Author: Ophelia Benson

Whenever things get a little slow, and there seems to be nothing pressing to do, and it’s just really hard to think of any way to interfere with everyone – that’s when it’s time to get busy telling women what to do. It’s a thankless task, but somebody’s got to do it. It’s a job that’s never done, so somebody’s got to keep doing it over and over and over again. The horrible slags never listen, but somebody’s got to keep trying all the same – and anyway when desperate somebody can just kill them when they don’t listen.

A powerful state body regulating the role of Islam in Turkey has come under fire over an article on sexual behaviour…”Women have to be more careful, since they have stimulants…His highness the prophet Muhammad did not think kindly of women who put on perfumes outside their homes and go strolling and saw this as immoral behaviour.”

No; we know. Tough shit. His highness the prophet Muhammad should have minded his own business, and so should you.

The article said women and men should not be alone together unless married and questioned the role of females in mixed-gender workplaces. It blamed “social and moral” decline in the west for the legalisation of abortion…Yusuf Kanli, a columnist in the English-language Turkish Daily News, said it reflected a “very primitive mindset”, adding: “Is this mentality at all different with that of the Taliban that placed Afghan women behind chadors?”…The article is especially striking since Diyanet has a reputation for promoting a moderate interpretation of Islam. It is sponsoring a study of the hadiths, the sayings ascribed to Muhammad, with a view to striking out those judged inauthentic or misogynistic.

Well…so much for that idea then.

A little of this, a little of that; split the difference; a plague on both your houses; between two extremes the correct answer is always in the middle; nothing too much; there are two sides to every question; cut the kid in half. Funny how often that cashes out to some caring woolly sentimentalist discovering that everyone to that side is wrong in that way and everyone to the other side is wrong in the other way and Caring Woolly Sentimentalist turns out (what a coincidence!) to be the one person who has it Just Right. Yeah sure – that’s how that always works, as sure as sediment sinks to the bottom. Ideas sort themselves into two sets of opposing wrong extreme versions and a tiny spot right in the middle that is Perfection Itself.

Waldman wins his centrist peace by dismissing Christian conservatives’ majoritarian bullying and secularists’ insistence on separation of church and state as “extremes” that can be reconciled by the former acknowledging pluralism and the latter accepting that separation is neither strict nor meant to be universal.

But why carve it just there? And why narrow the discussion to two groups each of which has one idea? Because that makes it easier to declare oneself the winner. Yeah but besides that.

Waldman’s centrism may appear to support a mildly liberal resolution; his book is, in the end, a defense of separation of church and state, very narrowly defined. But by slighting the enduring strength of religious conservatism, suggesting that the right’s partisans and the left’s separationists are evenly matched and assuming that his relatively liberal views are the happy mean, Waldman undermines the case for real religious freedom and liberty of conscience. Founding Faith is one of those books that find friends and enemies on both the left and the right and thus declare themselves balanced, as if freedom and equality were sandwich meats to be weighed on a scale.

It’s always a bad idea to assume that one’s own views are the happy mean. It’s kind of like assuming the center of the universe is the spot where you happen to be sitting.

Ah, Buddhism – so spiritual, so compassionate, so deep.

Sharon Stone says the Chinese earthquake was bad karma.

“I thought, ‘Is that karma?’ When you are not nice, bad things happen to you.”

Ah right – we see that every day. Cosmic justice is dealt out with unerring accuracy and gratifying speed, day in day out. Well spotted, Ms Stone.

“I’m not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans because I don’t think anyone should be unkind to anyone else,” Stone said in footage widely available on the internet. “And then all this earthquake and all this stuff happened, and I thought, is that karma?”

Yeah, that’s what it is all right. All those schoolchildren crushed under their schools, all their teachers, all their parents; they were all unkind to the Tibetans; China’s policy toward Tibet is of course decided by schoolchildren among others. All the children left orphans by the earthquake; they were unkind too. The people at the other end of China are of course a different breed entirely, and have never been unkind in their lives. Oh and Katrina happened because of all the whores and faggots in New Orleans, too. Glad we got that straight.

Oh, please.

From this week, astrologers, palm-readers, mediums and the like must display a kind of rationalist health warning. Wherever they sell their services, new consumer protection regulations require that they declare “for entertainment only”, because not “experimentally proven”…[I]t is tempting to raise a scientistic cheer. At last the quacks have been foiled, their bluff called! Until, that is, one asks what else in the marketplace of goods and services could pass a similar test.

Well nothing could, because ‘proven’ is the wrong word, which is not Mark Vernon’s fault if that’s really what the regulations themselves say and not just some journalist’s sloppy paraphrase. But the things that astrologers and mediums do or rather claim to do are not backed up by evidence, and there’s really nothing particularly silly about expecting people who sell services for money to provide evidence for claims they make about those services, and if they can’t, to warn consumers that they’re not actually, literally, offering the services – they’re just pretending to by way of entertainment.

And Mark Vernon is, perhaps, pretending to think that lots of things are on the same kind of footing as astrology and mediuming.

Consider a housing development that bills itself as a provider of “beautiful homes”?…Science has developed no Geiger counter for aesthetic measurements, a device whose clicks become a purr as it draws close to good taste…So it is actually quite tough, and often impossible, experimentally to verify many of the things that we take for granted in life.

Yes yes yes, but claiming these houses are beautiful is a different kind of thing from claiming to be able to talk to a consumer’s dead child. Thinking or assuming or pretending to think or assume that everyone thinks a particular kind of house is beautiful is a different kind of thing from thinking a medium can talk to dead people. The first is not all that outlandish, especially since tastes in beauty are largely social and manufactured, so what developers say helps to shape taste in houses over the years. The second is very outlandish indeed. So…Vernon’s comparison is just kind of…beside the point.