Link blog: religion, humour, video, politics

[nameandnature]

Is Obama About To Become Just Another War Criminal?

"Aghanistan is not a country, it's a criminal enterprise" - Evert Cilliers wonders what America is doing there, a question you might also ask about the UK.
(tags: drugs politics war afghanistan taliban pakistan islam)

George Carlin - Religion is bullshit.

Carlin's classic routine on religion, in which he tells us how he worships the Sun and Joe Pesci. May be "strident".
(tags: religion video youtube funny atheism humour god carlin comedy)

36 ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD —  By Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

The Edge introduces and gives us an excerpt from Goldstein's novel. The 36 arguments (and their rebuttals) are included in the excerpt, handily: the moral argument and the cosmological argument are in there.
(tags: religion philosophy god atheism books morality)

Caveman Science Fiction

From the same people who brought you "Dungeons and Discourse": Caveman SF.
(tags: comics scifi funny science satire comic humour)

The Open Road London (1927)

Colour footage of London in 1927. Pretty amazing stuff.
(tags: london video history youtube archive)

Renouncing Islamism: To the brink and back again - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent

The stories of former Islamists who came back from the brink, and just what went wrong to put them there in the first place. "From the right, there was the brutal nativist cry of "Go back where you came from!" But from the left, there was its mirror-image: a gooey multicultural sense that immigrants didn't want liberal democratic values and should be exempted from them. Again and again, they described how at school they were treated as "the funny foreign child", and told to "explain their customs" to the class. It patronised them into alienation. "
(tags: islam religion politics terrorism culture war hari johann-hari jihad islamism)

Comments

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

I don't think the argument given is circular (perhaps poorly expressed, but it's hard to be both succinct and precise).

The Argument from Altruism says that altruistic behaviour cannot have evolved by natural selection, because natural selection only favours selfish behaviours.

The response in "flaw 2" points out that altruism is not necessarily an adaptive behaviour. It could be a non-adaptive consequence (what Stephen Jay Gould calls a spandrel) of another feature, namely, general intelligence.

We don't have to explain why general intelligence leads to altruism in order to establish that this is a flaw in the Argument from Altruism, merely observe that it does.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

OK, that makes sense now.

(Maybe you should rewrite the article - your comment is as concise as the original, and clearer and more precise.)