1. Happy Birthday, Richard Dawkins!

Comment #150245 by benh on March 26, 2008 at 3:52 pm

Happy Birthday, and to a great many more!

2. Richard Dawkins on his online alterego

Comment #50710 by benh on June 19, 2007 at 2:57 pm

There is an island in second life called Svarga that has a completely functioning, although simple, ecosystem:

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2006/05/god_game.html

That and the scale model of Ringworld are to me the real highlights of the place

3. Sam Harris in conversation with Oliver McTernan

Comment #38949 by benh on May 9, 2007 at 3:52 pm

And part 2 -

http://rapidshare.com/files/30442298/samharris_nypl2.mp3

Have Fun!

4. Sam Harris in conversation with Oliver McTernan

Comment #38939 by benh on May 9, 2007 at 3:18 pm

Beaten to the punch, but if anyone still wants part one of the debate -

http://rapidshare.com/files/30437641/samharris_nypl1.mp3

5. Christopher Hitchens and Al Sharpton: A Debate God Is Not Great

Comment #38730 by benh on May 9, 2007 at 4:31 am

@Atticus_of_Amber

Nice post indeed, however wouldn't the attempted assassination of a former president and harbouring the man responsible for the bombing of PA103 serve as casus beli?

But if we leave aside the legal arguments, which I have no doubt will rage on for years, here's a simple question, is Iraq and the world a better place without Saddam Hussein?

My own view is that it is, personally I would have preferred Saddam to be bought before the ICC for a proper trial (along with TB for lying about WMD's) before being thrown in a cell for the rest of his life. Or even dealt with in the pit he was found in rather than be put through the show trial and execution that appears to have been designed to antagonise Sunni's. But thats the way it played out and I'm not going to shed any tears for the psychopath.

I would love for the UN to take an actual leadership position along with the ICC in world affairs and have the stomach to deal with the maniacs that obtain power. However in reality the UN is a corrupt sham of an organisation; and in part that corruption has been caused by the lack of interest and indeed outright contempt that the US has held of it.

I also would have loved the post invasion Iraq plan was a little more detailed than 'Hand it over to Haliburton to sort out'. However it seems it wasn't, hence the mess that still exists.

Lots of mistakes that have cost lots more lives have been made in regard to Iraq, and more will certainly be made, but there is now another genuine democracy in the Middle East and I count that as one hell of a big plus.

It is this new democracy that is under constant attack by the armies of the abrahamic god, obsessed with creating yet another theocracy. If we want to stop this happening, then we in the west need to accept the job of nation building and unfortunately that is going to cost even more lives before Iraq (and hopefully Afghanistan) is a stable, safe and secular country.

The constant caterwauling from the left about warcrimes and respecting the culture of the Iraqi natives (which apparently means allowing children to be stoned to death in broad daylight amongst others) is what is truly contemptable and more than just a little cowardly.

6. Christopher Hitchens and Al Sharpton: A Debate God Is Not Great

Comment #38685 by benh on May 9, 2007 at 12:04 am

@Bonzai

I think you might be surprised to learn that Hitchens at least in part agrees with you, that a lot of Dresden was bombed to provide new crews with target practice.

However the USAAF was certainly involved, although it was on the second night as weather conditions prevented them from flying on the first.

As for the fatuous comment about it being a war crime, Dresden had an intact rail yard and road network as well as a large number of factories used in the war effort and air defense. This made it a useful communication hub and a possible rallying point for German forces and therefore a legitimate target. It was not as revisionists would have us believe, Churchill's revenge for Coventry.

7. Christopher Hitchens and Al Sharpton: A Debate God Is Not Great

Comment #38585 by benh on May 8, 2007 at 5:16 pm

@jesus_christ_himself

You'll have to do this in several parts, Linux and MacOS users shouldn't have a problem, windows users will have to modify the steps accordingly -

1) Obtain the stream URL

wget http://helix.nypl.org/ramgen/live/070507/070507.ra?usehostname

vi 070507.ra

Copy the line beginning with rtsp

2) Download the stream using mplayer

mplayer -dumpstream rtsp://helix.nypl.org:554/live/070507/070507.ra

3) Once the stream is downloaded, convert it to a wav file

mplayer -ao pcm stream.dump

4) Once this is complete, you will have a file called audiodump.wav in your working directory, to convert this to an mp3 you will need a program called LAME.

lame --preset standard ./audiodump.wav ./hitchensvssharpton.mp3

And your done, have fun!