I have other stuff I wanted to mutter about, but it’s hard to think about anything else right now.

I watched a lot of cable news last night. Shattering stuff. ‘We need help, sir, we really do.’ ‘Look at these old people over here – look at this little baby.’ People in floods of tears, people mopping each other’s faces, people angry on behalf of those older, younger, weaker, frailer than themselves. People desperately needing water. (We all know what it’s like to be thirsty – imagine being that thirsty for four days! While watching people around you dying of dehydration – knowing if you don’t get water you’ll all die soon.) People who’ve lost everything they had, who … Read the rest

Why is it taking so long? There are relief supplies there, we’re told. Why can’t they get them to the convention center? I can see why it would be slow to take them to widely scattered areas – but they can’t even take them to the convention center?

Which has quite a few dead bodies in it now. Well – it will have a lot more in the morning. After four days with no water…

A reporter on ‘The World Tonight’ told us about an elderly man with diabetes who asked if he could buy some water from the reporter – and that there were a lot of requests like that. It’s just a nightmare.

Bush explained this morning that … Read the rest

I’ve transcribed some of that chat with Salman Rushdie on ‘Today’ last Monday, because he said several excellent things, worth preserving.

First he was asked his opinion of Muslim ‘leaders’…

Well for a start I’m not sure how much of a ‘leader’ these people are – it’s interesting – sort of a moot point about how many people actually follow them. But I think the mistake is to see these people as being somehow the voice of moderation. Sacranie and his deputy Banglawala have been very very vociferously hard-line on a range of issues for a long long time, and I think the Panorama programme kind of exposed that.

Then he said he wasn’t very confident that people like … Read the rest

Another passage from Haack’s book that is relevant to Ruse’s argument.

The commitment to naturalism is not merely the expression of a kind of scientific imperialism; for supernatural explanations are as alien to detective work and history or to our everyday explanations of spoiled food or delayed buses as they are to physics or biology. And the reason is not that supernatural explanations are alien to science; not that they appeal to the intentions of an agent; not that they rely on unobservable causes. The fundamental difficulty (familiar from the central mystery of Cartesian dualism, how mental substance could interact with physical substance) is rather that by appealing to the intentions of an agent which, being immaterial, cannot put

And here it is.

We take it for granted, you know, the comfortable safe manageable world we live in – those of us who do live in a world like that. That seems (to us) like the natural way of things, the normal state of affairs. In many parts of the world, normal life is more like the inside of the New Orleans Superdome, but we think normal life is less hot and crowded and smelly and unsafe and miserable than that. We think it’s normal to be able to get drinkable water and eatable food whenever we want them, to be able to take a shower and use a toilet whenever we need to, to have clean clothes, lights, … Read the rest