Richard Dawkins likes to outrage people. He’s not the only person in the world who likes to do that, in fact it’s just barely possible that there are one or two people connected with Butterflies and Wheels who don’t mind irritating. However that may be, Dawkins has done it again.

Evil is not an entity, not a spirit, not a force to be opposed and subdued. Evil is a miscellaneous collection of nasty things that nasty people do. There are nasty people in every country, stupid people, insane people, people who should never be allowed to get anywhere near power. Just killing nasty people doesn’t help: they will be replaced. We must try to tailor our institutions, our constitutions, our

This review by Alan Wolfe is an odd mix of insight and blindness, shrewdness and obtuseness.

Wolfe makes some good points about the inherent difficulties of trying to make a progressive politics out of consumer movements, and about the value of thinking big when writing about history.

For the past two or three decades, historians have been studiously thinking small…As important as social history has been, however, it has also been mind-numbingly narrow in its evocation of detail and in its reluctance to consider the larger meanings of its findings. But Cohen thinks big…One hopes that her book will stimulate her colleagues to take similar risks, even the risk of emulating historians of previous generations whose efforts at intellectual synthesis

I have found something useful for philosophers to do!

Surprising news indeed, but take a look at this paragraph from Helen Salmon, student representative for the Stop the War Coalition.

This is not a war for the liberation of the people of Iraq. The US and Britain were happy to back Saddam’s tyrannical regime, his gassing of the Kurds and his war against Iran until he invaded Kuwait. Nor is this a war against weapons of mass destruction. No evidence of such weapons has been found in Iraq, and no war has been threatened against North Korea, despite its possession of nuclear weapons.

Never in the field of writing about human confict, have so many bad argumentative moves … Read the rest