Fluo posted:

Sunday cartoons, so not many as normal.

Guardian:

Was Eastleigh such a great victory?
Chris Riddell on the prospects for Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats.

Mr. Squishy posted:

What other challengers approach? There's the Bojo balloon, Gove with a lollypop, Murdoch with Farage as a headband, but who's the skinny man with the OBR pillow, or the gnome?

quote:

I don't like this one. Fixating on shoes as a symbol for May is a bit misogynist.

Mr. Squishy posted:

What other challengers approach? There's the Bojo balloon, Gove with a lollypop, Murdoch with Farage as a headband, but who's the skinny man with the OBR pillow, or the gnome?
Also, the bed's made of Clegg and Osbourne (who's awake to the threats) is using Danny Alexander as a pillow.

Whitefish posted:

The gnome is Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=j...biw=672&bih=323

Whitefish posted:

The gnome is Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=j...biw=672&bih=323

Niric posted:

Ah! Still don't really like to acknowledge that the beard isn't there any more. He seems like a nice chap.

Niric posted:

Ah! Still don't really like to acknowledge that the beard isn't there any more. He seems like a nice chap.

quote:

Rowan Williams wants to be like Thomas More but risks looking like Don Quixote.
Rowan Williams, the most interesting Archbishop of Canterbury in years, is as capable of a sophisticated analysis of Dostoyevsky as an innovative interpretation of Aquinas. Yet when it comes to politics he is a simple, old-fashioned socialist who believes the State should intervene when its citizens can't cope. Hence his attack on the Coalition's plans for welfare reform: Williams wants to cushion every blow for every citizen, and believes no one should ever feel the pinch of poverty or the pang of hunger.[...]

Fluo posted:

My dad is a lay reader and says the times he met Rowan Williams, he was a christian socialist but couldn't fully say his views because of the awkward spot he was put into. He got pretty upset at the people within the Church not wanting women bishops.

Torygraph would always try and attack him.

Torygraph posted:

Williams wants to cushion every blow for every citizen, and believes no one should ever feel the pinch of poverty or the pang of hunger.[...]

Fluo posted:

Two Rowsons on Rowan!

Clapham Omnibus posted:

The Horror, the Horror!

quote:

Rowan Williams, the most interesting Archbishop of Canterbury in years, is as capable of a sophisticated analysis of Dostoyevsky as an innovative interpretation of Aquinas. Yet when it comes to politics he is a simple, old-fashioned socialist who believes the State should intervene when its citizens can't cope. Hence his attack on the Coalition's plans for welfare reform: Williams wants to cushion every blow for every citizen, and believes no one should ever feel the pinch of poverty or the pang of hunger.
For my colleague Janet Daley, Williams's broadside seems a daft attack on work. The Archbishop's target, in fact, is much more ambitious: capitalism. It is a system that he instinctively deplores, seeing in it greed-generating machine that cannot be controlled and that causes injustice and misery. Williams champions benefits as the humane face of the cruel market.
Unlike Janet, I have a lot of time for Rowan Williams. He is a good man, and a great mind. I've met him several times and like him immensely. I suspect there is a "man for all seasons" quality about the Archbishop which now, as he approaches retirement, he would like to unleash. He would relish a row with a big dictator, say, or taking on an exploitative multinational.
The problem is that this new reckless ardour must be reined in, lest he appear a Don Quixote rather than a Thomas More. In attacking the Coalition for its welfare reform, Williams is tilting at windmills. Capitalism may be hugely flawed, but communism has been totally discredited, and the socialist experiments have evolved into capitalist-lite economies that owe little to Marx. Even the most hard-bitten Lefties, although they may have forgotten to tell Rowan Williams, have moved on from the "Capitalism Must Go" position.
In this new global understanding, the Christian ethic of William Temple and Rowan Williams, with its emphasis on community and mutual responsibility, still has a role to play. The Churches, with their voluntary groups and inclusive ethos, can establish themselves at the centre of the Big Society. They can provide a guiding light and a moral grounding.
Instead, in a move that betrays a dangerous unworldliness, the Archbishop seeks to be the troublesome priest, the man of conscience who will make life difficult for government. It's the wrong role, and the wrong target. It shows a misunderstanding of contemporary politics but also of contemporary principles such as "aspiration".
For the unworldly Dr Williams, aspiration lies somewhere between unfettered ambition and greedy accumulation. It's about having and achieving worldly goods which, in the great scheme of things, should not matter a jot. Aspiration smacks of "me", not the caring sharing "we" that is at the heart of the Christian message.
This is why, when the Coalition – and in particular Iain Duncan Smith – argue that the present welfare system stifles aspiration, their words make no impression on Dr Williams. He refuses to consider that withdrawing some benefits might enable some citizens to create their own good fortune; in his view, a government that wants to reduce its role as provider is ducking its responsibility.
In fact, as Duncan Smith has argued, aspiration is as much about the single mum on the council estate wanting to improve her children's chances as about the City banker gunning for the big Christmas bonus. Judicious, carefully targetted benefits do not hold back the citizen fizzing with get up and go. But a benefits culture, in which welfare guarantees you a better lifestyle than you can earn through hard graft, risks clogging the arteries of even the most eager, leaving them paralysed if not lifeless.
The Coalition is working to change this culture: the disadvantaged will benefit from its success. That is why the Archbishop of Canterbury must rein in his Don Quixote tendencies.

Jedit posted:

I don't recognise the Crucifixion painting, though.

Fluo posted:

Daily Express:

a pipe smoking dog posted:

Rowan Williams is great and is definitely one of the reasons that I am still an Anglican against all the odds.

Fluo posted:

Daily Express:

a pipe smoking dog posted:

Rowan Williams is great and is definitely one of the reasons that I am still an Anglican against all the odds.

quote:

“I love this bit… It’s where he asks her to take on his speeding penalty points.”

Fluo posted:

Daily Mail:

Vicky Price and Chris Huhne have both been sentenced to 8 months in prison.

Fluo posted:

Daily Bird:

The bird today is in one of the creases on Vicky's scarf!

Coohoolin posted:

Jesus Christ Fluo, a wealth of literature and journalistic efforts from the man with very good socialist analyses all over the place, but he writes one book on religion and because of that he's an un-chill rear end in a top hat?

Coohoolin posted:

Jesus Christ Fluo, a wealth of literature and journalistic efforts from the man with very good socialist analyses all over the place, but he writes one book on religion and because of that he's an un-chill rear end in a top hat?

Fluo posted:

Keir Hardie was a Christian Socialist.

Fluo posted:

Daily Mail:

Vicky Price and Chris Huhne have both been sentenced to 8 months in prison.

KazigluBey posted:

He's talking about Hitchens. I'm aware of the Iraq-war stuff, but not much else in the Hitch-criticism angle, myself.

C. Hitchens September 2005 posted:

LET ME BEGIN WITH A simple sentence that, even as I write it, appears less than Swiftian in the modesty of its proposal: "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad."

I could undertake to defend that statement against any member of Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, and I know in advance that none of them could challenge it, let alone negate it. Before March 2003, Abu Ghraib was an abattoir, a torture chamber, and a concentration camp. Now, and not without reason, it is an international byword for Yankee imperialism and sadism. Yet the improvement is still, unarguably, the difference between night and day. How is it possible that the advocates of a post-Saddam Iraq have been placed on the defensive in this manner? And where should one begin?

C. Hitchens June 2006 posted:

[..]
However, all the glib talk about My Lai is so much propaganda and hot air. In Vietnam, the rules of engagement were such as to make an atrocity—the slaughter of the My Lai villagers took almost a day rather than a white-hot few minutes—overwhelmingly probable. The ghastliness was only stopped by a brave officer who prepared his chopper-gunner to fire. In those days there were no precision-guided missiles, but there were "free-fire zones," and "body counts," and other virtual incitements to psycho officers such as Capt. Medina and Lt. Calley. As a consequence, a training film about My Lai—"if anything like this happens, you have really, truly screwed up"—has been in use for U.S. soldiers for some time.[..]

C. Hitchens March 2007 posted:

[...]Should it not have been known by Western intelligence that Iraq had no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction?

The entire record of UNSCOM until that date had shown a determination on the part of the Iraqi dictatorship to build dummy facilities to deceive inspectors, to refuse to allow scientists to be interviewed without coercion, to conceal chemical and biological deposits, and to search the black market for materiel that would breach the sanctions. The defection of Saddam Hussein's sons-in-law, the Kamel brothers, had shown that this policy was even more systematic than had even been suspected. Moreover, Iraq did not account for—has in fact never accounted for—a number of the items that it admitted under pressure to possessing after the Kamel defection. We still do not know what happened to this weaponry. This is partly why allWestern intelligence agencies, including French and German ones quite uninfluenced by Ahmad Chalabi, believed that Iraq had actual or latent programs for the production of WMD. Would it have been preferable to accept Saddam Hussein's word for it and to allow him the chance to re-equip once more once the sanctions had further decayed?

Coohoolin posted:

I'm talking about Hitchens. Dawkins is a smug arse, you won't find any disagreement from me there, and his foundation has been funneling donated money away to pay for, among other things, apartments for his affairs. Ignoring Hitchens' work on, for example, Zionism and human rights abuses, Kurdistan, neoliberalism (remember the "America the Banana Republic" essay?), interpretations of Marx, American use of torture, undying support of women's rights (part of his main critique of Mother Theresa), and calling out Henry Kissinger for being a war criminal, just to focus on the one book on religion he wrote and labeling him a poo poo because of it is absurd. Sure, he's held positions I disagree with, but he held them out of the same principles. He supported the Iraq War primarily out of concern for Kurdish self-determination and human rights. He supported Thatcher's war with Argentina out of concern for Argentine citizens suffering under a brutal dictatorship.

Just stop using him as a poster boy for "smug aggressive atheism", Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are far better candidates for that and don't have a wealth of otherwise valuable leftist rhetoric to tarnish by doing so.

quote:

“I’ve just heard the first Cuckoo of spring….He was hammering on the door to come in.”

Fluo posted:

Fluo posted:

Anyway sorry for the derail, went from Rowan to Hitchens quite fast.
Guardian:

Zephro posted:

The Mac one today seems to be totally free of dodgy ethnic stereotypes and is even a passable joke.

He sure knows his audience, though. Every domestic scene features the smug, wealthy and old and looks like time completely stopped in about 1980*.



*That style of mantlepiece clock, the fact that there are letters everywhere but no computer, the phone isn't cordless, the fire burns coal instead of gas/being a wood-burner...

quote:

“For heaven’s sake, Dennis, Put it back! You’re supposed to be on sick leave!”

Fluo posted:

Daily Mail:

A man who wrestled with a shark in Australia has been sacked from his job because he was supposed to be on sick leave.