A grievous assault on very stupid people

So, there's a bit of a fuss because the BBC called on Stephen Green, the leader of an extremist group with 600 members called Christian Voice, to comment on Elton John having a surrogate child. The fuss is largely concentrated on how awful this person is, but I have a different angle; is it not terribly unfair on the anti-gay lobby?

Anti-gay people may be dim, vicious, near-sighted, bigoted, lacking in education and empathy, and prone to writing rambling and unparseable letters to the paper, but Stephen Green is hardly representative. His group supports censorship of the media, the execution of gay people, the blackmail of cancer charities, the lying to the public about the efficacy and dangers of vaccines, and it opposes the ban on marital rape; see here if you doubt me. They are total mad people, and there are 600 of them. This is a bit like, in a debate on privatisation of state services, getting a comment from Stalin. They are actually far less credible than groups like the BNP or National Front; at least those groups have some small public support.

I'm really puzzled as to why the BBC did this, but one thing that's clear is that it was not out of an anti-gay agenda. I can think of two possibilities; they had trouble finding someone on short notice, given the reluctance of most bigots to advertise themselves as such on national television, or that it's a deliberate attempt to discredit the anti-gay lobby by using someone really crazy to represent them.

On a side note, Stephen Green actually has a wife! One has to wonder if he discussed his organisation's opinions on how it's okay to rape your wife (specifically, they claim that a Christian marriage service gives binding consent to sexual intercourse) before he proposed...

Google AdWords needs a grammar checker...

An ad in my GMail:

Ugh.

Down weird street

Coming back from The Grand Social (an odd pub itself; used to be Pravda, the one with the Communist propaganda; now has robot-themed art, though the remarkably opulent smoking area still has Russian Orthodox imagery...), I was going down that street in Temple Bar at the end of the Ha'penny Bridge.

Ever been down it? I'm pretty sure that Dublin Corporation has zoned it 'Weird Commercial'. "Restaurant? It had better not be something boring like Chinese. Oh, Cornish pasties? Fine. Clothes? We hope they're peculiar clothes. Chip shop? Oh, no, we couldn't have that, it'd be far too normal... What's that you say? It's abnormally narrow? Carry on,  then!"

URL of the month

http://burlesquecabaretsocialclub.com

Do you think they agonised before clicking the 'register' button... "Oh, I hope someone hasn't already taken it..."

Only way it could have been more absurd: a .org.uk domain. That's the silliest domain.

Rational markets and creationism

It occurs to me that rational market fundamentalists (those who believe that markets inherently behave rationally) are rather like evolution-deniers; both take the attitude that a complex system which behaves, if you don't look too hard, like it has a guiding intelligence must have a guiding intelligence, and quietly ignore any evidence to the authority. Bubbles are treated much the same as the human blind spot (which is, despite the tendency of creationists to go on about how the eye is irreducibly complex, evidence against design; a designer could fix it rather easily, but evolution through natural selection cannot).