A Victory for the Ideologically Mad

 

BBC News has reported on the following:   States push through tax on food

Food, books, newspapers and magazines in Jersey will all be subject to the proposed 3% goods and services tax (GST) from next year. States Members rejected plans to exempt food from the tax by 28 votes to 21 and by 33 to 16 in favour of taxing books, newspapers and magazines on Thursday. Plans to exclude children's clothes from GST were rejected on Wednesday. Senator Ben Shenton said he would bring the proposition back to the States after the next election.

 

That they voted to bring it in on food, neglecting the plight of the poor, can only go down in local history as a vote for infamy by those who have never known what it is like to scrape by month after month, on the most meagre of incomes. Now more of these people will have to apply for income support, with all the bureaucratic humiliation that involves. I notice that States Members do not have any kind of means testing on their income!

 

A victory for the ideologically mad, who seem determined to pursue policies through with all the finesse and compassion of Oliver Cromwell in Ireland!

 

 

God is not so bad, after all

In this his book, God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens discusses a hypothetical question he was asked by Dennis Prager: If he were alone in a unfamiliar city at night, and a group of men he didn't know approached him, would he feel safer, or less safe, if he knew these men had just come from a prayer meeting? Hitchens answers by specifying some "unfamiliar cities" where he may indeed feel threatened. Sticking just "within the letter B" he lists Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad. He claims "absolutely" that he can find reasons why, if walking in any such city and meeting a group of men coming from a religious observance, he would "feel immediately threatened."

 

But is it just an intersection of extremism and place? Is religion really the core element here? If he was alone alone in a unfamiliar city at night, and a group of men he didn't know approached him, would he feel safer, or less safe, if he knew these men had just come from a political meeting where they were discussing profound (and fervent) matters of political ideology? Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Pol Pots Cambodia and in today's world Burma, China, North Korea, Zimbabwe...

 

The chapter is called "religion kills". Should there be one called "politics kills"? Hitchens seems to assume that if he can show religion kills, it must be a bad thing. By the logic of that argument, politics is also a bad thing. Shoddy logic, methinks.