It’s extraordinary what the Telegraph considers news.

Michelle Obama fights to control summer dress in windy London

Seriously.

What next? Michelle Obama eats a cress sandwich? Michelle Obama moves her head from left to right? Michelle Obama blinks?

Well let’s not hastily accuse the Telegraph of triviality. Of course the story was newsworthy, for the very pressing reason that if Michelle Obama had lost the fight with her dress, the Telegraph would have been able to look up her skirt. Obviously that’s a significant news item in anybody’s book. Granted, it didn’t happen, but even the unrealized potential is newsworthy. In fact why not just skip the risks attendant on the weather and ask her to pull up … Read the rest

Gnu-haters are bad enough when they just say it, but when they say it and then later say they didn’t, they’re worse. I got into a disagreement of that kind with Stephen Prothero on a thread of Jennifer Michael Hecht’s at Facebook. Remember Prothero? I did a post about an article of his in December 2009. Lots of people did. It was the one about how gnu atheism is angry and male but women will maybe fix it up.

He said I got him all wrong.

My point is that there are TWO ways to argue for atheism, rather than one. (Actually, there are many more, but two will do for present purposes.) The people who lit into me afterwards

Miranda did a close reading of the US Conference of Catholic bishops’ report on child sexual abuse.

Feast on this one item:

One of the most egregious aspects of this report is that the researchers arbitrarily redefine “pedophilia” as sexual abuse of victims that were ten years old or younger at the time, despite the fact that the DSM sets the cutoff age at thirteen.

And guess what the result of that is? It changes the stats! Radically. It makes the problem seem a whole lot smaller than it is.

 if the researchers had used the DSM‘s guidelines, the percentage would jump from 22% to almost 73%.

Extraordinary, isn’t it? Just arbitrarily change the definition and poof, the … Read the rest

Eric is telling Paul W what theologians mean by “the ground of all being.”

Part of the point of speaking about the ground of being is to distinguish god from things that exist. In this guise, ie, as the ground of being, whatever god is — and this is the most unsatisfactory parts of this idea of god — god does not exist, and cannot be treated like any other existent.

I don’t understand that. I can’t force myself to understand it – because I keep thinking, stupidly obstinately, if it doesn’t exist then it doesn’t exist. If god doesn’t exist then that’s the end of it – it can’t not exist yet also be something called the ground of … Read the rest

Good old Gallic wit, eh?

Jean-François Kahn asked what was the big deal about DSK’s alleged assault on a hotel maid – it’s just a “troussage domestique” – lifting the maid’s skirt, a tussle with the help, you know the kind of thing.

Jack Lang asked what was the big deal when after all nobody died.

Gilles Savary asked what was the big deal:

Mr Strauss-Kahn, he said, was a “libertine” who enjoyed the “pleasures of the flesh” but this was not tolerated in a “puritan America, impregnated with rigorous Protestantism”.

Actually not; there’s quite a lot in the way of the pleasures of the flesh around here; what’s frowned on is rape. Rape, you stupid … Read the rest