Category Archives: Video

Newsnippets, January 5, 2013 [VIDEO]

newspaper newsnippets articles

The real story of the Syrian civil war

We watched the TV, fascinated.

We had been in Maraa for days, waiting for a driver who would take us further into the interior of the country. Not a single government soldier had been seen in this small city north of Aleppo in quite a while. Not even the artillery cannons in Aleppo were capable of reaching the town. Someone called an acquaintance living near the cultural center, and learned that everything was quiet there too. And the multi-story apartment buildings? There aren’t any in Maraa.

The entire report, several minutes long and related in a breathless tone, was fiction. This time we ourselves were witnesses and knew the truth.

More Pakistani aid workers murdered

Six women and a man, working for a health and education charity, have been shot dead in a drive-by shooting after they left a community centre in northwest Pakistan, police say.

The victims of Tuesday’s attack were all Pakistanis attached to the community centre in a Swabi village.

2012 was not a good year for FOX News

In a discussion of the role of women in the military, Fox News contributor Liz Trotta expressed an opinion about new rules from the Pentagon that would permit women to serve closer to the front lines. Trotta’s take on this centered on the problems faced by servicewomen who are sexually assaulted by fellow soldiers whom she regards as whiners because they won’t shut up and accept the fact that if they work closely with men they should expect to be assaulted. And if that weren’t bad enough, Trotta went on to complain about the expensive military bureaucracy set up to “support women in the military who are now being raped too much.” I would really like to know precisely how much rape is acceptable before it crosses Trotta’s line. Is there any context in which she might have meant that that isn’t unfathomably repulsive?

Pope Benedict XVI condemns “unregulated capitalism” for contributing to world tension

The Pope also thanked the world’s peacemakers and said humanity had “an innate vocation for peace”

[…]

He deplored “hotbeds of tension and conflict caused by growing instances of inequality between rich and poor”.
Those “hotbeds” also grew out of “the prevalence of a selfish and individualistic mindset which also finds expression in an unregulated financial capitalism”, as well as “various forms of terrorism and crime”, he said.

Settlers leave illegal West Bank outpost ahead of eviction

The unauthorized West Bank outpost of Oz Tzion was nearly empty on Saturday night, after the 200 or so young people who came on Friday with the intention of stopping the community’s evacuation by the Israel Defense Forces left voluntarily.
The few permanent residents of the outpost still remain in the site situated between Jerusalem and Ramallah, near the Givat Assaf outpost. Its founder is Daniela Weiss, the former head of the Kedumim Local Council. It includes a few wooden structures, which the IDF says it will demolish at a time it sees fit.

Why mostly men protesting rape in India?

There are women out on the streets, some from India’s long-suppressed women’s movement, to fight for stronger rape laws and other legal protections. But those women risk being groped by fellow protesters or shouted down. And the men on these same streets seem to be operating just as much from a revenge instinct as from any desire for meaningful social, political and legal changes.

A plea to report violence-related statistics thoroughly and honestly from AmidsTheNoise

Russion Plane Crash

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New Les Miserables long trailer out now [VIDEO]

A new long trailer has been released for the soon to be released cinematic musical version of Les Miserables.

les miserable hugh jackman

A scene from Les Miserables [Image credit]


It looks and sounds fantastic. The primaries appear to be amazing–save Russell Crowe singing–and I am guessing the casting of Sacha Baron Cohen will prove a stroke of genius.

Christmas Day.

(HT: Steve McCoy)

When your top defender is a coward: Richard Dawkins [VIDEO]

Remember Richard Dawkins? One of the “Four Horsemen of the Atheist Apocalypse”? Author of The God Delusion, The Selfish Gene and other anti-theistic tomes?

richard dawkins

Professor, author, anti-theist Richard Dawkins [Image credit]

Several years ago Dawkins was one of the most prominent (though never ablest) defenders of atheism. More accurately, he was a prominent proponent of “anti-theism.” That is, he did not simply not believe in God he says the idea of God is negative and harmful. He believes “pitiless indifference” lies at the bottom of every single thing that exists, ever has existed or ever will exist. All design is apparent; no intelligence needed.

Lately, though, Dawkins has shown himself to be little more than a philosophical and intellectual coward. Repeated declinations for debating well known philosopher William Lane Craig–considered by many the best in the field–are broadly publicized and now oft repeated. According to Craig, Dawkins has also turned down at least one invitation to debate Alvin Plantinga. Dawkins, for his part, says he does not need such on his CV and refuses to share the stage with one who defends the Old Testament. Perhaps it is more because the Dawkster had his head handed to him in a cardboard box by another Christian philosopher (of mathematics), the inimitable John Lennox.

A counter-piece in the UK Guardian frames the issue well:

[T]he tactics deployed by [Dawkins] and the other New Atheists, it seems to me, are fundamentally ignoble and potentially harmful to public intellectual life. For there is something cynical, ominously patronising, and anti-intellectualist in their modus operandi, with its implicit assumption that hurling insults is an effective way to influence people’s beliefs about religion.

And this from a skeptic who likely agrees with Dawkins’ conclusions.

Possibly one reason for all of these “no’s” is that Dawkins claims to operate from the field of biology, while Craig, Plantinga and others are philosophers. Perhaps the Dawkster feels inadequate for the cross-disciplinary exchange. That would be all well and good save this fact: Dawkins routinely engages in philosophy in his books. He just rarely calls it such, and rarely does it well.

In a recent appearance at Oxford University, yet another “Can’t make it” from the Dawkster, Craig took a page from Clint Eastwood’s RNC book and debated an empty chair. Unlike Eastwood’s famous razzing of President Obama, Dawkins’ statements and responses as played by Craig were not invented.

The statements ascribed to Richard Dawkins in this presentation are statements actually made by Prof. Dawkins. The following is a list of the sources of such statements.

So reads the video beginning around 42:10.

The following video is pretty thick philosophically, but valuable if you can hang with it. I would encourage giving it two or three listens. Rather than turning it off early be taught by it. I was.