The BBC’s decision to ban religious comedy Popetown is absolutely shit. For a start, Catholics are seditious traitors who shouldn’t be allowed to flaunt their evil Popeish influence in our glorious Protestant land. It says so in the law, and everything.

More importantly, religion is silly, and causing religious offence is a glorious and excellent way to spend one’s time.

Should anyone be wishing to raise cheap debating points about politically correct selective religious tolerance, I’d like to make clear that I believe Mohammed fucked goats, Buddha was a greedy fat bastard, and that the Greek (and then Roman – fucking wops, stealing everyone else’s ideas) gods piss all over everyone else’s with their eyes shut.

And you can’t complain about that. Melissa Henry says so.

Update: forgot to say, via Will Generaltheoryofrubbish

…or whatever other topic you wish. I’m unlikely to make any new posts before Sunday night, unless I discover ways to make my various mobile phones use the Web properly.

They aren’t a resistance, they’re murderous scum.

What’s the betting this will get less press than Bigley (about whose sad case, incidentally, Stephen Newton says all there is to be said)? High, I suspect.

On nasty man and closet batty boy Buju Banton, by a daft PC idiot: "Personally I believe that he is singing about his culture and no one, no matter what the situation, should be criticized for expressing his or her beliefs".

Fortunately I disagree, which allows me to state that Melissa Henry’s beliefs are outrageously, unequivocally stupid. I’m not sure whether she’s incapable of understanding the difference between criticism and censorship… it sounds implausible, but the idea that she believes everyone should have impunity to express their beliefs without being challenged on how fuckwitted they are is even more so.

Ho hum. Thanks to slightly surprising source Laban Tall for that one. Although I’m less convinced by his thoughts on the similarities or lack thereof between hostages in Iraq and captives in Guantanamo.

In response to a BBC Have Your Say piece comparing the two situations, Eric the Unread points out that George Bush is unlikely to cut the Gitmo prisoners’ heads off personally while reciting the Lord’s Prayer. This is true, although it seems to fit Peter Cuthbertson’s point about attacking an analogy based on irrelevant dissimilarities (the salient features in both cases are that they’re in cages, they don’t know what’s going to happen, they might well end up being topped, and it’s mostly being done to appeal to the home crowd).

Laban’s example is a little more surprising: "Not exactly the same, Eric. The beheadee would be an innocent bloke pulled off the street, chosen on racial or religious grounds". This appears to be a claim that the people in Guantanamo are all guilty, and weren’t chosen on racial or religious grounds.

I’m sure Ms Henry wouldn’t offer any criticism of this belief, although I’m less convinced about the rest of the world…

Given that the people of Florida are clearly being punished by God for electing Jeb Bush, it seems strange that his approval ratings are at a record high.

Maybe the opinion polls involved some questions that could be answered incorrectly if you were an idiot. Or maybe they banned black people from answering – after all, it’s important to reflect election conditions in your polling.

On the other hand, maybe the people of Florida have just decided that God can go fuck himself. In which case I salute them.

I’m the #1 Google hit for living up to stereotypes. Fucking typical. I reckon I must have been secretly Googlebombed into it – probably by a bunch of pseudo-lefty cunts who think that killing brown people is a good laugh. Or maybe by the RNC.

A shock new survey finds that people who watch Jon Stewart’s Daily Show are better educated and more knowledgable about politics than people who watch Bill O’Reilly on Fox.

So fans of liberal-ish political satire are smarter than fans of right-wing demagoguery? Next you’ll be telling me that UKIP voters aren’t very bright…

(via Class Worrier Raj)

Gotta love the BBC’s tech coverage. The linked article talks about attempts at Imperial College to make an optical disk with a terabyte of storage capacity (equivalent to about 120 DVDs, or 240 DVD-Rs). The Beeb say you could fit 472 hours of video on this, equivalent to the whole of the Simpsons.

Now, there are currently 15 series of the Simpsons, each with around 24 episodes lasting for around 25 minutes each, making a total of 150 hours of telly. It’s possible the show will run for another 30 seasons (and presumably season 16 has already been made), but even so this seems a little presumptious.

More irritatingly, the article ignores the most important change in digital video since DVD launched – which is that compression technology has improved so much you can now squeeze 25 minutes of DVD quality video into less than 200MB, so you only need 72GB, nine DVDs, or 18 DVD-Rs, to store the whole of the Simpsons anyway. If you go for VHS quality instead of DVD quality, you can cut the file size down to 50MB, which gets the entire show onto 2.5 DVDs anyway. And by 2010, compression will have improved still further, by the power of Moore’s Law.

I guess the author’s suffering from DVD-price-based brainwashing (‘in the crazy future, you’ll be able to get £1000s worth of telly on a single disk… what do you mean you can do that already?’)

(via Insert Joke Here)

An Arab professor wrote the deranged screed below against the Americans and the Jews. Outrageously, he still has a job teaching at an Egyptian public university; clearly the country is run by savages and lunatics.

"Ordinary Muslims are arming themselves for war with you. I and many of my friends have closets full of handguns, rifles, shotguns and thousands of cartridges. If we had enough ammunition and time, we would kill every last one of you.

"We completely support Bin Laden and our martyrs. We only wish they would destroy you faster, but we are certain that they will.

"One day soon, our bombs and bullets will begin turning your churches, your godless universities, your hotels, your government offices, your hideouts, and your neighborhoods into rubble.

"And then our Jihadis will enter your cities and begin the work of killing you, roaches, as you crawl from the debris…. We will transport the Jews to our deserts, where they can pray to scorpions under the blazing sun."

Oh no, wait. This was an Christian professor at an American university, talking about the Americans killing all the Muslims. And yup, he still has a job, and isn’t in jail or Guantanamo Bay. It’s all good to know…

(via Crooked Timber)

Rightwing think-tank Civitas has a new blog, which claims to be ‘classically liberal’.

If they followed the Adam Smith Institute‘s lead and suggested that the government should privatise everything and legalise most things, that would be fair enough. But no. Their first posts discuss how it would be great to send more people to jail, let in fewer immigrants, and hire more coppers.

If that’s classical liberalism, then I’m Norman Tebbitt. Still, what can you expect from an organisation which makes Stephen Pollard a Senior Fellow?