Yesterday I received Tory propaganda in the post, along with a questionnaire. They are still repeating their claims that not only will they not cut NHS funding, but they will improve the service. On the face of things this seems like a reasonable proposition, but from the Tories it seems to demonstrate a disturbing lack of arithmetic ability.

The problem is, the Tories insist that they will not increase the deficit. They also claim that they will cut taxes (on rich people at least). How exactly do they propose to reduce government income and increase or maintain government spending without increasing the deficit?

The only solution is for them to cut some other services, but they attempt to gloss over this in the vain hope that people won't ask how they intend to pay for anything. They make vague and misleading promises and hope that they won't be caught out.

The simple fact of the matter is that the NHS, and the welfare state, are socialist ideas, and yet no matter how much some Conservatives might want to, they have no hope of ever getting rid of them. The Tories have no choice but to maintain and even improve these embodiments of left-wing principles, because like it or not, people want them. If they were to promise to abolish the NHS and replace it with a US-style system of private healthcare, I suspect that they'd not only be soundly beaten by Labour, but the Liberal Democrats would give them a tough time too; thus, they're reduced to basing their campaign on not Conservative principles, but Labour ones.

The USA has plenty of prominent fundamentalists in important positions, but for the most part the UK has seemed to avoid it. Except in Northern Ireland, where apparently the government is full of them. For example, Mervyn Storey, who threatened the Ulster Museum in Belfast with legal action if they went ahead with an exhibition on evolution, because apparently it’s discrimination.

Yep, because some people don’t believe in it, it’s discriminatory to even talk about it.

"They could be subject to a legal challenge under equality legislation within Northern Ireland if they chose to ignore alternative views that many people here in the Province believe in," he said.

Firstly, it is not required for a museum to put on exhibitions about everything under the sun. I’d be surprised if the exhibition didn’t talk about alternative theories at all, but the exhibition is focusing on evolution.

The bit which pisses me off the most:

…and let’s stress it is still only a theory…

"Only a theory" demonstrates that he has no clue what a theory is; for a start, I’m not even convinced that creationism/intelligent-design are even theories at all. According to the United States National Academy of Sciences:

A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment. Such fact-supported theories are not "guesses" but reliable accounts of the real world.

Creationism and "Intelligent Design" are not, by that definition, theories. They’re simply statements that this is how the world works. At best, they start with the assumption that God exists and then look for evidence to support that belief. That is not science.

(The National Academy of Sciences goes on to say "The theory of biological evolution is more than "just a theory." It is as factual an explanation of the universe as the atomic theory of matter or the germ theory of disease. Our understanding of gravity is still a work in progress. But the phenomenon of gravity, like evolution, is an accepted fact"; that is, we know evolution happens, just like we know gravity happens; we just don’t quite understand all the details as to why.)

So a few weeks back I emailed some loony Christian organisation in the US as part of a protest, basically to tell them to stop being such total wankers (they were advocating a boycott of Hallmark because Hallmark, horror of horrors, were selling cards that acknowledged that not everybody is heterosexual, or something).

Their revenge, apparently, was to sign me up for their newsletter. Curses!

(Except not, ‘cause I had the sense to add "nospampleasefundiewankers" to the address, so I can filter it no problem…)

http://www.badscience.net/2008/06/all-time-classic-creationist-pwnage/

Biologist Richard Lenski recently published a paper describing the emergence of new traits in bacteria (they evolved the ability to metabolise new food sources when kept in an environment without food they could already metabolise). Andrew Schlafly, founder of that paragon of scientific endeavour Conservapedia [1] [2], got very upset by this and demanded to see the evidence. Lenski responded quite politely, but after further demands, threats, and insults, replies with an impressively snotty letter.

Rick Santorum has been whinging about the recent California Supreme Court decision to legalise same-sex marriage:

The California judges also ruled, for the first time in American legal history, that sexual orientation is just like race.

The California court just declared that those of us who see marriage as the union of husband and wife are the legal equivalent of racists. And openly racist groups and individuals can be denied government benefits because of their views, including professional licenses (attorney, physicians, psychiatrists, marriage counselors), accredited schools, and tax-exempt status for charities. Have fun with the rest.

So, he’s upset that the Roman Catholic Church (and others, obviously) will be subject to legal sanctions if it continues to spread anti-gay hate speech. How sad for it. If the RC Church was openly racist, it would be subject to these sanctions; as it is openly homophobic it should be too. While we’re at it, why not force it to be an equal-opportunities employer, too — where are all the female priests?

Bigotry is not okay just because your God says it is.

In reply to my last post, Rich points out that the "wizardry" wasn’t the only reason he was fired, but also things like failing to stick to a lesson plan, and so on. While that’s fair enough, and completely justifiable, that’s really not the point I was trying to make.

These people, in complete seriousness, described a simple conjouring trick as "wizardry". They are demonstrating serious craziness, of the "shouldn’t be allowed out in public" variety. When your religious strictures against "magic" and "witchcraft" and "wizardry" lead you to burn childrens’ books, ban conjuring tricks, and denounce Easter eggs as "satanism", then there’s really no help for you.

(Also, quite frankly, if he’s a crap teacher then fire him for that. Don’t blame it on "wizardry", it makes you look even more stupid than you already do.)

On a lighter note, a comment from Julian Elson made me grin:

Even if Piculas is a wizard, the toothpick trick described is probably, like, a cantrip at most. Maybe prestidigitation or something. Surely it’s not all that worth getting worked up about. It’s not as if he baleful polymorph‘ed a disruptive student or anything.

Apparently, a substitute teacher in America was fired for — wait for it — wizardry. Seriously. The exact word, "wizardry", was used. Apparently he’d shown the kids a magic trick where he made a toothpick disappear and reappear.

I’m really very scared right now.

This blog post on Pandagon quotes some random Christian (a lawyer, of all things; I’d assumed Christianity and the law profession were as fundamentally opposed as Christianity and Satanism) thusly:

A 24-page pro-homosexual booklet is set to be distributed to all 16,000 school districts in the nation. The booklet produced by the National Education Association and the American Psychological Association falsely tells students that homosexuality is a "normal expression of human sexuality."

It falsely tells them, does it? Ignoring the split infinitive, who the bloody hell is Richard Thompson, that he knows more about what is and isn’t psychologically normal than a large group of psychologists? Where is his evidence that homosexuality is not a normal psychological state? If all the evidence that hundreds of psychologists can come up with shows that homosexuality is a normal expression of human sexuality, then I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to do better than "But my God says it’s not!".

Frickin’ nutjobs…

TermiSoc’s annual general meeting was Tuesday; against my better judgement, I put myself forward for the position of president. Showing a lack of common sense that’s astounding even to people with experience of TermiSoc, they actually voted for me. So basically, I’m screwed.

I’ve been teaching myself Haskell; I found a tutorial that doesn’t assume you already get functional programming, and it’s really quite a nice language; I was going to try learning Scheme, after Dan’s tutorial on Monday, but the parentheses were driving me insane. The main problem I’m having with Haskell is dealing with its type system and the IO monad; I keep getting told that I can’t do things because my variables are IO strings or whatever, instead of normal ones. Other than that, it’s a really nice language; maybe I’ll do a tutorial on it next year.

Smalltalk and C++ are still on my <span class="createlink"><a href="http://bma.cx/wiki.cgi?page=about%2Flanguages%2Fcomputer&amp;from=journal%2Fentries%2F2008%2Fmisc-updates&amp;do=create" rel="nofollow">?</a>list</span>, since they’re mandatory for the final-year course I want to take (Plymouth has a system whereby you can get a "Computing and Such-And-Such" degree instead of plain Computing, if you choose from a specific subset of the normally-allowed final-year modules; I’m going for Computing and Software Development). I’ll spend some time on both of them over the summer, if all goes to plan.

Just for kicks, the latest psychotic dribble from the Roman Catholic Church: apparently, abortion offends "the dignity and rights of women". They’d be more credible if pro-choicers hadn’t been saying for years that banning abortion does exactly that. Bishop Girotti, you fail.

"If you’re in high-school, you should only be exposed to an inaccuracy-laden form of sex education that is no more likely to keep you from having sex than other forms of sex ed. When you do go ahead and have sex anyway, chances are you get pregnant, because you never got any accurate information about birth control or contraceptives. Once you get pregnant, you have to carry the child to term, because abortion is wrong but even if you do keep the baby, we’re still going to shun you and treat you as a leper because you never should’ve had sex in the first place. And God forbid you work hard, finish your schooling and make something of yourself, because then you’re glamorizing teen pregnancy and demonstrating to your peers that God doesnt automatically make pregnant teens spontaneously combust in a fireball of shame."

(From an article about a teen girl who got pregnant, had a baby, and carried on at school and did well despite that; her classmates wanted to write an article about her for the yearbook, but the school administration refused, saying that it was "glamorizing teen pregnancy". Yay America.)