Another point about this strawman argument we keep getting from rabbis and bishops, this ‘argument’ that boils down to claiming that non-theists have a ‘belief that the only things that are real or can be known are those that can be empirically observed and measured’ and then following that absurd claim with the equally absurd claim that love, morality, beauty and god are all ‘face[s] of human experience that [are] not subject to empirical verification.’

The other point (see above) is that that endlessly repeated pseudo-argument is a crap argument from two directions, not just one. It’s bad and stupid first, as I mentioned, because it dishonestly or woollily or confusedly makes a truth-claim about the existence of an … Read the rest

Read any Dwight Macdonald? If not you should. He’s a good one.

I take exception to all this.

But you can’t dine on clippings and the bones of old controversies, so what did his versatile output amount to after decades of pounding the typewriter? For years…Macdonald had been…frustrated, fatigued and plagued by the feeling that he had failed to climb the masthead of his talent by writing a major, original work – bringing out a real book, not just a basket of articles.

That’s a stupid opposition – a real book as opposed to a ‘basket’ of articles. As if there is some Platonic Ideal length, as if there is some magic that makes sixty thousand words on the … Read the rest

Martin Jacques has some thoughts on globalization, or on one version of globalization anyway. He starts with Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.

Benedict, a cultural anthropologist, was assigned by the US office of war administration to work on a project to try and understand Japan as the US began to contemplate the challenge that would be posed by its defeat, occupation and subsequent administration. Her book is written with a complete absence of judgmental attitude or sense of superiority, which one might expect; she treats Japan’s culture as of equal merit, virtue and logic to that of the US. In other words, its tone and approach could not be more different from the present US attitude