Comment is Free asks a disgusting question *

Apr 2nd, 2011 | Filed by

Is Terry Jones morally responsible for the murders in Afghanistan? Yes, it’s a provocative blasphemy. No, it’s a free speech act.… Read the rest



Women who would otherwise have been housewives

Apr 1st, 2011 3:24 pm | By

Oh good grief.

[David] Willetts blamed the entry of women into the workplace and universities for the lack of progress for men.

“Feminism trumped egalitarianism,” he said, adding that women who would otherwise have been housewives had taken university places and well-paid jobs that could have gone to ambitious working-class men.

Yes, and working-class men who would otherwise have been miners had taken university places and well-paid jobs that could have gone to ambitious women. What about it?

Everybody could always have been and done something else; so what? It’s no more inevitable or Right or How Things Ought to Be that women “are” housewives than it is that working-class men “are” miners. The university places and well-paid jobs … Read the rest



David Willetts says women took men’s jobs *

Apr 1st, 2011 | Filed by

Women who would otherwise have been housewives had taken university places and well-paid jobs that could have gone to ambitious working-class men.… Read the rest



Friday Friday

Apr 1st, 2011 12:46 pm | By

Watch out for Fridays. Maybe stay home on Fridays, with the doors locked and barred and sheets of iron over the windows. At least, if you live somewhere like Pakistan or Afghanistan, do that.

Thousands of demonstrators angered over the burning of a Koran in Florida mobbed offices of the United Nations in northern Afghanistan on Friday, overrunning the compound and killing at least seven foreign staff workers, according to Afghan officials…The incident began when thousands of protesters poured out of the Blue Mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif after Friday prayers and attacked the nearby headquarters of the United Nations.

Correlation is not causation, but when thousands of angry men rush out of a mosque after Friday prayers and attack a … Read the rest



Stanley Fish gets something not wrong *

Apr 1st, 2011 | Filed by

He is bothered by “the spectacle of a court declaring with a straight face that the state-mandated display of crucifixes has nothing to do with religion or indoctrination.”… Read the rest



Another problem solved

Apr 1st, 2011 11:25 am | By

What a relief: it turns out that religious schools don’t exclude after all. Whew!

The Catholic school accommodates plenty of non-Catholic children whose parents are often African Christians who choose to send their kids to a school with a specifically religious ethos.

In other words, they find a denominational school, even if it is not of their own denomination, more congenial than a non-denominational or a multi-denominational school.

This is an absolutely key point. It blows out of the water the assumption that denominational schools somehow ‘exclude’ anyone not of their own denomination.

Ohhhhhh, I see. I was confused all this time. I thought “exclusion” could apply to students of other religions as well as other denominations, and to … Read the rest



George Johnson on Laurence Krauss’s Feynman bio *

Apr 1st, 2011 | Filed by

In “Quantum Man” we see a master mathematician who could concentrate on a problem for hours and then recast it in a surprising new manner.… Read the rest



Afghanistan: 10 UN workers killed by mob *

Apr 1st, 2011 | Filed by

The incident began when thousands of protesters poured out of the Blue Mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif after Friday prayers…… Read the rest



To say religious schools exclude is nonsense *

Apr 1st, 2011 | Filed by

Because they exclude only the non-religious, and who cares about that?… Read the rest



Nick Cohen notes: they missed the story *

Apr 1st, 2011 | Filed by

The Arab uprising is annihilating the assumptions of foreign ministries, academia and human rights groups with true revolutionary élan.Read the rest