Good news about Ai Weiwei though.

The release of Mr. Ai, 54, who is widely known and admired outside China, appeared to be a rare example in recent years of China’s bowing to international pressure on human rights. Mr. Ai was the most prominent of hundreds of people detained since China intensified a broad crackdown on critics of the government in February, when anonymous calls for mass protests modeled after the revolutions in the Middle East percolated on the Chinese Internet.

Crappy about the hundreds though.

China came under unusually heavy pressure from all corners of the globe, not only from standard diplomatic channels but also from prominent people like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in New York, who harangued China

Salil Tripathi set off a seriously interesting discussion of Arundhati Roy at Facebook, via a piece by Andrew Buncombe in the Independent. (This is why, say what you will, FB is not altogether silly.) I got his permission to quote him.

The subject is, as Buncombe put it:

It was the writer and activist Arundhati Roy who set foreign journalists in India busily chattering recently. In an interview with Stephen Moss in the Guardian, Ms Roy was discussing the Maoist and Adavasi “resistance” to encroachment on tribal lands. Mr Moss, asked her why, “we in the West don’t hear about these mini-wars?”. Ms Roy replied: “I have been told quite openly by several correspondents of international newspapers, that they

I’m burning up the time reading sapient comments on PZ’s response to “Be” Scofield’s “5 stupid things stupid atheists think” so I might as well recycle one so that I can pretend I’ve accomplished something more than reading sapient comments on a post of PZ’s, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Sastra quotes a bit from “Be” and annotates it:

Scofield has gone into Therapist Mode (sometimes known as Anthropologist Mode.) If you’re trying to help or understand other people, don’t treat them as equal members of your own group and argue with them over truth or content. Instead, you concern yourself with what works for them. Are they happy? You shouldn’t try to change their minds

I’m reading Final Rights: Reclaiming the American Way of Death by our own dear Joshua Slocum and Lisa Carlson. It’s very good and very infuriating.

The situation is the totally familiar one of an industry straining every nerve and pulling every string to winkle more dollars out of other people’s pockets into its own, but in a context where doing so allows a lot of really nasty forms of manipulation – like creating a bogus “requirement” to view the body and then saying “wouldn’t you prefer to see her in an upgraded” vastly more expensive box?

There’s a weird strain of hilarity behind the whole thing – the basic idea of buying an expensive box that’s going to be buried … Read the rest

Catherine Bennett isn’t fooled or wowed or befuddled or rendered absent-minded by the archbishop.

After a great success with Jemima Khan, the New Statesman had made the archbishop guest editor. Why? Why not?…As it turned out, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s internship proved equally inspired, exposing a public tolerance of episcopal power that, even as it dismays reformers, can only encourage undimmed Anglican ambition.

What was that all about? It seemed more like a Monty Python joke than anything else. Who’s the next guest editor, the queen? Could they have found anyone less appropriate for a putative left-wing magazine?

The response to his provocation could hardly have been more satisfactory. Clearly, everyone had forgotten his flirtation with sharia and that other