March is a good month. Don’t you think? I love March. March and October, they’re the best. Although April has a strong claim, despite the cruelty thing. But March is special. I think it’s the daffodils. I have a really slightly insane passion for daffodils – especially the way they’re planted in the UK, in those great blankets covering whole sections of parks and gardens. We don’t do that here, unfortunately. No blankets. But there are a lot of them, just in smaller batches, so I trudge around the place gazing fondly at clumps of them next to trees and on parking strips. I took a trip to London in March about ten years ago and people laughed at me … Read the rest

How sensible of Slavoj Žižek. Better than sensible, even.

…only religion, it is said, can elevate us to a higher spiritual level. Today, when religion is emerging as the wellspring of murderous violence around the world, assurances that Christian or Muslim or Hindu fundamentalists are only abusing and perverting the noble spiritual messages of their creeds ring increasingly hollow. What about restoring the dignity of atheism, one of Europe’s greatest legacies and perhaps our only chance for peace?

Of course this is the cue for thousands of parrots and robots and zombies to come clattering and squawking and staggering up to intone ‘Stalin Hitler Mao Pol Pot’ at us – but atheism wasn’t the essence of Communism or Nazism … Read the rest

Just a little more of this (as Don called it) labyrinthine topic, then I’ll talk about different, straight up and down topics. I just want to say just this one more thing, as an old friend used to say on the phone when we were fifteen. (She’s a public radio producer now, so she has to do that fund-raising stuff; she’s in the middle of it right now, it’s ‘Pledge Week’. Terrible.) Just this one more thing on the moral right and people ought not to prevent us.

Lies and falsifications are generally (and certainly in the case of Holocaust-denial) morally wrong. And it does seem puzzling, even paradoxical, to say that we can have a moral right to

Enough of all this pallid nerdy arguing and wondering and marching back and forth. I have been persuaded. much against my better judgment, that what I really want is a very long walk on a mountain trail. I don’t think it is, I think I’ll cry and whine and ask to be carried and say my foot hurts and ask for ice cream and say my face is cold and ask for a cookie and say why aren’t we there yet and ask for brandy and say I want to go home right now. But I have acquiesced, despite the insufficiently theorized nature of this proposed very long walk and the absence of coffee houses and bookshops on this much-advertised … Read the rest

Eve Garrard comments at Normblog on this whole incompletely theorized thing we have going here (though not in those terms, which I have only just this second dragged in). Her comment is interesting, and it helpfully omits the part about being puzzled as to why I keep etc etc (yes, I am having fun with that, why do you ask?) – but it still isn’t quite what I’m talking about, at least I think it isn’t.

It’s very hard to see why we would think that Holocaust-denial ought to be legally permissible unless we think that there’s a moral right in play, that people have a moral right to speak their minds, even if what their minds contain is false

I’m going to do a Cool Hand Luke on you. What we have here is an incompletely theorized agreement.

From ‘Incompletely Theorized Agreements,’ chapter 2 of Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict by Cass Sunstein, pp 35-37.

Hence the pervasive legal and political phenomenon of an agreement on a general principle alongside disagreement about particular cases. The agreement is incompletely theorized in the sense that it is incompletely specified. Much of the key work must be done by others, often through casuistical judgments at the point of application.

Well there you go. That’s all I’m saying. It’s not so odd – and in fact it happens all the time. That’s what Sunstein means by referring to a ‘pervasive legal and … Read the rest