Author: Ophelia Benson

Okay, I give up, you win.

For months (months? weeks? years? I forget) I’ve been kind of defending CT to my colleague. Kind of – which means admitting they have a tendency to groupthink, to call people trolls just because they disagree with them, but still thinking they (CT, that is) have their good points. But I give it up.

Everyone knows that comments can get out of hand. A lot of blogs don’t have them; a lot have them only for some threads; a lot have them intermittently, disabling them when things get tiresome. It is also sometimes possible to keep things civil by asking people to be civil, and/or by deleting comments when they’re not. I’ve only deleted comments here once – but then that’s not surprising: the people who read B&W are a civil, polite, rational crowd.

So that’s one way to keep things civil. Another way is just to tell people to go fuck themselves – which seems like a fairly oxymoronic method, frankly. Seems to defeat the purpose. Also it seems ill-advised to resort to it just because you disagree with what a commenter has said, as opposed to because the commenter has gotten out of hand. Well – you know what I’m going to say. No, you don’t, quite, because I didn’t actually get sworn at – I got threatened with being sworn at. But I’m afraid I just don’t find that kind of thing conducive to interesting or rewarding discussion. I can get plenty of that kind of thing in my own living room, thank you very much, I don’t need to go elsewhere for it.

But more to the point, I find it too symptomatic of what Jerry S is talking about – too indicative of what he’s been saying all along. Too groupthinky, too orthodoxy-enforcing. So. I’ll just do my talking here, where men are men and the beer is flat.

There are several sites that have linked to us in the past couple of days on an interestingly wide variety of subjects. I wouldn’t have thought we were all that various. I’d have thought we were focused rather than wide-ranging; narrow rather than broad. But maybe not. Maybe our subject covers more ground than I had quite realized. That’s good, if so. I like a judicious blend of breadth and depth – with just a pinch of coriander.

It was thanks to one such link that I found the articles on the assault on Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiongo and his wife Mary Njeeri, which Robin Varghese of 3 Quarks Daily connects to Martha Nussbaum on Gujarat and the threats to historian James Laine, and to B&W on that whole large subject. One could also mention Salman Rushdie, and Naguib Mahfouz, and Rushdie’s Japanese translator. So…yes, of course all these things are connected. So the more people who see the connections and join the dots, the better. Greetings, 3 Quarks.

And there’s a new blog called No Credentials (hey, that’s my name), which mentions B&W in the same breath with Alan Sokal, which I take to be one of the best compliments we’ve ever had. There’s a lot of excellent stuff on that blog – too much to summarize or quote briefly: scroll down and read. Read Quackademism #2, and Michael Drout responds, and My favorite Marxist – here’s a bit from that last one:

Berman is different from, say, a David Harvey or a Frederic Jameson, in that he writes fluently and beautifully. Not incidentally, he is also a humane writer: The human heart–even the human soul, as he acknowledges in Adventures–is his real subject; it’s just that for his entire adult life he has believed that Marx’s vision offers the soul its best solace, its greatest hope, and so he commits all of his worldly efforts to that vision.

Well just read them all. Greetings, No Credentials.

And there’s the one at Philosophy et cetera that I mentioned below. Okay, maybe three is not several. But it’s almost several. Well maybe I just thought it was several because each one was so interesting – yes that must be it.

Discussion continues, in many places. Jonathan Derbyshire suggests a new thesis:

There’s a view, call it the “Crooked Timber thesis”, according to which the truth of statements about a group or a set of beliefs ought to be weighed against the perlocutionary effect of uttering such statements on the group or the holders of the beliefs in question. In one recurrent variant of this view, true statements about what, for shorthand purposes, I’ll call “political Islamism” ought to be circumscribed, if not actually withheld, for fear of inciting “Islamophobia”…And it seems to me obvious that the point applies in contexts different to the one in which it’s usually applied over at Crooked Timber. So one wonders whether the Guardian might have been advised not to run today Madeleine Bunting’s characteristically egregious and sophomoric piece on “Islamophobia” (these aren’t scare quotes, by the way; they simply indicate that the term is the one used by the author). Bunting manages a passing nod to the “horrific barbarity of Beslan”, but she has other, more pressing business to attend to.

Richard at Philosophy, et cetera has a very interesting post on the related subject of multiplicity, apparently inspired by that Manifesto by people of Muslim culture (including atheists) a few days ago.

This is great stuff, and deserves more publicity. Some of my fellow lefties are fond of diversity, but they only see it at the macro level – they espouse “cultural diversity”, yet ignore the diversity within cultures. But excessive tolerance of the former can have grevious costs for the latter. This blinkered focus can also lead to negative consequences within our own society.

Just so. This ignoring of diversity may explain why we hear so much more about al-Qaradawi and Ziauddin Sardar and Tariq Ramadan than we do about Ibn Warraq or Azam Kamguian or Maryam Namazie or Kenan Malik. Is there an assumption that Muslims are more ‘authentic’ spokesmen for ‘Muslim’ societies than secularists and atheists are? Well let’s hope not. I certainly wouldn’t accept that Christians are more ‘authentic’ spokesmen for the US than atheists are, for example. More representative, possibly, but that’s another matter. That’s that difference between democracy or majoritarianism on the one hand, and truth on the other, that we’re always running into.