Hurt sentiments, episode 9

I have lost count of the number of posts I have written about stupid people and their stupid sentiments. I must have written at least eight of them over the previous year, and the year before that. So this is nine.

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Sans Serif reports that two separate cases have been filed in Karnataka against a subsidiary of the Times of India, and the directors of the said subsidiary, for having “hurt the feelings of Christians” (complaint #1 by a local People’s Union for Civil Liberties branch official) and “endorsing the bashing of the minority community and seeking to create discord among various communities” (complaint #2 by a local Christian outfit).

When you have a fucked up law like the Indian Penal Code, its hardly a surprise that people with (communal) axes to grind make full use of it. Outfits like the VHP and Bajrang Dal resorted to the use of violence to make their voice heard; the Christian ones are doing it with the law. The blog asks-

Is the publication of any kind of content OK in the name of a public debate? Is it really the business of the media to maintain communal and societal peace and harmony, or is it of the “State”? Is it beyond the function of a newspaper or a writer to provoke readers because somebody might find it offensive?

If Christian literature published decades ago can be suddenly ferreted out and declared offensive to Hindus, are Christians wrong in finding offence in yesterday’s newspaper? Is it wrong for Muslims to feel offence if the Danish cartoons are republished in the name of “debate”?

Freedom of speech is the victim here, and this will continue as long as the State stops arming enemies of freedom with weapons of every kind – particularly the legal one.

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In another crazy incident, Buddhist monks in Cambodia have managed to get a rock opera banned because “it insults Buddhism”-

Cambodia is predominantly Buddhist and monks are expected to be austere and eschew worldly pleasures such as entertainment.

“Some scenes in the story insult Buddhism,” the letter said in asking the ministry to “ban the performance and airing of the opera.”

The council objected to many scenes, including one in which the actor “left the monkhood and slept with a woman, but a moment later (he) put the robe back on to be a monk again…” said the letter, dated December 30.

The show “oppresses Cambodian Buddhist monks, causes more than 50,000 monks to loss their honour, value and to express frustration,” it added.

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No wonder religion makes me angry. Maybe I should go and file a case under the IPC demanding that the government ban all religions because they are an insult to my atheism and my intelligence, and that they result in my not being able to enjoy worldly pleasures to their fullest extent. And if this is what the PUCL is up to in the name of “civil liberties”, then I won’t waste my sympathies on Binayak Sen.

The Wilders interview

If you have some how missed Geert Wilders and his anti-Koran film Fitna, go see it, and then read his interview to the WSJ–

Having his own party liberates Mr. Wilders to speak his mind. As he sees it, the West suffers from an excess of toleration for those who do not share its tradition of tolerance. “We believe that — ‘we’ means the political elite — that all cultures are equal,” he says. “I believe this is the biggest disease today facing Europe. . . . We should wake up and tell ourselves: You’re not a xenophobe, you’re not a racist, you’re not a crazy guy if you say, ‘My culture is better than yours.’ A culture based on Christianity, Judaism, humanism is better. Look at how we treat women, look at how we treat apostates, look at how we go with the separation of church and state. I can give you 500 examples why our culture is better.”

He acknowledges that “the majority of Muslims in Europe and America are not terrorists or violent people.” But he says “it really doesn’t matter that much, because if you don’t define your own culture as the best, dominant one, and you allow through immigration people from those countries to come in, at the end of the day you will lose your own identity and your own culture, and your society will change. And our freedom will change — all the freedoms we have will change.”

The murder of van Gogh lends credence to this warning, as does the Muhammad cartoon controversy of 2005 in Denmark. As for “Fitna,” it has not occasioned a violent response, but its foes have made efforts to suppress it. A Dutch Muslim organization went to court seeking to enjoin its release on the ground that, in Mr. Wilders’s words, “it’s not in the interest of Dutch security.” The plaintiffs also charged Mr. Wilders with blasphemy and inciting hatred. Mr. Wilders thought the argument frivolous, but decided to pre-empt it: “The day before the verdict, I broadcasted [‘Fitna’] . . . not because I was not confident in the outcome, but I thought: I’m not taking any chance, I’m doing it. And it was legal, because there was not a verdict yet.” The judge held that the national-security claim was moot and ruled in Mr. Wilders’s favor on the issues of blasphemy and incitement.

He surely does believe in Popper’s paradox.

Self-righteous lunacy

While Lal Krishna Advani is the master of the foot-in-the-mouth maneuver, the BJP has done one up on him – it has managed to perform the anatomically impossible task of shoving its head up its own arse. And I am not talking about its position on the nuclear deal. BJP president Rajnath Singh has blamed the violence against Christians in Orissa and Karnataka on “Hindu anger”–

“Hindu anger and resentment against large-scale forcible conversions is the root cause of anti-Christian riots in both the states,” he said. He was convinced it could end only if strong measures were put in place to “stop forcible, or by allurement, conversions of Hindus by Christian missionaries”.

He said every conversion should be verified to ensure that missionaries have not forced a person or offered any sort of allurement to convert a Hindu to Christianity.

“The government should look into finding a way to verify this. Whenever a Hindu converts to Christianity, there should be verification by district authorities to the state that the conversion is not by force or after extension of any allurement such as promise of money or food.

“There should be a verification document with the person who has been converted. If such a system is put in place, there will be no opportunity for this sort of violence.”

Should the police also start a daily door to door verification campaign to see if women have not been raped or beaten, property has not been stolen etc instead of letting the affected people come and register a complaint? This is fascism, pure and simple, and Singh is treading on dangerous territory here. If attacks on Christians are justified on the basis of “Hindu anger”, is Islamic terrorism justifiable on the basis of “Muslim anger”, Naxalism on the basis of “class conflict”? Such stupid statements were to be expected from the BJP though.

The Congress-led UPA on the other hand is trying to see what political benefits it can gain from incidents of murder, rape and church burning. Should the Bajrang Dal be banned or not? In pondering this question, it has let murderous goons and arsonists run amok and failed to protect the citizens. The flareup in Assam and the attitude of Assam’s Nero only goes to show that when it comes to protecting the life and property of citizens, both political formations follow similar lines of thought.

In another development, megalomaniac Ramadoss is now planning to start a campaign against alcohol, and he is waving the Indian Constitution to make his point-

“The Constitution mandates all states to exercise prohibition but except J&K and Gujarat none of the states follow it. Prohibition is a state subject, I would urge all state governments to enforce to (sic) total prohibition.”

“Don’t encourage these despots”, Sauvik Chakraverti writes. He blames India’s reich wing press for having encouraged Anbumani Ramadoss by endorsing his perverse smoking ban. Regarding the Hindutva wackos, he says -“The country will become a Living Hell is (sic) these rascals who exploit faith are not put down by the mainstream press.” Read his whole post.

Further, the VHP and some organization that calls itself the “Global Human Rights Council” (the VHP and a human rights organization? Partners?) have together filed a complaint against Harbhajan Singh and Mona Singh for having danced in a reality show dressed up as Ravana and Sita. And the crazy part is a magistrate has admitted the criminal complaint.

The 5000 year old “rich Hindu civilization” is hurt when someone spoofs mythological characters; the Indian government cannot tolerate videos that show a performer dressed up as Gandhi doing a pole dance; and by failing to protect freedom of expression, the Indian constitution allows the Indian State to unleash a reign of terror on the flimsiest of reasons.

If India has to survive, it needs to be saved from two of its biggest enemies – its people, and its constitution.

Intellectual bankruptcy of the “pro-life” movement

In Insanity by consensus, I talked about the abuses and death threats hurled at The Rule of Reason’s Nicholas Provenzo by pro-fetus-anti-liberty religious wackos for his view that a mother (expectant mother if you will – idiots with axes to grind are known to latch on to a single point and bludgeon it to death) has the absolute right to decide on whether or not she wants to abort her fetus. He was talking in context of the substantial praise Sarah Palin received for having brought a Down’s Syndrome affected baby into this world. In “Palin’s Down syndrome child and the right to abortion” and “The Fundamental Right to Abortion”, he essentially made the following points (listing my interpretation using choice phrases of my own)-

• It is moral to abort a Down’s Syndrome affected fetus (or any fetus for that matter – even a perfectly healthy one) and immoral to deny a mother the right to do so, as the pro-fetus-anti-liberty movement seeks to do.
• Once parents give birth to a child, they have the moral obligation to take care of it till the child grows up and is able to provide for itself. That is, once they have brought a new life into this world, they cannot run away from the responsibility of providing for it. The choice of having a baby is a purely selfish one, not a selfless one as religious wackos assume it is (those who cannot understand what Objectivists mean when they refer to “selfishness” and “selflessness”, even after reading about it, needn’t proceed any further). Raising a child is not child’s play (no pun intended), as every mother knows. It takes a superhuman effort to do that, particularly when managing a career side-by-side. And the fact that people still choose to have children is proof that the choice is a selfish one, in Provenzo’s words – “an expression of the parent’s personal desire to create new life.”
• People with disabilities or afflicted with conditions such as Down’s Syndrome are not able to take care of themselves (living an independent life) in most cases. So if the parents are not wealthy enough to provide for the additional care necessary in such cases, and they decide to bring in a damaged baby into the world fully aware of the fact that the fetus is damaged, they are essentially passing off the responsibility and costs of sustaining such a life on to others. If parents have weighed their options rationally and decided to go ahead with the baby, it is not something that deserves praise and definitely not a model that every mother in a similar situation should adopt.
• Aborting a fetus is not eugenics, forced euthanasia or murder.

A controversy soon erupted in the blogosphere over Provenzo’s post, and he was invited to appear on conservative radio talk show host Laura Ingraham’s show (Partial podcast of the debate (mp3 file – 2.5 MB)) where she misrepresented nearly everything he said. She latched on (as have many other “pro-lifers”) to a single point in Provenzo’s post-

A parent has a moral obligation to provide for his or her children until these children are equipped to provide for themselves. Because a person afflicted with Down syndrome is only capable of being marginally productive (if at all) and requires constant care and supervision, unless a parent enjoys the wealth to provide for the lifetime of assistance that their child will require, they are essentially stranding the cost of their child’s life upon others.

and demanded to know what other diseases are candidates for abortion. Further, she goes on to ask if terminally ill patients or disabled people should be eliminated because they are only “marginally productive”. According to Provenzo, her staff even turned off his mike in between while she went on speaking giving the impression that “I sat in silent awe while she pontificated”. I say talking to conservatives of all kinds, and particularly the religious one, is always a big mistake. They are shrill, obnoxious, blind to reason and take liberties with their opponent’s positions.

The attempts at drawing comparisons between abortion and Nazi eugenics and murder shows that the “pro-lifers” have no sense of shame or morality, and lack the intellect to differentiate between abortion, and impregnating and forcing all the women in the country to give birth to a “superior” form of man; between aborting a fetus that is inside the mother’s womb, attached to her through the umbilical cord, completely dependent on her, and killing a human being against his will. Note that the same group, or sections of it, are also against euthanasia – the right of terminally ill people to choose to die rather than live in pain. Their concept of life is based on one premise – people have no right to decide what to do with their lives and bodies – only God can do that. And God is so indifferent that he cannot bother to come down and tell people in person – “listen folks these are the rules”. Maybe he euthanized himself after seeing that he made a mistake by creating humans and introducing them to religion.

Calling the pro-life movement “pro-life” is a contradiction. They are pro-fetus – that is all there is to them. In fact, it is the pro-choice movement which is pro-life because it fights for a living, thinking woman’s right to choose what is best for her own body. The “pro-lifers” on the other hand, are an opinionated lot who believe in a non-existent God and every “moral” teaching that emerges from such an entity’s non-existent behind. And based on such God-given morality, their stand essentially is that a fetus’ rights are superior to those of the woman carrying it, and if the woman has to be tied down – forced – terrorized by letting the law loose on her and her “enablers” – emotionally blackmailed – so that she gives birth to the fetus that she is carrying – against her will and regardless of the dangers it poses to her life – that is a small price to pay for bringing a life into this world. If this is not malice – pure evil – I don’t know what is.

If someone deserves to be called anti-life, it is the present pro-life movement and all those who enable it or don’t have the courage to take a stand against it.

Insanity by consensus

Nicholas Provenzo (at The Rule Of Reason) wrote about a woman’s right to abort her fetus and mentioned Sarah Palin and her Down’s Syndrome affected baby as an example. Palin has received praise from many quarters for not having aborted the fetus in spite of having prior knowledge of its condition. And Provenzo, agreed with Diana Hsieh’s (Noodlefood) condemnation of the situation – she called it “the worship of retardation.” And Christian (and every other kind of) pro-life wackos descended on the blog and hurled abuses at the blogger. Provenzo has responded by posting a selection together with his one-line comments.

First, I agree with Provenzo’s view 100 percent. A mother’s right to her body is inviolable; she has the absolute right to abort the fetus even if it is perfectly healthy. The pro-life brigade however will leave no stone unturned in their quest for victory – from bombing abortion clinics, to murdering doctors, to terming selective abortion as eugenics and equating it with Nazism, to getting anti-liberty laws passed, to intimidating bloggers.

Second, the fact that the abusive crowd is overwhelmingly religious shows that religious people – particularly those who take their religion very seriously (the non-moderates, if I may) – are dangerous as hell. On one hand they claim to be pro-life, on the other hand many support the death penalty, support anti-liberty laws that are essentially anti-life, and even support the bombing of thousands of civilians in Iraq – contradictions galore. Some of the abuses reek of homophobia – not surprising since (as Swapan Dasgupta writes in the TOI) their three pillars of action are God, guns and gays.

Religious fundamentalists, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews or anyone else, are all the same – irrational and deriving their perverse ideas of morality from a non-existent God who if he exists must surely be the Devil in disguise given the state of HIS world. Bill Maher said something regarding Scientologists which applies to all religious minded people – they suffer from a neurological disorder and [religion] is nothing but insanity by consensus.