Author: Ophelia Benson

Just one little thing, Mr President.

Mr Obama reminded everyone of his religious leanings by saying that “as a person of faith, I believe we are called to care for each other and work to ease human suffering”.

Come on – you know better than that. Play fair. I realize you have to soothe the religious as much as possible, but don’t do it by throwing the non-religious under the bus. You know that’s silly, you know that persons of no faith can just as well believe we should or must care for each other and work to ease human suffering. Yes we say ‘should or must’ instead of ‘are called to’ – but you know the should or must can be every bit as strong and peremptory as the called to. I know you know this because you used to be an atheist yourself, and you know plenty of atheists, and you’ve worked with all sorts of people, and you’re sensible and observant. You’re not like your inattentive clueless incurious predecessor, who probably does really think that only ‘persons of faith’ have any moral sense; so do try not to talk like him.

Thanks about the stem-cell research though. Love ya, mean it.

The future king is playing games with his subjects.

Prince Charles has been accused of exploiting the public in times of hardship by launching what a leading scientist calls a “dodgy” detox mix. Edzard Ernst, the UK’s first professor of complementary medicine, said the Duchy Originals detox tincture was based on “outright quackery”. There was no scientific evidence to show that detox products work, he said. Duchy Originals says the product is a “natural aid to digestion and supports the body’s elimination processes”.

Notice how conveniently meaningless those claims are, yet at the same time how attractive to the gullible. A ‘natural aid to digestion’ could just mean – something you eat so therefore it ‘aids’ digestion by, you know, forcing you to digest it. ‘Supports the body’s elimination processes’ could mean the same thing – if I drink a root beer or a bottle of gin or a basin of dirty bath water that supports my body’s elimination processes in the sense that I will eventually have to pee because of the added fluids. Yet to people browsing the shelves at Waitrose in hopes of something to ‘support’ the body’s natural health-giving whatnots, that might sound like just the ticket, to the tune of £10 for a 50ml bottle.

Professor Ernst of Peninsula Medical School said Prince Charles and his advisers appeared to be deliberately ignoring science, preferring “to rely on ‘make-believe’ and superstition”.
He added: “Prince Charles thus financially exploits a gullible public in a time of financial hardship.” Marketed as Duchy Herbals’ Detox Tincture, the artichoke and dandelion mix is described as “a food supplement to help eliminate toxins and aid digestion”…Andrew Baker, the head of Duchy Originals, said the tincture “is not – and has never been described as – a medicine, remedy or cure for any disease.

No, because they were careful; they kept deniability; which is very unattractive of them. It seems to hint that they know it’s worthless, and word their claims carefully so as not to get the future monarch charged with false advertising, yet still persuade the persuadable to buy the expensive ‘tincture.’

Professor Ernst said the suggestion that such products remove toxins from the body was “implausible, unproven and dangerous”. “Nothing would, of course, be easier than to demonstrate that detox products work. All one needed to do is to take a few blood samples from volunteers and test whether this or that toxin is eliminated from the body faster than normal,” he said. “But where are the studies that demonstrate efficacy? They do not exist, and the reason is simple: these products have no real detoxification effects.”

Wellllllll – they don’t actually prevent detoxification, as far as the Duchy knows, so that makes it fair enough to say they aid it. Surely? Be a sport! Say yes!

I was at Whole Foods a few days ago, and found that they are in the business too – they had bottles of something called ‘Urban Detox’ on sale for something like $4.95 for four not-large bottles. Cheaper than the Prince’s stuff though, plus Whole Foods isn’t the heir to the throne.

Here’s a funny thing – there’s this old thread at Talking Philosophy, so old that it’s dated January 8 2008, so old that I’d entirely forgotten it. More than a year old. Long time ago. I found it because I googled ‘Bernie Ranson,’ and I googled ‘Bernie Ranson’ because that was the name on an email message sent to one of my correspondents by what I had thought was a new and unfamiliar troll named Kees but turns out to be a troll I have encountered at least once before, on this old thread at Talking Philosophy. His MO is a little different there, at least at first – which is revealing, because it means he could have done a better job here, but chose not to.

Anyway, there’s an interesting note of obsessiveness about the whole thing – about the two threads taken together. Well ‘interesting’ isn’t quite the right word. ‘Peculiar’; maybe that’s what I mean.

It’s noteworthy (or something) that in January 2008 and in the past week, I took ‘Bernie Ranson’/’Kees’ to task for telling me and others that we were lying – it’s noteworthy that his approach is very consistent in that way (and in others, too).

One substantive issue at the end of the recent encounter was whether it is consistent to defend the right to free speech and also delete comments on a website. Yes, of course it is. I publish this web site: publishers don’t publish everything they are offered, they are selective; I select what I publish here; that includes comments. I don’t delete or edit comments very often – but that is because I don’t need to. Most comments here are good, and worth reading and engaging with, so I don’t do anything to them. But that doesn’t mean I don’t do anything to cause them to happen. Comments here are good because B&W attracts people who make good comments, and B&W does that because it has good content, and B&W has good content because I select it. Obviously I select it. B&W has a subject matter, and a tendency, and a set of commitments, and its content reflects all that. The pope doesn’t write for B&W, nor does Robert Mugabe, nor does Ann Coulter, nor does Tariq Ramadan. That’s not censorship, it’s selection.

I thought you’d like to know that.

Ian Buruma is ringing the same old bell.

In civilised life, people refrain from saying many things, regardless of questions of legality…Mocking the ways and beliefs of minorities is not quite the same thing as taking on the cherished habits and views of majorities…[C]ivilised life, especially in countries with great ethnic and religious diversity, would soon break down if everyone felt free to say anything they liked to anyone.

So…what he appears to be hinting, albeit very cautiously, not to say evasively, not to say timorously, is that everyone should not feel free to mock the beliefs of minorities; in other words, everyone should not feel free to satirize or cartoonize or tell jokes about Islam, because where Ian Buruma is sitting Islam fits one definition of ‘beliefs of minorities,’ although of course in many other places in the world it constitutes beliefs of the majority and is often in fact legally imposed rather than freely offered. In other words Buruma is being, as usual, rather fatuously parochial (which is odd, because he’s not really parochial at all) about what is a minority and in what sense Islam can be considered ‘vulnerable’ in the way minorities can be vulnerable. In other, other words, he’s urging (again) special sensitivity about and protection for a very demanding coercive intrusive and often punitive religion, which has state power behind it in many countries on the planet, on the grounds that in some other countries on the planet it is a minority belief. Frankly I think that’s a bad and dangerous idea. We don’t think that way about Nazis, or Westboro Baptists, so why should we think it about any minority? I don’t think we should, and I think Buruma is woolly and mistaken.