First of all there’s the guy in the pig snout. Just fancy – that’s not a cartoon of the prophet, it’s not a cartoon of anyone, it’s not a cartoon at all, and it’s also nothing whatever to do with the prophet, or a different prophet, or any prophet, or Islam, or Muslims, or religion, or satire, or secularism, or free speech, or hate mail, or anything like that. Just fancy – it’s a guy taking part in a pig-squealing contest in France in August last year. My oh my, isn’t that amusing. Apparently what happened is, when the Danish imams were putting together their ‘brochure’ to take to the Middle East to show to the nice officials of … Read the rest

Kofi Annan joins the unseemly rush to tell us what we may not say.

Annan condemned the drawings, first published in a Danish newspaper, as “insensitive and rather offensive,” and also denounced the violent reactions in some Muslim countries. He said the drawings, one of which shows Muhammad wearing a turban shaped like a bomb, could be seen as vilifying a religion with more than 1 billion adherents.

So what? What’s the one billion got to do with anything? What is that other than moral blackmail? Number of adherents is not necessarily a good index of quality or merit, let alone of truth or rational credibility. If Nazism had one billion adherents (as perhaps in fact it does, though … Read the rest

A reader sent me a quotation from Paul Virilio the other day. I’m going to add it to quotations, and I thought I would flag it up here too, since it certainly gave me a hell of a laugh. It’s from Polar Inertia, translated by Patrick Camiller ‘with financial support from the French Ministry of Culture’. Hmm – I wouldn’t, if I were you, French min of cult.

An earthling based at NASA headquarters will be equipped with a data suit and a helmet relaying live vision of the Martian surface; he will then be able to remote-guide a vehicle several light years away on the red planet.

The robot’s video-sight will certainly be his own, as will the … Read the rest

Rhetoric is simply inexhaustibly interesting. One never does come to the end of it. One thing that’s interesting about it is how easily it can slip past us. I’ve just noticed a bit that slipped past me the other day, when the publishers explained why they had sent a copy to one author but not the other, the other being your humble. They only had two advance copies, you see, and had to keep one in the office, but my copies were ordered from the warehouse on the same day that Jeremy’s was sent out. There it is – I didn’t catch that. It’s interesting. They had one advance copy to send out – and that was Jeremy’s. It belonged … Read the rest