This interview with Jamie Whyte is full of good quotable remarks. So I think I’ll quote some for your Saturday enjoyment.

It has always driven me mad to see people saying things that are well known to be rubbish. And I’ve never understood how they can bear it.

A good beginning.

The really big mistake comes when you treat people as authority figures when they are not expert but simply well known. There is a terrible tendency to treat people as reliable sources of fact when in fact they are simply “important” people or people who happen to be in the news. It is doubly perverse when you consider who gets counted as “important”.

Yup. We noticed that in connection … Read the rest

I was reading a book by Philip Kitcher, Science, Truth, and Democracy, earlier this morning. He says some interesting things about people doing the Galileo thing. Page 101 for instance –

People who publish findings purporting to show that behavioral differences stem from matters of race or sex often portray themselves as opposing widely held views in the interest of truth.

And page 106 and 107 –

Prejudice can be buttressed as those who oppose the ban [on research into race differences in IQ] proclaim themselves to be gallant heirs of Galileo…So long as the conditions driving the argument are not appreciated, champions of the forms of inquiry that should be eschewed can always make use of the rhetoric

Funny, that comment I did on Arundhati Roy was a catch-up item, as I said, left over from weeks ago, but I no sooner post it than there is a small flurry of posts on Roy because of an interview with her in Outlook India (which I hadn’t seen). She does say one or two woolly things there.

Mind you – to be fair, she also says some okay things. I may be unfair to her because her manner puts me off – and that’s not really a very compelling reason. She may not be as smug as she appears (just as I may not be as deranged and malicious as I appear – who knows). Though I am not … Read the rest

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Oh I don’t know…it’s just that it’s all such an effort, you know? I’m supposed to go to London in a couple of weeks (well not ‘supposed to’ – it was my own idea – but it’s planned and scheduled and so on). But…I don’t know…I have so much to do. I should tidy up the living room, and I should hang all my clothes up one of these days, and I ought to wipe the shelves in the fridge. It just all adds up. Plus there’s B&W, and a book to write, and one thing and another. And then a trip on top of that? You have to pack, and make sure you have everything, and go here and … Read the rest

Another interesting pairing. This piece by David Aaronovitch and this one by Ishtiaq Ahmed. They say some parallel things.

Aaronovitch:

When the Muslim theologian was asked to give an example of where the secular concept of human rights might be seen as deficient by other societies, his immediate answer was: ‘Women’s rights.’ Did secularists not understand, he asked, that there were cultures in which women did not want equal rights? ‘How do you know what they want?’ I snapped at him. ‘Have you polled them?’…And this, it seems to me, is what it always boils down to…Why is it that when God speaks through man, he so resolutely demands that women are subordinate?…It is extraordinary how mainstream religions devote

I saw something that made me laugh at Normblog this morning – I mean, I saw something at Normblog that made me laugh. I would never laugh at Normblog, or any other blog. I’m not that kind of person. Yes I am, but I pretend not to be. I am however the kind of person who would laugh at woolly novelists – would and does.

It’s a funny thing about novelists, at least some of them. The ones that have a certain kind of success, and get a certain kind of, what to call it, of cultural standing and credibility as a result. When I say ‘certain kind’ I don’t mean I know exactly what that kind is. Some combination … Read the rest

by Jeremy Stangroom

I’ve just been sent a review copy of a book called Debating Design. I don’t normally go in for book burning, but I’m tempted. It’s edited by Michael Ruse and, wait for it, William Dembski. It claims to provide a “comprehensive and even-handed overview of the debate concerning biological origins”. And, guess what, there’s a whole section on intelligent design written by the bastards – to quote Norman Levitt – from The Discovery Institute.

Maybe someone could explain to me why Cambridge University Press would publish such a book? If I decided to resurrect the theory of phlogiston, I wonder if I could persuade them that it warranted a book.

Perhaps more to the point, … Read the rest