And here’s an amusing and heart-warming little item. Tom Morris went to the Euston Manifesto launch and gave it ‘the liveblog treatment.’ Ain’t technology grand? So he tells us how it goes – what Nick says, what Norm says, what Eve says, what Shalom Lappin says, what Alan Johnson says. Then he says what someone in the audience says – making me give a snort of laughter in the process:

The first question is about women and feminism – the response was simple: get involved, and look at Ophelia Benson at Butterflies and Wheels.

Yep, that’s a simple response all right, but an elegant kind of simplicity, like a little black T shirt – look at me! Get involved, and … Read the rest

Sunny of Pickled Politics has an excellent wrathful comment on Asia House’s cancellation of the M F Husain exhibit because of whining by a group ludicrously called ‘Hindu Human Rights’ (ludicrously because it clearly has a peculiar idea of what human rights are or should be). You go Sunny.

It is surely a bizarre state of affairs that we have reached a point where religious organisations are competing against each other for victim status…You may notice the similarity in language to other self-appointed representatives. Indeed, HHR’s campaign was backed by the supposed representative of British Hindus, the Hindu Forum of Britain, whose spokesperson, Ramesh Kallidai, has trotted out the familiar line that Hindus are being maligned in favour of Muslims

It was Freud’s 150th the other day. Prospect looks in on the birthday boy.

[Janet] Malcolm was not one of psychoanalysis’s detractors. Far from discrediting it, her aim had been to distinguish charlatanism from genuine practice. But American psychoanalysis had by that time reached its baroque period, and was ripe for pillorying. A decade later, the Berkeley English professor Frederick Crews delivered the coup-de-grâce in the New York Review of Books with an essay which still stands as one of the most unflinching executions to have been performed on Freudian practice, theory and scientific pretensions.

I still have fond memories of the fuss that essay kicked up. That and the Sokal hoax made the mid-nineties a pleasant time to … Read the rest

A little more on the question of skepticism and complacency and how and whether it is possible to have one without the other. What I think is that it could well (of course) be that we are all complacent around here, but that JS’s account of his special powers experience and our reception of it doesn’t really show that. I don’t think it can show that, in the nature of the case. Something else might show that, but I don’t think this particular offering does. I think the reason it can’t is the one I’ve already indicated, as have others: there are too many perfectly legitimate reasons to be skeptical of it and too few legitimate reasons to be credulous … Read the rest

Here’s a little information. Amazon says, irritatingly, that Why Truth Matters is ‘usually dispatched within 5 to 8 weeks’ – but it doesn’t mean it. The publisher looked into it and discovered that Amazon has an automated system whereby if they temporarily run out of copies of a book (because of a sudden spike in sales, for instance) their system automatically reverts to 5-8 weeks, even if they have an arrangement with the publisher that supplies them directly so that they get new supplies in 24 hours. No amount of pleading from the publishers, apparently, can shift this odd and unhelpful way of doing things. Well, thanks! Discourage customers, why don’t you! So the point is, it’s not really going … Read the rest

No thanks, no more religious politics, we’ve had more than enough, in fact we’re likely to be sick on the carpet any minute now.

Michael Kazin cites the historian D.G. Hart’s argument that religion is “inherently useful in solving social problems because it yields moral guidelines that inevitably generate both a concern for justice and the welfare of all people.”

Susan Jacoby takes that ludicrous remark down, but I want to do some taking down too. Religion yields moral guidelines that inevitably generate a concern for the welfare of all people? Meaning a concern for the welfare of all people here on this earth as opposed to in God’s pretty summerhouse? How does that explain the caste system then? … Read the rest

Then again, JS has clarified his point a little, and it does seem like a point worth making.

…the kind of naturalistic worldview that most
materialists embrace, and the scientific methodology that goes with it,
rules out of court my kind of experience as a datum to be explained.
Therefore, if my kinds of experiences do exist, and if they also have
naturalistic explanations, they’re never going to be discovered, because the
“it must be a coincidence because it could be a coincidence” response or the
“ah but the testimony is necessarily suspect” response are both
unfalsifiable.

Again, I thought that was common knowledge – but maybe I was wrong to think that. I thought it was common knowledge that … Read the rest