Looking around for a distraction from work this morning, I came across the local paper (the Ham & High) which had the headline:

GHOSTS SUPPORT BID TO SAVE PUB!

Now, as it turns out the 'Ghosts' are actually a band and not, as I'd hoped, phantoms from beyond the grave. But it set me wondering, what sort of ridiculous, hyperbole-bound, alramist or just generally idiotic headlines or stories have you come across in the past?

Link: http://www.rttimes.co.uk/mostpopular.var.1568617.mostcommented.crabs_attack_in_hampton.php" target="_blank">Crabs Attack in Hampton!

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The Parkhouse/Gibbons Davison strips are pretty damn good (The Stars Fell on Stockbridge et al), but Voyager was the culmination of everything that Steve was trying to do with the strip, alongside what I'd rate as Ridgway's greatest artwork - just take a look at the waterfall dream sequence if you don't believe me. Steve managed to give the Doctor far more mystery, humour and tragedy than the concurrent television series did at the time, and without simply resorting to bringing back the past monster of the week. It's one of the few comics I've held onto since I was a kid, actually (and long since I lost interest in Dr. Who), which I think is telling.

The Steve Parkhouse stuff that culminates in Voyager are the best Dr. Who comics ever printed (and Frobisher was actually quite an interesting companion at that point). Unfortunately, after Steve fell out with editorial, McKenzie's efforts never really cut the mustard in comparison.

Those Golden Wonder mini-comiocs were fantastic though (even if they were McKenzie reprints!)

"which i find insulting really..."

Christ, if you're insulted by that, I'd just give up on popular culture if I were you.

You couldn't really have two badges with the same name on it (especially not if the wearers both looked pretty much identical).