Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says music is permitted but bad and nasty.

Khamenei said: “Although music is halal, promoting and teaching it is not compatible with the highest values of the sacred regime of the Islamic Republic.”…”It’s better that our dear youth spend their valuable time in learning science and essential and useful skills and fill their time with sport and healthy recreations instead of music.

Because…music, while permitted, is not a healthy recreation. It’s a recreation, but not a healthy one. It’s permitted, but it’s ungood. Why? Well because it’s pretty, and pleasurable, and emotive, and often sexy, and often exciting. We can’t be having any of that. It’s not healthful. Or useful. Or good. Or compatible with the highest … Read the rest

Comment is Free Belief asks “Can we choose what we believe?” Usama Hasan answers briskly right from the outset.

God exists, obviously.

Oh; all right then! Nothing further to think about. He goes on to point out that the Qur’an says so, and give the sura where it says so. Then he gets to the thinky part.

God is a given, and our lives are an opportunity to learn about and experience God in countless different ways because the universe is a collection of theophanies: God’s infinite variety of names is manifested throughout the diversity of nature that includes our complex, intertwined lives.

He forgets to explain how he knows that.… Read the rest

Part I of this is getting long, so I might as well start another.

Redundancies was one I meant to do yesterday, and forgot.

• The reason why. Superfluous.
• The British “in an hour’s time.” Really superfluous. Why is “in an hour’s time” better than “in an hour”? It isn’t. It doesn’t add anything. Once you notice it, it sounds incredibly stupid.

It’s amusing that BBC presenters thoroughly mispronounce “Barack” when Catherine Sangster of the BBC Pronunication Unit has told them and everyone how it’s done. Doesn’t the BBC Pronunication Unit catch prominent mistakes of this kind? I mean the guy’s name comes up pretty often – you’d think someone would eventually notice. And they must get mail.

His name

Drat. I thought I was going to be able to drop the subject now, but Aratina Cage pointed out another item. There was another dust-up at the Intersection last March, that I didn’t follow closely at the time. This one was by Kirshenbaum, and it involved taking some unattractive bluster in a few comments at Pharyngula as literal threats of violence against women. You know: as in taking “fuck you” as a threat of rape. I didn’t follow it closely because I didn’t feel like defending unattractive bluster, but I never thought it equated to literal threats.

In any case, as Aratina points out, the thread is full of comments by TJ under his many many fake names. … Read the rest

Jerry has a post on most-hated verbal infelicities. Solecisms, he elegantly says, but I’m going to be cagy, in order to avoid the obligatory lecture about How Language Works. There are no Mistakes; whatever most people do is Right; language is constantly evolving; lots of putative rules are just made up; language is arbitrary; what you think is a new Mistake actually goes back to Knut. Right. Got all that. Not talking about Mistakes. Talking about things I don’t like.

Because I thought I would mention a few things I don’t like.

• May instead of might. “If things had been different Hitler may have won the war.” No; he might have, but it is not the case that