here

here and here

Jürgen Habermas is quoted here (via here) as having said this the other day:

For secular citizens, this same ethics of citizenship entails the duty of reciprocal accountability toward all citizens. Reciprocity in this sense also entails not dismissing religious utterances as mere nonsense in the public sphere.

Of course one doesn’t want to get worked up about something reported second hand but if Habermas really said that  it’s very disappointing. The propositional content of religious utterances in the public sphere  - or anywhere else – is indeed mere nonsense. In public discourse it may often be neither polite nor politic to point this out but it’s an option that has to be there. Otherwise we end up either patronizing religious people or shutting up because we are afraid of them.

This doesn’t mean that religious belief can be ignored in public debate. The number of religious people makes this impractical and undesirable. However, their views and demands can’t a priori be given greater weight than that of those of any other group and they must be subject to the same level of scrutiny and criticism. If religious people are willing to say their piece in the public square on that basis then good for them but I suspect that a lot of them are not.

It would also be interesting to know if Habermas was calling for all religious utterances to be treated seriously or only those coming from members of the big religions. If we aren’t going to dismiss Roman Catholicism as  mere nonsense then what are we going to say when the Moonies and Scientologists come looking for respect?

Now something else entirely. Further down in the same article you’ll find this about Judith Butler:

She underscored the multiplicity of Jewish values and experiences and offered a courageous critique of Israeli state violence.

So, a world renowned (God knows why) academic criticizes Israel in an address to an audience of colleagues at NYU and is held to show courage in so doing. In the thrall of what kind of world view would you want to be in order to not to find something odd about that?

here

According to its own narrative, the government is fighting the good fight against “economic interests” who wish to hold the people of Argentina in servitude. This narrative also holds that control of the media is one of the principle methods employed by those interests for the creation of public consent for their activities and expansion. With the government’s new media regulation bill being passed into law by the senate last night we are supposed to believe that these interests have been dealt a severe blow.

Judging by the howls of protest from the Clarín group these interests have at least been given something to think about. However, the fact that some of the unloveliest standard bearers of Argentine capitalism are roaring like stuck pigs doesn’t mean that they are going to die. They didn’t get where where they are by being either slow or stupid and they’ll adapt to the new regulatory environment and do their damnedest to have it modified to suit their needs. Also, the media businesses which the new law will oblige them to divest themselves of will be bought by capitalists not a whit more fragrant than the current specimens and while it’s nice that that NGOs and indigenous peoples will be able to have their own radio and TV stations it´ll be very surprising if any great number of people want to tune into them.

So, a cheer and a half for the new media law. It’s nice to hear the pigs squealing. In due course, though, they’ll get their act together and join any new entrants in the great mission of making the country safe for half-cocked capitalism.

here, here and here

The Holocaust. Representations of  the Holocaust, what it’s possible to say about certain things. Jews as natural allies of native Americans and blacks, an ode to miscegenation.  Do people who prostitute art and especially cinema, deserve to live?  An exploding, orgasmic, revenge fantasy. References to dozens of other films. Some excellent jokes. Spoken in English, French, German and Italian. Beautifully shot and great art direction. Very violent and about the redemptive and necessary parts of violence. Against  proportional violence. if violence is necessary only too much is enough and then it’s barely enough.

Norm and Oliver Kamm are barking up the wrong – Latinate – tree when it comes to thinking about English grammar. Norm wonders

… how may we discriminate between ways of speaking and writing that are incorrect even though they are in use, and ways of speaking and writing that have become domesticated, so to say, in the language, accepted as OK even though they are technically incorrect? Over to you, Oliver.

What native speakers say is English and the idea of a native speaker saying something that’s technically incorrect is a contradiction in terms. Of course there are sentences that would be totally incorrect no matter who said them but they would be on the scale of “Geras Manchester, lives Professor in.” and no native speaker is ever going to come up with anything like that.

So, anything goes? No, it does not. What you have to do is stop analyzing English as if it were Latin and instead of worrying about whether a certain utterance is correct, in a universal, metaphysical sense, start thinking about what might be appropriate to say or write in a given set of circumstances. The kind of grammatical forms Norm and I might come up with over a beer or three are of a different kind from those we’d use if we were arguing for different points of view in a series of blog posts and would be more different still if we were writing academic papers.

And if a new grammatical structure becomes widely accepted and used by members of a speech community then the idea of it being technically incorrect loses whatever relevance it might have had. It’s now English and may be correctly used in the appropriate circumstances.

Note too that not a word have I said on the infinite regional varieties of English.

here

As well as being as fancying himself as an expert on football, politics and cinema, the increasingly crazed Quintín has taken to criticizing English to Spanish translations of literature.  In an attempt to impress us all with his erudition he writes here that the term “chocolate goodies” is “a bit far-fetched”.    There are further  demonstrations of the depth of his learning in the same comment and his original critique but citing them all would be extremely tedious. Let’s just say that he’s a complete amadán.