Simon Blackburn has fun teasing John Gray. John Gray strikes me as a great dogmatic repetitive bore, so I enjoy seeing people teasing him.

The habit of abstraction enables Gray to position himself as a lone voice against a world of fantastical optimists: “All prevailing philosoph­ies embody the fiction that ­human life can be changed at will,” he tells us sweepingly, naming no names. What? I suppose many ­philosophers do think that if you need to have a drink, you can change your life, a ­little, by doing so. Other things can be harder to do. But I challenge Gray to name a single philosopher who thinks we can change everything about our lives at will.

Oh, naming people … Read the rest

Department of Strange Ideas.

[W]hile the Constitution requires an offence of blasphemy it also, like the position in many other countries, expressly protects freedom of expression. …No innocent conduct will be captured. The revised provision in regard to blasphemy requires at least three elements to be present: that the material be grossly abusive or insulting in matters held sacred by a religion; that it must actually cause outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion; and, crucially, that there be an intent to cause such outrage.

Okay, that does clear things up: it will be a crime to produce ‘material’ that is grossly abusive or insulting in matters held sacred by a religion, if it causes outrage … Read the rest

G did a comment on ‘The downside of torture’ that needs to be out here in the daylight, so here it is. OB.

What is perhaps most appalling about this is that prosecuting torture has become nothing more than another tawdry political game. Barack Obama is, among other things, not just a Harvard Law graduate but an actual Constitutional scholar. He knows what an appalling clusterfuck the Bush Administration made of the Constitution with its denial of habeas corpus, secret prisons, torture, and all that. He knows what the morally and legally required path must be. But he is rather scrupulously avoiding that path.

Worse, Obama’s administration has in almost all terrorism-related court cases pushed the absurdly counter-Constitutional secrecy policies … Read the rest

Philippe Sands said on ‘Fresh Air’ that Judge Garzon attempted to prosecute a couple of people that the Bush administration had tortured and that the case collapsed because the evidence, being the product of torture, was not admissable in court. Sands said this is one reason Garzon has started a criminal investigation of some of Bush’s team: they (allegedly) not only violated international law, they also made it impossible for other courts to prosecute the objects of the torture.

He also discussed the irony of the fact that Chuckie Taylor was convicted in a US court for crimes he committed in Liberia; that was possible because the crimes he committed were violations of international law. States that have signed such … Read the rest

I saw a horrible thing on tv last night, in a PBS show about the Kalahari. There are flamingos that nest in in an area of the Kalahari which slowly dries out during the nesting season, with the result that the chicks have to walk a hundred miles through the desert to get to water. They have to walk. A hundred miles. Through a desert. It’s as ridiculous as it sounds. They’re small, they’re feeble, it’s burning hot. It takes weeks.

250,000 leave; some years not one chick makes it.

Good planning! Wouldn’t you think the adults would manage to think ‘gee, maybe we should find a better place to nest’? Or that, failing to think that, they would … Read the rest