Lies and imposters

“Dear religion,
This week I safely dropped a man from space while you shot a child in the head for wanting to go to school.
Yours, Science”

A friend of mine posted this image on her Facebook with the comment “Enough said”.

I say not quite.

That wasn’t religion.
That was an imposter. And a lie.

You see, no matter what they call it, no matter what claims they make and no matter what “excuses” they may try to sell you,
the truth is that evil is just evil.
It’s not an integrated part of anything else. It’s just evil.

Remember that.

There’s never a good time for bad wording

At the time I’m writing this, there’s 48 days remaining until the American 2012 election and the republican candidate Mitt Romney is in rough weather after being recorded saying 47 % of American voters will never vote for him because… well basically because, in his opinion, they’re simply too stupid to be reasoned with. In his defense, he did not use those exact words and it may not even be anywhere near what he meant to say. But that’s more or less how it came across.

So, basically, Romney did the kind of thing where you write a nasty e-mail about someone and it ends up getting sent to them? It happens. Well, if you write nasty e-mails about people, it will. Just a matter of time. And there’s never a good time for something like that to come back and bite you – and bite you it will. Which is why you shouldn’t write nasty e-mails about people, or post crappy comments online. You may think you are “amongst your own” at the time, but you never know who might eventually end up reading it and how bad it can make you look in their eyes. In fact, this applies not only to e-mails and online comments, but to pretty much the whole world in general: It is never a good idea to try to impress people by speaking badly of others. At the end of the day, most people will be anything but impressed.

No thanks, Mr O’Leary

I hear the CEO of Ryanair, Michael O’Leary, has taken it upon himself to call a group of customers “idiots” for showing up at the airport without printed boarding passes. (Source: Time Magazine.)

As I understand it, the passengers were all checked in electronically, but failed to bring along printed boarding passes when showing up at the airport. For this, they were charged an additional fee of 60 euros per person and subsequently dismissed as “idiots” who got what was coming to them because “it was their **** up”.

This from an airline that keeps having to make emergency landings because they don’t put enough fuel on their planes (Source: The Telegraph).

No thanks, Mr O’Leary. I don’t need that kind of service.
I have never flown with Ryanair.
And I don't believe I ever will.

Sad but true…

Yes, it has occured to me, that although I scolded the “extremist blogger” Eivind Berge for his violent rhetoric in my recent Democracy revisited post, the fact that he did post the things he did and got arrested for it was the reason I even heard of him – and read his blog.

For him it did work: He got plenty of attention and now states that “While my kind of violent rhetoric is legal, it is no longer needed. We are strong enough to fight feminism in more elegant and subtle ways now.”

Yes, Eivind, posting those statements about “killing the cops” really worked out well for you. Sad but true. (Not sad because you got attention, but because of how you got it.) But I do hope this time you will actually practice what you preach.

Democracy revisited

Over the past several weeks, the "extremist blogger" Eivind Berge has gotten a lot of attention in Norwegian media. To those who do not know him, Mr. Berge calls himself a male rights activist (MRA) and anti-feminist, he opposes the "feminist state" and has repeatedly spoken favorably about the use of violence as a political tool - specifically against the police. For this reason, he was arrested and imprisoned for 3 weeks in July.

In the spirit of my own blog post about "true democracy" earlier this year, I have visited Mr. Berge's blog, read some of his work and responded rationally and without hate or anger.

I left the following comment under his "Thoughts about the trial" post:

In my humble opinion, Eivind has expressed several political opinions and rational concerns that are quite legitimate in themselves. But in my eyes, he completely and utterly destroys this legitimacy with his hateful ramblings about killing people.

Killing a police officer does not harm the state, it just kills a person and makes the state want to harm you. Also, it gives them all the legitimacy they could possibly need to do so: The moment you resort to violence, they can treat you ONLY as a dangerous terrorist and not pay any attention to your politics at all. I fail to see how this is supposed to accomplish anything good.

If you're angry about something and want to correct it, what you need to do is convince enough people and the state will correct itself. It can be a slow and painstaking process, but it's the only way I know that really does work.

As Winston Churchill once said it, "Democracy is by far the worst form of government. Except all the others that have been tried."