One can see from this story how hopeless it is to try to reconcile worries about injustice, torture, inequity, barbaric punishments, misogyny, and just outright cruelty and brutality and bloody awful ugliness, with worries about being tolerant and broad-minded and not colonialist or cultural imperialist or Eurocentric.

Prosecutors argued Ms Lawal’s child was living proof she committed a crime under Sharia. However, defence lawyers countered that under some interpretations of Sharia, babies can remain in gestation in a mother’s womb for five years, raising the possibility that her ex-husband could have fathered the child.

That’s interesting. What if there were no such interpretations of Sharia? What if every possible interpetation of Sharia that anyone could find anywhere held that a … Read the rest

I’m reading Mark Crispin Miller’s The Bush Dyslexicon, a witty but deadly serious analysis of Bush’s real as opposed to advertised nature, and what the election of such an ignorant, unqualified, spiteful man says about US politics and media. Miller makes, for example, one point that doesn’t get made nearly often enough or loudly enough – that Bush and his propagandists succeed by conflating ignorance with poverty – intellectual poverty with literal, financial poverty.

However, the comparison with Andrew Jackson is, to put it mildly, problematic. That military hero was, of course, a fiery democrat…When ‘the laws’ are used ‘to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful,’ Jackson wrote in 1832, ‘the humble members of society –

Let’s re-invent the wheel again. How many times do we need to learn that democracy is not the same thing as freedom, that the majority will does not necessarily (in fact almost certainly doesn’t) represent the will of absolutely everyone, that in fact majorities are perfectly capable of deciding to oppress minorities? John Stuart Mill seems to be widely read, judging by the number of copies of On Liberty one sees in used bookstores, and yet we still go on telling each other with an air of innocent surprise that democracy in Iraq could possibly mean that people will vote in an oppressive fundamentalist Islamic government. Well yes, it could mean exactly that.

Nicholas Kristof pointed this out in the … Read the rest

The Chronicle of Higher Education had an interesting story in June – interesting albeit peculiar. So many people arguing so back-to-front – I don’t like this/this is offensive/this hurts my feelings, therefore this has to be wrong. Not that it’s exactly a news flash that people do argue that way – it’s even possible that I’ve been known to argue that way myself – but there is so much of it in this story it does get one’s attention.

Other scholars and activists have blasted the book for reinforcing inaccurate stereotypes.

Hmm. Why do I suspect that those scholars and activists would still have ‘blasted’ the book even if the stereotypes had been accurate? Why do I wonder if they … Read the rest

So, as if to prove my point, here is an article that gives some idea of the kind of thing the Competitive Enterprise Institute gets up to. Helping the Bush White House to ‘play down’ research on global warming that could have consequences the CEI wouldn’t like, for example.

White House officials wanted the CEI’s help to play down the impact of a report last summer by the government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in which the US admitted for the first time that humans are contributing to global warming…The email discusses possible tactics for playing down the report and getting rid of EPA officials, including its then head, Christine Whitman…The CEI is suing another government climate research body that produced