However, despite Sutherland’s inexplicable resort to Islamophobiawatch as a source, it was pleasing to see Daniel Dennett reply to Bunting and Brown. I replied to them myself here and here but I was just filling in the time until Dennett got around to it.

I find it amusing that two Brits – Madeleine Bunting and Michael Ruse – have fallen for a version of one of the most famous scams in American folklore. When Brer Rabbit gets caught by the fox, he pleads with him: “Oh, please, please, Brer Fox, whatever you do, don’t throw me in that awful briar patch!” – where he ends up safe and sound after the fox does just that. When the American propagandist William

John Sutherland is a little worried that Phyllis Chesler may have an Islamophobia problem. He cites a very weighty and authoritative source to back this up:

The blog Islamophobia Watch suggested that this signalled “the point of total dementia”.

The blog Islamophobia Watch? Has he read it much? It equates any criticism of or dissent from Islam at all with ‘Islamophobia’ and (of course) it equates ‘Islamophobia’ with hatred of Muslims which it equates with or simply considers identical to racism – so, criticism of Islam (including of course by people from Iran, Pakistan, and other ‘brown’ countries) amounts to racism. That’s stupid, and it works to stifle criticism and dissent, and it works to stifle them in advance of… Read the rest

Consider monism. The Ethics of Identity page 143-4.

Many theorists – among them William Galston, John Gray, Bhikhu Parekh, and Uday Singh Meta – hold the great enemy to be monism, and, in particular, the philosophical monism they associate with the classic texts of liberalism, not excluding Mill himself. The monist tradition that Parekh has painstakingly traced, in his Rethinking Multiculturalism, starts with Plato and haunts us still; it is characterized by a belief in the universality of human nature…Raz is faulted for his bigoted insistence on autonomy; Kymlicka is faulted for the requirement that national minorities must, at least in some measure, respect liberal principles of individual liberty. The trail of the monist serpent is over them

Well there I was thinking the restored update thing was going just swimmingly, and then I had a horrible experience yesterday evening when I sent the third one. I got emails back saying it didn’t work: people clicked on the links and got nothing. All my hair stood on end, the glass shivered in the windows, the milk turned sour in the fridge, and the barometer fell. So I howled, and flung myself back and forth in a passion, and threw things, and then I sent a new update to myself and tested it and then sent it to the list, with an apology. But it’s very annoying. I have no idea why it didn’t work, and don’t like having … Read the rest

A thought for the day or two.

Sam Harris doing a spot of the ever-popular ‘religion-bashing’:

It is worth noting that no one ever needs to identify himself as a non-astrologer or a non-alchemist.

Ben Goldacre getting cross with pseudoscientific burbling:

I’m waiting to be very impressed by any kid who can stimulate his carotid arteries inside his ribcage, but it’s going to involve dissection with the sharp scissors that only mummy can use…Children listen to what you tell them: that’s the point of being a child, that’s the reason why you don’t come out fully-formed, speaking English with a favourite album…I’ve just kicked the Brain Gym Teacher’s Edition around the room for two minutes and I’m feeling minty fresh.