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🔗 Defining the Obscene - Daily News Egypt

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I’m not defending obscenity; I just don’t know what it is. Obscenity is a very subjective term; what’s obscene for you might not be obscene for me and vice versa. Confining one or a small group of people to decide it is wishful thinking. Values and morals are also loose terms that cannot be shoved down people’s throats.

🔗 Religion, agnostics, and the cure for baldness | The Smirking Chimp

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But this sort of thinking is exactly what most agnostics find ridiculous about religion and religious people, who seem incapable of looking at the world unless it’s through the prism of some kind of belief system. They seem to think that if one doesn’t believe in God, one must believe in something else, because to live without answers would be intolerable. And maybe that’s true of the humorless Richard Dawkins, who does seem actually to have tried to turn atheism into a kind of religion unto itself. But there are plenty of other people who are simply comfortable not knowing the answers. It always seemed weird to me that this quality of not needing an explanation and just being cool with what few answers we …

🔗 Egyptian Journalist experiences police state first hand at May 4 anti-Mubarak demo | Menassat

The rest of the time we listened to a bored police station employee (his exact job was unclear) hold forth on the press (“I read all the papers but trust [independent daily] El-Masry El-Youm most”) and press criticism of police violations (“Nobody is above criticism. Even doctors make mistakes and should be held to account”).

🔗 Inanities: Obscenity

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Every new crisis, every new tragedy in Egypt is a reprieve, a fresh start, another chance to put things right. It's never taken. Things are always and inevitably ballsed up, and back we are dragged to zero.