Okay, you tell me – what does the phrase ‘human dignity’ mean? I don’t mean look it up, I can do that and that’s not what I’m asking anyway; I mean what does it mean as far as you know? What, if anything, does it suggest to you if you hear it or read it? A commenter pretended to find it scary as well as funny that potentilla and I both consider it meaningless, so I’m curious.

Why do I consider it meaningless? I suppose largely because it doesn’t seem to refer to anything real. What human dignity? I don’t consider humans to have much dignity. We’re too mortal, too fleshy, too fragile, too clumsy, too weak, too dim to … Read the rest

Jesus and Mo discuss the ‘personally offensive’ issue. I would love to think Bill Buckingham will see that – but perhaps if he did he wouldn’t realize that it was about people like him.

Richard Chappell also discusses it.

It’s so depressing how arbitrary subjective responses are presented in public discourse as though they were legitimate reasons…The underlying problem, I suspect, is that our public culture has become so infected with subjectivist assumptions that people don’t realize that there’s a difference between desires and reasons. Sentiments are taken as given; no-one ever stops to question whether their reactive attitudes are warranted. Any kind of negative emotion is not just evidence, but constitutive, of suffering injustice. You’re

The Manhattan Institute, a conservative ‘think tank’ in the US, declares its mission on each page:

The Mission of the Manhattan Institute is to develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility.

Oh yeah? Then what’s the latest piece of obscurantist theistic sciencephobic mystification from Leon Kass doing there? The ideas are so not new that they’re more like a putrefying corpse, they’re about closing down greater economic choice rather than fostering it, and they’re about irresponsible irrational scaremongering rather than about individual responsibility. Fucking typical of most US conservatives of the respectable stripe: they talk resounding bullshit but they line up obediently behind ‘ideas’ that ought to be anathema to them; in short, they’re … Read the rest