Well here’s an oddity (the air is thick with oddities these days) – someone arguing for more clarity, an end to muddling through, an awareness of tensions and conflicts and the need for hard choices – and doing it by means of surprisingly muddled mushy unclear woolly language. That seems like a peculiar way to argue for clear thinking.

The conflict played out in Birmingham, and elsewhere every day, is between two values – one that liberals have cherished for centuries and another acquired much more recently. The ancient, almost defining liberal ideal is freedom: of expression, of movement, of protest. The newer value is an approach to society’s minorities that aims to go beyond mere tolerance, and reaches for

Just two or three more brief quotations from Wicca. My little solstice present for you.

To discourage a poltergeist from remaining in the house put up a list of chores and tell it that if it is to remain in the house it must earn its keep. If it does not, then you will bring in an exorcist.

Errm – okay. But – um – how do I tell it? Write it at the top of the list of chores? But how do I know if the poltergeist has seen the list of chores? Or that it can read? Should I tell it personally, by announcing it aloud? But how do I know where polty is, or if it’s … Read the rest

Update: Check out Amardeep Singh’s No False Medicine for as he puts it ‘insider updates.’ Amardeep is a Sikh himself, and not best pleased about all this. This post includes part of an email from a Sikh friend in Birmingham:

I am in Birmingham and have been talking to people who were at the protests on Saturday and I can tell you that the Khalistanis in Britain have scented blood and are not going to step down. They have been inciting people in Gurdwaras and on websites and Punjabi radio stations to come to Birmingham from all four corners of Britain to “protest” outside the theatre. It is the raising of a lynch mob, people are talking about thousands being

Well, here we go again. Another victory for religious sensitivity and obscurantism and shutting people up, another defeat for open discussion of religion and religions. Another victory for clerics, another defeat for playwrights, theatres, actors, and playgoers. Another victory for the principle that if discussion of Subject X is ‘offensive’ to certain easily-offended domineering people, then discussion of Subject X gets stopped, and that’s that. Hooray. (Of course, looked at another way, it’s also a victory of a sort for wider dissemination of Subject X. No doubt a lot more people will be at least reading ‘Behzti’ than otherwise would have, even if fewer will be seeing it. But the terrible precedent is still set.) It’s all so obvious. You … Read the rest

Another dispatch from ‘Hey I’ll believe anything’ land. This time from Celtic Myth and Magic by Edain McCoy.

There’s a great long section in the middle of this book about ‘Pathworking.’ Pathworking, we are told, is another name for ‘guided meditations.’ Okay and what are guided meditations? Apparently they are pre-scripted daydreams. What you do is, you read one of the stories McCoy writes out for you, then you do the relaxation/meditation thing (you know: get comfortable, do breathing stuff, empty your mind, all that), then you have a daydream in which you are the protatgonist of the story you’ve just read (complete with pronunciation guide, because we wouldn’t want to be mispronouncing all those Celtic names in our daydream, … Read the rest