So 1500 people who currently work for the BBC in London are being shifted to working for the BBC in Salford, i.e. Manchester. This is rather like working for PBS in New York and being shifted to working for PBS in Pittsburgh…Though not all that much like it, since Manchester is a lot closer to London than Pittsburgh is to New York, plus there’s a hell of a lot of good stuff between Manchester and London, not to mention in a 50 mile radius of Manchester, which is not so true of Pittsburgh.

But never mind; it’s close enough. You get the idea. It’s a move to the provinces, and the industrial provinces at that; it’s a move to the rust belt; it’s a move out of The City to a city. Mind you – Manchester’s got two football teams – and an interesting past (Engels? remember him?) – and a university – but all the same, it’s not London.

The BBC understands. The BBC feels their pain. The BBC realizes they must be going through hell. The BBC knows how to help. A source explained:

Many of the London staff were horrified by the prospect of moving up North and there will no doubt be people who need counselling about their change of surroundings. It is hoped that the new vicar will be able to provide some pastoral support to the new community of London staff who, it is expected, will take a while to acclimatise to life outside the capital.

Ahhhh…isn’t that sweet? They’ll be wanting counselling about their change of surroundings. So I suppose that will be the vicar explaining about the 50 mile radius, and the two football teams, and the university, because the BBC staff won’t be able to figure out for themselves, being still paralyzed with horror about this moving up North thing. Plus of course the vicar will be able to pray with them, and pat them on the shoulder, and say there there there there, and tell them how dreadful Evan Harris is.

Or is there more to pastoral support than that? Does it include herding sheep? Is there a lot of sheep-farming in Manchester? I rather thought that was outside the cities, on the fells or dales or hawes or krills or something.
No matter; that’s for the vicar to work out; but anyway the staff is sure to be fine, because they are the new community of London staff, and no one who is the community can possibly be downcast or horrified for long.

David Colquhoun sees Evan Harris rather differently from the way George Pitcher does.

Evan Harris is one of the most principled men I have ever had the pleasure to meet. His stands on human rights, civil rights and libel law reform have been exemplary. He is also one of the few (and now fewer) members of parliament who understands how science works and its importance for the future of the UK. He has been a tireless advocate for the idea that policy should be based on evidence (as opposed to guesswork).

And he’s an atheist, and “his defeat was brought about by poisonous lies propagated by, ahem, evangelical christians.”

Then Colquhoun goes through the lies and the people who propagated them.

Lynda Rose is an Anglican minister who seems to think it appropriate to call a good man “Dr Death” because of her religious ‘principles’…Cristina Odone was editor of the Catholic Herald from 1991 to 1996. She is another ‘good christian’ who wrote an abominably nasty piece in the Daily Telegraph on April 19th…

A piece also calling Harris “Dr Death.” And then George Pitcher, and Father Raymond Blake.

So much for the idea that religious people are nicer.

I’ve been working on the next issue of The Philosophers’ Magazine for the past twelve days. We have now finished; another issue put to bed. This one is the 50th. Imagine that! The 50th! Cities have risen and fallen in that time, dynasties have collapsed, bubbles have burst, banks have run through all their own and everyone else’s money, oil has spilled, cookies have crumbled.

It’s a tremendous issue. I can’t tell you how, because it’s a surprise, but it’s Special, and it’s very very good. I’ve read every word of it, as always, and it’s great.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has some sharp (in both senses) things to say about the burqa and laws relating to it and the hijab.

As always, the British power elite casts itself – unconsciously perhaps – as more tolerant and enlightened than its European counterparts…
We have a history of self-righteousness in these intra-continental culture wars. The veil once more gives us a chance to show off our liberal credentials and show up our more bigoted neighbours, whose anti-Muslim attitudes are indeed uglier…

But defending the right to wear the burqa isn’t really the ideal way to show off one’s liberal credentials.

What of the fact that millions of us are against the black covering? And that many supported the French school-uniform proscription? We know there is no Koranic injunction to cover the face, and we watch helplessly as organised brainwashing is leading to the blanking out of female Muslim presence and individuality from the public space. The Oxford theologian and imam Dr Taj Hargey can give you chapter and verse to prove both these points. We say that dress codes can be imposed in public-service interactions for a greater good. That whether opted for by the woman or pushed on her by others, the inherent message of the veiled woman is that femininity is treacherous – which is an evil slur.

Too many defenders of the right to wear the burqa – not all, but too many – fail to deal with the evil slur aspect. Too many defenders treat the matter as unambiguous, easy, a slam dunk. They need to keep the evil slur firmly in mind.

Jerry Coyne did an amusing post yesterday about anonymous blogging. He did it as if he were Andy Rooney (an editorialist on a long-running tv news show, for non-US readers).

I’ve learned that there are people out there who run blogs but do it anonymously. Anonymously—get it? That means that they hide their identity from readers. Now when I first heard this I was astounded. After all, I’ve been a journalist for nearly seven decades, and the first thing you learn is that you stand behind your work—you take responsibility for what you say.

Well quite. And if you don’t, then most of the time – unless you’re very good at it, very clever and sharp and funny and knowledgeable – you will be taken considerably less seriously than you would be if you did take responsibility for your work. You will also be read less. I’m just not very interested in what Someone Random has to say (unless SR is good enough to have built up a reputation as SR, which takes time), and I’m also usually wary of it, because SR lacks an important motivation that the rest of us have for not doing things like lying or lapsing into scatalogical frenzies.

But some commenters on Jerry’s post sharply disagreed – mostly for bad reasons. A somewhat good or at least reasonable reason is that some people want to be free to discuss controversial ideas without fear of repelling employers or families or both.

I would still say that is at least not the best way to argue for controversial ideas, precisely because it does look evasive and unaccountable. There is an old and admirable tradition of anonymous pamphleteering, but all the same – there are drawbacks to pamphleteering that way. There are non-invidious reasons people want to know who is writing.

More to the point, however, that kind of anonymity isn’t a reason for slandering other people who are not anonymous, and doing so is ethically…suspect, shall we say.

One late commenter remarked that

I find it interesting that those who fail to understand the value of anonymity are usually those who didn’t have the privilege of growing up with the internet. It’s an unfortunate generation gap.

No; that won’t fly. Anonymous abuse does not magically become a fine thing just because it’s on the internet. For one thing it’s hardly a secret that the internet can be an incredibly nasty place, nor that anonymity is one major reason for that. For another thing, why would it?

Suppose someone at your workplace starts leaving messages all over the place saying nasty things about you or some other co-worker – anonymously. That’s not considered perfectly all right, is it? Granted I don’t get out much, but it is my understanding that that kind of thing is frowned on. Or suppose someone at a school is doing that – plastering the place with anonymous messages about a teacher or a student. Is that seen as okie dokie? No. So why would it be ok on the internet? It wouldn’t, and it isn’t.

I don’t read anonymous blogs much; it may be that I don’t read them at all (I’m not sure offhand). One I’m just not very interested, but two, I don’t trust them. Newspaper editors don’t trust anonymous sources, and neither do I. And as for anonymous ankle-biters – they’re just a joke, and they sink to their own level. No one reads them but other anonymous ankle-biters.

You did want to know that, didn’t you?

Poor Orlando Figes, what a terrible fate. The embarrassment of it.

The future of one of Britain’s leading historians was looking increasingly uncertain tonight after he admitted that he was the author of anonymous reviews that praised his own work as “fascinating” and “uplifting” while rubbishing that of his rivals.

On Amazon. Oh dear.

Orlando Figes, one of the stars of contemporary history, had issued a string of legal threats to academic colleagues, literary journals and newspapers that suggested he might have written the reviews posted on Amazon.co.uk.

When challenged about the reviews, Figes’s lawyer initially denied Figes was the author and threatened legal action. In a later statement, Figes blamed them on his wife, the barrister Stephanie Palmer.

Then he said he did it, and he’s fraffly sorry.

[T]he editor of the TLS, Peter Stothard, said the issue of poisonous online reviews needed to be kept in proportion. “There’s nothing new about oversensitive writers, and nothing new about anonymous criticism, both of which have existed since time immemorial. What is new and is regrettable is when historians use the law to stifle debate and to put something in the paper which is untrue.”…As a specialist in Russian history, Figes’s “whole business is replacing a mountain of lies with a few truths”.

It’s a good business, and people who engage in it should try to live up to it.

Anthony Grayling nails Terry Eagleton (who has written a new book pretending to say something about evil).

[H]e sets off on one of those complexifying journeys, like the route of a pinball bouncing backwards and forwards among a thicket of pingers, from William Golding to St Augustine, Macbeth to Pseudo-Dionysus, original sin to the Holocaust, Shakespeare to Freud, Satan to Thomas Mann, Arendt to Aristotle, and so copiously on – a verbal pinball ride among the entries in the telephone book of Western culture, to tell us what evil is. But do not expect, by the end, a conclusion, still less a definition, nor even a summary. Eagleton has been too long among the theorists to risk a straightforward statement. You have to grasp at fragments as you bounce among the pingers, not always quite sure whether he is agreeing or disagreeing with this or that author, even whether he is still paraphrasing an author or speaking with his own voice. That’s a technique, of course.

That’s the guy all right – copious name-dropping, energetic showing off by means of style and a bogus kind of erudition, and no actual argument at all. That last bit about not being able to tell if he is paraphrasing or speaking with his own voice applies exactly to Stanley Fish, too. The snail-trail of ‘Theory.’

As we are dealing with Eagleton here, note that this is of course not a mish-mash of inconsistencies, as it appears to be; this is subtlety and nuance. It is, you might say, nuance-sense.

It may not be clear if you haven’t read the whole review: that first claim is pure irony.

Eagleton has spent his life inside two mental boxes, Catholicism and Marxism, of both of which he is a severe internal critic – that is, he frequently kicks and scratches at the inside of the boxes, but does not leave them.

Now that’s a great line. Funny that Eagleton, for all his showing off, can’t write anything as good.

More Pitcher. He’s an embarrassment to the Anglican church and to the Telegraph (whether the Anglican church and the Telegraph know it or not) so let’s by all means rub it in.

He was so pleased with his stupid abusive self-admiring reply to Sholto Byrnes that he re-posted it on the Telegraph blog. Well all right then, that makes it worth ridiculing.

(I’m doing what I’m criticizing him for doing, of course, and I do it all the time. But 1) I’m not an Anglican vicar 2) I write more restrainedly when I write on other people’s sites and 3) I do it better than he does. Plus did I mention I’m not a vicar?)

He starts by alluding to “a more measured atmosphere than currently prevails on my own foam-flecked thread.” But the foam is his, yet he seems to be pretending that it’s other people’s. So: he’s sly, and devious, and a blame-shifter.

Then he calls people who criticize his extraordinarily abusive post about Evan Harris “attack puppies” then he wonders “how many of them actually read the piece before dutifully answering the Twitter-call.” As if no one would have criticized his extraordinarily abusive post had it not been tweeted. That’s wrong, I criticized it without having seen any tweets about it. But even more absurd is the implication that if people had read the piece they wouldn’t have criticized it, or not as harshly as they did. Nonsense. It was an extraordinarily abusive post – he said Evan Harris campaigns to euthanize terminally ill people. That’s both vicious and false.

Then there are four paragraphs of blustering “I never, and besides they did too,” fetching up at

As for the Lib-Dems’ attack-bunnies, if they consider that’s evil and vicious, then I’d hate them to be around if I was rude about someone

without having mentioned the abusive and dishonest claim that Harris campaigns to euthanize terminally ill people. What a disgusting man – abusive, cowardly, and unrepentant. That claim was evil and vicious, and his refusal to cop to it now is…enough to make you lose your lunch.

Then there’s a rant about how Christian he is, whatever people say.

Many of these people expressing outrage about my criticism of Harris would be the same people who criticise Christians for not being more robust and outspoken; I wish they’d make their minds up.

That’s a good illustration of how stupid he is. He doesn’t know what “these people” would say, so it’s imbecilic to wish they would make their minds up when he has no way of knowing that their minds aren’t made up. Of course it’s also rude, but that goes without saying by now.

Then there’s the sly nasty stuff about loving him but struggling to like him oh the hell with it he doesn’t like him. Cute. What is he, 12?

Then he flogs his book, then he closes, revoltingly, with “With every blessing.”

There is one ray of light though; David Colquhoun comments (May 9, 10:48 p.m.).

It is no wonder that Christianity is in decline. Attitudes like those of George Pitcher must be helping it in its way to oblivion rather effectively. I can’t recall reading any political diatribe that was quite so intolerant and hate-filled as his.

I am reminded of homeopaths, those lovely cuddly holistic people who, once the realise that there trade has been revealed as fraud, turn quite remarkably unpleasant.

There is some amusement to be derived from the fact that these groups of people, who are both adamantly opposed to science and to enlightenment values, spread there hate-filled messages via the internet, a product, ahem, of science and the enlightenment.

There’s for you, sir!

I think I’m going to start being more thorough about observing the antics of George Pitcher. I find him really remarkable, and all the more so because he’s an Anglican vicar. He’s such a bizarre ambassador for his institution.

Yesterday he extruded a little heap of sneers at Nick Clegg and atheism and Nick Clegg’s atheism.

One aspect of this new Con-Dem Government that hasn’t got an airing yet is that David Cameron is a devout Christian and his new deputy-dawg Nick Clegg is an atheist…I’ve had a right ear-bashing from Nicky’s press office in the past for describing his atheism as “numbskull”. I’m sorry, I’m sure he’s up there with AC Grayling and Dr Simon Heffer.

Really. This is a grown man, with a job that is considered respectable in some circles. His job in fact basically consists of being wise and telling everyone else how to be wise – and this is how he goes about it. Do admit.

And then there’s this whole idea that we can make morality a science by basing it on universal desire for well-being.

One problem with that is that we don’t all have the same view of what constitutes well-being, to say the least. We don’t agree on what constitutes well-being in general and we certainly don’t agree on what constitutes it for self as opposed to other.

And suppose someone did come up with a survey that found – convincingly – that aggregate well-being was higher when women were more or less forced, by the lack of opportunity to do anything else, to be wives and mothers and nothing else, and lower when they had wider opportunities and correspondingly more freedom. Suppose there is such a survey, that shows aggregate well-being higher and women’s well-being lower. Suppose a world where women are distinctly a minority, as they are in India and China because of selective abortion. Would that outcome – a less happy minority but a happier total – be moral?

No; not in my view at least. But the idea that we can make morality a science by basing it on universal desire for well-being seems to mean that it would be.

Sholto Byrnes did a nice job of defending Evan Harris.

A consistently strong voice for the NHS and for science, he shared the title of “Secularist of the Year” with Lord Avebury in 2009 for their work in helping abolish the offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel. He has campaigned against faith schools and argued courageously in favour of abortion, euthanasia, immigration and gay rights…I think he has been one of the most principled MPs in parliament, sticking to his convictions and standing up for a true-liberal view of free speech and of the idea of liberty itself.

The fact that some of the policies he advocates led “one Labour MP” in this peculiarly nasty Daily Mail profile to say “he’s way to the left of us”, only serves to show that Evan — or “Dr Death” as the Mail’s Leo McKinstry calls him — has not trimmed and tacked to the centre-right as New Labour did.

Well said. Under that there’s a very long and very whiny self-justifying comment by George Pitcher, claiming that he wasn’t really so terribly nasty and dishonest as all that in his Telegraph blog post. He doesn’t even mention his foul accusation that Harris “supported the strange idea that terminally ill people should be helped to kill themselves,” much less take it back or claim he said it by accident. Horrible man.

And speaking of not having the right to have rights –

“According to African culture, the man is the overlord,” said Peace Atwongyeire, 42, a handsome counselor whose face adorns local billboards saying she is not ashamed to be H.I.V.-positive. “You have to say yes.”

Because a man buys a wife from her father for cows or cash, he “owns” her. If she refuses sex or insists on a condom, he may beat her or throw her out of the house.

Also, condoms thwart pregnancy, and “I prove my manhood by having children,” said Mr. Bitti, a father of 14. “That is how a girl proves she is a woman. In Africa, you cannot tell anyone to stop having children. They will even think, ‘I would rather have AIDS and leave my children when I die. At least I will have produced my three.’ ”

And then abandoned them to misery; terrific.

Sam Harris has been (belatedly, he says) considering the unpleasant ways the Catholic church has with children, and the reasons therefore.

Consider the ludicrous ideology that made it possible: The Catholic Church has spent two millennia demonizing human sexuality to a degree unmatched by any other institution, declaring the most basic, healthy, mature, and consensual behaviors taboo. Indeed, this organization still opposes the use of contraception, preferring, instead, that the poorest people on earth be blessed with the largest families and the shortest lives. As a consequence of this hallowed and incorrigible stupidity, the Church has condemned generations of decent people to shame and hypocrisy — or to Neolithic fecundity, poverty, and death by AIDS.

That sums it up pretty nicely. The church prides itself on this ideology, which takes great care not to think about sex and sex-related issues in a reasonable way but instead simply recycles dogma year after year, decade after decade, century after century. This makes the church “our better conscience” – because it has this hypertrophied ability to invent stupid cruel useless moral rules that make nearly everyone worse off than they have to be.

Harris has been reading the Ryan report, and like everyone who reads that blistering document, he is staggered and horrified. And he is taking (joining) action:

I would like to announce that Project Reason, the foundation that my wife and I started to spread scientific thinking and secular values, has joined Hitchens and Dawkins (both of whom sit on our advisory board) in an effort to end the “diplomatic immunity” which the Vatican claims protects the Pope from any responsibility.

Hear hear.

George Pitcher, Anglican vicar and Telegraph columnist, is just beside himself with glee that Evan Harris lost his seat in the election. Why is Pitcher so delighted? Because Harris is a secularist, and because he thinks terminally ill people should be able to choose when their suffering ends. That’s not exactly how Pitcher puts it though.

For a doctor, he supported the strange idea that terminally ill people should be helped to kill themselves…His political demise will be mourned only by those with a strange fascination for death, those euthanasia enthusiasts whose idea of care for the elderly and infirm is a one-way ticket to Switzerland.

Stupid, stupid man, and dishonest besides. (And he can’t even write. “For a doctor, he supported the strange idea” – sheesh!) Harris did not support the idea that “terminally ill people should be helped to kill themselves” nor was his idea of care for the elderly and infirm a one-way ticket to Switzerland (i.e. euthanasia). Stupid malicious man – as if he can’t tell the difference between having the option of euthanasia and having euthanasia imposed!

I wish I could gloat that George Pitcher had lost his seat on the Telegraph.