donkey-punched.

By Challi

There's been a lot of talk going around that Shrek, the lovable bald green ogre version of John Goodman, should stop being used for advertising junk food, like cheesy bacon balls and Nutella, because, apparently, that would only contribute to the obesity epidemic.



but of course, that's stupid. Kids will eat what their parents give them and usually nothing else, therefore parents are the ones responsible for their children's health. So how freaking stupid must the parents be to assume that some food being represented a clearly obese, ugly, green monster could possibly be good for their kids? Not very stupid at all, actually. Parents are usually smart and they have enough common sense to know that cheesy bacon balls and Nutella are bad for their kids but they'll buy it anyway, ugly ogre or not, because they know it will shut the kids up.

Back to the point of a fat green ogre advertising junk food, it makes perfect sense, doesn't it? He's fat and he's promoting kids to eat stuff that makes them fat, and possibly green. If he was actually promoting food that was good and healthy for kids, it wouldn't actually work.

What really grinds my gears about all this is that all these health organisations and such are basically trying to eliminate the junk food companies' right to promote their product at all. They have a right to advertise as much as everyone else does. How else are they going to make people aware of their junk?So what's the mentality of these health organisations trying to get rid of ads and promotions like these for junk food? Apparently, it's bad for us. No shit! We wouldn't buy it if it wasn't bad for us. Are we now going to get rid of every ad promoting things that are bad for us? Well there goes all the ads for beer, Travel Auction, 4WDs, Optus and any ad for Big Brother, then what the hell's left?

If the people aren't aware of the product, it might as well not exist and will just be sitting on the shelves unbought and label-less. And although that's probably what is preferred by these protesters, you can't take away the right for us already obese people to enjoy such wonderful food as much as we want. We earned it!

So get stuffed!

-C

stupor troopers?

By Challi

Like any lily-livered pinko in Australia, I want the Australian troops out of Iraq. My original reason for this was that they're participating in an unjust war in a god-forsaken hellhole and they might get hurt blah blah blah I want my mummy, but then I reattached my testicles and now actually have a practical reason as to why they shouldn't be in Iraq that even your average heartless bastard will understand:

They're not doing anything there!

Yes, according to a recent report from Iraq which I'll be sure to cite as soon as it comes up on a news site and obviously will have this sentence removed, Australian soldiers are being taunted by American troops for not participating as much as they should be. I tend to agree, mostly because the body count for American troops stands at around the 3500 mark, whereas the body count for Australian troops stands at a measly 2, and they were both accidental. If the Australian soldiers were really doing their jobs, we'd see a lot more dead Australian soldiers, and that's what we'd want to see! If it takes someone to be cleaning their gun and it accidentally going off for a death to happen, they may as well leave right now because they clearly aren't pulling their weight!

Ok, I don't actually wish death on the Australian troops and I understand they probably ran out of things to do, but they're also basically going in there and getting paid extra for nothing, except to stay in a war zone for a few months. So what? I went to the Philippines and Melbourne, I didn't get paid at all for that. Some of my brother's navy buddies, excluding himself, went to Iraq's coast and stayed there for a month or so and did absolutely nothing except stay there and await an attack that obviously isn't gonna happen (because the rebels have no submarines, duh) and they got paid extra for it. My brother went to Aceh and helped to rebuild an entire town after the Boxing Day Tsunami and he just got his regular pay. Injustice!

and to top it all off, it's American troops that are telling our troops that they're not doing enough in the war. That's got to be the last straw. Australians, either do your job and get a nice tally of deaths that somehow indicate a job well done, or get the hell out of there and stop getting paid for no reason whatsoever, slackers!

-C

philosophy and 'Tales From Earthsea'.

By PJK



Few would argue against Miyazaki's film making genius. But does it run in the family? Studio Ghibli's latest offering is not by Miyazaki but in fact by his son. It's called Tales from Earthsea, and like Howl's Moving Castle, it's based on a book by some lady I've never heard of. Not that it matters. By the way, just a warning for anyone who, like me, was expecting a plurality of 'tales' throughout the movie: there is only one tale, the title is erroneous.

By their usual standards the movie was pretty average. You can be sure that, being Studio Ghbili, the artwork and visuals will be as amazing as you've come to expect. Quite frankly though the story is disjointed and its telling is overly dramatic, at times cringe-worthy. Yet the movie does get one thing very right: its philosophical message. After the dragons and sorcery of the first half of the film, the last thing I expected was to be confronted with philosophy in the second half. But sure enough, there were sections of dialogue that sounded hardly dissimilar to something by Albert Camus. I don't want to spoil it for those who have yet to see it, but the movie ultimately deals with the exact themes I discussed in my last post: death, fear of dying, eternal life, and ultimate meaning.

The message is not one of despair but one of hope. As humans, we are the only beings aware of our own mortality. Faced with this knowledge, we should neither by burdened by the immense weight of it all, nor should we take for granted the 'unbearable lightness of being' and in so doing dismiss its value. Whether the promise of eternal life comes from science or from religion (or, in the fictional world of the movie, from magic), it makes no difference: the promise is an empty one. A life without end would be like a song without its final chord, or a story without the last, poignant words of its closing chapter.

Death makes life poetic. Surely we might better embrace life by accepting death?

death is like a box of chocolates.

By PJK

Religion seems to be a hot topic at the moment (the subject of two of our most recent posts, and several before that). This post is a supplement to my recent rant wherein I discussed how people's religious beliefs — specifically their notion of an afterlife — affect their worldview (and hence their attitudes to others). I've been thinking about death a lot lately; not necessarily fretting about it, just pondering. No particular reason, just because I'm getting older I guess (I'll be 20 next month; as a teen it felt like time was standing still for me, now it feels like time is racing ahead much too fast). So I thought I'd now share my beliefs about death honestly and with a frankness that I hope no one finds disrespectful, in the hope that someone out there on the Wide World of Web might find it enlightening. Yes, yes, I know. For a light-hearted satirical blog like this one, I couldn't have picked a less cheery subject. I can only urge you to read on, and you can forget all about the subject in a few short minutes. Sound fair?

"Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome." — Isaac Asimov.

Of course you might ask why I'm bothering to mention it at all; I'm still young, I have my whole life ahead of me, right? I hate this phrase because it implies that I will surely live a long time and that I won't say, be hit by a car tomorrow and be killed, which is a distinct possibility and one which we should all be aware of, at least some of the time. Here in the developed world we take for granted our ever-increasing lifespan. We owe a great deal of thanks to the benefits of modern healthcare, ready access to food and clean water and a comfortable standard of living. Because of these we therefore expect, nay demand, a long and prosperous life for ourselves and our loved ones. But as we are all made painfully aware from time to time, death can take any one of us at any moment.

What happens when it does? Well, as you might have guessed by now, my belief is that death is final. There is no soul. You and I will someday cease to exist altogether. Some people use very emotionally-charged language to describe this end. They call it 'oblivion', 'nothingness', 'eternal darkness', and so on. It is an idea that makes a lot of people very afraid indeed. This, along with the lack of an objective source of morality, is probably one of the least attractive aspects of modern atheist materialism. But I urge everyone to overcome these emotional stumbling blocks. I contend that death should not be scary, and by confronting it honestly we can achieve a better outlook on the life we have here and now. The rest of this post will be dedicated to showing why this kind of death is actually the ideal, and that belief in a life after death is both unnecessary and undesirable.

"The world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look Death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides." — Carl Sagan.

Afterlife beliefs are probably as old as human thought itself. Ever since early man was first able to reason causally (cause X will bring about effect Y), we have considered certain facts about our existence. This includes the observable truth that human beings and other creatures will eventually die. The corpse of a stone age hunter mauled by a sabre-toothed tiger ceases to move, no matter how many times his companions must have tried to rouse him from his slumber. Since primitive humans were a bit of stickler for spirits and sprites and other invisible forces working in nature, they concluded that there must be a spirit in all of us that departs the body at death. Dying, they thought, was just the process of shedding our earthly bodies so we may travel to a wonderful spirit world in the sky.

Let's take one example of an eternal spirit world that continues to have a huge influence on Western Civilization. Let's assume that I (and billions of Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Pagans and other assorted heathens) am wrong, and Christianity is indeed the one true faith (ignoring denominational differences of course). If you've been good you get go to a place called Heaven where everything is perfect and anything is possible. You can meet and converse with God, Jesus, lost relatives, famous dead people from history and so on. Awesome! Well, for a while I guess. But for ETERNITY? That's forever. Think about it. You will eventually get around to doing every activity you've ever wanted to do (many, many times over). You'll have met every dead celebrity from history you've ever wanted to meet. By now you're sick of playing Nintendo with Jesus. Mozart is writing another symphony?! Does this guy ever stop? And watching through the clouds as life on Earth unfolds is getting pretty damn boring. Think of the old saying, history repeats itself. Watching the endless follies of humanity would be a bit like watching endless re-runs on daytime TV.

Heaven: boring?

So the boredom of eternal life starts to look more like an agony without end than a reward, and you'll probably end up having lengthy, heated arguments with God about why he came up with the idea in the first place. Ditto eternal punishment in Hell. Sure, being constantly whipped and beaten by imps and sodomised by Satan's demonic member might be a sheer relentless nightmare for the first few months, but after a dozen or so years of torment, you'll get used to non-stop pain (particularly since you were quite a hardcore dude to get into Hell in the first place). You're there for eternity remember, so pain will soon become a very normal occurrence. At some point you'll start to grow apathetic. Yo Satan, this the best you've got? Give me some real suffering, this stuff's for pussies!

"Since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn't it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him, and struggle with all our might against death without raising our eyes towards the heaven where He sits in silence?" — Albert Camus.

What about the more esoteric idea that life is cyclical? Reincarnation has been central to many ancient religions East and West and is still widely believed today. At first glance it has a lot going for it: uh oh, dead... I guess that means Game Over, right? Nope! Simply insert coins and try again! Life is a never-ending arcade lock-in where everyone becomes a winner eventually! Sounds like a positive message huh?

But it raises too many questions. Where do new souls come from? What happens to all the souls if people all agree to stop having babies? But a more profound question: does reincarnation actually guarantee us anything? By which I mean, philosophically speaking, are we still 'us' when we reincarnate? We consider our sense of 'self' to be an accumulation of our deeds, our behaviour, our personality, our thoughts. Our spirit is said to be the enduring qualities of our embodied minds. But when you think about it, a lot of our identity has to do with memory. If we permanently lose our memory due to some sort of brain damage (as many people do), can we ever be 'us' again? Many people who suffer amnesia feel like different people, and fail to connect their past experience with what they think and feel at the present moment. So if at death we lose everything that had contributed to building our identity, does reincarnating without full awareness of our previous life make any difference anyway? Isn't it almost the same as the atheist version of death?

Reincarnation: not the answer.

There is another life-after-death belief that some people posit; I tend to associate the idea with hokey New Age crap and spaced-out hippies on acid. This is the notion that when we die we will all become 'one with the universe'. It's like y'know, dude, perhaps there is like this single, enduring consciousness, okay? Like a universal mind that we are all a part of man, and like, when we die, the like, essences of our being totally become a part of this eternal one-ness! Yeah. Maybe. Maybe not. I just don't find this one very reassuring, which is what afterlife beliefs are supposed to be. If it's true (and there's certainly no reason to think that it is, other than wishful thinking), it's kind of cool. But like re-incarnation, it ignores the fact that what we're really afraid of losing in death is our identity; if we become 'one' with the universe, aren't we becoming something that's pretty far removed from the person we were before we died? So is it really that much better than the atheist version of death?

Far out dude! I'm one with the universe.

So we're back where we're started: death as an eternal, dreamless slumber. Perhaps you're still not convinced. If not on an intellectual level, maybe you object to the idea on an emotional level. After all, if we're all going to die and that's it... why do anything at all? Doesn't death invalidate our lives? Doesn't it make our existence ultimately 'meaningless'? There are many and varied philosophical responses to questions like these. Indeed, the idea is nothing new: people have been considering such questions since at least the mid-19th Century, around the time many people began to suspect there might not be a god after all. This branch of thought is known as existentialism, expounded by thinkers like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Russel, Satre, and Camus.

It is possible the philosophers listed above didn't consider the possibility (now becoming more and more realistic) that as technology advances, we may be able to cheat death altogether. Should we, if possible, do away with death? If we have the technology to 'live forever', would it be a good idea? If current knowledge of the laws of physics is to believed, such a feat would be impossible. The universe is finite, and billions of years from now it will collapse, at which point it will no longer be possible for anything to exist. We may be able to increase our lifespan for aeons to come, but since our lives would still be finite, questions of life and death would simply be put off for a later day.

'Transhumanism' is thus not an answer, merely a means of delaying the question. In any case, as I mentioned in my response to traditional afterlife beliefs, living forever simply isn't desirable anyway. What gives us our impetus for action, what drives us to fill our days with the things that bring us great joy, is the knowledge that our time on earth is limited. If there was no end in sight we would simply put off all our ambitions, take for granted everything we have and everything we strive for, and eventually grow completely apathetic and weary of the world. That's not living. That's not the kind of existence I want, and on reflection, I don't think there are many people who would want it either (and those that think they do now would live to regret their mistake!)

"Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not." — Epicurus.

In sum, there is no reason to fear death, and indeed it gives us a solid grounding from which we may make sense of our lives. I argue that given this knowledge, we must either accept that death is final, or else live our lives as if it were. Because if we don't, and our beliefs about an afterlife are wrong, we risk taking for granted the only life we get. Of course, if I'm wrong and there really is a hell, I can only hope God is not so petty that he'd send me there simply for not believing in him.

Obviously none of this is really the most comforting message. When a loved one dies, the knowledge that they are gone forever, that it is impossible to ever see them again, is shattering. As anyone who has suffered loss will know, the first stage of the grief process is denial. Even when you finally accept that they're gone, it's still difficult to think that they aren't somehow here in spirit. I lost my grandmother when I was seven. I didn't see her very often and we were never very close, but it was still a huge shock. I was not raised in any religion and I don't believe in Heaven, but I still felt as if she was here, watching over me somehow. This feeling lasted many years, even as I became more convinced of my atheism.

This 'feeling' might not represent a metaphysical reality, but there is a sense in which it is significant. Indeed, we can all achieve some kind of immortality, because in a sense we do survive our death; in the thoughts and memories of our loved ones; on inscriptions on tombstones and in photographs and written records; through our contributions to society (whether they be our life's labours or our creative accomplishments); and in our genetic lineage, through our children and grandchildren and so on. Some day the planet will burn up, or we will destroy ourselves in a petty war, or the universe will have collapsed. But by then it won't matter. As long as the spark of humanity persists, we will all have shared in it, an experience which is significant to us if only because we know it can't last forever.

"Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have." — James Baldwin.