Oh, lordy, lordy, lordy, children – I’ve spent too much of today arguing with a ‘Holocaust denier,’ or perhaps just a brainless troll pretending to be a Holocaust denier. I knew I shouldn’t, I knew it was as futile an enterprise as cooking rice one grain at a time or shoveling snow with a teaspoon, but I couldn’t stop myself. The troll kept answering and answering and answering, and I just couldn’t leave it alone. I’m such a fool!

But, I don’t know, perhaps it was inevitable. It kept saying ‘there’s no evidence’ so how could I not go fetch some evidence to show it that there is? It would be expecting too much. Or maybe it wouldn’t, but anyway, … Read the rest

Did you read this article at Dissent by Nadia Urbinati? I find it a little baffling…because she’s a professor of political theory at Columbia, but the article seems to me to be just startlingly bad. It reminds me of several I read the other day at Comment is Free. It goes like this: first a lot of straw man stuff, then a lot of pointing out the obvious, then mixing the straw man stuff with the obvious stuff, then it winds up with a resounding contradiction.

Am I missing something?

(Probably not, actually, because Michael Walzer in his reply says much the same thing except far more politely, but then Urbinati is a friend of his.)

[O]n the one

Now it’s the pope’s turn to tell us what’s what. He met with some ‘academics’ at the Vatican and told them “that science is not capable of fully understanding the mystery of human beings.” No doubt implying that the Vatican by contrast is.

[It is important not to ignore anthropological, philosophical and theological research, which highlight and maintain the mystery of human beings, because no science can say who they are, where they come from and where they go.

Theological research? Into…what? And what does it tell us about the mystery of human beings? Well, other than the fact that they believe in peculiar and usually nasty gods.

Man, said the Pope is “characterized by his otherness. He is a

Another thing about the archbishop. He suggests, you remember, that we should ‘exercise a little imagination’ about the Muslims in West Yorkshire who were angry about Salman Rushdie’s book – who “know only that one of their most overpoweringly significant sources of identity is being held up to public scorn.” Well I think it’s the archbishop who needs to exercise some imagination here, or perhaps rather some rational thought along with some knowledge. He phrases that as if all West Yorks Muslims or at least West Yorks Muslims in general knew only that, but in fact 1) he doesn’t know that and 2) in fact it isn’t true, because the anger was political: it was Islamist anger, not Muslim … Read the rest

One or two thoughts on the Archbisop of Canterbury’s speech. One thought is that he’s a sly bastard. If you read the speech slowly and carefully, it’s clear enough what sinister nonsense he is talking, but he embeds it so deeply and thoroughly in layer upon layer upon layer of episcopally dignified verbiage that it’s very difficult to convey how nonsensical and sinister it is by for instance quoting passages. In this he is very unlike the many other people I get so much innocent pleasure from teasing. He’s just as wrong-headed they are, but he makes it much less obvious. That’s not fair! If he’s going to talk obsequious churchy bullshit, he ought to be obvious about it.… Read the rest