Jeremy was sabotaged by international finance and currency speculators who deliberately engineered market instability in order to prevent his assault on their business practices and lifestyle.
Actually, someone who is probably rehearsing this line right now.
Please no. God no. We need Jeremy to run. We need Jeremy to win.
Je-re-my! Je-re-my! Je-re-my!
In passing, we need to file this one under “Timmy Told ‘Em”:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3221966/Nicola-Sturgeon-s-plans-50p-unit-minimum-alcohol-price-rocks-European-court-finds-infringe-free-trade-rules.html
…and some of the DPW Army are already blaming the European Court decision on Westminster.
SMFS,
> “However SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon has refused to back down from plans”
So basically she’s telling the EU to fuck off, which is what the French also do whenever the EU tell them they can’t do something. She understands this game.
Thanks SMfS. I do enjoy being referred to Daily Mail articles. The right hand column’s an incredible source of information. I learn ” Bronzed beauty Nicole Scherzinger shows off her assets in a sexy blue bikini…” Indeed! She does!.
Incredible paper the Mail. Truly a newspaper of record.
Ritchie wants QE to house a million refugees. Perhaps he could be as good as Geldof and house a family in his annexe.
The comments on the fat idiot’s blog are riddled with conspiracy theories, about banks, Bilderberg, BIS, etc and they are not from the satirical accounts.
@Diogenes,
Since lefties do wish to run the economy on the basis of an official, out-in-the-open, state-run conspiracy, they seem to have great difficulty understanding understanding that a (moderately) free-market economy just isn’t. They just cannot conceive of it, so it must all be Bilderberg lizards ‘n junk.
Like creationists just cannot conceive that evolution just happens without a guiding hand or intelligent design.
@ abacab
The breeding programmes which produced most of winners at Cruft’s did not just happen – they had guiding hands and frequently *unintelligent* design. I could say the same of those that produced beautiful roses with no scent. Most of our crops and farm animals score higher on design.
The self-styled “creationists” have brought into disrepute a theory which was, when first proposed, was intellectually and philosophically acceptable. The two leading lights in the early stages of classical (non-“intelligent design”) evolutionary theory were, respectively, a monk and an Anglican pre-ordination theological student.
I have neither enough knowledge nor training in either theology or evolution to make any judgement on the original theoy of “intelligent design” but a little very elementary training in logic shows me that the self-styled “creationists” are almost certainly wrong.
john77: intelligent design is crap too; it’s fancified, frou-frou creationism designed to appeal to people who think actual out-and-proud creationists are a backwards bunch of snake-handling shitkickers (which they are). It’s no more intellectually respectable. It’s a bit like Murphy dressing up Zimbabwe style money-printing as “People’s Quantitative Easing” so as not to conjure the images of people going to the supermarket with wheelbarrows full of banknotes.
abacab:
“Like creationists just cannot conceive that evolution just happens without a guiding hand or intelligent design.”
Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism explain a great deal; but they don’t plausibly explain everything they claim to explain. The alternatives are not (a) to retreat to the Dawkins’ bunker OR (b) to fall back on a super-natural explanation. It is to look scientifically for another possible process or mechanism that affects evolution (which we know occurs). I can’t help but feel that Dawkins’ hysteria results from the (unjustified) assumption that biology has run out of answers. It hasn’t: science will advance. (None of the above, btw, is strictly incompatible with belief in a ‘God’.)
Please furnish an example of where modern evolutionary theory does not plausibly explain something it claims to explain.
I once upset a neighbour who was a creationist by pointing out in front of him and his kids when he said how could everything come for a single cell that it only takes 9 months to make a human by fusing 2 cells and considerably less time for other species.
BICR: altruism?
Who designed the designer? Can’t possibly have “come from out of nowhere” – far too complex a being, what with being able to create the universe an’all, this God character. So who designed him?
“altruism?”
You point at some altruism & we’ll inspect it.
‘Til then I’ll go along with self interest.
BiG: yeah, yeah…boring. Meanwhile, let’s look objectively at the deficiencies of Neo-Darwinism — without assuming that the alternative is non-scientific or theological. Please??
Bloke in Germany it’s turtles all the way down
secret squirrel: saints and heroes?
I’ve no doubt Richie, on the back of all that unpaid, dedicated work he does in the cause of tax justice sees himself as an altruist. Do Quackers have saints? If so, that ‘n all. And definitely a hero. Certainly Arnald’s.
And who’s to doubt him?
And I’d have thought the alternative to Darwin was modern evolutionary theory. For this week, anyway.
Bit like the Wright Brothers didn’t design the F35
@ BiCR
You cannot have actually looked at it.
I am not convinced either way on Intelligent Design but I DO know the difference between it and creationism.
I suspect that you have looked at the Creationist variant because you do not normally appear to be that stupid.
John77 – could you elaborate? Most of what I have seen from ID believers is a re-casting of “God did it” in terms of “it wasn’t God, but someone/something exactly like Him (but ineffably different). I can’t see a shadow of real difference between ID and creationism; it’s the same concept just in less deliberately religious guise – but that may be my shortcoming, or just the incomplete materials I have seen. I would be pleased if you could explain what distinguishes them.
Isn’t ID just the watchmaker fallacy dressed up
A watch is complex
A watch is designed by someone
The world is complex
Therefore something/someone must have designed it
Andrew M – “So basically she’s telling the EU to fuck off, which is what the French also do whenever the EU tell them they can’t do something. She understands this game.”
Yeah but the French government has French courts. I don’t think she is going to make it work for her in the UK.
secret squirrel
Did you lurk for a while before picking that name?
“Thanks SMfS. I do enjoy being referred to Daily Mail articles.”
No worries. My pleasure. I used to think the Daily Mail was a rag at best, but then I started to think about the Times and the Guardian. Now I think that it is just a slightly different collection of unexamined bigotries and knee jerk prejudices. But with bigger knockers. I think the only sensible thing is to view them all as a Minstrel Show.
dcardno
So far as I can see, the difference between ID and creationism is that with ID HE gives the occasional tweak to His creation. Maybe He didn’t get it perfect first time round or something. So, even more bonkers than creationism.
The Miller Urey experiment didn’t create life (just amino acids, the building blocks) nor did it get to proteins. But given that there are only 4 proteins in DNA (those CAGT) when there are 10^240 possibles, it’s a hint that life does well enough to get one solution and then lets evolution do the rest.
Sir Fred Hoyle likened the emergence of life like blowing a hurricane through a junkyard and making a jumbo jet. But if all you’re after is a paper aeroplane, the odds are shorter.
Bloke in Germany – “Who designed the designer? Can’t possibly have “come from out of nowhere” – far too complex a being, what with being able to create the universe an’all, this God character. So who designed him?”
An even larger Designer. Who was in turn designed by an even larger Designer. Re-iterate until we hit a Designer of infinite complexity and then we have a singularity – call that God.
Contemporary physics tells a story that is clearly shaped by Christian texts. We have a singularity and then the university simply came into being. It is a lot more credible than the Christian version but it is not actually all that different. What existed before the Big Bang? Well nothing because there was no time for it to happen in. But somehow, definitely not magically, the universe all came into existence. After the Singularity.
secret squirrel – “Thanks SMfS. I do enjoy being referred to Daily Mail articles.”
If it wasn’t for the Daily Mail, where would we ever learn about stories like this:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3222536/Husband-caught-pornography-phone-involving-fish-dog-broke-wife-avoids-jail-term.html
I always assumed The Simpsons chose Troy McClure’s sex problems because people who sleep with the fishes are the only people unlikely to complain and picket. As there aren’t any. They would not dare make him Gay for instance. But it turns out they may be in trouble after all. It is a short step from a preference to an identity to a mob demanding full legal protection and immediate firing for anyone who dares to suggest goldfish are meant for tanks, not the bedroom.
Well let me be ahead of the curve for once – Down With Piscasexualphobia!
@ dcardno
I am not a theologian, so anything I say should not be relied on – I am just trying, as a complete amateur, to answer.
Theology embraces both Freewill and Predestination, but this is not as difficult.
God is, by definition, infinite, omnipotent and omniscient. Therefore He can predict the outcomes of any event and arrange matters to organise that event – Moses striking a rock in the desert to provide a flow of water is an obviouis example.
So, if He can tell Moses which rock to strike to provide a flow of water, He can equally tell which bees to pollinate which flowers to produce a plant that turns into wheat (or barley, or rice, or whatever). If asked why I believe in a loving God, the easy answer is Apricots (the real answer usually gets ignored after hours of gentle explanation).
There is no logical bar to an/the omnipotent omniscient God deciding to set things up so that on this planet bi-pedal humanoids should develop intelligence and morals..
*Really* Intelligent Design allows for freewill that means that some humans do not act in acordance with God’s will so where some intermediate stage in the divine plan is quite important there are umpteen back-ups (Plans B to ZZZ) and, in extremis, Jesus appears to Saul of Tarsus on his journey to Damascus.
It is open for non-believers to disbelieve but there is no logical argument against belief.
@ BiG
Cogito, ergo sum
I exist – even if you are a figment of somebody’s imagination.
I can see the night sky
The universe exists
So why do you deny that the creator of the universe exists? If He does not exist, neither does the universe, nor do you.
Intelligent Design seems to me to be one of the best arguments religious people have that God exists. Not specifically their God, just any old God at all. It’s useful to the religious person in an argument between them and atheists to try to get the atheist to be a believer. Trying to convert the atheist to the correct belief system is the next step and much harder as there are so many to choose from.
Creationism is for arguments between people who are already religious.
Just my 2p worth.
I accept both creation and evolution – to me they tell the same thing from a different viewpoint.
The best argument I have heard in favour of a designer so far, is that we are on the cusp of creating supercomputers that could emulate an entire Universe – every single quark (or their hitherto unknown constituent parts) is a model running on an a computer somewhere above us. The theory goes that if we are actually capable of creating a computer that powerful (possibly using quantum processors) then isn’t it far more likely that us ourselves are the product of another emulator, rather than being the originals?
Of course this doesn’t answer who created the creator – but that was evolution… obviously <:-)
john77: Intelligent Design is a God-of-the-gaps argument. It posits that there are structures and systems in biology that cannot, even in principle, be explained by materialistic processes. It thereby offers up a whole series of hostages to fortune as one after the other they are knocked off the list. If one looks behind the scenes, it’s explicitly a project of Evangelical Protestantism. It is petitio principii that ‘the’ creator of the universe exists. We do not know if there even was a creation event, let alone that it required causation or a fortiori some ‘unmoved mover’. If you run the universe backwards it becomes denser and hotter but our ability to model it fails when distances and temperatures are near their Planck values. What was the state of the universe before the inflationary epoch, if there indeed was an inflationary epoch? Do the constants of nature have to have the values they do or are they essentially arbitrary? What is the topological structure of spacetime on the very large and very small scale? Are there six or seven extra compactified space dimensions? Are we living in a three-dimensional brane hovering a few millimetres away from another parallel universe? What does a block spacetime universe have to say about free will vs. predestiny? We really don’t know but it is logically fallacious to state that if science cannot explain something it therefore rehabilitates a supernatural explanation.
Bloke in Malta: we’re not even remotely close to being able to do that. Lattice QCD needs serious runtime on Lawrence Livermore-sized supercomputers to model a single proton to 10% or so. The Universe-as-a-simulation idea is interesting, but practically unfalsifiable and thus not really a theory.
@BiCR
Well it’s unfalsifiable, but so is the theory of the multiverse at the moment – and I don’t think anyone disputes it’s a ‘theory’. Anyway, I was indulging in the best argument I’ve heard in favour of a creator – I didn’t say it was a good one 🙂
P.S. anyone remember a Playstation 1, when playing the likes of Gran Turismo racing you’d get ‘pop up scenery’ – as in you’d see the mountains load in front of your eyes as you turned a corner. You know what this is? That’s quantum superposition – we’re all in a simulation, and the reason that Schrodinger’s cat is both dead and alive is that no fucker has drove their car around that corner to run over that cat yet. You see, I’ve got this all worked out.
No, multiverses of any flavour fall quite firmly in the ‘hypothesis’ camp at the moment.
john77,
“It is open for non-believers to disbelieve but there is no logical argument against belief.”
That depends. Are we talking about generally believing that some superbeing created the universe, or turning up to church each week? Because the latter is a waste of time, where the former has no real impact (although going to church also has social benefits that may be of some value).
The Stigler – “That depends. Are we talking about generally believing that some superbeing created the universe, or turning up to church each week? Because the latter is a waste of time, where the former has no real impact (although going to church also has social benefits that may be of some value).”
Rape rates in the US follow an upside down U-shape. In the 50s rape rates were low. In the 1980s they were low again. In the 60s and 70s they were high.
We know why they are low. It may be porn, it may be DNA testing. It may be increased personal security. It may be some combination of all of them. But we don’t know why they were low before the Sixties hit.
The likely explanation is, as you say, Church-going is a social good. But belief in God is also a personal good. At least it is if it seems to stop people raping.
As it does seem to have done.
Science and Theology describe two completely different phenomenon and any attempt to use one to ‘prove’ or ‘disprove’ the other is doomed to end in a screaming argument, (if not a war).
Anyway, the only serious position on all this is agnosticism.
Or as the great Patrick more was wont to exclaim; “We just don’t know!”
Kevin and Martin Davies: I agree.
As far as I am concerned: science does the “how”, religion the “why” of creation.
John77 – thanks for your response, and perhaps it’s just me, but I didn’t see anything that showed ID to be a non-religious theory of creation. It seemed to me to illustrate that ID is another variant well within within the range of extant theological creation-stories, albeit one that goes some way to disguise (or attempt to disguise) its essentially religious basis.
John Square – I suppose so, but religion is only necessary if you posit that there must be a why of creation. What if there isn’t?
Dcardno- no reason at all. I think you may have just ascertained precisely why some folk are religious and some aren’t though.
The biggest problem with intelligent design is that there are more than enough examples in nature of designs that are downright stupid. (Not to mention the many highly unpleasant life cycles that are the purest evil.) It always seemed to me to be rather blasphemous (to put it in religious terms) to be blaming them on God.
Unless you’re one of those Cthulhu worshipers, of course…