What life is like when there is no rule of law, no security, no strong-enough central government, no one able to keep the strong and cruel and violent and selfish from preying on everyone else. Thrasymachus world. Thug world, warlord world, Mafia world, feudal world, give me that world, extortion world. Do what I say or I’ll hit you with a stick or cut you with a knife or shoot you world. Nightmare world.

Escalating attacks by the Taliban and other armed groups on teachers, students and schools in Afghanistan are shutting down schools and depriving another generation of an education, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today. Schools for girls have been hit particularly hard,

This is an interesting bit of reasoning.

The letter pinned overnight to the wall of the mosque in Kandahar was succinct. “Girls going to school need to be careful for their safety. If we put acid on their faces or they are murdered then the blame will be on their parents.”

That’s good, isn’t it? If we put acid on their faces, the blame will be on their parents. Well of course it will – if it hadn’t been for their parents, the girls wouldn’t be there to have faces that Talibanists can put acid on. Furthermore, if the parents hadn’t fed them all those years, again the girls wouldn’t be there to have faces. If the parents hadn’t … Read the rest

Bob from Brockley tells us of a good item on Radio 4’s The World This Weekend. I haven’t listened yet but I’m going to, as well as to Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Start the Week, which Nick S mentioned. (Time! I have no time!)

a very interesting segment on Radio 4’s World This Weekend about who represents British Muslisms…A number of British Muslims forcefully argued that the Muslim Council of Britain completely fails to represent the perdominantly Sufi Sunni British Muslims, who do not have a Muslim Brotherhood worldview, but rather have a much more theologically open perspective…A new organisation is needed to better represent them…Particularly daming was the testimony with Haras Rafiq from the Sufi Muslim Council on

Bill Moyers also talked to Mary Gordon in that installment of his ‘faith and reason’ series. Gordon said a lot of interesting things, as she generally does; I like her, she’s shrewd, self-mocking, funny, and a believer in the non-triumphalist and non-accusatory (why don’t you believe too?) way that seems so out of fashion in the US. But I wanted to take exception to one thing she said because I think it relies on equivocation (though not necessarily deliberately), and it’s an equivocation that does a lot of work for believers of the triumphalist and accusatory variety.

Without faith we would be paralyzed. We believe that all men are created equal. That our mothers, or at least our dogs, love