There are several sites that have linked to us in the past couple of days on an interestingly wide variety of subjects. I wouldn’t have thought we were all that various. I’d have thought we were focused rather than wide-ranging; narrow rather than broad. But maybe not. Maybe our subject covers more ground than I had quite realized. That’s good, if so. I like a judicious blend of breadth and depth – with just a pinch of coriander.

It was thanks to one such link that I found the articles on the assault on Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiongo and his wife Mary Njeeri, which Robin Varghese of 3 Quarks Daily connects to Martha Nussbaum on Gujarat and the threats … Read the rest

Discussion continues, in many places. Jonathan Derbyshire suggests a new thesis:

There’s a view, call it the “Crooked Timber thesis”, according to which the truth of statements about a group or a set of beliefs ought to be weighed against the perlocutionary effect of uttering such statements on the group or the holders of the beliefs in question. In one recurrent variant of this view, true statements about what, for shorthand purposes, I’ll call “political Islamism” ought to be circumscribed, if not actually withheld, for fear of inciting “Islamophobia”…And it seems to me obvious that the point applies in contexts different to the one in which it’s usually applied over at Crooked Timber. So one wonders whether the Guardian

A follow-up of sorts to my colleague’s Comment on Crooked Timber. Bush’s monopoly seems to be broken for the moment; the Timberites are discussing Beslan and Islamophobia and Islamophobiaphobia. Somewhat heatedly, as a matter of fact.

There is a thread on ‘Al Qaeda in Beslan?’ for instance, and another on the horror itself which kicked up an interesting comment by Dsquared:

I think that ‘Islamism’ is a politically convenient but fictional construct drawn up by people who want to drag their own pet Middle Eastern issue into the fight against Al-Quaeda.

Ah. Fictional construct. Really. Do the people in, say, Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey, etc etc, who are damn well terrified of Islamists, think ‘Islamism’ is a fictional … Read the rest

As OB suggested below, it’s been a pretty awful time lately. And it goes without saying that Russia today is just appalling.

Admittedly I should have known better, but I decided to check out what the folk (with apologies to Dubya) at Crooked Timber made of all the horror this week.

Guess what, as far as I can tell – and despite their combined IQ of 213 – they have absolutely nothing to say on these matters. Not a squeak.

So what are they talking about?

Something about ITunes – though I’m too limited to understand a word of it.

Something about George Bush.

Ah, Rousseau. Cool.

Some blindingly obvious stuff about Durkheim. Oh no, … Read the rest

Just a little more Harding – because the previous visits with her are on the August page, which no one will ever look at again, and because at least one reader thinks I may be giving her the straw man treatment. But in fact I’m making her sound better than she is rather than worse, because as I mentioned it simply is impossible to convey how feeble her arguments are via brief quotations. Brief quotations don’t, for instance, and can’t of their nature, make clear how absent any evidence is. They also can’t convey the cumulative effect of her writing, which is genuinely credulity-strainingly childish. Brief quotation for instance misses out how often she repeats the identical inane phrases, but … Read the rest