Lars Vilks blir attackerad på föreläsningen
Se från 11 minuter in i filmen. Vilks visar en film från en Iransk kvinna som tar upp homosexualitet och Islam.
Dagens citat
"This is no time to make new enemies."
Supposedly the last words of the philosopher Voltaire, uttered when a priest asked him to renounce Satan
Matt Ridley: When ideas have sex
At TEDGlobal 2010, author Matt Ridley shows how, throughout history, the engine of human progress has been the meeting and mating of ideas to make new ideas. It's not important how clever individuals are, he says; what really matters is how smart the collective brain is.
Hitch-22
Jag sitter och läser "Hitch-22", Christopher Hitchens biografi. Boken känns välplanerad med tanke på att han nyligen drabbats av esofaguscancer, (strupen).
Angående Vietnam:
"To all appearances, it seemed as if a military-industrial superpower was employing a terrible aerial bombardment of steel and explosives and chemicals to subdue a defiant agrarian society. I had expected the newly elected Labour government to withhold British support for this foul war (and the amazigly coarse and thuggish-looking American president who was prosecuting it), and when this expectation was disappointed I began, along many, many of my contemporaries, to experience a furious disillisionment with "conventional" politics. A bit young to be so cynical and so superior, you might think. My reply is that you should fucking well have been there, and felt if for yourself.
Had the study of life and literature and history merely domesticated me to waste and betray my youth, and to gape at a spectacle of undisgusted atrocity and aggression as if it should be camly received? I hope to never lose the access to outrage that I felt then.
Indisk vegetarianism
Enligt John Stewart Mills i On Liberty:
"The case of the Bombay Parsees is a curious instance in point. When this industrious and enterprising tribe, the descendants of the Persian fire-worshippers, flying from their native country before the Caliphs, arrived in Western India, they were admitted to toleration by the Hindoo sovereigns, on condition of not eating beef. When those regions afterwards fell under the dominion of Mahomedan conquerors, the Parsees obtained from them a continuance of indulgence, on condition of refraining from pork. What was at first obedience to authority became a second nature, and the Parsees to this day abstain both from beef and pork. Though not required by their religion, the double abstinence has had time to grow into a custom of their tribe; and custom, in the East, is a religion."
Like



