You should listen to Radio 4’s Inside a Muslim School . It’s rather horrible.

It’s about a very small school in Blackburn, mostly girls with a few boys in the primary grades. The headteacher (who is a man) explains the dress code:

According to the Islamic principle, women should not show their hair. So if the hair is not covered properly, then we will ask them to do so. That’s why they have to wear scarves.

And outdoors, ‘veils’ as well, we find out later – although a lot of girls don’t. But right off the bat they get this nasty, creepy, prying, domineering, bordering on prurient stuff of a Boss Man telling little girls that their nasty dangerous hair … Read the rest

This question does keep coming up. And up, and up. When is free speech free speech and when is it incitement to murder? (That’s only one version of the question, of course. It can be phrased other ways. When is free speech protected as such and when is it not because it is incitement to violence? That’s another version. There are more.)

Scott Jaschik has an article at Inside Higher Ed where the question seems to be in play, although it’s not absolutely clear whether the people involved in the matter actually phrased it that way. It’s also not clear whether that was avoidance or just lack of clarity – confusion, in short.

An adjunct English instructor at Warren Community … Read the rest

Who’s Deborah Solomon? I don’t know, apart from the fact that she writes for that monument to mediocrity, the New York Times. She says dumb things in this article on Lynne Truss’s new book on rudeness.

To be sure, most people, regardless of the precise elasticity of their flesh, would like to live in a world where everyone respects one another. Yet Americans have always harbored a suspicion of manners, which evoke visions of English history at its most hierarchical and hoity-toity – of dukes, earls, lords and viscounts tripping over one another in phony displays of deference and veneration. Who would want to live with all that kneeling and curtsying, all that monarchy-mandated fawning? Not the American revolutionaries, who

Voltaire. The Philosophical Dictionary. Good read.

What can be said in answer to a man who says he will rather obey God than men, and who consequently feels certain of meriting heaven by cutting your throat? When once fanaticism has gangrened the brain of any man the disease may be regarded as nearly incurable. I have seen Convulsionaries who, while speaking of the miracles of St. Paris, gradually worked themselves up to higher and more vehement degrees of agitation till their eyes became inflamed, their whole frames shook, their countenances became distorted by rage, and had any man contradicted them he would inevitably have been murdered.

Sound familiar at all?

There is no other remedy for this epidemical malady