Why dissent is positive

I was recently asked why I bother to complain so much beneath a protest image I'd created for Facebook. This is the comment:

"You're too angry and focused. Why? Has someone or something made you feel this resentment? I'm wondering, don't you have any good stuff, positive thoughts?

My initial response was; why is this guy trying to give me the "headshrinker treatment"? Not every motivation boils down to something that happened to us in the past. I consider much of the Freudian rooted "psychosciences" game to be a sham and a lucrative profit making opportunity above anything else. Of course our upbringing has some formative effect on who we are today, but raking through the past to try to identify incidents we can retrospectively assume are causal factors in our current behavioral tendencies, has always seemed like an abject waste of time to me. Past incidents certainly have an effect on who we have become, however I believe that attempts to establish direct causation simply reinforce the idea that our current behaviours are determined by our past circumstances, rather than our choices and actions in the present. More than that, once a causal narrative has been established, it is then easy for the individual to use such retrospective causation theories as justification techniques to excuse their current behaviour. 

I find it odd that someone would consider me worthy of impromptu "headshrinker analysis" for the fact that I complain, whilst so many others prefer to turn a blind eye to the environment of corruption and injustice they live in, or choose to carefully maintain a state of deliberate ignorance. Surely the psychosis of the masses is a more interesting (and important) subject than the motivation that drives some random blogger?

My second response was a reaction to the absurd snap judgement that I may have no life outside my protest activities. I do have a life outside of Another Angry Voice. I write other, explicitly positive things, I enjoy spending time with my family, I find pleasure in countless other activities too, such as photography, reading, teaching, film, good music, swimming, darts... But the most important thing, is that I thoroughly enjoy what I do here too. 

Critical analysis and dissent against tyranny may seem like burdensome occupations to many, but to me, there are fewer more positive feelings than having applied one's own critical judgement to form a conclusion that is entirely one's own, rather than having simply adopted something learned, derivative or crudely synthesised. 

To learn something new is a pleasure in itself, but to develop one's own idea is a greater pleasure still. It is a joy to think for ourselves, rather than accept at face value what we are told by the media or by "experts" but it is also a positive thing to take action. Boycotting a company that is engaged in unethical behavior, writing a blog post, attending a protest or creating a "Facebook meme" are positive things too. If we do nothing and simply allow the corruption and injustice to go on around us unchecked, this leads to feelings of resentment and despair. By attempting (in whatever small way we can manage) to change things, these feelings of frustration, despair and resentment are somewhat alleviated.

From a purely personal point of view, critical analysis and dissent (as opposed to intellectual laziness and lethargy) are overwhelmingly positive activities. One of the fundamental factors in depression is a feeling of powerlessness; an inability to change one's circumstances. However before we change our circumstances we must first change ourselves. Instead of allowing ourselves to get stuck in a negative loop, where we blame our past circumstances for our present condition or despair at our powerlessness to change our current circumstances, we must give ourselves the cognitive skills to break out of it.

Instead of allowing ourselves to sink into the pit of despair, fixate on the negative or traumatic experiences of the past or our perceived powerlessness in the present, we must recognise when we are allowing ourselves to slip into unconstructive thought processes or self-destructive coping strategies (alcoholism, over-eating, drug use, self-harm, lethargy ...) and break out of it. This is easier said than done, but it is achievable, myself and many other sufferers of depression have developed techniques to snap out of our depressive thought patterns, cognitive over-ride switches, if you like.

Instead of focusing on the trauma of the past, or the injustice of the present, we must focus on something constructive. Instead of fixating on our problems, we must make a conscious decision to focus upon what we can enjoy in the present and what steps we can take towards changing the circumstances that drive us to despair. This brings us back to protest and dissent. I enjoy critical analysis, to me it is a positive and rewarding pastime, and even though I am unlikely to ever change the world dramatically, by expressing myself in order to criticise corruption and injustice and to explain what I believe to be right, I am making a difference. I am making a difference within myself and I am making a difference to the thousands of people that read and share my work.

I think the problem with "protest" is that so many people see criticism and dissent as inherently negative things. They assume that you must be a negative person to in order to complain so much. But to complain about corruption and injustice is not negative. Protest and dissent are not inherently negative things because to protest against tyranny, corruption and injustice demonstrates an optimism that things should, and could be better.

Another Angry Voice is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for Another Angry Voice is the PayPal donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

More articles from
ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE

Psychoquackery

The economic case against tax-dodging

My views on Occupy Wall Street

My views on SlutWalk

How Tory scapegoating works

A Tory campaign poster from the 2010 election. Jobseekers
Allowance was already being cut for people that refused to
work, but since when did the facts ever stop a right-wing rant?

Less than a week after David Cameron ignited a storm of criticism by hypocritically attacking the tax arrangements of the (so-called) comedian Jimmy Carr as "morally wrong", he decided to win back the public with a speech at the Bluewater shopping centre aimed at scapegoating the poor and needy.

Anyone capable of critical thought could spot the rank hypocrisy of a man who leads a political party funded and supported by tax-dodgers, who inherited a fortune from his father's tax-dodging empire, publicly criticising a comedian for his dodgy tax arrangements. Similarly the critical thinker should also be able to see that Cameron's speech was nothing more than an attempt to divert attention away from the huge scale of tax dodging and the brazen mismanagement of the economy under his leadership by attempting to blame the poorest in society.

One of the most bizarre and controversial proposals was to cut housing benefits to all under-25s, forcing them to return to live with their parents. The fact that around 80% of housing benefits clamiants actually have low paid or part time work, seems to have passed him by entirely. The reason the cost of welfare is so high is not because there are millions of "feckless scroungers" as Cameron would have us believe, it is because corporate bosses have got away with paying poverty wages which are then topped up by the state via housing benefits and tax credits. The main beneficiaries of housing benefit payments are not the poor sods that can't afford to buy their own homes or even pay the over-inflated rents in their areas, it is the virtually unregulated buy-to-let slumlords, that inflated house prices by buying up all of the available affordable housing then parasitically enriched themselves by renting their shit houses to the unemployed and the working poor, creaming off a huge proportion of the £20 billion annual cost of housing benefit for no effort at all. If any sector of society can be described as "idle scroungers" it is these buy-to-let parasites, living off other people's labour and when that is not enough, expecting the taxpayer to subsidise their "investments" through the housing benefits money faucet.

If Cameron really wanted to cut the cost of housing benefit payments he would ensure that employers actually pay a living wage and stop relying on the state to top up their poverty wages for them and he should ensure that the private rental market is properly regulated, via the introduction of rent caps and similar environmental and habitability standards to which all social housing properties must comply. Obviously these kinds of reform would never happen under a Tory government, since the corporate exploiters and the parasitic rentier class are two of their major sources of votes and political donations.

Cameron's proposed welfare cuts are an obvious smokescreen, to divert attention away from the people that really caused the economic crisis and the ever growing budget deficit, the reckless bankers, the tax-dodgers and the hopelessly compromised and incompetent political class. Under Tory rule the rich have continued to get richer whilst ordinary working people and the desperately poor have been made to pay for the reckless gambling of the financial sector elite via brutal "austerity measures". These austerity measures are also causing further economic contraction, via the austerity death cycle.

The core Tory objective is to further enrich the economic elite at the expense of millions of ordinary people, it doesn't matter to them if the UK economy falls back into recession, as far as they are concerned the only indicator of whether they are doing their jobs properly is if their rich friends continue to get richer.

Such a divisive and malicious core objective is impossible to justify to the millions of ordinary people that must suffer in order to further enrich tax-dodging Tory donors, exploitative rentiers, greedy corporate bosses, reckless bankers, landed gentry and the like, so the Tories need another strategy, a narrative that unthinking reactionaries will tend to believe in, thus the scapegoating of the poor, the blame-the-victim narrative.

From a critical perspective it is almost impossible to see how this strategy works. Even if you allow the absurd assumption that absolutely every claimant is a "feckless scrounger", that 100% of all housing benefit (£20 billion) and Job Seeker's Allowance (£12.5 billion) go directly to the workshy scroungers that Cameron invokes, these figures are drops in the ocean compared to the cost of the "feckless rich". It has been estimated that tax-dodging costs the UK economy between £70-150 billion a year, the Bank of England has devalued the Pound by "magicking up" £375 billion to distribute to their wealthy financial sector mates, the UK government handed out another £900 billion to the financial sector and the absurd Tory cut to the 50p tax rate for the extremely rich is set to cost up to £20 billion according to the Daily Telegraph. The facts just don't add up. Getting rid of housing benefit and Job Seeker's Allowance entirely still wouldn't be enough to cover the ever growing budget deficit created by Neo-Labour and significantly worsened by the Tory led coalition and their barmy cut now, think later austerity agenda.

The maths don't add up but these kind of scapegoating strategies remain popular with the right-wing press and the ever growing crowd of braying reactionaries that lap up and repeat the feeble narrative that "feckless poor" caused the recession and must be the ones to pay. The reason that this grotesquely distorted version of events remains popular has nothing to do with facts or reality, it is all to do with perception and ego.

Even the unthinking right-wing reactionary has to recognise that there is something wrong with the economy, after all they (like the rest of us) have probably suffered several consecutive years of pay freezes, whilst their costs of living has sky rocketed. Blaming the poor, the young, the disabled and immigrants is the easy option for the reactionary mind, since the reality that they are being robbed by the financial elite and the political classes implies that themselves they are lower down in the social order and that they must have been completely stupid to have allowed themselves to be duped in this way by their "superiors". Blaming "lower-class vermin" for the crisis allows the reactionary to feel superior and absolve themselves from all blame for the economic crisis.

The reactionary doesn't care about facts and accuracy, all he needs is a simple narrative that allows him to explain complex situations in basic terms. This narrative is much more likely to stick if absolves the reactionary of blame and gives them a smug sense of superiority. Hence the desperation from Cameron and the right-wing press to blame the poor and needy, who had virtually nothing to do with the global economic meltdown instead of allowing the finger of blame to point at Cameron's financial sector backers, (the ones that actually created the crisis in the first place) and the cack-handed mismanagement of the economy from his government that exacerbated it.

See also

Who is to blame for the economic crisis?

What is... A justification narrative?

 

No new ideas, just more Tory cuts

 

Austerity & the double-dip

The Tory contempt for the value of labour

 

The inefficient state fallacy

One of the fundamental beliefs of the orthodox neoliberal is that government spending must be cut because state spending is less efficient than private sector spending. This is a form of reductive fallacy, in that a vast amount of economic circumstances are being reduced down to fit a simplistic right wing platitude.

On the face of it the fallacy is absurd, there is nothing that makes a worker suddenly become more productive once he is working for a capitalist boss rather than a state run enterprise, in fact the short-term profit motive can actually make private sector businesses much less efficient in the long-term as they slash investment in training, research and modernisation order to provide larger short-term profits to shareholders (a philosophy called Shareholder Value Maximisation). The idea that all state spending is inefficient is as simplistic and absurd as the idea that all private sector spending is efficient. If all private sector activity was "efficient", there wouldn't have been over 230,000 bankruptcies since the Coalition government came to power in 2010 and the state wouldn't have had to have intervened to save the deregulated financial sector from the consequences of their own reckless gambling.

These selected fiscal multiplier statistics demonstrate that well spent
state funds can provide significantly more economic benefit 
than returning the cash to the private sector via tax cuts.

One of the economic tools for determining the monetary value of state spending is the fiscal multiplication value. A score of 1 would mean that the state investment returned exactly the same fiscal value to the economy as it cost. It has been calculated that state spending on construction can create very strong fiscal multiplication values (estimated to be as high as 2.84 in the UK) as large labour intensive projects tend to add to aggregate demand, whilst tax cuts for the extremely rich (the lost revenue is considered as spending) often create extremely low fiscal multiplications. In the United States making the Bush tax cuts permanent created an extraordinarily low fiscal multiplication value of just 0.29. In 2008 the strongest fiscal multiplication effect in American state spending (as calculated by Moody's) was a score of 1.73 for the temporary increase in the provision of Food Stamps to impoverished American families.

Another area that creates strong fiscal multiplication is state spending on tax enforcement officers, who can often return an average of more than ten times their own salaries in what would have been lost tax revenue. If the ideologically driven neoliberal decides to slash the number of tax inspectors as part of their austerity drive, any savings on salaries and overheads are more than wiped out by the resulting loss in recovered tax revenue. Even if these recovered tax revenues are spent on slightly inefficient state spending projects with fiscal multiplications of 0.6-0.9, this would still create a vast amount more localised economic activity than simply allowing the cash to disappear into some foreign tax haven.

It is clear from these selected fiscal multiplication statistics that some forms of state spending create vastly more economic benefit than returning the funds to the private sector (via corporation tax cuts) or to the public (via the Bush tax cuts for the super-rich). If all state spending was truly inefficient, then the fiscal multiplication effects should be the other way around, with state spending and investment failing to break even and the tax cuts for private and corporate interests making large positive returns.

If a government initiates a strategy of indiscriminate across-the-board cuts in government spending they are likely to destroy a great deal of fiscal multipliers in the process, throwing the baby out with the bathwater in effect. To give another hypothetical example of false economies driven by an ideological stance on state spending:

In order to meet their ideologically driven austerity objectives, a government attempts to cut public sector spending on policing. These cuts end up leaving one neighbourhood with very few bobbies on the beat. Criminals begin to realise that the area is poorly policed and begin a campaign of car thefts, household burglaries and business burglaries. Over the next year or so insurance companies pick up the growing crime trends in the Post Code area and hike rates for car, home and business insurance. The large above inflation rises in car and home insurance eat into the disposable income of local residents, meaning they have less money to spend in local businesses. The rise in crime and unruly behavior on the high street deters older people from doing their shopping there and combined with the huge hike in business insurance rates several local retailers go bankrupt. In the act of saving the salaries of a dozen policemen in the area, the government has ended up losing a great deal of corporation tax that would have been paid by the busted businesses, the income tax of their now unemployed staff, the VAT on the produce the businesses used to sell, and the unpaid back taxes of several of the bankrupted businesses. The state also faces the additional costs of paying the redundancy pay and then the unemployment benefits for the dozen sacked policemen and the unemployment costs of dozens more people that used to be gainfully employed in what has rapidly turned into a high street filled only with abandoned premises, gambling shops, pound shops and predatory lenders offering 4,000%APR loans to the growing number of unemployed people in the area.

Anyone that tries to make the claim that all state spending is by definition inefficient and supports across-the-board cuts in state spending and investment, really doesn't know what they are talking about. Economics, just like the rest of the World, is not clearly divisible into simplistic categories of black and white or good and bad.

In reality the field of economics is coloured in ambiguous shades of grey. Some state spending is terribly wasteful (absurdly inefficient PFI contracts, crazy outsourcing deals or huge arms deals for weapons that will never even be used) yet other forms of government spending are incredibly efficient, creating far more in economic benefits than the initial investment cost.

Looking back to the most successful period in British economic history, which was the mixed economy era of 1948-1979 in which the economy grew by an average of 4.5% of GDP per year and over the 32 year period the national debt was reduced from 237% of GDP to only 43%, this period of extraordinary levels of economic growth and debt reduction coincided with vast levels of state investment in infrastructure, social housing, power stations, NHS facilities, the motorway network and countless state operated enterprises. The UK has never again seen economic growth and debt repayment on this scale, ever since Thatcher initiated the neoliberal revolution in 1979 and started slashing government investment and selling off profitable state run enterprises. Tony Benn summed up Thatcher's indiscriminate attacks on state spending and investment by saying that "her whole philosophy was that she measured the price of everything and the value of nothing".

There is absolutely nothing wrong with demanding that the state uses taxpayers' money more efficiently but demanding that they implement indiscriminate across-the-board cuts in spending and investment (as a whole bunch of so-called business leaders did in a letter to the Telegraph in 2010) is extremely likely to result in worsening economic conditions (the double-dip recession). Simply slashing government spending by arbitrary amounts for ideological reasons (demanding that the NHS save £20bn for example) is extremely unlikely to achieve good economic outcomes. The best way to achieve better state sector efficiency is to establish which areas of state spending and investment are creating strong fiscal multiplication effects then increase spending there, and then set about cutting spending in areas that create the lowest fiscal multiplication values.

It is also important to recognise that state spending has more than just financial outcomes. As much as the right-wing brigade would like us to believe that "there is no such thing as society" and that pure self-interest is the only true virtue, there are actually more than just economic costs to state spending. Even if the economic benefits of the outcomes are not immediately apparent, with a little thought it is easy to understand. Investment in health care increases economic productivity by keeping workers healthy and alive for longer, investment in education is economically beneficial because educated workers are productive workers, investment in policing is economically beneficial because crime is one of the most economically harmful activities. Investment in welfare payments to the extremely poor are extremely beneficial, since poor people tend to spend their money in the local economy (increasing aggregate demand) and the relatively low costs of making welfare payments is much smaller than the scale of economic damage if desperate people start turning to criminal activities in order to meet their basic needs.

A rational economic recovery strategy would be for the government to focus upon the fiscal multiplication values of state spending and investment and target additional investment at areas which have high fiscal multiplication values (construction, house building, welfare provision, research and education) whilst cutting spending in areas that create very low economic returns. The problem is of course that all three of the Establishment Westminster political parties are still enamoured with their defunct orthodox neoliberal ideology, which dictates that state spending is bad for the economy, hence the near unanimous mantra of "austerity" from the Tories and Lib-Dems and "Austerity-lite" from Neo-Labour.                
 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for  Another Angry Voice  is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

More articles from 
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 

Mixed Economy vs Neoliberalism

The Golden Hammer of Neoliberalism

3D Economics: Disposable income, Demand and Debt

What is... Fiscal multiplication?

The case for evidence based policy in UK politics

Obnoxious atheism

Just look at this obnoxious picture I came across on on Facebook. The shocking thing is not that someone actually created such a piece of shit (virtually anyone can create a photo collage, even idiots) but the fact that thousands of people have "liked" it and several hundred enjoyed it so much they decided to "share" it with all of their friends.

The fact that the atheist woman seems to be undergoing some kind of spiritual rapture is frankly absurd (we've all come across plenty of stressed and depressed atheists) but the really obnoxious thing about it is the crude and unbalanced way that it stereotypes the three selected religious faiths. The portrayal of the Jew as the scholar, the Christian as the peaceful contemplator and the Muslim as the terrorist is grotesquely unbalanced.

If the creator of the image above is determined to use 
divisive negative faith stereotypes, perhaps this kind of  
image would have better illustrated the Jewish faith.

I mean if the creator of the image was determined to find the worst possible negative stereotype to illustrate Islam, why on Earth didn't they find images to demonstrate the worst of the other two religions? Perhaps the Jew could have been illustrated an Israeli Defence Force soldier committing warcrimes, an orthodox Jew spitting on an immodestly dressed woman or a brainwashed Israeli child writing on a missile.The Christian could have been illustrated with a woman celebrating fundamentalist Christian intolerance with a "God Hates Fags" banner, an anti-abortion terrorist or a paedophile priest.

Everyone has a right to call themselves an atheist and to celebrate their chosen belief system if they choose to, but the thing I find offensive is the rank hypocrisy of the fundamentalist atheist who see it as their duty to proselytise and convert people to their "orthodox" way of thinking. Their compulsion to spread the "message" that acceptance of atheist orthodoxy will provide the kind of ecstatic spiritual fulfilment that adorns the image I'm complaining about. This sanctimonious and preachy form of atheism is exactly the same kind of behaviour that anti-theists complain so vehemently about when it is God believers pushing their orthodoxies onto others.

Hmmm, this woman seems to have badly
misunderstood the teachings of Jesus.

Hardline atheism isn't a higher, more rational belief system than theism, it is the other side of the fundamentalist coin. Theists take a leap of faith to believe in their specific version of what God is, whilst the militant anti-theist takes the same kind of leap of faith to believe in the nonexistence of any kind of God, no matter what the definition. Since it is impossible to prove a negative, it stands to reason that the only properly rational position for a non-believer to take would be some kind of sceptical agnosticism.

The problem is though, that these shouty atheist ranter types are too stupid to even understand the nuances of the debate. They don't care about reason or logic, they just like displaying the badge of rationality without the baggage of actually using it. They like to take the intellectual high ground, yet the production and dissemination of images like the one above demonstrates that just like the faiths that atheists criticise, the atheist movement is also riddled with unthinking, dim-witted, obnoxious and divisive cretins pushing a belief system that they are incapable of even properly analysing.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, the important distinction is not between those that believe in God and those that don't, it is between decent, thoughtful and tolerant people (of all faiths and none) and horrible, reactionary and bigoted idiots.

Dawkins' ranters, please shut up.

Here is a handy instant reply you can link to next time some anti-theist ranter tries to drag the level of  online debate on the subjects of religion, ethics or science down to their own pathetic level by invoking "sky pixies" or "spaghetti monsters", or spouting intolerant bile about how religiously afflicted people are "delusional" and should be openly discriminated against.

The abridged works of Richard Dawkins.

Oh God no, not another reference to Dawkins. The man is a noted evolutionary biologist, but as a philosopher and a human he is quite lame. I respect his passion for science and reason, but faith in the non-existence of God is crazy stuff. Any scientist will tell you that abscence of evidence is not evidence of abscence. Militant atheism and anti-theism are fundamentalist positions, while open minded agnosticism is a much more reasoned and pragmatic stance. Personally I prefer something a little more philosophical, an ignostic stance. I question the entire basis of the "does God exist?" debate that has earned this unremarkable upper class fellow his millions of pounds in royalties and hundreds of thousands of witless devotees. Put simply, if the term "God" is not properly defined the whole question is meaningless.

To an atheist or anti-theist "does god exist?" holds no meaning at all, reduce it down and it reads as "does something that doesn't exist, exist?" To a devout follower of perscriptive religion on the other hand it can be reduced to "does the most important and fundamental thing in the universe exist?" again pretty meaningless, since the answer is in the question. The question "does God exist?" is silly, a much better set of questions are, "if God does exist, what is it? why is it invisible? and why are humans so inclined to believe in it?" Plenty of answers to these questions can formulated from the very frontiers of science (quantum physics and the huge cosmological problems of dark energy and dark matter) and in areas that in my opinion transcend science entirely (such as love, art, imagination and ethics). Whether contemplation of these questions is worthwhile is debatable, though surely preferable to arguments about the answer to a meaningless question.

I hate the sad reactionary twerps that worship Dawkins and like him, hold a mystical faith that science can and will eventually explain everything. I hate them because they belittle the few good theological points Dawkins ever managed to make by blathering all over any open comment internet based religion/ethics/science article with their witless rants about "sky pixies" and "spaghetti monsters", as if they are actually adding anything coherent to the conversation by invoking these absurd words from the scripture of Dawkins. Even worse are the grossly intolerant comments that "religious people are all delusional", "they should all be locked up/prevented from voting/killed" for their crimes of cognitive non-conformity. This idea that people must be punished if they do not think in the same "rational" way and the claiming of the rational high ground to encourage the persecution of others, is a dangerously totalitarian stance.

Dawkins have every reason to resent religion,
non-conformist religions such as Quakerism and
Methodism were instrumental in the abolition of slavery, an
industry that made his forefathers spectacularly rich. Dawkins
 ancestors were amongst the small Tory minority that voted against
 the abolition of slavery in order to protect their own financial
 interests. Dawkins would have been born much richer, had
religious organisations been less influential in the 19th Century.

Many of these shouty Dawkins inspired fools have simply transferred their natural human "faith tendency" from old school perscriptive ethics to new school greed-is-good, ideology-dressed-up-as-science, neoliberal consumerism. Many of them are complete idiots that can't even properly understand the massive difference in conceptual content between the sociological effects of organised religion and the existence or not of an unintelligably superior intelligence.

Science cannot ever explain everything, it is against the very conceptual framework of science to adopt a belief that is undeniably true, every assertion must be up for scrutiny. Quantum indeterminacy dictates that nothing is ever absolutely certain, nothing is perfectly measurable. There is no perfect scientific answer and that is the beauty of it. For every wonderful thing that science reveals, it poses countless new questions.

Science is a spectacularly wonderful methodology for exploring and explaining the physical universe, but it is not a faith system and a complete conceptual substitute for the perscriptive ethical conformity of mass religion. The application of science without ethics or proper scientific scrutiny (such as unbiased peer review) has resulted in the grotesquely unfair and unsustainable neoliberal expansionist model of economics, where the greed of the few rules supreme over the needs of the many and the long term potential of the human species and the planet we inhabit is sacrificed to turn a short term profit for the few. 

Neoliberalism as an ideology is a fundamentally corrupt and pseudo-scientific construct, complete with it's own faith based dogma and mantras (the invisible hand, freedom of the markets, private sector is always more competitive than the state, the trickle down effect...) yet Dawkins' ranters seem reluctant to aim their criticism at the amoral neoliberal church of mamon, preferring instead to aim their unfocussed bile at the much more tangible and visible ideologies of mass religious indoctrination.

My God, what a ridiculously long comment, I should write a book or two full of this drivel and rake in the millions like Dawkins has.

Postscript. What I have written here was originally posted on a friend's Facebook status, several people responded to say that I should actually write such a book and that they would read it because my arguments are more coherent than Dawkins and my prose far superior. Not bad considering what I wrote was just a pissed, spur of the moment, four o'clock in the morning philosophical ramble about some of my views on the boringness of Dawkins' ever growing hoard of tedious reactionary anti-theists and their utterly feeble synthetic arguments like "God doesn't exist because organised religion is crap". If these people can't even master Dawkins own dumbed down (and often philosophically inconsistent) arguments and just mouth off angry, incoherent and reactionary "religion is evil" themed drivel, there really appears to be no hope for them. And little hope for humanity either, if this kind of idiot really does consider himself to be the very pinnace of rational sentience.