Oh well, I guess that I may as well pick myself up a nutbar t-shirt to wear around... it's not as if the secret police aren't following me about and reading all my emails already...
Well, I just can't resist following links to wherever it is they end up. For example, your particle link...
http://www.catandgirl.com/view.cgi?20
...took me through the rest of Cat and Girl...
http://www.catandgirl.com/index.cgi
...then on to another site that Dorothy Gambrell posts to...
http://www.moderntales.com/series2.php?name=gambrell-journal&view=current
...and thence on to following up on what it is that her sixth grade class have done with their lives, for example Eliza Strickland...
http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/authors/elizastrickland.html
I'd never thought of doing that with Google, but now, thanks to your posting of a link to a comic about "the Old Gods", I'm tempted to scan in myself an old class photo and see how many of the people I went to school with there are that I can chase up.
So yeah, if you link to somebody's site I'm going to hunt around all of its nooks and crannies and see where it can take me.
Just on the proof-and-disproof debate, I think it worth pointing out that matters relating to the existence of God are meta-empirical in nature... that is to say, they are not matters that can be answered with reference to empirical arguments. You cannot prove or falsify statements relating to the existence of God through empirical tests, tests which are based in empirical rules of observation and material evidence.
If there is such a thing as a God then it is by definition immaterial and meta-empirical. This is not to say that that there aren't reasons for believing or disbelieving in God, or that it isn't more or less reasonable to choose to believe in a particular form of the divine, but you can't assess God's existence through mechanical science and empirical arguement. These just don't have the tools necessary to deal with the existence of deity.
(The standard example here regarding empirical testing of the meta-empirical is ghosts. You can argue that you've not seen a ghost, you can argue that there's no empirical evidence for the existence of ghosts, you argue that you don't believe in ghosts and even that you can see no reason why anybody would want to believe in ghosts, but you can't prove that ghosts don't exist or falsify a person's claim that they have seen a ghost. Ghosts are by nature meta-empirical entities and their existence cannot be determined with reference to empiricism. And gods exist - or don't exist - in just the same meta-empirical way.)
'I believe in the Church of Baseball. I've tried all the major religions and most of the minor ones--I've worshipped Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms, and Isadora Duncan...' (Bull Durham, by Ron Shelton)
Well, actually, my own personal list isn't as extensive as the above, but I have tried (without success) to believe in quite a range of things in my time, and I've come to the conclusion that if there is something/someone out there then it would be more like the Tao or some notional Source-of-All than anything which is worshipped by any of the major religions.
And in the end I believe that it matters less What you worship or Who you worship than it does the Way that you worship and the Way you live your life. If you follow the Way then you'll get wherever it is that you're going in the end.
That and of course I do believe in the Church of Baseball... thank God/Gods that the season is finally under way!
What we need here is some kind of machine that we can feed a sample of writing into and have it tell us based on an analysis of the text whether the writing is fiction or not... surely in this day and age we're capable of building such a thing. Or then again perhaps we already have built this machine and the intelligence services use it exclusively to make assessments of foreign government statements and terrorist communiqués, assessments which are then promptly ignored because they don't provide the answers that the administration is looking for... Oh yeah and happy holidays everybody.
Hmm... when I was paying my way through university by working as a security officer my mates and I used to say that the kinds of people who became security officers were those who couldn't even manage to get themselves a taxi license... and we also used to say that the first place to look when something went missing from a site was inside the duty guard's bag.
In my own experience security guards tend to be fairly unpleasant and amoral people (I would say immoral, but I don't think they've given enough thought to questions of ethics for them to have made a choice to do the wrong thing) and whenever I hear of security personnel being involved in any context I suspect the worst. I don't know whether the individuals killed in Iraq were involved in any morally culpable activities but it certainly would not surprise me to find out that they were.
In any case, leaving aside my feelings about the security industry as a whole, I would have to admit that I didn't feel an awful lot when I saw the footage of these guys' deaths. But then, I don't feel terribly much when I read of regular soldiers being killed either. In my view they are all legitimate targets in an ongoing conflict. The manner in which these men died was unfortunate and unpleasant, but none of the armed personnel serving in Iraq were conscripted and all of them willingly signed up for jobs that they knew involved the prospect of shooting people and being shot at by others.
I'm not in any way glad that these four men died and I find it hard to believe that the mutilation of their corpses was at all justifiable, but we invaded Iraq and can't pretend to be surprised that some Iraqis aren't too happy about it. If we want the killings in Iraq to stop then we either need to convince an overwhelming majority of Iraqis that we did them a favour by invading their country (which seems a bit unlikely) or suppress their resistance through overwhelming force (which seems to be impossible).
But if we can't convince the Iraqis to stop killing our personnel or force them to stop doing so then the killings are just going to continue. I suppose we could always withdraw our occupying forces, but then, given that the coalition governments had to make up stories before they could even convince themselves that they had any right to invade Iraq in the first place, running home again before the conflict was actually over might just make them all look a little bit silly...
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 7 |
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