As one who has tried to point this out - and had the "where's your evidence"? response used as tactic to divert attention from the basic point - I'm glad to see this post. None of us are perfect, and we could all benefit from an occasional dose of critical self-examination.

Congratulations - your terrific trumping of my playful use of language with your pedantic literalism wins the Internet. Don't forgot to collect your George Lucas Award for Literary Underachievment on your way to your next triumph.

No it isn't, because a monkey is not an ape. Also, by quoting a common phrase that has a distinct resonance rather than plumping for an imprecise synonym, I exercise the writer's plaything that is imagery :-)

Seems fair enough. Now your premise is supported, whereas in your original post it wasn't. I'm familiar enough with the design of psychological experiments to know that sweeping statements about violence in the media are more often based on people's bias and folklore than actual evidence :-)

Can I just point out that by making an unsupported statement like "We have extremely violent entertainment media." and try to infer a causal link between that assertion and the killings in Aurora is as irrational and faith-based as any religious piety. It's been a long standing observation of mine that there are a class of people who believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that violence depected as entertainment inevitably leads to violence in reality. This is pretty much the same argument that says reading Harry Potter books will turn you into a satanic witch/wizard. Monkey see, monkey do? It's a pretty selective argument when you think about it rationally. If it were really true, then violence, drug dependency and all the things we don't like could be eradicated by just showing people endlessly nice things, where conflicts are resolved peacefully and where no-one gets hurt, dies in an accident or has a bad day. But we seem to only reach for this argument to support a censorious finger-wagging negativity when bad things happen. No-one ever reaches for it when someone devotes their money and time to good causes. No-one ever says, "There you go - years of watching 'The Waltons' and 'Little House on the Prairie' paid off," do they? If you are going to claim rationality, walk the talk :-)

Surely anyone with any sort of critical faculty could hardly have come away from the final episode of "Battlestar Galactica" without understanding that it was 4-season long thesis against rationality, the Enlightenment and any form of science- or evidence-based thinking. Despite the topicality of the political plot arcs, and the superb performances, production values and special effects, the fact that it was characterised as "science" fiction was merely a simplified allusion to the environment in which it was set, and had nothing to do with it's overtly theological underpinnings. Poor monotheists - how oppressed they must have felt when the one scientist converted to the monotheistic cult, and when all the rational Cylons either committed suicide or were destroyed because, as was inevitable, their ultimate plan to dissect a child (as all atheists are wont to do) was thwarted at the end :-)

That's a wise observation. The advice I was given when I was young (relating to maintaining an informed political perspective) was never to ignore the opinions or writings of those people with whom you disagree, just because you disagree with them. It's very easy to inflate one's bubble by only absorbing the output of those with whom we agree and then, as you have discovered, the bubble becomes a safe and unrepresentative haven which like minds turn into an echo chamber. Regardless of one's political or religious perspective, that behaviour distances one from reality. In the end it boils down to the simple fact that one can hardly marshall effective counterarguments if one hasn't fully understood the original arguments in the first place.

"The "eye of a needle" has been interpreted as a gate in Jerusalem, which opened after the main gate was closed at night. A camel could only pass through this smaller gate if it was stooped and had its baggage removed. This story has been put forth since at least the 15th century, and possibly as far back as the 9th century. However, there is no evidence for the existence of such a gate."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_a_needle

The trouble with creating special exemptions, and categories such as "hate speech" is that you then get this sort of rubbish clouding the real issues: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1325280/Ro...

I too find the Welsh "irritating and annoying", even though my paternal grandmother was Welsh. Primarily I dislike the Welsh because it's usual for an Englishman, such as myself, to end up at the boring end of a tedious lecture from some ignorant Welsh zealot banging on about what a bunch of bastards the English are and blaming us for crimes committed 800 years ago by Norman-French kings. Frankly, the Welsh hate me and I hate them back. So my question is: if we are to categorise English jokes at the expense of the Welsh as racist hate speech, shouldn't we also be demanding the prosecution of the anti-English Welsh racists? Just who's "hate speech" is protected and who's isn't in this silly game of victimhood?

Speech is speech and actions are actions. A lot of the discussion here confuses the two things. My Scottish mother taught me that sticks and stones could break my bones, but words could never hurt me. Anyone who whines about what someone else has said about them directly, or about a category of people into which they have elected to place themselves, is essentially trying to use the state to censor the public expression of opinions and ideas they don't like. Yarbles to the lot of 'em!

There is no such thing as free speech here in the UK. There are a multitude of laws that constrain expression and which are becoming more and more difficult to navigate as various special interests seek to suppress dissent. Even our medieval blasphemy laws weren't repealed until 2008. Remember, this is a country in which our libel judges believe they have global jurisdiction and can constrain the expression of US citizens, in the US, purely because some rich libel tourist can demonstrate that at least one person in the UK saw the offending article. We have superinjunctions that allow rich individuals to not only impose silence on those they target, but also prohibit everybody who has knowledge of the injunction from acknowledging that it even exists!

Ironically, these people are being selectively prosecuted under a racist application of the law. Other organisations have certainly held similar views and have certainly published materials that would failed the same tests. However it is noticeable that in this country, when 1500 ignorant white people turn up to violently intimidate an entire town in protest against an imagined Islamification that never took place, no-one is prosecuted. When 5 Muslims stand in a public space and publicly express their opposition to the westerna wars in Muslim countries, they are attcked by the police in force and then relentlessly prosecuted and pilloried in our media. The very idea that the UK could countenance free speech, or make the very simple distinction between the expression of unpopular ideas and acts of violence or incitement, is nothing but a dream for many of us.