GamePol­it­ics is report­ing that Jack Thompson is back in the legal fir­ing line, this time for spam­ming one of his sup­port­ers — the Pres­id­ent of the Utah State Sen­ate, Michael Wad­doups — with “offens­ive” images from GTA4. Need­less to say, Mr Wad­doups is no longer quite so sup­port­ive of Mr Thompson and not only has he vowed not to sup­port his anti-​​game legis­la­tion again, he’s attempt­ing to have him sued for mis­use of email.

This sort of thing really makes Jacko no friends, and it’s tempt­ing to think that he’s just a mad old fool who doesn’t real­ise he’s fast run­ning out of them. My take on it is some­what dif­fer­ent though; if you actu­ally look at how the man acts it’s clear that he’s not actu­ally inter­ested in mak­ing friends, or advan­cing his cause, or even in mak­ing money. What he craves is atten­tion. It’s that simple; he wants people to notice him, and he’s real­ised the best way to man­age that is to piss them off. He’s basic­ally a troll, except that instead of hanging around on anonym­ous mes­sage boards annoy­ing Star Trek fans, he’s quite suc­cess­fully trolled the entire com­puter game industry, the US legal sys­tem and is mov­ing on to their gov­ern­ment. Ladies and gen­tle­men, I put it to you that Jack Thompson is not an idiot at all; he’s the most suc­cess­ful troll the world has ever seen.

You have to respect him for that.

I was going to make some quip about Sarah Palin here, but really, I guess I just did. :)

So, it went through the Com­mons, after some wheeler-​​dealing, and now has to get through the Lords.

At the risk of sound­ing like someone writ­ing to The Times, I am appalled and dis­gus­ted that it’s got this far. There is no jus­ti­fic­a­tion for hold­ing mem­bers of the pub­lic for so long. A week sounds about right to me, any more than that is simply wrong. Whatever happened to “inno­cent until proven guilty”?

Right now, I’m ashamed that I ever voted Labour, and I never will do again.

Excel­lent news! The Com­mons has voted in sup­port of research on hybrid embryos. Need­less to say, the unin­formed are up in arms about the “army of Frankesteins” about to be unleashed, but I think every­one who under­stands the issues knows this is the right outcome.

So, the votes on the Human Fer­til­isa­tion and Embry­ology Bill are tak­ing place over the next couple of days, with the big one — hybrid embryos — hap­pen­ing today.

The BBC has sum­mar­ised the key points on both sides of the debate:

What are the argu­ments in favour of this process?

Sci­ent­ists who advoc­ate the work say the cells would allow them to study how genetic defects, which cause dis­eases such as Parkinson’s, develop.

They also say that stem cells’ abil­ity to develop into dif­fer­ent tis­sues mean it could be pos­sible to use cells formed in this pro­cess to cure diseases.

Using animal eggs would enable sci­ent­ists to over­come the prob­lem that human eggs are in short supply.

What are the argu­ments against?

Oppon­ents say it is tam­per­ing with nature, and is unethical.

On the one hand we have a set of reasoned argu­ments detail­ing spe­cific pre­dicted health bene­fits for thou­sands of people, and on the other we have “eewwww!”.

I really wish people would stop con­flat­ing their own squeam­ish­ness with their eth­ical pos­i­tion; it clouds import­ant issues, like this, where the eth­ical pos­i­tion is surely the one that saves lives.

This is excel­lent news. I’ve always voted Lib­eral Demo­crat any­way (well except that time I helped vote Tony Blair into power¹,) but now there’s another reason to do so. Their new party leader, Nick Clegg, has come out in a radio inter­view and con­firmed him­self as an athe­ist. “Do you believe in God?” was the ques­tion, and “no” was the answer.

The show’s quick fire inter­view format forces short, unequi­vocal answers like that, so we shouldn’t read too much into the brev­ity of the answer, but it’s reas­sur­ing to note that he hasn’t gone back on the pos­i­tion when ques­tioned about it after­wards. Unfor­tu­nately, he has said that he has enorm­ous respect for reli­gion (which must, surely, be a lie to soothe the reli­gious voters — how can he respect such a vast, byz­antine social con­struct, with all of it’s rules and reg­u­la­tions and restric­tions of liberty and down­right wack­i­ness, when he doesn’t accept the one fun­da­mental asser­tion they use to jus­tify the whole sorry mess?) and, more wor­ry­ingly, that since his wife is a Cath­olic, their chil­dren will be raised as Cath­ol­ics. I don’t under­stand how any­one free from the mind-​​virus of reli­gion could will­ingly allow their own chil­dren to be infec­ted with it.

But never mind; I can draw some com­fort from that fact that if my vote ever leads to a land­slide vic­tory again (which is, admit­tedly, a very long shot with the Lib Dems,) that I won’t be hand­ing power to someone who’s so far from my mind­set that he’s actu­ally afraid the coun­try at large will think him a nut­ter if he’s hon­est about his degree of religiosity.

[^1]: I was a stu­dent, and only just old enough to vote when the 1997 gen­eral elec­tion came around. I can vividly remem­ber sit­ting around with all my friends as the res­ults came in, all of us buzz­ing with excite­ment as the Labour land­slide became appar­ent. We’d obvi­ously all voted for them, because stu­dents tend to vote left and because after chaf­ing under 18 years of Tory rule, we just knew that a Labour vic­tory would change the coun­try for the bet­ter. When we saw those res­ults come in, we really felt that our gen­er­a­tion had made the dif­fer­ence, that we’d done what our par­ents never could; we’d kicked out the cor­rupt, right-​​wing, author­it­arian Tor­ies and given power to a more hon­est, demo­cratic altern­at­ive. We felt like we’d changed the world, and that it was a change for good. Ironic, really.

1. I was a stu­dent, and only just old enough to vote when the 1997 gen­eral elec­tion came around. I can vividly remem­ber sit­ting around with all my friends as the res­ults came in, all of us buzz­ing with excite­ment as the Labour land­slide became appar­ent. We’d obvi­ously all voted for them, because stu­dents tend to vote left and because after chaf­ing under 18 years of Tory rule, we just knew that a Labour vic­tory would change the coun­try for the bet­ter. When we saw those res­ults come in, we really felt that our gen­er­a­tion had made the dif­fer­ence, that we’d done what our par­ents never could; we’d kicked out the cor­rupt, right-​​wing, author­it­arian Tor­ies and given power to a more hon­est, demo­cratic altern­at­ive. We felt like we’d changed the world, and that it was a change for good. Ironic, really. [↩]

Why is it whenever I read the name Hal­libur­ton it’s never because of some great phil­an­thropic work they’ve done, or because of their con­tri­bu­tions to char­ity. You never see any­one com­ing onto the news and thank­ing Hal­libur­ton for sort­ing their life out, do you? No; it’s always some­thing like this.

I hon­estly don’t know what to say. It’s a good job my faith in basic human decency is more or less unshakable.

Thanks to Deni­al­ism for the link.

Apo­lo­gies for the lack of updates recently; I’ve been busy enjoy­ing a ver­it­able cor­nu­copia of symp­toms for the past couple of weeks, and haven’t really been up to writ­ing about much, even though there’s been plenty going on:

• The Texas Edu­ca­tion Agency has fired Chris Comer, a staff mem­ber of nine years, for send­ing an email announ­cing a talk by a Bar­bara For­rest, a prom­in­ent critic of ID. The inter­net has been buzz­ing, and For­rest her­self has writ­ten on how this proves her point that ID, rather than being a sci­entific pos­i­tion, is an attempt to force the reli­gious right’s agenda into the classroom (and the pub­lic con­scious­ness) through power-​​politics and out­right bul­ly­ing. Just remem­ber kids; it’s the Dar­win­ists who have a shady global con­spir­acy to sup­press the oppos­i­tion and get people fired just for sup­port­ing ID.

• The Brit­ish gov­ern­ment has given up all pre­tense at seek­ing con­sensus and is for­cing through legis­la­tion that will increase the time “sus­pec­ted ter­ror­ists” can be held without charge. If you’re a UK cit­izen, you can register your dis­pleas­ure by sign­ing this peti­tion. Please take the time; this is a hugely import­ant issue that bears dir­ectly on our most import­ant human rights.

• Some poor teacher was arres­ted, tried, jailed and then depor­ted for call­ing a Teddy Bear Muhammad. Local people took excep­tion to the fact that she wasn’t executed and took to the streets in protest. Gov­ern­ments the world over seem not to notice that whenever a group of people go bat­shit insane and start demand­ing inno­cent people are beheaded for some utterly trivial slight to their cul­ture, those people always seem to be Muslim. The Brit­ish pub­lic seems not to notice that the laws Gillian Gib­bons were arres­ted under bear a strik­ing resemb­lance to the laws our gov­ern­ment put in place a few years back with the express pur­pose of arrest­ing Muslims for mak­ing utterly trivial slights against our cul­ture.

That’s prob­ably enough for tonight. I should be back to a more reas­on­able posting-​​schedule now, so if I think of any­thing else I missed, I’ll sneak it into a future post.

The Tele­graph has an inter­est­ing art­icle about how Tony Blair didn’t feel free to express his reli­gion in pub­lic for fear of being seen as a “nutter”:

Mr Blair com­plained that he had been unable to fol­low the example of US politi­cians, such as Pres­id­ent
George W. Bush, in being open about his faith because people in Bri­tain regarded reli­gion with suspicion.

“It’s dif­fi­cult if you talk about reli­gious faith in our polit­ical sys­tem,” Mr Blair said. “If you are in the
Amer­ican polit­ical sys­tem or oth­ers then you can talk about reli­gious faith and people say ‘yes,
that’s fair enough’ and it is some­thing they respond to quite naturally.

“You talk about it in our sys­tem and, frankly, people do think you’re a nut­ter. I mean … you may go
off and sit in the corner and … com­mune with the man upstairs and then come back and say ‘right, I’ve
been told the answer and that’s it’.”

Well, fair enough. I can see why you’d want to avoid people think­ing you made hugely import­ant decisions about national secur­ity and inter­na­tional policy based on mes­sages from ceil­ingcat God. I mean, that really would be insane.

The recent ordeal (which I’ve blogged about here and here,) of a young woman who was sen­tenced to state-​​sponsored bru­tal­ity after being gang-​​raped is just one example of the shock­ing bar­bar­ity of the Saudi regime. It is unac­cept­able that the UK counts any nation with such a poor human-​​rights record as an ally, so please take a couple of minutes to sign this peti­tion urging our gov­ern­ment to sever friendly ties with Saudi Ara­bia until such a time as they join us in the 21^st Century.

The actual text you’ll be put­ting your name to is:

The gov­ern­ment have rolled out the Red car­pet to the Saudi Royal Fam­ily yet the gov­ern­ment of Saudi Ara­bia is an auto­cratic regime with an appalling human rights record. Exe­cu­tions, flog­ging and ampu­ta­tions are imposed and car­ried out with dis­reg­ard for the most basic inter­na­tional fair trial stand­ards. ‘Offences’ include being gay or being a woman unac­com­pan­ied by a man or driv­ing a car. Yet with utter hypo­crisy the UK gov­ern­ment con­demns sim­ilar regimes such as Burma and has very min­imal ties with coun­tries like Libya. The UK has turned a blind eye to this for its own selfish eco­nomic interests to the extent that we will break inter­na­tional law on cor­rup­tion to avoid upset­ting the Saudi Royal Fam­ily. As a con­sequence of this rela­tion­ship we are per­ceived as sup­port­ers and back­ers of this repress­ive regime. We have seen the con­sequences of these injustices on the secur­ity of our coun­try. It is now the oppor­tun­ity to restore Britain’s dig­nity and end this stain on our country’s reputation.

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