Habermas And Religion Yet Again

I’ve  taken a few shots at Habermas for his recently expressed views on the role of religion in public life. Stuff about about secular people  learning from the religious and the like.  However, in a recent, lengthy and considered interview he says:

What must be safeguarded is that the decisions of the legislator, the executive branch, and the courts  are  not only formulated in a universally accessible language, but are also justified on the basis of universally acceptable reasons. This excludes religious reasons from decisions about all state-sanctioned – that is, legally binding – norms. Apart from that I do not believes that secular citizens can learn anything from fundamentalist doctrines that cannot cope with the fact of pluralism,  with the public authority of the sciences, and with the egalitarianism of our constitutional principles.

So it looks like there’s not much to be learned from religion after all. Well, thank God for that.

The Blair Syndrome

I think we here have a case of a political syndrome which, though increasingly common, still lacks a name. It goes roughly like this “Blair bad, bad bad for having accompanied America into Iraq. Blair a liar, Blair a sneak. Therefore, everything done pre- Iraq by Blair must now be interpreted as evidence of his badness and sneakiness. And it doesn’t matter/is irrelevant that parliament approved the war”

The British state comprehensively defeated Provoism and Blair deserves credit for recognizing that Gerry, Martin and the boys were itching to go respectable. For a more developed version of this thesis see this

Stephen Sizer Wants To Shut Someone Up

The odious Stephen Sizer is an Anglican priest and  is happy to share platforms with Holocaust deniers and mouth off about the evils of Zionism on Iranian TV. He is now attempting to intimidate Seismic Shock. In the interests of adding my grain of sand to the Barbara Streisand effect I reproduce the text by Seismic Shock below.

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Jyoti Basu Dead At 95

Jyoti Basu and Diego Maradona

Sensitivity to Casualties and the British Public

Patrick Porter has a post here in which he discusses the sensitivity of the British public to casualties suffered in the war in Afghanistan. He, rightly, takes issue with the idea that British culture has gone soft and his key points are these:

The Oil Argument

The oil argument was often made in the run up to the Iraq war and after. Roughly put, it holds that all the arguments made for toppling Baathism in Iraq were just a smokescreen for America’s or, more broadly, the West’s, need for oil.

Recent Z Word Posts

here and here

Eduardo Montes-Bradley And Genocide Obfustication

1.

In the course of criminal investigations the agents of democratic states may take a variety of measures. For example, they may question witnesses and seek contradictions and inconsistencies in what they are told. This can be really annoying and may get you very flustered. Even if you are completely innocent you may find it hard to remember who you were with and exactly where you were on a particular date months or even years ago.

The Film of the Year

The best film I saw this year was Tarantino’s magnificent and misunderstood Inglorious Basterds. I wrote an initial reaction to it here and I stand over it. A lot of critics seemed to have liked it as a display of Tarantino’s power and range as a director while either regarding it as morally trivial or, worse,  as questioning the verity of the received narrative of WWII. They see Landa as the film’s most attractive character and seem fascinated with the scene when where Eli Roth’s character bludgeons a German sergeant to death for refusing to reveal the whereabouts of German forces.

Muñoz and Telledín

here and here