The Federal Court ruled that the NSW Government’s ban on annoying World Youth Day pilgrims was invalid in law.
Justices French, Branson and Stone, said the laws “should not be interpreted as conferring powers that are repugnant to fundamental rights and freedoms at common law in the absence of clear authority from Parliament”.
It is, unfortunately, too late to order one of these from the US.
A team of neuropsychologists from Haifa University have worked out how the brain processes sarcasm.
Dr Simone Shamay-Tsoory said language areas on the left hand side of the brain interpret the literal meaning of words and the frontal lobes and the right side of the brain understand the social and emotional context. An area called the right ventromedial prefrontal cortex then integrates the literal meaning with the social/emotional context, which will reveal any sarcasm.
People who suffer from autism or have had one of those parts of their brains damaged have trouble interpreting sarcasm - they tend to understand the statement literally - because they don’t pick up the emotional context or can’t reconcile the context with the literal meaning.
(Image courtesy of BBC)
Perhaps these parts of the brain atrophy through disuse, or can be removed through selective breeding. Which might explain Americans.
Could someone explain why I woke up this morning with intense pain in two muscles at the back of my head - about level with the tops of my ears?
The best suggestion I’ve heard so far was from a colleague who said she used to get the same muscular pain after taking acid.
Of course I haven’t knowingly taken any in the last decade, which could only mean someone secretly dosed me with the stuff. That doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Although it might explain the dream I had last night in which my late grandmother was telling me about bacon sandwiches.
There is no doubt Christopher Hitchens’s latest book God is Not Great: How religion poisons everything is a beautifully written and forcefully argued polemic against the evils of organised religion. And Hitchens is much more balanced and accommodating than Richard Dawkins’s rigid and absolute (dare I say religious?) hatred of any form of faith.
But it didn’t take long for my faith in Hitchens to be shattered. In chapter four, A Note on Health, to Which Religion Can Be Hazardous, listing a variety of forms of sexual repression in organised religion, he says:
Orthodox Jews conduct congress by means of a hole in the sheet . . .
Uh. No they don’t, Chris. That’s a myth. And ten seconds of basic research on the intertubes would have at least cast sufficient doubt in the mind of a supreme rationalist about the veracity of that claim.
OK, a minor point to be sure. But if he’s completely, verifiably and carelessly wrong about such a basic fact - one which I am very familiar with - I have to wonder how many other points in the book - of which I know less - might also be wrong, distorted or lazily, sloppily generalised.
Which, I’m afraid, makes it very hard to believe . . .
British teenager Lydia Playfoot lost a High Court challenge against her school’s decision to ban her from wearing a silver “purity ring”, symbolising her Christian faith and commitment to virginity before marriage.
Her lawyers argued that as an expression of faith, it should be exempt from school regulations banning the wearing of jewellery and that the ban breached her human rights to “freedom of thought, conscience and religion”, protected by the European Convention on Human Rights.
Lawyers for the school countered that it made allowances for Muslim, Sikh and Christian students to wear items integral to their religious beliefs, but that purity rings were not integral to Christianity.
Poppycock! Who could forget the passage in the Gospel of John where Jesus is attending a wedding at Cana and his mother says: “They have no more wine. Also the bride weareth a silver ring to symbolise her belief in you and commitment to virginity, or something.”?
There are other troubling things about this case.
Whenever you hear a politician using the word “commitment”, this is code for ‘we want people to think we care about this without having to do anything about it’. Thus the Howard government is ‘committed to the environment’ and the Iemma government is ‘committed to public transport’. Much in the same way, I suspect, most religious teenagers are ‘committed to virginity’. I know I was.
Also, as a teenager, there was nothing I liked to do more than take organisations I disliked to the High Court. Unfortunately, part-time work and Austudy left a fairly significant funding gap that prevented me from indulging this pastime. Perhaps young Lydia is an interpreneur who has already earned millions on eBay. Or perhaps she was put up to the whole thing by her parents, who are high-ups in the British hierarchy of Silver Ring Thing, an American religious group which promotes abstinence.
After the verdict, Lydia released a statement which was also in no way influenced by Ma and Pa Playfoot.
I believe that the judge’s decision will mean that slowly, over time, people such as school governors, employers, political organisations and others will be allowed to stop Christians from publicly expressing and practising their faith.
Yes, those poor oppressed Christians. My palms bleed for them.
Brit backpackers Caroline Day and Mei-Yin Lee’s elation when they found out they won $574,000 soon turned to shock and dismay when it turned out the friendly chap at the newsagency, Chrishartato Ongkoputra or Chris Ong, had done the old switcheroo and submitted a claim form with their ticket and his name on it. NSW Lotteries paid him the money and he mysteriously left the country.
Day and Lee had to sue NSW Lotteries to get the money, which they did, and now the lottery and the newsagent (and the newsagent’s insurance company) are in court to see who’s liable. The newsagent Michael Pavellis admitted he didn’t check the form before sending it off, explaining:
He was a religious person; he went to church twice a week. I know it sounds strange after what has happened, but he was an active member of the church band. He was a well-liked person.
Classic blunder, assuming a religious person is trustworthy. There are plenty of people who display all the outward trappings of religiosity while being complete scoundrels or deviants.
We assume otherwise at our peril.
And let’s not forget modern, hip Christianity tells us God Wants You to be Rich and God Wants You to be Wealthy. (I never really understood that thing about rich men, camels and needles or why Jesus knocked over the moneylenders’ tables anyway.)
Surely Ong was just being a Good Christian.
At a recent(ish) Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS concert, the casts of Avenue Q and Fiddler on the Roof got together in a fine example of the “replace regular words with Jewish words for humorous effect” school of comedy. ‘You live on Avenue Q’ becomes ‘You shlep/kvetch on Avenue Jew’. Hilarious!
Apologies for getting all biblical, but a stint visiting Ma and Pa Vealmince tends to put me in this frame of mind.
The elder Vealminces, ordinarily the most liberal, egalitarian folk, have of late turned to the right on issues of national security and hold some fairly un-PC views about Muslims. As a result they tend to support the Howard Government’s tough-on-immigration stance of keeping ‘undersirable’ people who ‘don’t share Australian values’ out of the country. If we let too many of ‘those people’ in, the argument goes, it will change the character of society.
Liberal lefty types like me argue this is one of Howard’s true evils: that in a time when he could have led his people to be more compassionate and generous, he instead appealed to their xenophobia and self interest.
I would not have thought it necessary to remind Ma and Pa Vealmince that people in Australia were arguing a lot of the same things in the late 40s when the issue was whether or not to let in a bunch of refugees from Europe, among them my grandparents and their infant children. It was feared they would change the character of society. Which they definitely did, and few people would argue for the worse.
But having put things in this context, the folks were - to their credit - chastened.
“That’s why we have the drought now,” Pa Vealmince concluded. “Because we have turned away from our values and become selfish and mean.” Read the rest of this entry ?
As if the Jewish community’s internal politics weren’t already confusing enough.
Earlier in the week, a group calling themselves Independent Australian Jewish Voices, styled on the UK’s Independent Jewish Voices group, issued a declaration and petition arguing that dissenting Jewish voices about Israel should not be stifled by community bodies.
We feel there is an urgent need to hear alternative voices that should not be silenced by being labelled disloyal or “self-hating.” Uncritical allegiance to Israeli government policy does not necessarily serve Israel’s best interests.
This earned a predictable smack-down from the ever-consistent Colin Rubinstein, Executive Director of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (an independent think tank, not an official community representative). This spat was of course reported widely by the ABC/Fairfax socialist collective end of the media, as were the poorly chosen words of Melbourne University Press CEO Louise Adler, comparing the Jewish community to the Third Reich. Oops.
Things only got more confusing today when another group of Jews published a statement sticking the boot into the AIJV mob, which was also well reported. But this new group of people are not the usual suspects . . . Read the rest of this entry ?
Jewish people who don’t toe the line get called names by Colin Rubinstein, but the first person to mention Hitler or the Nazis always loses the argument. Sam Brett plugs a whole bunch of other people’s books to discover the shocking truth that women like foreplay, but remains oblivious to the fact that her readers are bloody morons. Young, overpaid, testosterone-filled boofhead gets charged with sexual assault. John Howard and co will do anything and say anything to get re-elected (as will Peter Debnam?), but it just might not work this time despite the wishful bleating of his cheer squad. Paul Keating is piss funny when he gets fired up. And yet another example where right-wing idiots play the man when they have no real argument, but by now they really should be ashamed of themselves.
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