They’re ba-ack. The dear Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Discouragement of Vice is making a comeback. Nostalgic, innit.

Behind a desk in a spartan government office, a bearded official says he is swamped with job applicants for a proposed department to promote virtue and discourage vice, which would send out religious monitors to uncover and correct un-Islamic behavior in the populace.

I bet. I bet he’s swamped with applicants who want to go out to uncover and correct things that other people are doing – laughing, singing, talking to friends, going outside; sinister stuff like that. Uncover it and correct it, quick, before everything goes to hell.

The cabinet also approved reviving the Department for the Promotion

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown reviews Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism in the Indy.

Cosmopolitanism, in its reconstructed meaning, says Appiah, provokes attacks from the left for whom it is dilettante and elitist. The right despises it because cosmopolitans make bad nationalists and patriots. All authoritarians detest the internationalist spirit. Hitler and Stalin launched regular invectives against “rootless cosmopolitans”.

Yeah. And identitarians hate it, which is one reason it is worth trying to dispute identitarianism, especially of the solitarist variety, John Gray notwithstanding. Cosmopolitanism is a good thing. Cosmopolitanism is Sarajevo before everything went to hell.

The Professor of Philosophy at the Centre for Human Values, Princeton no less, is not as bold as he could have been. A crucial treatise is rendered impotent by neat

John Gray is not entirely convinced by Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence, despite his admiration.

Impassioned, eloquent and often moving, Identity and Violence is a sustained attack on the “solitarist” theory which says that human identities are formed by membership of a single social group…There is a deeper unrealism in Sen’s analysis, which emerges in his inability to account for the powerful appeal of the solitarist view…Along with many liberal philosophers, he seems to think human conflict is a result of intellectual error. But if the error of solitarism is so blatantly obvious, why do large numbers of people continue to believe in it and act on it? Sen refers repeatedly to manipulation by malevolent propagandists…But are people really

This is Jerry, so don’t blame OB for this post.

I’ve just returned from my protest against the awful anti-Israel, pro-Hizbullah march in London. Here are four pictures from the march.

Draw your own conclusions.… Read the rest

Interesting. Mediawatchwatch points out that Germaine Greer’s defense of her article on the Brick Lane ruckus slightly adjusts what she said in the first article. It’s right there for all to see…

July 24:

The community has the moral right to keep the film-makers out but they cannot then complain if somewhere else is used and presented to the world as Brick Lane.

August 5:

I have been accused of saying things I never said about Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane and the campaign to prevent its filming in the East End of London…Natasha Walter, writing on these pages, claims not to know what I could possibly mean by saying that the residents of Brick Lane have

So didja listen to JS on Little Atoms? It was pretty funny, in an absurd sort of way. He has some kind of bee in his bonnet that people who sign the Euston Manifesto think it is going to set off a mass progressive movement. It turned up in that HERO interview too. HERO asked ‘Ophelia, you are a signatory to the Euston Manifesto, and Butterflies and Wheels is an affiliated site. What are your expectations of the movement for a rational left, and how much do you feel that blogging and, more widely, the internet has contributed to the timing of this development?’ and he answered –

The Euston Manifesto will die a quick death. There is no