What the affair of the Archbishop and his thoughtful talk on the Shari’a has underlined is the appalling level of public discourse in the media today. This applies to parliamentarians, journalists and writers, intellectuals, artists, and a wide range of public figures. They were simply incapable of handling his nuanced arguments, and I am not …
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Information and knowledge
One of the vital matters for the information age is to know the difference between information and knowledge. If one is informed of something that someone else knows then that is information. When one knows it oneself with genuine knowing then it is knowledge. Quite properly in every culture there are means to verify information. …
The LAT points out that it was the fifth school shooting in a week.
Lecture Nightmare  By Daniel Politi Posted Friday, Feb. 15, 2008, at 6:17 AM ET USA Today and the Los Angeles Times lead with the shooting at Northern Illinois University, where a gunman walked into a geology class and began firing. The gunman, who was identified as a former graduate student, killed five students and injured 16 others (at …
Continue reading “The LAT points out that it was the fifth school shooting in a week.”
Shariah in the UK
We have not even got the basic elements with which to gingerly approach this issue, and while all the pundits dive into the maelstrom of debate, lining up in a strange consensus that unites odd bedfellows and produces the predictable reactions and antinomies, who is there to point out that our vaunted democratic institutions have …
A meta-opinion
What exactly are the media for? They are for perpetuating the idea that opinions matter. Some knowledgeable people define opinion in this sense as a sense of certainty arrived at without knowledge. Thus it is by definition ignorance itself, but with the added and very dangerous element of an unjustified feeling of certainty. What might …
The exception
How extraordinary! The very essence of physical science is that scientists insist that things have causes. They are utterly dedicated to this simple rule, with one exception, however: they regard the universe – or the sum of all existent things – as the only exception. It alone is completely uncaused and simply popped into being …
Mesopotamia
Yesterday, my family and I were approached by a couple of girls who are art students, in a cafe. They apologised for intruding, but asked us to say the first thing that came into our heads when they mentioned Iraq. I said, Mesopotamia. They were nonplussed. They had never heard of it. I said the …
The End of Money
Am grateful to Yusuf in København for this: http://cphinterpretation.blogspot.com/2007/10/end-of-money-as-we-know-it.htmlÂ
Sanity
Fighting against madness is mad, and produces ever more madness. The only radical act in a mad age is to be sane and to be with those who are sane. But what is sanity and how do we know it? It is that on which you were created. However, the collusion of your parents and …
Definition
After science, knowledge.