by Girish Menon
Modern science is founded on the belief in the Genesis, that nature was created by a law-giving God and so we must be governed by "laws of nature".
Equally important was the belief that human beings are made in the image of God and, as a consequence, can understand these "laws of nature".
What do scientists have to say to that?
I say all scientists are therefore Judeo-Christian in their beliefs.
Thursday, 27 October 2016
Stop comparing the Canadian Ceta deal to Brexit – we are going to suffer much more in our trade negotiations
James Moore in The Independent
Those Brexiteers who fondly believe that Britain will be able to have its cake and eat it too as regards trade with the EU often used to like to point to Canada as a potential model for our future relationship with our former partners.
Canada, you see, was in the process of negotiating a trade deal that would have eliminated nearly all the tariffs between the two sides.
It would have thus facilitated access to the European single market for the country without it being a member and having to accept lots of Europeans turning up and looking for work in Toronto.
Everything was going swimmingly until, that is, the Walloons of Belgium kicked up a fuss and threatened to derail the deal, the future of which is now hanging on a knife edge.
To get agreements like the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (Ceta) up and running requires the assent of all of the EU’s 28 member states. Unfortunately, before Belgium can add its name to the list it first has to secure the assent of six regional assemblies. The Wallonian one is worried about the impact of the deal on its farmers.
Cue a blizzard of statements, and counter statements, and threats and counter threats, as both sides face up to the fact that they may have wasted seven years of complex and painstaking work.
Critics of the EU in Britain have used the debacle to bolster the case for leaving.
But critics within the EU have tabled a rather different argument. They suggest that the problem lies with Brussels having ceded too much control over trade to national Parliaments. There is a rich irony in the fact that Britain and its Eurosceptics are part of the reason for that.
For years they preached the virtue of national vetoes and subsidiarity. No handing power to Brussels Bureaucrats!
That may now come back to bite them because it might just scupper hopes of securing a favourable trade deal with Europe.
But, but, but we buy lots from the Wallonian farmers so they won’t have a problem with us!
That was the knuckle-headed response of Brexit supporting minister Chris Grayling. We’ve heard many variants on that sort of theme in recent months.
It’s true that Grayling’s flimsy argument was given something of a boost when the entirely more substantial figure of Germany’s Angela Merkel said she didn’t necessarily see parallels between this debacle and the upcoming talks between the UK and the EU.
But what if someone does kick up a fuss when the outcome of those talks becomes known? Germany might not, despite the childish insults lobbed its way by some right wing politicians and some right wing newspapers. Germany, however, doesn’t speak for the entire EU.
Perhaps the Spanish will decide to throw a spanner into the works unless there’s some movement on the question of Gibraltar. You could hardly blame the Poles for digging their heels in given the way Britain has treated the citizens of that country who live here. Maybe the French will decide it’s time for some payback for past British obstructionism.
Hang on, I hear you say, they’re grown ups. They surely wouldn’t stoop to such tactics. They’ll want a deal that works for both sides too.
Perhaps that’s so. But would you really be confident in ruling out the risk of a repeat performance when it’s Britain’s turn?
The Canadians will manage without this deal. They’re already part of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and they have trade deals in place with other countries besides.
Britain shorn of the EU has nothing of the sort. And it has a very different international image to the one that Canada has.
You couldn’t imagine its Prime Minister Justin Trudeau not guaranteeing the rights of Europeans living in his country if the issue cropped up, or of tolerating calls for child refugees to submit to dental testing.
Goodwill and good PR are powerful currencies, and Trudeau has lots of both, in stark contrast to Theresa May’s nasty and inward looking Tory administration.
An administration that doesn’t appear to have anything resembling a strategy beyond waving its fists, stomping its feet and threatening to go home and sulk if its former European friends won’t play the game by its rules.
Soon the reality of that will start to bite. The sort of problems Canada is having with Europe may ultimately pale by comparison to the ones faced by Britain.
We’ll know who to blame when they emerge. Clue: it won’t be the Wallonian farmers or their surrogates.
Those Brexiteers who fondly believe that Britain will be able to have its cake and eat it too as regards trade with the EU often used to like to point to Canada as a potential model for our future relationship with our former partners.
Canada, you see, was in the process of negotiating a trade deal that would have eliminated nearly all the tariffs between the two sides.
It would have thus facilitated access to the European single market for the country without it being a member and having to accept lots of Europeans turning up and looking for work in Toronto.
Everything was going swimmingly until, that is, the Walloons of Belgium kicked up a fuss and threatened to derail the deal, the future of which is now hanging on a knife edge.
To get agreements like the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (Ceta) up and running requires the assent of all of the EU’s 28 member states. Unfortunately, before Belgium can add its name to the list it first has to secure the assent of six regional assemblies. The Wallonian one is worried about the impact of the deal on its farmers.
Cue a blizzard of statements, and counter statements, and threats and counter threats, as both sides face up to the fact that they may have wasted seven years of complex and painstaking work.
Critics of the EU in Britain have used the debacle to bolster the case for leaving.
But critics within the EU have tabled a rather different argument. They suggest that the problem lies with Brussels having ceded too much control over trade to national Parliaments. There is a rich irony in the fact that Britain and its Eurosceptics are part of the reason for that.
For years they preached the virtue of national vetoes and subsidiarity. No handing power to Brussels Bureaucrats!
That may now come back to bite them because it might just scupper hopes of securing a favourable trade deal with Europe.
But, but, but we buy lots from the Wallonian farmers so they won’t have a problem with us!
That was the knuckle-headed response of Brexit supporting minister Chris Grayling. We’ve heard many variants on that sort of theme in recent months.
It’s true that Grayling’s flimsy argument was given something of a boost when the entirely more substantial figure of Germany’s Angela Merkel said she didn’t necessarily see parallels between this debacle and the upcoming talks between the UK and the EU.
But what if someone does kick up a fuss when the outcome of those talks becomes known? Germany might not, despite the childish insults lobbed its way by some right wing politicians and some right wing newspapers. Germany, however, doesn’t speak for the entire EU.
Perhaps the Spanish will decide to throw a spanner into the works unless there’s some movement on the question of Gibraltar. You could hardly blame the Poles for digging their heels in given the way Britain has treated the citizens of that country who live here. Maybe the French will decide it’s time for some payback for past British obstructionism.
Hang on, I hear you say, they’re grown ups. They surely wouldn’t stoop to such tactics. They’ll want a deal that works for both sides too.
Perhaps that’s so. But would you really be confident in ruling out the risk of a repeat performance when it’s Britain’s turn?
The Canadians will manage without this deal. They’re already part of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and they have trade deals in place with other countries besides.
Britain shorn of the EU has nothing of the sort. And it has a very different international image to the one that Canada has.
You couldn’t imagine its Prime Minister Justin Trudeau not guaranteeing the rights of Europeans living in his country if the issue cropped up, or of tolerating calls for child refugees to submit to dental testing.
Goodwill and good PR are powerful currencies, and Trudeau has lots of both, in stark contrast to Theresa May’s nasty and inward looking Tory administration.
An administration that doesn’t appear to have anything resembling a strategy beyond waving its fists, stomping its feet and threatening to go home and sulk if its former European friends won’t play the game by its rules.
Soon the reality of that will start to bite. The sort of problems Canada is having with Europe may ultimately pale by comparison to the ones faced by Britain.
We’ll know who to blame when they emerge. Clue: it won’t be the Wallonian farmers or their surrogates.
Wednesday, 26 October 2016
Donald Trump is no outsider: he mirrors our political culture
George Monbiot in The Guardian
What is the worst thing about Donald Trump? The lies? The racist stereotypes? The misogyny? The alleged gropings? The apparent refusal to accept democratic outcomes? All these are bad enough. But they’re not the worst. The worst thing about Donald Trump is that he’s the man in the mirror.
We love to horrify ourselves with his excesses, and to see him as a monstrous outlier, the polar opposite of everything a modern, civilised society represents. But he is nothing of the kind. He is the distillation of all that we have been induced to desire and admire. Trump is so repulsive not because he offends our civilisation’s most basic values, but because he embodies them.
Trump personifies the traits promoted by the media and corporate worlds he affects to revile; the worlds that created him. He is the fetishisation of wealth, power and image in a nation where extrinsic values are championed throughout public discourse. His conspicuous consumption, self-amplification and towering (if fragile) ego are in tune with the dominant narratives of our age.
The entire electoral process is stolen from the American people before they even cast their vote
As the recipient of vast inherited wealth who markets himself as solely responsible for his good fortune, he is the man of our times. The US Apprentice TV show which he hosted tells the story of everything he is not: the little guy dragging himself up from the bottom through enterprise and skill. None of this distinguishes him from the majority of the very rich, whose entrepreneurial image, loyally projected by the media, clashes with their histories of huge bequests, government assistance, monopolies and rent-seeking.
If his politics differ from those of the rest of the modern Republican party, it is because he is, in some respects, more liberal. Every vice, for the Republican trailblazers such as Ted Cruz and Scott Walker, is now a virtue; every virtue a vice. Encouraged by the corporate media, the Republicans have been waging a full-spectrum assault on empathy, altruism and the decencies we owe to other people. Their gleeful stoving in of faces, their cackling destruction of political safeguards and democratic norms, their stomping on all that is generous and caring and cooperative in human nature, have turned the party into a game of Mortal Kombat scripted by Breitbart News.
Did Trump invent the xenophobia and racism that infuse his campaign? Did he invent his conspiracy theories about stolen elections and the criminality of his opponents? No. They were there all along. What is new and different about him is that he has streamlined these narratives into a virulent demagoguery. But the opportunity has been building for years; all that was required was someone blunt and unscrupulous enough to take it.
What is the worst thing about Donald Trump? The lies? The racist stereotypes? The misogyny? The alleged gropings? The apparent refusal to accept democratic outcomes? All these are bad enough. But they’re not the worst. The worst thing about Donald Trump is that he’s the man in the mirror.
We love to horrify ourselves with his excesses, and to see him as a monstrous outlier, the polar opposite of everything a modern, civilised society represents. But he is nothing of the kind. He is the distillation of all that we have been induced to desire and admire. Trump is so repulsive not because he offends our civilisation’s most basic values, but because he embodies them.
Trump personifies the traits promoted by the media and corporate worlds he affects to revile; the worlds that created him. He is the fetishisation of wealth, power and image in a nation where extrinsic values are championed throughout public discourse. His conspicuous consumption, self-amplification and towering (if fragile) ego are in tune with the dominant narratives of our age.
The entire electoral process is stolen from the American people before they even cast their vote
As the recipient of vast inherited wealth who markets himself as solely responsible for his good fortune, he is the man of our times. The US Apprentice TV show which he hosted tells the story of everything he is not: the little guy dragging himself up from the bottom through enterprise and skill. None of this distinguishes him from the majority of the very rich, whose entrepreneurial image, loyally projected by the media, clashes with their histories of huge bequests, government assistance, monopolies and rent-seeking.
If his politics differ from those of the rest of the modern Republican party, it is because he is, in some respects, more liberal. Every vice, for the Republican trailblazers such as Ted Cruz and Scott Walker, is now a virtue; every virtue a vice. Encouraged by the corporate media, the Republicans have been waging a full-spectrum assault on empathy, altruism and the decencies we owe to other people. Their gleeful stoving in of faces, their cackling destruction of political safeguards and democratic norms, their stomping on all that is generous and caring and cooperative in human nature, have turned the party into a game of Mortal Kombat scripted by Breitbart News.
Did Trump invent the xenophobia and racism that infuse his campaign? Did he invent his conspiracy theories about stolen elections and the criminality of his opponents? No. They were there all along. What is new and different about him is that he has streamlined these narratives into a virulent demagoguery. But the opportunity has been building for years; all that was required was someone blunt and unscrupulous enough to take it.
The fourth US president, James Madison. Photograph: White House/Reuters
Nor can you single out Trump for ignoring, denying and deriding the key issues of our time, such as climate change. Almost all prominent Republicans have been at it. In fact, across the four presidential debates, not one question about climate change was asked. Even when politicians and journalists accept the science, it makes little difference if they avoid the subject like the plague.
America’s fourth president, James Madison, envisaged the United States constitution as representation tempered by competition between factions. In the 10th federalist paper, written in 1787, he argued that large republics were better insulated from corruption than small, or “pure” democracies, as the greater number of citizens would make it “more difficult for unworthy candidates to practise with success the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried”. A large electorate would protect the system against oppressive interest groups. Politics practised on a grand scale would be more likely to select people of “enlightened views and virtuous sentiments”.
Instead, the US – in common with many other nations – now suffers the worst of both worlds: a large electorate dominated by a tiny faction. Instead of republics being governed, as Madison feared, by “the secret wishes of an unjust and interested majority”, they are beholden to the not-so-secret wishes of an unjust and interested minority. What Madison could not have foreseen was the extent to which unconstrained campaign finance and a sophisticated lobbying industry would come to dominate an entire nation, regardless of its size.
For every representative, Republican or Democrat, who retains a trace element of independence, there are three sitting in the breast pocket of corporate capital. Since the supreme court decided that there should be no effective limits on campaign finance, and, to a lesser extent, long before, candidates have been reduced to tongue-tied automata, incapable of responding to those in need of help, incapable of regulating those in need of restraint, for fear of upsetting their funders.
Democracy in the US is so corrupted by money that it is no longer recognisable as democracy. You can kick individual politicians out of office, but what do you do when the entire structure of politics is corrupt? Turn to the demagogue who rages into this political vacuum, denouncing the forces he exemplifies. The problem is not, as Trump claims, that the election will be stolen by ballot rigging. It is that the entire electoral process is stolen from the American people before they get anywhere near casting their votes. When Trump claims that the little guy is being screwed by the system, he’s right. The only problem is that he is the system.
The political constitution of the United States is not, as Madison envisaged, representation tempered by competition between factions. The true constitution is plutocracy tempered by scandal. In other words, all that impedes the absolute power of money is the occasional exposure of the excesses of the wealthy. What distinguishes Trump’s political career is that, until recently, his scandals have done him no harm.
Trump disgusts us because, where others use a dog whistle, he uses a klaxon. We hate to hear his themes so clearly articulated. But we know in our hearts that they suffuse the way the world is run.
Because this story did not begin with Trump, it will not end with Trump, however badly he may lose the election. Yes, he is a shallow, mendacious, boorish and extremely dangerous man. But those traits ensure that he is not an outsider but the perfect representation of his caste, the caste that runs the global economy and governs our politics. He is our system, stripped of its pretences.
Nor can you single out Trump for ignoring, denying and deriding the key issues of our time, such as climate change. Almost all prominent Republicans have been at it. In fact, across the four presidential debates, not one question about climate change was asked. Even when politicians and journalists accept the science, it makes little difference if they avoid the subject like the plague.
America’s fourth president, James Madison, envisaged the United States constitution as representation tempered by competition between factions. In the 10th federalist paper, written in 1787, he argued that large republics were better insulated from corruption than small, or “pure” democracies, as the greater number of citizens would make it “more difficult for unworthy candidates to practise with success the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried”. A large electorate would protect the system against oppressive interest groups. Politics practised on a grand scale would be more likely to select people of “enlightened views and virtuous sentiments”.
Instead, the US – in common with many other nations – now suffers the worst of both worlds: a large electorate dominated by a tiny faction. Instead of republics being governed, as Madison feared, by “the secret wishes of an unjust and interested majority”, they are beholden to the not-so-secret wishes of an unjust and interested minority. What Madison could not have foreseen was the extent to which unconstrained campaign finance and a sophisticated lobbying industry would come to dominate an entire nation, regardless of its size.
For every representative, Republican or Democrat, who retains a trace element of independence, there are three sitting in the breast pocket of corporate capital. Since the supreme court decided that there should be no effective limits on campaign finance, and, to a lesser extent, long before, candidates have been reduced to tongue-tied automata, incapable of responding to those in need of help, incapable of regulating those in need of restraint, for fear of upsetting their funders.
Democracy in the US is so corrupted by money that it is no longer recognisable as democracy. You can kick individual politicians out of office, but what do you do when the entire structure of politics is corrupt? Turn to the demagogue who rages into this political vacuum, denouncing the forces he exemplifies. The problem is not, as Trump claims, that the election will be stolen by ballot rigging. It is that the entire electoral process is stolen from the American people before they get anywhere near casting their votes. When Trump claims that the little guy is being screwed by the system, he’s right. The only problem is that he is the system.
The political constitution of the United States is not, as Madison envisaged, representation tempered by competition between factions. The true constitution is plutocracy tempered by scandal. In other words, all that impedes the absolute power of money is the occasional exposure of the excesses of the wealthy. What distinguishes Trump’s political career is that, until recently, his scandals have done him no harm.
Trump disgusts us because, where others use a dog whistle, he uses a klaxon. We hate to hear his themes so clearly articulated. But we know in our hearts that they suffuse the way the world is run.
Because this story did not begin with Trump, it will not end with Trump, however badly he may lose the election. Yes, he is a shallow, mendacious, boorish and extremely dangerous man. But those traits ensure that he is not an outsider but the perfect representation of his caste, the caste that runs the global economy and governs our politics. He is our system, stripped of its pretences.
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