Rod Fleming's Blog, page 87

Parliament: Stronger than Brexit

Originally posted 2016-06-29 11:12:24.

In the UK, Parliament is the ultimate authority. All power is held by it. While technically, sovereignty resides with the monarch, in the UK this is ceded to and implemented by a group of elected representatives called Members of Parliament.

The UK is NOT a plebiscitary democracy; it is a representational one.  Elected Members of Parliament make decisions on behalf of the electors they represent.

The enabling legislation for the EU referendum last week is t...

Something Greater

Originally posted 2013-12-11 23:59:41.

I am part of something greater, in a very real and immediate sense. It’s not so much a question of believing but of accepting the evidence in front of me. I am part of the Earth. The Earth is not just a core of molten iron covered in a crust of rock and water, with an outer gaseous atmosphere, though it is these things. It is a living system, an entity. And I am—we are all—part of that entity.

Consider what you are: you are composed of billions of individua...

Finesse: Cameron’s booby-trap

Originally posted 2016-06-27 10:34:01.

Is that a seagull or is Cameron up there?

Finesse might be David Cameron’s middle name. He was a long-time and successful PR man before entering politics, and, having been one myself, I can assure you that this is a training that makes you grasp every opportunity to show how good you are. And of course, how stupid, incompetent and generally just bad your enemies are.

Now I freely admit I have not been impressed by Cameron. I’ll grant, though, that this may ...

Cameron’s Last Stand

Originally posted 2016-06-24 12:12:37.

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Captain of the UK ship of State, Dave ‘Mine’s a Pint’ Cameron nailed his colours to the mast and finally had the worm-eaten hulk torpedoed from under him. And what did it? His own insufferable Tory hubris and his barrow-boy addiction to gambling. Thanks to Cameron, the end of Europe as we know it has become likely. The voters in Britain just pulled out the props and the sky fell in.

Well, that was what it felt like this morning as I turned on my pc and sud...

EU Referendum

Originally posted 2016-06-20 11:42:53.

[image error]On Thursday this week, the people of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland  will vote in a crucial referendum. For the first time in over 40 years, they will have the chance to express a view about the European Union (EU). To decide, in fact, whether they wish to remain a part of it or not.

(This post was updated on 24 September 2018. It seems just as apposite today, even though the Referendum this referred to was held and the UK voted to leave the ...

War with Islam: ideology, not people

Originally posted 2016-06-19 12:56:56.

Outside Pulse nightclub in Orlando on the night when 49 people were murdered in the name of Islam.

Islam is locked in a war with secular democracy and moderate Muslims themselves.

In one week in, June 2016, a Canadian, Robert Hall, had his head hacked from his body in a brutal public murder. Two days later, over 100 people were gunned down in a nightclub in Orlando, Florida; forty-nine died. Two days after that a married couple, both police officers, were s...

Qur’an: Read It Yourself

Originally posted 2016-06-10 12:11:09.

The Qur’an is the base text of Islam, which is today followed by approximately 1.2 billion people.

Most people know about the activities of so-called Islamic extremists, operating in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and, most prominently and gaining the most attention, in the Levant conflict zone, principally Syria and Iraq. But how extreme are they? Do they have justification for their behaviour from the Qur’an, as they repeatedly claim to?

Just this week, new rep...

Sharia: Halal and Haram

Originally posted 2016-06-03 19:10:03.

The Muslim legal code called Sharia specifies everything that is ‘mandated’ and ‘forbidden’.

In Arabic they are ‘halal’ and ‘haram’. Sharia — contained in a manual called Sharia Law. (The Reliance of the Traveller) actually extends to over 1200 pages of text which specify every imaginable action or aspect of life. Everything from how to brush your teeth or how to put on your clothes, to how to beat your wife or kill your enemies. It is, literally, not just ...

The Duterte Phenomenon

Originally posted 2016-05-31 13:57:44.

The Duterte Phenomenon: the Philippines does politics a little differently.

This month the Philippines elected Rodrigo Duterte, a tough-talking maverick largely unknown outside his own country, as President.

The Western media has been completely wrong-footed by Duterte, and has even compared him to Donald Trump. But Duterte is a far more complex character and if he reminds me of any politician, it is Alex Salmond of Scotland’s SNP. The two men play the poli...

The Man Who Would Be Queen

Originally posted 2016-05-17 12:53:54.

J Michael Bailey’s seminal book, The Man Who Would Be Queen (TMWWBQ) sparked huge controversy when it was published in 2003. The furore it caused, while small in focus, was spectacular in its incandescent rage at the author. This was categorically different from the conservative reaction to works of other controversial authors like D H Lawrence, or even Vladimir Nabokov’s deeply unsettling study of male attraction to pubescent girls. In those,  the hostilit...