The Fair, the Fare and the Furry

Women; where do you start in such a far reaching topic? Well, let’s start with the obvious. I. Love. Women. Not all women. I draw the line at 15 stone munters with faces resembling a bulldog chewing a wasp and ne’er dare cross it, but as a loose generalisation it approximates closely my inner feeling when the word ‘woman’ enters my head. I think it’s worth pointing out at this stage that when I say ‘love’ I actually mean that I would graciously – one could say almost heroically – accept a quick knee-trembler ‘round the back of the pub in between pints. But don’t tell them that.

Of course I jest, but as you well know many a true word has been spoken out of such proclamations of banter. Unfortunately for us males, women know this too and they also know that when we say we love them, we in fact intend to convey that we wouldn’t object to the act of her placing her laughing gear ‘round our purple headed womb ferret and proceed to conduct a search for man-oil. They know it, we know it, but what do they get out of the deal? Simply being told that they inspire heart palpitations and the release of endorphins in our brains is not enough apparently, although a day with our credit cards invariably does the trick.

George Bernard Shaw summed this state of affairs up best whilst at a banquet. Throughout the meal a female journalist continually belittled him until she finally proffered, "Mr. Shaw, I don't know how you can prostitute your art the way you do."

To which Shaw responded, with the smell of blood in his nostrils, "Madam, in our own way, we are all prostitutes.”

"Sir, how dare you!" was the instant riposte.

"Madam, if I offered you ten thousand dollars, would you go to bed with me?" postulated Shaw.

The woman thinks for all of two seconds as galaxy-sized wads of green patterned paper with a fellow that looks unerringly like George Washington emblazoned on the front flash before her eyes. "Yes, I would."

[Indeed the very mention of such a sum of money clearly clouded this poor creature’s thinking to the extent that she couldn’t even figure out what was about to unfurl.]

Perhaps thinking that he’d overvalued the woman a tad, "Madam, if I offered you twenty-five cents, would you go to bed with me?"

The woman was suitably offended by this revised fare, thinking that she was a bit more of a catch than twenty-five cents: “What do you take me for?”

Shaw wasted no time in grasping at the bait he had been seeking, "That, madam, is an established fact. We're just haggling over the price."

To me that sums up the actions of most women in one nice, easy to remember anecdote. We men have all experienced it; we have all exclaimed at one point, “She’s done it again!” followed by a suitable sentence containing the word ‘cunt’ and yet we are powerless to prevent it. By Christ, we see it coming a mile off like one of those runaway trains of a bygone cinematic age, hurtling towards our stricken form at breakneck speed. What binds us to the track in such pitifully unbreakable weak fashion is the notion that the next session of miscreant behaviour – more than likely banned in several US states – is only around the corner. In other words we as men are perfectly happy to let the chugging locomotive steam right over us and then holler to the driver to shift that metallic juggernaut of majestic fury into reverse for a second helping.

I still love women. I really do.

But – and there’s always a but – there exists one breed of woman that I cannot bear, stand, tolerate, abide, put up with, endure, accept or indeed stomach. Yes, it’s the burn-your-bra, Germain Greer-worshipping, man-hating militants who protest through rabidly foaming mouths that men are obsolete, the appendix of humankind, the Betamax of Homo sapiens. They’re otherwise known as dykes. Big, fat, crew cut, dungaree-wearing, army booted dykes. Not the acceptable face of lesbianism, that of girls without a hair on their entire body (and especially none on their chin) who pretend to be inhabitants of the Isle of Lesbos in return for remuneration (a little more than twenty-five cents, one suspects), but the despicable underbelly.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they’re dykes – more than glad – but what rankles is their abject hatred of anything with a throbbing length of gristle between their thighs. These are the sort of left luggage who won’t even extend the common courtesy of using a strap-on to fuck their girlfriend’s brains out because it is a reminder of the necessity of man. How barbarically uncouth of them. They are the type that want not just parity but dominance over men and by feeling this way have become the very adversary that they hope to topple.

It’s this sort of benighted inter-gender warfare that baffles me to bemused bedazzlement. I’m quite happy to let drinkers of the furry goblet get on with whatever they want to do – as they are entitled – and I honestly don’t give a monkey’s pink, bulbous arse what they do to each other so long as they don’t hate another human being for nothing more than having an amusingly coarse adult water pistol attached to their groin.

But what motivates this hatred? No, let’s broaden that to, “What motivates women?” For the life of me I don’t know; men are from Mars and women are from Venus and all that guff. Some of the most notable men in history have sought a means by which to comprehend our impressively breasted fellow humans and about as close as we can get to a leading light is Dr John Gray. What a sad indictment: not even a whispering whiff of French-ness about him and yet there he stands almightily as man’s interpreter of all things feminine. And like his name, his book’s all codswallop, to boot. But to meekly admit that the only aspect to understand about females is their perplexing nature sounds like too much of a monumental cop out to me. My money’s backing that it is a theory permeated by women, for women. We all know who runs the show.

And I’m happy to go along with it. Now, my love, a blow job for monies rendered please.

TOPIC - Due 31/3 - "The Fairer Sex"

fair¹ ( P ) Pronunciation Key (fâr)
adj. fair·er, fair·est

1. Of pleasing appearance, especially because of a pure or fresh quality; comely.
2. 1. Light in color, especially blond: fair hair.
   2. Of light complexion: fair skin.
3. Free of clouds or storms; clear and sunny: fair skies.
4. Free of blemishes or stains; clean and pure: one's fair name.
5. Promising; likely: We're in a fair way to succeed.
6. 1. Having or exhibiting a disposition that is free of favoritism or bias; impartial: a fair mediator.
   2. Just to all parties; equitable: a compromise that is fair to both factions.
7. Being in accordance with relative merit or significance: She wanted to receive her fair share of the proceeds.
8. Consistent with rules, logic, or ethics: a fair tactic.
9. Moderately good; acceptable or satisfactory: gave only a fair performance of the play; in fair health.
10. Superficially true or appealing; specious: Don't trust his fair promises.
11. Lawful to hunt or attack: fair game.

I've never seen a dictionary be so insightful before.

Yep. Wimmins, boys.

And let's dispense with the indignity of the word limit, shall we? We all ignore the bastard anyway. Just jam it.

In Which The Doctor Decries Deist Dickheads and Design Douchebags

It fits.

I’ve found the link.

I frantically scrabble in the five-inch-high pile of research papers on my desk.

The paper I have just read is about the activity and pattern of the lactase gene across cultures. The authors predict frequency differences in gene expression across cultures, associated with their origins and selective pressures (i.e. the cultural practice of herding animals will be associated with adult gene expression).

The paper I’m looking for has a map of Western and Eastern Europe, and in each country the percentage of lactose intolerant adults and their Paleolithic heritage.

It’s close to the bottom of the pile. It always is. Except if you start looking at the bottom, of course.

Bliss.

The lactase gene map agrees almost entirely with the physical map of lactose tolerance across Europe. This gang of MIT geneticists is walking hand in hand with their European dietician counterparts. Best of all, I predicted they would be. The anthropological, genetic and dietary evidence all fits together.

This is more than just good evidence. This discovery gives me the feeling. Not the same one I have when I think about the Norwegian women’s curling team in the group showers. It is the feeling any scientist will get when pieces of evidence, regardless of how disparate, start to gently encircle the same locus. When the truth, whatever that might mean, starts to converge out of the mists. It seems as if for the briefest moment that reality appears directly in word or thought. It is this feeling, regardless of the empirical basis, that makes us think this is right.

This certitude, this brief pleasing silliness, is important to us here. This is faith, my faith. It is subservient to reason. Wait and see what this certitude can do when it comes from the other side.

But I digress, and before I’ve even started too...

There is no scientific debate on the reality of evolution.

Debate, yes. Plenty. Every two-bit evangelist, crusading pindick and squinty-eyed street corner prophet is yelling about it. Arguments and idiocies crash over the issue, hysterical swathes of babble and blather. Every intellectual half-pint from the President of the United States downwards has had their two bits worth.

Scientific debate is another matter.

We have theoretical problems with Newton’s conception of gravity. However, you will never find a mathematician who is willing to let me drop an anvil on his head because Newtown was wrong at boundary conditions. We have theoretical problems with the theory of relativity. But you will never find a quantum physicist laying me a bet that he can outrun a beam of light. Even in his good Nikes. The arguments are theoretical rather than material.

This is to say: while there is debate within the subject of evolution, and various parts of it fluctuate in popularity and plausibility, there such substance to the area of study as a whole that arguing against it (rather than within it) is considered a complete waste of time. It is quite literally that self-evident.

No peer reviewed journal has ever published a study or hypothesis attempting to disprove the fundamental conceptions of evolution, ever, EVER. Considering there are whole journals whose entire purpose is dedicated to the most tangential balls-backwards hypotheses that the hash-smoking scientists of the world can dream up, and that scientists absolutely love a good bust-up, this absence of dissent is a Clinton-libido-sized achievement.

Let’s not even trek up the towering mountain of confirmatory evidence – vestigial bones, vestigial organs, the ‘goosebump’ response to cold and fear, male nipples, the plantaris muscle, tails and gill slits on embryos, transitional species etc. Obsolete structures and leftover impulses from a thousand thousand generations of glacially slow progress. Things that have no reason to exist, unless they are simply harmless biological trinkets left over from previous speciations, evidence of the march of genes, and of time.

The basic theory of evolution, as we understand it, is true.

To claim it to be otherwise and simultaneously to be any kind of scientist is stand-under-the-anvil, outrun-the-photon stupid.

So what the FUCK is intelligent design? This unending babbling that’s in the news, the constant slack-jawed yammering about “options in the syllabus” and “irreducible complexity”, where is it all coming from? Are there renegade scientists out there, too afraid to come forward because of academic censure, rogues who can prove that somewhere the human species (and every other one, for that matter) has blueprints?

Unfortunately, no.

The whole exercise is a massive fraud, a stage-managed swindle which even the realpolitik grandmaster Karl Rove would admire. To cut a very long story short in the interests of the word limit, hardline Christian groups are using modern political methods to systematically undermine the evolutionary legacy, from Darwin downwards, and they are not idly fucking around when they do it. Their strategy is carefully outlined:

1. Sponsor research from several different angles with foregone conclusions (biology, paleontology, genetics etc.). Do NOT mention the Christian God or any other deity at all. Simply talk about the possibility of design. Create dissent, create doubt, and expand the ‘issue’ until it is an issue.

2. Publicity! Conferences! Seminars! Converts! Television! School boards! Allies! Noise! Tell tales told by an idiot! Sound and fury!

3. Cultural shift. Establishment of a new academic paradigm. Tenure for ‘design’ professors. Expansion of research. General shitting in mouths.

A well-designed, carefully aimed and entirely subversive campaign. Even writing about it scares me.

Fortunately for us (not to mention the future of our species) they are taking on a world they do not understand, and when it comes to professional credence, they are found badly lacking. Much of their work is being giggled at after the completion of Stage 1, and outside the rabidly religious confines of the stupider states of America, there is little likelihood of this cancer metastasising.

If I was going to discredit a whole branch of science, I would not chose a poster-boys like the preposterous pissfuck Michael Behe, whose book “Darwin’s Black Box” has been torn to bloody empirical shreds so many times by geneticists that they constantly run out of original things to say about how dim-witted it is. The continual negative reviews are almost as boring as the book.

Also, I would also hide the associations between my branch of “science” (intelligent design) and the religious batfuckers sponsoring and supporting me (The Discovery Institute). That kind of thing can really take your credibility to the tip.

Lastly, I would string my bow differently. If you read their literature, these Intelligent Design people claim to hate Marx, Freud and Darwin, the heavyweights of the “social sciences”. Precious, stupid fools! They’ve missed the real target, the man who came before, and the man whose scientific principle pulps them to bloody mush.

William of Ockham, 1285-1349, Franciscan monk, logician, nominalist and author of Ockham’s Razor, the principle of parsimony – one should always choose the simplest explanation of a phenomenon, the one that requires the fewest leaps of logic.

Why is parsimony so important?

Because when we finally manage to connect amino acid generation to viral or RNA construction, and get to establish even a tenuous grasp on the biological origins of life, William of Ockham will rise towering and righteous from his grave and take a massive steaming zombie shit right across your contemptuous plans and your religious manifestos, you fucking proles.

That’s your bad boy, you Bible-humping fucks, one of your own! A Franciscan monk turned worst goddamn nightmare. At the most realistic level, the modern social scientists could be worked around. But what are you going to do when we turn your God into a physical irrelevance? And the most famous religious philosopher of the 14^th Century decries your stupidities? Instead of attacking the modern materialists, you should have been attacking the principles of materialism. But you’ve missed your boat now. The next generation of rogue geneticists will become your God and wave the life you claim as precious and divine in front of your eyes on the Telescreen in a petri dish. And the God you formed in your own image will be spit-shined and trampled like a political banner used after a protest march, waved frantically then broken, dropped and forgotten as you realise that no-one fucking cares.

I’ll dance on your grave, you dead whores. In my lifetime, I will taste your blood when your retarded ideas die withered and crippled in your wrinkled, festering, backwards heads.

Fuck you, and your God, and fuck the alleged intelligence of his design. If he was in any way intelligent, he wouldn’t have designed bobble-headed cumfarts like you to wave his standard.

'Intelligent (sic) Design (sic)'

Science is a particular, rigorous discipline, one that is cheapened whenever some crackpot takes advantage of a widespread misunderstanding of the word ‘theory’ to try and float a real cunt of one with some legitimacy. This is today’s problem.

Many of these are not paid much heed; few people fight to force the view that aliens built the pyramids, that the flying spaghetti monster was the unmoved mover of the Universe, the Kantian theory that the life forms on Pluto – and there are life forms on Pluto – must be hyper-efficient and closer to a perfect rationality due to the planet’s essential nature, that math is a ‘universal language’ and not a human construct, that the true source of genius is always repressed homosexuality, that the presence of an epicanthic fold in both Asians and people with Down’s syndrome implies that Asians are retarded, Linnaeus’s taxonomical classifications for racial subspecies (afer, americanus, asiaticus, europaeus, and monstrosus), and any other idiotic, anti-scientific theory you’d like to name into primary schools. This bullshit inundates us, true; but from TV shows, pop science publications, bad movies, quack (but accredited!) academicians with inexhaustible air supplies, crazy millionaires, and the ever-educational internet. Not primary school classes. The people who promote these theories don’t take advantage of the word ‘theory’ – as opposed to ‘fact’ – when promoting their wrongheaded bullshit; they just say it. Unlike the following group:

Christians seem to have a particularly thick nature – morbidly sensitive, they run from life, shrieking like an air-raid siren being anally raped by a Swedish fist, but, from a safe distance, try to force it into an entirely alien box. Faith can be well and good, but it isn’t if you don’t pursue it honestly. Take Kierkegaard as your guide. Honest faith is not pseudo-science pursued with the fury of a proselytizing religion; nor is it genuine science. This whole affair is little more than clever bullying, playing at seeming respectable.

Faith is and can only be a belief in something for which there is no proof. By definition, it does not need, or want, proof; you cannot have faith in something proven. It is entirely separate from knowledge and its power is derived from that separation. There is absolutely no need for this bullshit Christian (sic!) science (sic!). Neither Christianity nor science demands or can permit it.

The existence of this ‘science’ can only be attributable to these pseudo-religious demagogues who seem determined to run roughshod over my country, guzzling gullibility and spitting out full-formed, easy-swallow capsules of paranoiac, pseudo-Christian bullshit. The Falwells and Robertsons of our unfortunate world do have faith, a febrile, unshakeable, neurotic, unreflexive faith. But they’re too focused on indoctrinating America into their execrable, deformed Weltanschauung through horizontally integrated propaganda to have time for genuine faith. This is advertising, not religion. Certainly not science. Pat Robertson owns a television station and one of the best-endowed film schools in my country for this reason; it also motivates this attempt to exploit language to transmogrify bad theology into good science. Advertising.

Science is fantastic for a few reasons, biggest of which is that there are fucking rules that every scientist knows and enforces. Many fields have rules, but a lot of the practitioners are unfortunately very comfortable with ignoring them; scientists, on the other hand, are predisposed to rigor. What are these rules? To me, the most important with regard to this debate are as follows:

- Uniformitarianism. This means that the way the world works is and has been throughout the ages the same everywhere, permitting no change without a natural explanation.

-Falsifiability. If something is falsifiable this means it is possible to prove it wrong, so that, if mistaken, it will be replaced.

-Ockham’s Razor: ‘plurality is not to be posited without necessity.’ Explanations of phenomena should not be allowed to indulge in unnecessary complexity.

-Unending self-criticism. Science is not satisfied with anything less than the truth. Any and every theory, no matter how elegant or well-liked, will be hacked down, thrown away, and replaced by one which better conforms to the world if need be.

It should be clear that these guidelines feed into one another. A claim that something in the supernatural realm intruded into reality and caused what appears to be caused by some other natural phenomenon to occur would offend all these standards and generally be fucking unscientific.

This kind of offense against scientific method well defines the theory put forth by proponents of Intelligent Design, whose chief evidence is either a misapplication of some scientific principle (‘The complexity of x would be most simply explained by some creative intelligence having designed it’) or a gross suspension of natural laws (‘Carbon dating is invalid because the antediluvian layer of water hung suspended around the Earth and interfered with the radiation that buffeted the Earth before the Flood, making all radioactive dating inaccurate and its practice a test from God’). This is not science, it just plays at it. Not good Christianity either; God’s not supposed to be lying to or tricking us. That’s the Devil’s job, and a good Christian shouldn’t confuse the two because it suits him.

The mere existence of Intelligent Design bespeaks the pervasiveness of an insecure, irrational, unscientific, non-religious mindset, and it is puzzling why it should even be considered as an alternative to the more satisfying theories presented by legitimate science. I attribute this to a few things: the peculiar American religiosity; the Manichean belief that divides this world into Christians and Anti-Christians, both of which are believed to be proposing theories of the world’s makeup for identical reasons (i.e. religious propaganda); and some confusion over terms, such as ‘theory’ and ‘fact,’ as alluded to above.

American religiosity, and American Manicheanism, are familiar enough to us all, and the causes for them so complex, that I feel I don’t need to give them space here. Let it suffice to say that American Protestantism is not an examination of faith but a dictatorship of spirit striving to manifest itself into flesh, and that the American idea of devotion is a ‘with me or against me’ attitude that tends to attribute to one’s ‘enemy’ everything one believes and plans to do. Thus religion sees scientific attempts to explain existence as a deliberate attack; while it is a threat, science doesn’t have to have religion in its sights. Science is not so concerned with building itself up or destroying competing cosmologies as being RIGHT within its own system. Religion, on the other hand, definitely has science in mind when it collects or makes up this bullshit to paint over the halls of knowledge in a deliberate parody of science.

The word ‘theory’ does not indicate that something is false; it indicates that it is awaiting a valid counter-proof. Whether or not this counter-proof is even possible is not implied by the word. When used correctly, the word ‘theory’ signifies something that has submitted to the scientific method. Defenders of Intelligent Design like to take the word ‘theory’ and play it against the word ‘fact’ – a theory is not a fact, and, facts being true, is hence false. If we can take Umberto Eco’s definition of a moron (‘a master of parologism’) as accurate, these people are certainly morons of the first order, but their claims to being scientific are undercut by this obvious lack of understanding of the field’s technical lexicon. Unfortunately, due to an existing defect in primary education in this country, this lack is so widespread that this spurious distinction appears valid to the Christ Ad Agency’s target demographic.

Intelligent Design is not science. It’s not good religion either; if (and it’s arguable) there is anything beautiful about religion it is not and cannot be what is beautiful about science. Anybody who cares about either field should be profoundly offended by this cheap, cloying, manipulative smegma that threatens to foster further idiocy in the next generation of American schoolkids. The education system here is in serious need of positive reform to stave off the slide into idiocy, not the transfer of control to the loudest idiots of the day. It needs to be fixed, not fucked, or we’ll be faced with generations more execrable than those we already have.

Creeping Creation

In business, there are two main methods via which a company can obtain growth. The first is to expand organically by reinvesting retained profits internally into the development of more products and/or moving into new markets. The second is to reinvest those accumulated profits externally into the acquisition of other businesses, thus forming a group of companies under common control. Best results are often observed in the latter if the prospective group member is a main competitor as this ensures the market dominance of the purchasing company.

However, in the UK there is a Monopolies Commission which regulates, according to the best interest of the general public, which businesses can and can’t take over other businesses. As a result, most very large companies gain market dominance through more surreptitious means, i.e. they create an environment in which it becomes increasingly difficult for the competitor to trade. This is often done through the purchase of the main supplier to the competitor and the subsequent imposition of stinging price rises (indeed, many large companies like to have a stake in their principle suppliers in order to fend off such an arrangement). Another technique – although as rare as an intelligent Frenchman – is for one company to find itself in control of the market due to government legislation restricting the operations of its competitors.

It’s a brutal, ruthless environment permeated by cutthroats looking for more earnings per share at every turn. But! At least this environment is based on the application of sensible – if at times unscrupulous – ideas and methods of business management to the act of generating money. The hard fact is that either they go to the wall and drown in a puddle of putrefying piss or you do, and it is precisely this fear of bankruptcy allied with unmitigated greed that drives companies to act in this cold-blooded manner.

Fear and greed: Also two of the Church’s specialties over the last couple of millennia. The latter is for another time; however the former is pertinent in this case. The Christian faith – and religion at large – is largely built on allaying the fear of the unknown. What happens when we pop our clogs and depart this mortal coil? How did we come into being? How come Friends is so popular? For a millennium and a half, the Church proffered unchallenged that we go to a lovely place in the sky called Heaven, where, upon passing the entrance examination with a mark of no less than 55%, you live on for the rest of eternity in a contented, ethereal existence similar to that currently being enjoyed by Keith Richards. On our origins; well, it’s easy – God created us out of dirt. Yes, the same dirt that one wipes off one’s shoe before one enters the house. So you see, the Church has an answer for everything. [Except for why Friends is so popular.]

Now, in addition to putting our fears at rest, religion is quite big on instilling fear into its followers: “If you don’t worship God you will die and go to Hell!” is just one example of the regular oral excretions of the excruciatingly evangelical. And who wants to go to Hell? I certainly wouldn’t – I’ve heard it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. And so for centuries, fear kept the masses in check. However, rumblings against the Church’s explanations began to gain credence with the publishing of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium in 1543. His life’s work, it expanded upon the seven basic axioms of his earlier work, Little Commentary:

1. There is no one centre in the universe.
2. The Earth's centre is not the centre of the universe.
3. The centre of the universe is near the sun.
4. The distance from the Earth to the sun is imperceptible compared with the distance to the stars.
5. The rotation of the Earth accounts for the apparent daily rotation of the stars.
6. The apparent annual cycle of movements of the sun is caused by the Earth revolving round it.
7. The apparent retrograde motion of the planets is caused by the motion of the Earth from which one observes.

Foolish heresy! Everybody knows that the Earth is the centre of the universe! That may have been true at the time, but only because nobody was told otherwise due to there simply being no alternative. It was subsequently left to the brave, solitary voices of men such as Kepler and Galileo to extend upon the groundwork laid down by Copernicus, with Galileo feeling the wrath of the Church when placed under house arrest for his scientific beliefs. Indeed, Galileo’s inspiration appeared to be his very own father, who wrote in Dialogue on Ancient and Modern Music:

“It appears to me that they who in proof of any assertion rely simply on the weight of any authority, without adducing any argument in support of it, act very absurdly. I, on the other hand, wish to be allowed to freely question and to freely answer without any sort of adulation, as well becomes those who are sincerely in search of truth.”

It is this very thinking that the Church fears as it cannot prove its explanations of Creation, et al. Thankfully, the Church’s reaction to this line of thinking has changed over time – Darwin was merely ridiculed via his depiction as an ape man – yet the fear emanating from the Church remains and to no other area is this fear more focused than how we came into existence, or evolution through natural selection as it’s more commonly known. The Church, of course, vehemently opposes Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, maintaining that man was created from dirt and woman from one of his ribs. I wish I could do that.

But what is the story of Creation? Well, it’s an impressively productive period – even for a deity – of seven days within which everything was created by that nice chap God. On the first day He created light and separated it from darkness. Not content with sitting on his laurels and basking in his glorious opening day’s work, He then created the sky on the second day. Next up on day three was the creation of earth, vegetation and the sea while on the following day the Sun, moon and stars were created. Day five was an absolute corker: God created non-land animals and commanded that they be fruitful and multiply (presumably they could understand Hebrew). Now for the coup de grace and possibly most famous of days in the creation story: Day six, on which God created the land animals and man, again commanding that they be fruitful and multiply. On the seventh day God put His feet up and surveyed His creations. The lazy git.

How do Creationists prove that these events actually took place? Well, it says so in the Old Testament so it must be true. Maybe if God had taken a photograph of Himself standing in front of His new creations wearing a “I created everything and all I got was this lousy t-shirt” tee and passed the negatives on to Adam for safe keeping then Creationists would have something with which to back up their argument. Alas, it was not to be and we just have to take their word for it.

However, the Church has a new product that, in its own eyes, supports the story of Creation by means of sound scientific reasoning and is presently launching it into a new market. In this case, the product being Intelligent Design; the market being high school science classes. It looks like Creationism is attempting to grow organically on this evidence, but the main worry is that it is also growing through acquisition and that this is becoming the primary growth plan. In some states of America, it could become commonplace in high schools for children to never encounter Evolutionary Theory and instead be fed a staple diet of cretinous Creationism. In other words, Creationism is eliminating the competition in order to gain dominance and is doing so through the implementation of state political policy.

This, for me, says more about supporters of Creationism and its subsidiary, Intelligent Design, than it does about Evolution and again the reasons lie within a web of fear and apprehension. Not of Darwin’s theories, but a base fear that Intelligent Design simply would not stand up to scrutiny if it were taught alongside rational science such as Natural Selection, a celebrated theory supported by empirical evidence. And they’re right to be afraid as Intelligent Design is to science what I am to a Frenchman – as far removed as possible.

TOPIC - Due 15 March - Real Science Versus Intelligent Design

Physics, chemistry and biology as branches of science provide reasonably accurate theories that describe the universe and everything contained within it. We as a species have made giant strides in attempting to gain full understanding of our surroundings - both at the macro and micro scales - and are rapidly, at least in terms of the rate of advancement compared to how long we have existed as homo sapiens, closing in on theories that provide us with the answers to how we came to be and where we are going to be in the future.

For some people, the hard work of such luminaries as Darwin and Hubble is thought to be nothing more than the claptrap effusions of men harbouring blasphemous agendas against the Church. These people are known as Creationists (or more commonly, twats) and the relatively new method of communicating their ideas is through Intelligent Design, the so-called science of Creationism.

Now, I'm happy for these faux scientists to have their own theories so long as they do not impinge on real scientific principles. Unfortunately - nay scarily - Intelligent Design is being proposed as a complete replacement of Darwin's much celebrated Theory of Evolution in the school curricula of some states in America.

So, gentlemen, your thoughts please on these recent developments and the need for educational monopoly by exponents of Intelligent Design.

1,000 words, due 15 March.

The Multiple Molestation of Meaning

When you write a lot, there is a continual pressure to be original. I live in perpetual fear of using the same words and phrases, and also of working with the same ideas. A comfortable writer is a dead hack. You have an obligation to yourself and others to be heading somewhere.

However, there is one word that I find myself returning to in endless horror and fascination, like an arsonist returning to his mother’s burning apartment to masturbate over the flames.

It is ‘saccharine’. Yes, the stuff they put in NutraSweet.

Saccharine has no energy, no caloric value. It is a chemical creation, pieced together in a lab from errant molecules, designed and packaged, then turned out in packets of 500 so you can remove the guilty feeling, the emotional weight, of eating sweet foods. The taste is curiously hollow – undeniably sweet, but with an accompanying emptiness where your taste buds inform you that you are in fact being screwed.

It is the divine monarch of metaphors when it comes to describing the festering haemorrhoid that masquerades as the modern creative imagination. This bald-gummed drooling monstrosity, this baseless perversion, has so many, many things to hate I scarcely know where to begin or when to end.

We have television, film and music is ‘entertainment’ and not art, and art itself is pornography and dime-store sensationalism. We have “pre-stressed” clothing. We have astrology, horny goat weed, homeopathy and emails from those mysteriously rich Nigerian fellows who seem so desparately keen to make us a million dollars. We have the fucking abomination that is the self-help industry. We have the Artist’s Way franchise, which will inevitably help us discover our inner artist.

“But what if I’m not artistic?”

Don’t be silly, child. There’s no question of being uninspired. We have done away with all the stupid people and now we’re all special, with ‘different talents’ and ‘various levels of achievement’.

Marx was right in Grundrisse – a conspicuous product of capitalism seems to be stupidity. When we commodify an object or an act, we imply that it has no inherent value, because it can be co-valued and exchanged universally with any other entity. If we want to get fit, we buy a gym membership, new sweats, running shoes, goofy bike pants, ab gadgets from the television. We do not grind ourselves to a standstill and persevere. If we want to be a porn star, we buy expensive pills that rudely hijack our biology and give us erections you could hang an overcoat on for a week. As in life, we do not address that which makes us impotent. Impotence in all things is not a disease, it is a symptom. It cannot be ‘cured’. It will go away when a disease no longer produces it.

And what of method and rigour in all this? They are merely two players in this grubby little game, aspects of thought being slowly watered down. The respect that they earned over thousands of years up to the Modernist era is now being pissed on at an alarming rate by people whose raison d’etre for drawing breath holds no respect for truth, art or beauty.

This is one reason I take refuge in science. The area is not without its problems, but the central premise of the academic, regardless of where they work, is to give meaning. Rigour is both necessary and expected. The statistical and imaginative requirements for greatness are savagely maintained, while on the other hand, those who deviate from the correct method are treated as bastards and pariahs, and the boundaries of what is and isn’t science are patrolled by academics who rally around the Sokal Affair as a defining moment in keeping the head of cultural stupidity properly kicked in.

This is one lonely area of human endeavour where we maintain some kind of standard of decency. Many others languish. We only have space for the most recent example to do my head in.

This is a review of an album by an awful pop-punk cretin. He was on a television show called Australian Idol, a low-fidelity antipodean knock-off of American Idol. I have no intention of listening to his music. I do, however, have every intention of eviscerating its reviewer.

“Don't get too precious and snort that "this Idol joker with the stupid hair couldn't make a decent album". Put this alongside pretty much any of the bright/dumb Cali-punks - your Blinks and Good Charlottes - and it's not out of place.

Sure, every song works the same format, Harding's voice gets plenty of studio tweaking and its rebellion is as heartfelt as a McDonald's ad. Yet the choruses come perfectly packaged, the guitars run headlong, the energy buzzes and, well, it doesn't suck at all.”

Take notice, you arty whores. It’s ‘precious’ to insist that a bad artist makes bad art.

The correct perspective is to say merely that it isn’t offensive and therefore acceptable as entertainment.

I mourn for what’s left of my species.

The Internet, Cuntblather, and the Death of Reason

Being on the internet sometimes gives me the feeling of being a witness to the murder of thought.

I don’t use the more popular metaphor of watching a train or car wreck because that has too positive a connotation – we enjoy seeing a twisted wreck, love to drive by the abstract sculptures in steel, flesh, and viscera at a leisurely pace, so as not to miss any of the carefully wrought details. The murder metaphor, which I’ll admit is not particularly uncommon, is more appropriate because, among other reasons, nobody tries to witness a murder. People do not slow down their cars to get a better look at a murder. Especially not when it is of something they like. There is an element of unwillingness to it all; of being trapped in what would ordinarily be the right place at the regular time and finding it all wrong. In this manner, a quick tour of the internet will find you everywhere confronted with cruelty and ignorance casually draped with the stolen finery of the dearly departed.

The internet is a particular affront in terms of discussion and debate. This is where the majority of the visceral slop work in that murder I mentioned takes place, where every set of fingers capable of doing so pecks out ‘reasonable’ lookalikes of real words and sets them forth into the world with a bellicose logorrhea and a genuine sense of urgency, as though if their opinion were not yelled out as quickly and loudly as possible it would not be heard at all. This leads to a lot of overstatement, a lot of ‘this fucking sucks and everybody who listens to it is a pound-me-in-the-butt fag’ when what’s meant is ‘the one song I’ve heard of this band is not particularly memorable.’ With everybody grotesquely inflating their opinions, worried that without all the hot air blown frantically into their at-base uninteresting opinions they won’t even be noticed, the resulting conversation can be imagined.

On the genuinely democratic internet, where every man’s opinion is given space and he is not required to do more than insult anyone who disagrees for that privilege, the people described above are able to engage in discussion on any number of subjects with people from any manner of backgrounds. Meaning that some of the fingers typing out opinions are attached to brains capable of shining these before presenting them to other people, of submitting them to rigorous self-criticism and constructing them as a logically valid argument. Hence making sure that they have something worth saying and are capable of saying it convincingly.

The interaction of these two types is bound to create people who don’t know how to argue but respect and admire those who do, and desire to emulate them. These are the people who generally tend to want to come off as intelligent and have a mild idea as to what an intelligent opinion looks like, but no idea of how to go about getting one. They equate their own superficial perceptions with the depth of real thinking, and we get something about as stimulating as a tattoo of an areola on a 90 year-old man’s elbow: it barely resembles the real thing visually and does not at all in any other way.

The problem is that people in general seem to be congenitally lazy and need to be trained out of it in their youth. Our first instinct is to ask what an unfamiliar word means – a good parent will tell us to look it up in the dictionary, and to keep a dictionary by us as we read. Everyone should have this incuriosity bred out of him as he grows up, but, curiously, this happens less and less as the generations press on. A look at older cartoons is informative: they were deliberately abstract, which forced children to do some mental work to engage with them. Modern-day cartoons, while usually featuring the same characters, are anything but, more often mimicking tried and true formulas drawn from unabstracted places. And modern-day children seem to have maintained their incuriosity and laziness. They would rather watch a word pass by than put in the effort to learn it. They would similarly rather blog up febrile attempts at a shadow intellectualism than take the time to say anything genuinely intelligent.

The combination of these feeble arguments with the fragile egos of the people making them leads to a lot of bitching, complaining, fighting, and playing the victim. This tends to characterize all manner of intellectual discourse, and for much the same reasons, but the unlimited time, the diversity of participants, and the protective anonymity offered by the internet amplify these typical results into something monstrous. Arguments that would never have been started had one of the people involved taken the time to think about some proposition or objection that popped full-formed out of his skull tend to besiege and overwhelm every topic as a tide of people who want to be thought of as thinkers take offense when told their thought is shoddy. The internet, with its infinite potential for a meeting of practically unmediated minds, turns out to be clusterfuck of ego and emotions. Every fictional virtual reality situation has it that your mind goes off somewhere else while your body stays where it is, but for the real thing it seems to be the opposite: all detritus, no mind. We’ve fucked up one reality and seem determined to fuck the one we’ve created within it.

Internet discussion boards serve well to demonstrate a problem that is really pandemic. Intellectual pretensions without the curiosity and precision proper to them can’t produce impressive results and will tend towards producing the faux profundities and belligerent defenses associated with the worst parts of academia and especially with the internet. But the desire to do anything that requires some skill or commitment – that is, anything worth doing – that is not coupled with that commitment and the knowledge of how to go about applying it will come out the same way.

If it is successful, it will be so in a way that makes us all poorer. More often it will make the kind of tangled, rebarbative mess we all recognize on the internet. It will produce bad art the stomach-butts its way into popular respectability – keep in mind that this past year the British awarded The Da Vinci Code as ‘best book,’ and the movie based upon it will open this year’s festival at Cannes – and the type of pop science that spreads so quickly while the real, interesting stuff gets to slog away in obscurity, not reducible to soundbytes such as ‘mathematics is the universal language!’ or ‘evolution is not a fact!’ It produces the popular, completely empty and meaningless ‘spirituality’ so many teenagers profess in their profoundest tones, and the equally empty skepticism that is willing to say ‘I don’t believe that’ (a good statement to start with!) and end its commitment there. In short, a crayon drawing of a hole is proffered as genuine profundity.

More troubling is that, with standards so low, it is almost always accepted at face value. I shudder when I briefly consider the unreflexive monsters these peoples’ children will be raised into. And South Dakota’s just banned abortion. I come more and more to understand what Beckett meant when he ended his narrator’s curse on those he would not forgive in Malone Dies with ‘in the execrable generations to come [I wish you to have] a good name.’ When surrounded by the morally, intellectually, spiritually bankrupt, seeing that nothing more evil than an accidental laziness grown into an essential one produced it, I find myself crawling into the anti-humanist’s mind.