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February 06, 2006
In the news today...
There were three (repeated) items of news this morning that really annoyed me. The first was the continuing misrepresentation of the so-called RU486 debate. The announcers keep saying that this is a debate about abortion. It is not. Listen up - the debate is about whether a minister (or parliament) has the ability to override the decisions of his department. It is that simple. The current Health Minister has overruled his department and banned RU486. It doesn't matter what his reasons might be. What matters is that he (an elected representative) has the power to override the paladins of the public service. If you remove that power, for any reason, then you will open an enormous can of worms...
Item 2 is the idiotic behaviour of a minority religious group who believe they can dictate to the world media about the display of editorial cartoons. Come off the grass, get real and stop behaving like two year olds having a temper tantrum. They are bl**dy cartoons for goodness sake. The media of the nations where these idjits live have produced far more offensive cartoons than these. If this was my own server, I would republish the cartoons here for your benefit, instead, you need to check out Newspaperindex to see what the fuss is about.
Third and last item (for today) is the results of some survey in Victoria which showed that 3 out of 5 kids think that most terrorists are Muslim members of the minority religion mentioned above*. This leads immediately to the question as to what the heck the other 2 out of 5 were thinking? Did they identify "terrorists" with "presbyterians"?
[* Note that this does not imply that all Muslims are terrorists. For those deficient in logic, consider this example: (1) This is a cow, (2) it is brown, therefore all brown things are cows...]
Posted by Ozguru at February 6, 2006 07:30 AM
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For more information or commentary on the cartoons, check out Interested Participant, The Gray Monk, and A.E. Brain (who has a complete set of the cartoons available).
Posted by: Ozguru at February 6, 2006 09:04 AM
Also check out this tit-for-tat comment - given the cartoons published in the Arab media, should we follow their example and start burning embassies and boycotting goods?
Fortunately, the non-Arab world is somewhat more mature than this...
Posted by: Ozguru at February 6, 2006 09:06 AM
Interestingly, the whole fuss is a bit of a nonsense, because it is only in recent years that the "ban" on images of Mohammed http://www.zombietime.com/mohammed_image_archive/ has really been enforced. Check this site to see a small portion of the images - mostly from the Muslim world itself - that are available. As you will see, many have been defaced, but most of the defacing is of recent date!
Posted by: The Gray Monk at February 7, 2006 03:22 AM
