Okay so if you’re tired of reading about the Dictionary (the Fashionable Nonsense one) then just skip this post. Don’t read it. Not any of it, I mean – because that’s all this one is going to be about. So, fine, you’re still reading, so don’t come complaining to me that it’s about the Dictionary, because I did say.

Although I must say you’re very fussy and demanding if you are tired of reading about it. I mean after all. Look around you. Do you see any advertising? Any PayPal? Any donation box? Any subscription? You do not. Is this place all cluttered up and junky and slow to load like Slate because it’s so full of advertising? It is … Read the rest

I thought there were a lot of strange statements (assertions, even) in this review in the New Statesman of a book by some fella named Baggini. Never mind who wrote the book in question, in fact never mind the book itself, which I haven’t read. The point is these odd statements or assertions, which kind of stand alone (which is part of the problem with them, if there is one). They’re odd because Edward Skidelsky (for it is he) doesn’t say why they’re true, why he thinks they’re true, why we should believe them, and because one can instantly think of counter-examples that make them seem quite dubious.

We may be free to give our life any meaning we choose,

I said I was going to say more about that Washington Post article and skepticism. So here’s some more.

It has to do with the first three paragraphs, which set up some of the recurring ideas in the article.

The Native Americans were not making her job any easier. “This is a very discouraging job, ethnologically speaking,” she began a letter to a friend. She went on to paint a picture that is almost a parody of bad anthropology: The natives just aren’t very interesting, or reliable, or trustworthy…there is “no way of checking whether they are telling the truth”…She cross-examines, bullies and all but calls her “informants” liars…

There. What on earth is he talking about? I would really … Read the rest

This is a highly interesting interview with Christopher Hitchens by Johann Hari. It’s discomforting in some ways – but discomforting things often are interesting, aren’t they. At any rate, Bush or no Bush (and it’s some of the people around Bush he respects, rather than the W-man himself, apparently), Hitchens says some outstanding things, things that need saying. And saying and saying and saying.

The world these fascists want to create is one of constant submission and servility. The individual only has value to them if they enter into a life of constant reaffirmation and prayer. It is pure totalitarianism, and one of the ugliest totalitarianisms we’ve seen. It’s the irrational combined with the idea of a completely closed society…I