I like Evolving Thoughts but I think John Wilkins got the wrong end of the stick when he read Johann’s article ‘Why should I respect these oppressive religions?’ He quoted a bit on the Islamic Declaration of Human Rights and the UN and then commented:

There’s more, but I wanted only to discuss the UN-bashing here. There has been no such resolution by the UN, either by the General Assembly or the Security Council.

It’s not clear from the quoted passage exactly what resolution he means – it could be the Cairo Declaration, it could be the resolution on ‘defamation of religion,’ it could be the change in the role of the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights – or … Read the rest

Good news, which so far I can’t find anywhere online apart from Facebook, so I can’t link to it in News, so for now I’ll just say it here. Pegah Emambakhsh has been granted refugee status in the UK.

Hurrah!… Read the rest

I’ve transcribed a few bits of the Satanic Verses Nightwaves.

Kenan Malik talked about how different things were twenty years ago, and about the myth that all Muslims were offended by The Satanic Verses. Twenty years ago radicals didn’t identify themselves as Muslim or even Asian, they were black, and that was a political term. But that was then.

When people talk about ‘radical’ in the Islamic context now, what they mean is usually somebody who is religiously fundamentalist; twenty years ago, it meant the very opposite, somebody who was militantly secular, somebody like me; so that whole thing has shifted completely now in the past 20 years.

Jo Glanville of Index on Censorship talked about The Jewel … Read the rest

The Republican mind is a surprising thing at times. Sarah Palin’s sneer at community organizing, Sarah Palin’s sneer at fruit-fly research…and then their jokes.

‘A member of the Florida state Republican committee sent out an email to 8 people that said this:’

From: Carol Carter Friday, January 30, 9:30 AM Subject: FW: Amazing!

I’m confused.

How can 2,000,000 blacks get into Washington, DC in 1 day in sub zero temps when 200,000 couldn’t get out of New Orleans in 85 degree temps with four days notice?

Carol Carter

Jeezis.

Somebody was unamused (so it’s not all Republicans, so I shouldn’t say ‘the Republican mind’ – except that’s obviously not a left-wing ‘joke’) and Carter was told to apologize.

From:

As you may have noticed, comments are disabled. I think I know why. They were being bombarded by spammers for a few days, which I didn’t realize until yesterday, at which point I had to waste a vast amount of time deleting all the spam. I told Jeremy about the problem, which is to say I whined about it, without actually asking him to fix it in case it’s not convenient at the moment. I think he may have disabled them pending a less drastic fix (or perhaps, more depressingly, in the absence of a less drastic fix). I hope they’ll be restored eventually; meanwhile you can send comments to me if you like, and I will post them, though … Read the rest

The Atlantic’s rather boring Wunderkind Ross Douthat tells Jerry Coyne what’s what. He breathes heavily for some time in order to come up with the obvious point that many disciplines make various kinds of claims that are not scientific claims and that that’s all right.

One can reason productively about questions that cannot be resolved through falsification tests. If this weren’t the case, philosophy departments, historians, polemicists, and many social “scientists” would be out of business in a hurry.

Yes indeed; very true; well spotted. But…is it relevant?

Now of course religion is not a thing like political philosophy. But there are similarities between the way that belief operates in both religion and in politics. In making their case,