Mvh
tomas.

Thank you for standing for the truth (a very Lutheran thing to do, by the way). The ”truth” here is that without freedom of speech, humanity will continue to run to the abyss of mutually assured destruction. Freedom is necessary for us to survive. But freedom is not free. Someone pays for it. You are the hero of everyone who understands this. Freedom of speech is protected by law. The law is for everyone. No one has special rights. The Islamists want at once to play in the soccer game and be the referee. It doesn’t work that way. We do not tolerate ”white supremacists”. We cannot tolerate ”Islamic supremacists” either. Their claim to special rights to squash and stifle others into submission under their ayatollahs is based on determinism. In this primitive fatalism, only the viceroy of Allah has rights. That means only one person on the planet will have rights under pure Islam. This is hideous. It is so much like Hitlerism, we shall never accept it. The confrontation may be temporarily postponed, but it will not go away. I think most people know this. They do not want to be on the front line, but increasingly, we all are.

”Taqlid” means blind following. It is a complete disregard for the role of human intellect in matters of religion. It is enforced blind adherence to the religious leader, through fear of death or hellfire. It is based on an absence of intellectual activity on the part of the believer. It is purely cultic in nature. We are enlightened people. We shall not endorse this death cult. (Is it not instructive, do you think, that to enforce submission, they cut off the head, the seat of thought and reason?)

”Taqlid” is the name of the problem you are facing, in my opinion. Taqlid keeps all those ayatollahs in business, and without it, they would lose their jobs. Those who write to wish you ill, are their slaves and they run to do their bidding. Their minds are emprisoned by taqlid. There is good news, though. The Internet will set them free, if only the 800 million illiterates learn to read! (Scandalous.) Sooner or later, there will be a rapid and catastrophic collapse of taqlid, when the prisoners are no longer afraid. It happened in Romania. The crowd suddenly began to jeer. Ceauscescu was finished and was executed for his crimes within days. The ”crime” of the ayatollahs is that they truly believe they are the only ones who have rights. They hate freedom for others, because it takes away their unlimited control as the ”commanders of the believers”.

We are told so often that ”Islam” comes from the word for peace, but this ”peace” is only possible between the enslaved, not between free men.

Either we exercise our freedom or they will take away from us. As simple as that. They have declared so. When they see they are not winning, Islam will fall in most Islamic countries. There are still a few neo-Nazis around too, but no one is taking them seriously, if you see what I mean.

Liberalism is the voice of reason. It is a calm and steady voice, not a strident one, but such a voice! In spite of the countless, shrill threats of this death cult, liberalism will win. It has happened before. It is happening now, as one by one, silently, individuals refuse to be ruled by taqlid. Millions are leaving this death cult every year.

We need to see this clearly: tolerating a supremacist gives him the right to move into a position where he can take away our freedom. The supremacist wants to rule us, because he is better than us.

We have to continue to tell the Islamists, ”Sorry, but you’re not better than us.”

R.Frankling
Canada

Minareten på rampaden var en intressant installation. Betydligt mer politisk än din Muhammedskiss egentligen dessutom med ett av mina egna favoritteman inom konsten, dubbeltydighet. I vart fall fick dem mig att tänka på en artikel Dawkins hade införd i The Guardian 15/9 2001, kallad Religion’s Misguided Missiles. Jag klistrar in den nedan för den som känner sig manad att läsa
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A guided missile corrects its trajectory as it flies, homing in, say, on the heat of a jet plane’s exhaust. A great improvement on a simple ballistic shell, it still cannot discriminate particular targets. It could not zero in on a designated New York skyscraper if launched from as far away as Boston

That is precisely what a modern ”smart missile” can do. Computer miniaturisation has advanced to the point where one of today’s smart missiles could be programmed with an image of the Manhattan skyline together with instructions to home in on the north tower of the World Trade Centre. Smart missiles of this sophistication are possessed by the United States, as we learned in the Gulf war, but they are economically beyond ordinary terrorists and scientifically beyond theocratic governments. Might there be a cheaper and easier alternative?

In the second world war, before electronics became cheap and miniature, the psychologist BF Skinner did some research on pigeon-guided missiles. The pigeon was to sit in a tiny cockpit, having previously been trained to peck keys in such a way as to keep a designated target in the centre of a screen. In the missile, the target would be for real.

The principle worked, although it was never put into practice by the US authorities. Even factoring in the costs of training them, pigeons are cheaper and lighter than computers of comparable effectiveness. Their feats in Skinner’s boxes suggest that a pigeon, after a regimen of training with colour slides, really could guide a missile to a distinctive landmark at the southern end of Manhattan island. The pigeon has no idea that it is guiding a missile. It just keeps on pecking at those two tall rectangles on the screen, from time to time a food reward drops out of the dispenser, and this goes on until… oblivion.

Pigeons may be cheap and disposable as on-board guidance systems, but there’s no escaping the cost of the missile itself. And no such missile large enough to do much damage could penetrate US air space without being intercepted. What is needed is a missile that is not recognised for what it is until too late. Something like a large civilian airliner, carrying the innocuous markings of a well-known carrier and a great deal of fuel. That’s the easy part. But how do you smuggle on board the necessary guidance system? You can hardly expect the pilots to surrender the left-hand seat to a pigeon or a computer.

How about using humans as on-board guidance systems, instead of pigeons? Humans are at least as numerous as pigeons, their brains are not significantly costlier than pigeon brains, and for many tasks they are actually superior. Humans have a proven track record in taking over planes by the use of threats, which work because the legitimate pilots value their own lives and those of their passengers.

The natural assumption that the hijacker ultimately values his own life too, and will act rationally to preserve it, leads air crews and ground staff to make calculated decisions that would not work with guidance modules lacking a sense of self-preservation. If your plane is being hijacked by an armed man who, though prepared to take risks, presumably wants to go on living, there is room for bargaining. A rational pilot complies with the hijacker’s wishes, gets the plane down on the ground, has hot food sent in for the passengers and leaves the negotiations to people trained to negotiate.

The problem with the human guidance system is precisely this. Unlike the pigeon version, it knows that a successful mission culminates in its own destruction. Could we develop a biological guidance system with the compliance and dispensability of a pigeon but with a man’s resourcefulness and ability to infiltrate plausibly? What we need, in a nutshell, is a human who doesn’t mind being blown up. He’d make the perfect on-board guidance system. But suicide enthusiasts are hard to find. Even terminal cancer patients might lose their nerve when the crash was actually looming.

Could we get some otherwise normal humans and somehow persuade them that they are not going to die as a consequence of flying a plane smack into a skyscraper? If only! Nobody is that stupid, but how about this – it’s a long shot, but it just might work. Given that they are certainly going to die, couldn’t we sucker them into believing that they are going to come to life again afterwards? Don’t be daft! No, listen, it might work. Offer them a fast track to a Great Oasis in the Sky, cooled by everlasting fountains. Harps and wings wouldn’t appeal to the sort of young men we need, so tell them there’s a special martyr’s reward of 72 virgin brides, guaranteed eager and exclusive.

Would they fall for it? Yes, testosterone-sodden young men too unattractive to get a woman in this world might be desperate enough to go for 72 private virgins in the next.

It’s a tall story, but worth a try. You’d have to get them young, though. Feed them a complete and self-consistent background mythology to make the big lie sound plausible when it comes. Give them a holy book and make them learn it by heart. Do you know, I really think it might work. As luck would have it, we have just the thing to hand: a ready-made system of mind-control which has been honed over centuries, handed down through generations. Millions of people have been brought up in it. It is called religion and, for reasons which one day we may understand, most people fall for it (nowhere more so than America itself, though the irony passes unnoticed). Now all we need is to round up a few of these faith-heads and give them flying lessons.

Facetious? Trivialising an unspeakable evil? That is the exact opposite of my intention, which is deadly serious and prompted by deep grief and fierce anger. I am trying to call attention to the elephant in the room that everybody is too polite – or too devout – to notice: religion, and specifically the devaluing effect that religion has on human life. I don’t mean devaluing the life of others (though it can do that too), but devaluing one’s own life. Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

If death is final, a rational agent can be expected to value his life highly and be reluctant to risk it. This makes the world a safer place, just as a plane is safer if its hijacker wants to survive. At the other extreme, if a significant number of people convince themselves, or are convinced by their priests, that a martyr’s death is equivalent to pressing the hyperspace button and zooming through a wormhole to another universe, it can make the world a very dangerous place. Especially if they also believe that that other universe is a paradisical escape from the tribulations of the real world. Top it off with sincerely believed, if ludicrous and degrading to women, sexual promises, and is it any wonder that naive and frustrated young men are clamouring to be selected for suicide missions?

There is no doubt that the afterlife-obsessed suicidal brain really is a weapon of immense power and danger. It is comparable to a smart missile, and its guidance system is in many respects superior to the most sophisticated electronic brain that money can buy. Yet to a cynical government, organisation, or priesthood, it is very very cheap.

Our leaders have described the recent atrocity with the customary cliche: mindless cowardice. ”Mindless” may be a suitable word for the vandalising of a telephone box. It is not helpful for understanding what hit New York on September 11. Those people were not mindless and they were certainly not cowards. On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from.

It came from religion. Religion is also, of course, the underlying source of the divisiveness in the Middle East which motivated the use of this deadly weapon in the first place. But that is another story and not my concern here. My concern here is with the weapon itself. To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.

sorry för det där med sonen, det åkte med av bara farten. Kom på att det kanske lät otrevligt, och detta var inte meningen. Förlåt min tafflighet. Och tänk på att jag bara är en avskedad journalist.

Enbart du får stanna kvar i parlören och ges som kompensation dessutom 1 veckas fri lejd innan du blir indragen i Rondellhundsmorden.

Högaktningsfullt,
Göran E.
redaktör

Wallander lade den taffliga deckaren åt sidan och somnade.

-Jag känslig? frågar violinisten stingsligt? Det är faan inte så lätt att med enbart Suzuki i hand möta världens ondska. Ni skulle ha sett Menuhin. HAN var känslig. Men så spelade han ju lite bättre också.

Medan Göten Gote och folkskollärare Fredrikzon ordineras två påsar Laktipex vardera erhåller den känslige violinisten fyrdubbel dos, det vill säga åtta påsar, väl medveten om att förstoppningen när som helst kan slå över i diarré.

Under tiden upptages på det andra speciella spåret orden Gangsterprofet, anti-islamist, anpassad yttrandefrihet, ex-muslim, islamofob och islamofobisk till Rondellhundsparlören. Även Yngve Rådberg och hans tvåårige son tas upp i parlören.

Kan du inte vara med och vända tillbaka då?

YR: ”Detta ältande av yttrandefrihetens och den västerländska demokratins hotade gränser tråkar ut mig. Jag står bakom din och exempelvis Arne Ruths ståndpunkt när det gäller principen om yttrandefrihet, men var finns konsten i det hela?”

Har du inte reflekterat över att ditt ambitiösa inlägg ovan är en del av konstverket? Vilks taffliga hund är meningslös utan den förklarande texten, NAs publicering, den läckra timingen och efterföljande samtal. Det har länge funnits ett behov av att reda ut varför det ska tassas på tå för vissa, men inte för andra.

En hel värld vill diskutera frågan – det är konsten.

Det kan göra ont medan giftet verkar, men alla blir i förlängningen vinnare på att religion, diktat och andra påhitt synas, och utmanas. Islam är livslång underkastelse, det förhållningssättet svarar inte upp mot något enda mänskligt behov – men är ett effektivt maktinstrument.