It’s good that they’ve figured it out at last, but they do make me laugh while they’re doing it, sometimes.

The government must rely less on Muslim leadership organisations, Ruth Kelly said yesterday…The communities secretary said: “There are many people in Muslim communities who are already taking a brave stand…this new, more local approach will help reach directly into communities…”

In other words, the communities secretary used the word ‘communities’ several hundred times in the course of a short announcement. Oh well – I suppose it’s only to be expected.

“In the past, government has relied too much on engagement with traditional leadership organisations.” But there is concern in the Muslim community that the government is marginalising groups which

Johann Hari has some thoughts on the Chapman brothers.

In 2003, the Chapmans bought some of Goya’s original prints – and vandalised them. Where Goya drew with documentary clarity the agonised victims of war, the Chapmans painted the jeering faces of clowns and puppies over them. “Goya’s the artist who represents the kind of expressionistic struggle of the Enlightenment with the ancien regime,” Jake Chapman explained, “so it’s kind of nice to kick its underbelly.” Goya famously said “the sleep of reason produces monsters”. The Chapmans say the opposite: it is when reason is wide awake that it produces monsters…The Chapmans trashing Goya is a pure expression of postmodernist philosophy. They vandalise and ridicule the fruits of reason –

So Julian turns up on Comment is free.

If there’s one thing philosophers are not in short supply of it’s confidence and self-esteem…The unexamined life, we are fond of repeating, is not worth living. It sounds very noble, until you realise that the subtext is that not only are the Big Brother-watching masses unfit for existence, but even those engaged in less fundamental academic pursuits are lower forms of life.

But is that the subtext? It depends how you decide what a subtext is, I guess (the subness of a subtext gives a certain leeway for accusing people of saying things they haven’t actually literally said, which can be interesting but unfair or fair but uninteresting or various other … Read the rest