A little more. Because it’s hard to resist. Because there are just so many – um – interesting remarks.

To set the scene. Ross once attended what he calls a New Age trade convention, and gives us his thoughts on the subject.

The more official and centered voice of condemnation against the New Age community can be found in what are often charaterized as the witch-hunting activities of CSICOP…CSICOP is an international ‘inquisition’ of mostly academic ghostbusters, set up…to police the boundary between science and pseudoscience contested by a host of New Age alternatives to institutional scientific orthodoxies.

Same again. Official, ‘centered’ (huh?), witch-hunting (!!), inquisition, police, boundary, institutional, orthodoxies. All that in 1.5 sentences. Talk about over-egging the pudding … Read the rest

Sandra Harding had her time in the limelight; now it’s Andrew Ross’ turn. Fair’s fair. All children are talented, all children are special, all have something to say, we must listen politely to all of them and not make some feel bad and excluded and marginalized and of low worth by ignoring them. Nor must we throw the little bastards out of school merely because they threatened or assaulted a teacher, unless a gun or a knife was used. Once again, fair’s fair. Exclusion damages the academic performance of people who are excluded (except when it doesn’t), therefore it is important to avoid exclusion except in the most extreme of cases. A child who shoots up the classroom with an … Read the rest

I’ve been updating the Dictionary a little – for the first time in more than a year. We decided a long time ago to stop adding to it because of the book, and it was almost a year ago that we decided it was time to get serious about the book – but we may have stopped adding to it many months before that, even, because we thought of the book long before we decided to get serious about it. I don’t remember. I don’t remember if we went on adding to the Dictionary for several months, or if we stopped only a couple of months after we started. Probably the latter.

So anyway. We had a lot of … Read the rest

Terrible about Samira Bellil. A difficult life and then an early and very nasty death – thanks a lot. What godawful luck some people have. I know; no kidding; but it’s worth pointing out anyway. It’s worth registering these futile protests that don’t go anywhere. Worth shaking our puny fists at the sky.

I happened on this article in Dar al Hayat, and it seems relevant, to the issues that Bellil raised and those we’ve been discussing lately. They’re all the same issues at bottom.

In this framework, there are two forms of enmity against Islamists. The first is the annoyance of the wide spreading Islamic thought in comparison with other trends, to the extent that people wish to