There’s some nasty stuff around.

From Paul Vallely in the Independent for instance.

Cherished traditions, such as freedom of speech, the alarmists complain, are being surrendered out of political correctness and appeasement…Everywhere have sprung up champions of freedom of expression and crusaders against religious darkness in the name of Western values.

Everywhere? Not really – not in the places for instance where people who sneer about ‘cherished traditions’ have sprung up, for instance. And some of us don’t defend freedom of speech or resist religious darkness ‘in the name of Western values’ at all, we do it for quite non-geographical reasons.

This is not so much a clash of civilisations as one between religious and secular fundamentalists…Take the article in

Meet Ruth Simmons. She’s a hero of mine – I’ve mentioned her here several times, I think. She’s a hero for a variety of reasons; she forms a little cluster of examples of what can be thought and said and done that it’s popular to say can’t be thought and said and done, so I reach for her often, in different contexts. It all comes from just one interview on the US news show 60 Minutes – her being the twelfth child of Texas sharecroppers, her discovery of books as a child, school as a doorway to a better world, her wide interests. The best bit was when Morley Safer asked her why a black woman would want to … Read the rest

Here’s a funny thing I happened on yesterday. Sort of happened – I was looking up the Dictionary because it’s being released in the US this month, so that’s why I saw this, but I happened on it now rather than a year ago, and that’s happening because Nick just mentioned Richard Carrier the other day and I put the article he mentioned in Flashback – quite unaware that he had written to Skeptical Inquirer about the Dictionary. So that’s amusing. To me.

But Richard Carrier’s letter is much more so.

I found it quite amusing to find the last page of Phil Mole’s review of The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense (May/June 2005) making the correct observation that

Bassam Tibi seems an interesting guy.

Recently we have been seeing more and more acts of submission, the most recent case being the Pope’s apology. When it comes to Islam, there is no freedom of the press nor freedom of opinion in Germany. Organized groups in Islamic communities want to decide what is said and done here. I myself have been dropped from numerous events because of threats…Even the comparatively moderate Turkish organization DITIB says there are no Islamists, only Islam and Muslims – anything else is racism. That means that you can no longer criticize the religion. Accusing somebody of racism is a very effective weapon in Germany. Islamists know this: As soon as you accuse someone of

It’s amusing to compare John Banville’s review of Michael Frayn’s The Human Touch with that of Jerry Fodor. Frayn is a novelist with a philosophical background, Banville is a novelist, Fodor is a philosopher.

Banville is keen.

In his opening “Prospectus” he modestly insists that, although he has studied philosophy, his book is not an attempt to do philosophy – “I shouldn’t have the courage to make any such claim” – but then goes on to take a sly dig at the extreme specialisation and technicality of much of modern-day philosophical research…From his acquaintance with philosophy and his readings in the work of physicists such as Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr…he has got hold of a simple fact about