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Nov. 16th, 2005 10:28 pmIf things were not bad enough, it would appear that Tony Blair has locked us into a wartime alliance with a country that commits serious war crimes as a matter of policy.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1643679,00.html
I am not denying that the British Army has sins to its account, but this is cold-blooded murder of a kind we have not gone in for for some considerable time. Coupled with the attacks on Habeas Corpus in the Senate, a case is building itself that the UK should simply cease to regard itself as in alliance with a country that no longer acts as our closest ally should.
I love the US, and it pains me very deeply to say this. Your President and his clique are acting as if they were determined to create decades of war.
*****
Just though to remind ourselves that moral idiocy is universal, I ended up at Speaker's Corner on Sunday, to support Cory Doctorow and the other critics of Copyright law. And I found myself yelling quite serious abuse at a series of Islamic speakers who were trying to justify killing civilians in Jordan for being 'drinkers, gamblers and prostitutes' ie for using a hotel where some of these things may perhaps have gone on, and people in the West for 'building brothels' in the Arab world. Someone asked them what they thought about the killing of the schoolgirls in Malaysia, and the guy who was speaking said he did not know about it, and tried to move swiftly on. I shouted 'Well, you know now. What do you think about it?' and got a small cheer.
The Christian fundies went on about how they were engineers and knew that you could not get something from nothing. So that proved that God had created the world in 4004 BC. I must practice explaining quantum theory and its cosmological ramifications in words of one syllable, inasmuch as I even begin to understand it.
Why are these idiots always engineers?
They really do not like it when you bandy texts with them. The Christian was very fond of telling the agnostic hecklers that they were idiots so I pointed out to him that 'He who says to his brother 'thou fool' shall be in danger of Judgement.' He really was not happy - atheists are no longer expected to know the Gospels, it appears.
*****
On a happier note,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
vschanoes is in town momentarily.
Rome, this evening, had Octavia quote Aeneid Book 6 twenty years or so before it was written. No-one can get everything right, but 'facilis descensus Averni' is probably the second best-known quotation in the whole poem. And pretty much the same in English - 'Easy is the way down to Hell' - which brings us back to Blair and Bush.
Knowledge of Latin poetry in the original is, I suppose, definitely extinct.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1643679,00.html
I am not denying that the British Army has sins to its account, but this is cold-blooded murder of a kind we have not gone in for for some considerable time. Coupled with the attacks on Habeas Corpus in the Senate, a case is building itself that the UK should simply cease to regard itself as in alliance with a country that no longer acts as our closest ally should.
I love the US, and it pains me very deeply to say this. Your President and his clique are acting as if they were determined to create decades of war.
*****
Just though to remind ourselves that moral idiocy is universal, I ended up at Speaker's Corner on Sunday, to support Cory Doctorow and the other critics of Copyright law. And I found myself yelling quite serious abuse at a series of Islamic speakers who were trying to justify killing civilians in Jordan for being 'drinkers, gamblers and prostitutes' ie for using a hotel where some of these things may perhaps have gone on, and people in the West for 'building brothels' in the Arab world. Someone asked them what they thought about the killing of the schoolgirls in Malaysia, and the guy who was speaking said he did not know about it, and tried to move swiftly on. I shouted 'Well, you know now. What do you think about it?' and got a small cheer.
The Christian fundies went on about how they were engineers and knew that you could not get something from nothing. So that proved that God had created the world in 4004 BC. I must practice explaining quantum theory and its cosmological ramifications in words of one syllable, inasmuch as I even begin to understand it.
Why are these idiots always engineers?
They really do not like it when you bandy texts with them. The Christian was very fond of telling the agnostic hecklers that they were idiots so I pointed out to him that 'He who says to his brother 'thou fool' shall be in danger of Judgement.' He really was not happy - atheists are no longer expected to know the Gospels, it appears.
*****
On a happier note,
vschanoes is in town momentarily.Rome, this evening, had Octavia quote Aeneid Book 6 twenty years or so before it was written. No-one can get everything right, but 'facilis descensus Averni' is probably the second best-known quotation in the whole poem. And pretty much the same in English - 'Easy is the way down to Hell' - which brings us back to Blair and Bush.
Knowledge of Latin poetry in the original is, I suppose, definitely extinct.
