There may be some mileage in considering how certain constrained forms of social media tempt otherwise intelligent people (of various beliefs) into saying silly things when they might be better off being plainly factual, as I understand the Heresiarch is. I'm not on Twitter.
"I don't understand why Hasan is citing Decartes, Locke, Rousseau etc as peole who made statements without evidence or proof"
He's not, he's arguing precisely the opposite, apparently, in trying to deny that faith requires belief in something without evidence.
"not to mark the passing of such an extraordinary figure with extraordinary ceremonies would be unimaginative, myopic and cheap"
I can offer a Solemn Exorcism if anyone's interested
When I was in High Wycombe I got the lucky chance to write a new history of the town and while doing the research (and having had the experience of buying a house while I was there) I was struck first by the massive escalation in house prices which really took off from the mid-1980s and also by the escalation in the number of estate agents, solicitors and surveyors who all clustered around two streets in the town centre. I ended up writing (I thought a bit hyperbolically) that those two streets had become the real engine of the whole local economy. Now it seems not hyperbolic at all. This has been the great economic fact of the last thirty years, but it still seems that too few people realise it. I finally despaired of the coalition when I heard a minister declaring that what the country really needed was to get house prices rising again.
However, I think there's a point. Had Mrs T been more of a 19th-century conservative and less of a 19th-century liberal she might have grasped that sometimes social institutions, habits and customs exist to mitigate human selfishness rather than restrain human goodness.
Thanks very much for this - it saves me wasting energy and mental effort writing anything about it. Everything I'd want to say has been included here, down to the generation of the conditions that led to property price inflation and the appalling damage that's done our economy. What comes over most powerfully is the fantasy nature of so much of our political narratives.
Ah, on re-reading I see you do say rather more specifically the right-wing press "*provides a platform* for the articulation of traditional Judaeo-Christian values" rather than directly promotes them. It still seems to me that such contributions would be rather fatally vitiated by the poisonous morality of everything around them.
Which right-wing press are you thinking of that promotes Christian values? You surely can't be alluding to the Daily Mail, with its spite, rage, materialism, xenophobia, and deeply inappropriate attitude to underage girls? Or at least, if you are, we probably think of Christianity very differently. As I suspect we may.
Whatever the motivation of the EU over this, I'm sure most people in the UK would like to see the City hammered to make it contrite and reformed in character. Speaking as a paid guardian of public morals, I would love that to happen, but it's very hard to see how cutting their bonuses will make bankers and banks morally better. However, if their antics actually serve to beggar the public, as they apparently have, it makes some sense for the rest of us to be protected from the consequences of such reckless stupidity and, if reining in bonuses contributes to that, that's reason enough. "There might be fewer disasters if traders were more risk-averse, but there will also be fewer jackpots" - well, that depends whether you think periodic economic cataclysm is a price worth paying for the temporary exhilaration of periodic bubbles, cataclysm which causes great misery and, in extreme circumstances, death.
- As for the EU - do you think Mr Lenton is still with us?
You might interpret 'Susan's' comments as meaning that she felt ignoring Chris Rennard's alleged behaviour was more politic than making a fuss about it, not because he had any direct influence over who was and wasn't selected as a parliamentary candidate, but because you wouldn't want to get a reputation as a tiresome troublemaker. I can remember occasions when, back in the Old Days when I used to pay far more attention to the envelopes from Cowley Street that dropped through my letterbox, that the then-Mr Rennard was spoken of in hallowed and nigh-miraculous terms.
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Invention