Jeremy Waldron in the LRB:

A more troubling reading, however, is that Nazi speech is worth protecting even if a consequence of that protection is that someone gets hurt or killed. ‘I will defend your right to say it, even if your saying it makes violence more likely against the people attacked in your pamphlets.’ Is that what is meant? Defenders of free speech squirm on this point…they assure us dogmatically that there is no clear evidence of any causal connection between, say, racist posters and incidents of racial violence…

Yeah. The assurance often seems very dogmatic to me – it just somehow has to be true that there is no causal connection between racist speech and racial violence, … Read the rest

And there’s this interesting article by Scott McLemee which is a good read in itself and also the cause that – there is much silliness among the commenters. Why does a piece by an omnivorous reader like Scott attract so many people who can’t read at all? People who read the label on a can of pineapple juice and think it contains Crisco? Dunno, but the result is pretty funny. Somebody started off by reading Scott’s “There are plenty of conservative publicists in America now. There are not many conservative thinkers, proper, worthy of the name” and, first, paraphrasing that as “America has lots of conservative pundits. But thinkers? Not so much,” which is a pretty bad job of paraphrasing … Read the rest

One remark in this CHE piece on learning to hate literature in order to get a PhD in it particularly caught my attention. It’s so expectable and yet so odd.

In a course I taught last spring, after three months of tracing the development of literary theory from humanism to structuralism to poststructuralism to the dilemmas of the present, I finally asked my students the question: “So, why do you want to study literature, knowing what you now know?” I wondered if studying a century of cynicism had altered their motives in the slightest. They were all considering graduate school, but their answers had little to do with what I knew they would need to write in their application essays…It

So Katha Pollitt talks a little more about that imbecilic review of her book. Perhaps I’m not the only one who thought it was jaw-droppingly stupid.

Emily Amick: There’s a discussion raging on the blogosphere right now about Wonkette’s ‘post-feminist’ review of your book in the New York Times.

Ah. I rushed over to Google blogsearch to find out about that, and the comments seemed to be running heavily in the ‘jaw-droppingly stupid’ direction. Good. But – what did the Times ever run a review like that for? What is its point? What next? Assigning a stand-up comic to review Amartya Sen’s next book? Assigning Tom Cruise to review a book by John Searle? What is their point? … Read the rest

This is a piece of really very good news. The author says it hasn’t had much attention in the West – or elsewhere either. So let’s pay attention.

In a bold but little-noticed step toward reforming Islamic tradition, Turkey’s religious authorities recently declared that they will remove these statements [such as “If a husband’s body is covered with pus and his wife licks it clean, she still wouldn’t have paid her dues.” – OB] , and more like them, from the hadiths – the non-Koranic commentary on the words and deeds of the prophet Muhammad…Hadiths are serious stuff. More than 90 percent of the sharia (Islamic law) is based on them rather than the Koran, and the most infamous measures