Giles Fraser reiterates his antipathy to liberalism, but it’s a straw liberalism that he’s antipathetic to. In the reaction to his piece on circumcision he sees

an opportunity to clear the decks and say why I am not a liberal. No, I’m not a conservative either. I’m a communitarian. Blue labour, if you like. But certainly not a liberal. What I take to be the essence of liberalism is a belief that individual freedom and personal autonomy are the fundamental moral goods.

That’s wrong. Individual freedom and personal autonomy are important in liberalism, but they’re not the fundamental moral goods, and in fact they’re not really moral goods either. “Values” would probably be the better word. [Read more…]

Reposting a comment I just made (slightly altered to be more general) so that more people will see it. I wrote it in response to a comment based on the idea that there are insiders and outsiders among commenters. That’s an understandable idea – there are people who know the background of a lot of issues discussed here because they’ve been following them for awhile, and there are people who don’t. Sometimes the people who don’t make comments that miss the mark because of the lack of background. That can be frustrating, especially when the comments consist of angry scolding based on reading a post by, say, Thunderf00t and thus lacking all context. But dividing people into insiders and outsiders is a bad idea; hence the comment.

———–

I really don’t want to divide people into insiders and outsiders here. That’s junior high school stuff, you can’t sit at our lunch table stuff. I want new people – aka “outsiders” – to read and enjoy and join the discussion.

Now…some of that insider v outsider happens anyway, or as it were “naturally” – i.e. without anyone spelling out that that’s what we’re doing. But if that is what we’re doing…well we shouldn’t be.

On the other hand – there is a certain ethic that builds up over time. There are understood conventions, and so on. Casual jokey sexism isn’t popular here, for instance – and since it’s not a particularly benign thing in itself, I think it’s ok to object to it somewhat sharply. But I don’t want us pouncing on anyone who’s new here as if this were a club with a secret code. I really don’t. That’s just a barrier to new people. Plus…well, it ain’t nice.

That’s part of what critics dislike about blog culture, you know. It’s part of what the goons who rant about the mythic beast “FTB” have in mind. It’s that insider thing, that gangs up on outsiders. It’s groupthink; group dynamics; the Robbers Cave experiment; all that. We don’t want to do that. The goons aren’t wrong to frown on that.

On the other hand the goons themselves help to elicit it, by being so goonish, by trolling, by being so selective in whom they scold – so that’s part of why we get so defensive.

But let’s not.

Let’s try to assume people have good intentions unless they make it obvious that they don’t.

Imagine being a foreign worker in Saudi Arabia. Now imagine being a foreign worker in Saudi Arabia during Ramadan.

Saudi authorities are warning non-Muslim expatriates against eating, drinking or smoking in public during Ramadan, the monthlong sunrise-to-sunset fast — or face expulsion.

The Interior Ministry of the oil-rich kingdom is calling on non-Muslims to “show consideration for feelings of Muslims” and “preserve the sacred Islamic rituals.”

Otherwise, a statement says, Saudi authorities will cancel violators’ work contracts and expel them.

The warning came on Friday, the first day of the Ramadan observance.

In addition to Saudi Arabia’s 19 million citizens, there are nearly 8 million Asian workers in the country, as well as hundreds of thousands of other foreign expatriates from around the globe, according to government figures.

You realize what that means – it means that in one of the hottest countries on earth, foreign workers are forbidden to drink water on the job between sunrise and sunset. (Clearly so are all Saudis, including those who would prefer not to be Muslim at all if only that were permitted.)

Mo said Allah said everybody has to risk dehydration and death during Ramadan, so no back talk or you’ll be on the next plane to Manila.

Via Taslima.

 

My friend Mary Ellen pointed out an item about the Seneca Falls convention this morning.

The Seneca Falls Convention — the first convention for women’s rights — began on this date in 1848. The seed had been planted eight years earlier, and grew out of the abolitionist movement. Lucretia Mott and her husband were traveling to London to attend the World Anti-Slavery Convention. Aboard the ship, they met a pair of newlyweds — Henry and Elizabeth Cady Stanton — who were also on their way to the conference for their honeymoon. Once in London, the six female delegates, including Mott and Stanton, found that they would not be seated and could only attend the conference behind a drapery partition, because women were “constitutionally unfit for public and business meetings.” Mott and Stanton were outraged, and together they agreed that they really should organize their own convention.

Huh. That sounds vaguely familiar… [Read more…]

Looking for hidden assumptions in journalistic assertions, such as in a PBS story about Muslim athletes and Ramadan. First line:

The world’s more than 1.5 billion Muslims have begun observing the holy month of Ramadan, when they fast every day from dawn to sunset and offer special prayers and gifts to the poor.

That’s almost certain to be wrong. The figure includes people who are simply defined as Muslim geographically or ethnically, and then not all people who define themselves as Muslim observe Ramadan, and some who observe Ramadan do it selectively. It’s just dumb to assume that all “Muslims” are of the devout variety and obey all the putative rules.

It’s a weird kind of covert social pressure, probably unintentional. They should be more careful. It’s already a widespread mistaken assumption that all Muslims obey all the putative rules, no matter how stupid or cruel or both; the media shouldn’t be helping to entrench that assumption.

The president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, Sister Pat Farrell, was interviewed on Fresh Air the other day. It was pretty interesting. She had kind of a religious voice and way of speaking – very even and gentle – maybe because it’s her nature but (it seems to me) more likely because she was trained to. She never sounded angry. That was a little bit frustrating, in a way – I’m used to secular people, who do sometimes sound irritated or angry. The unchanging mildness of her tone sounded a little alien and pious.

But some of the content of what she said was pretty frank. That was especially the case when Terry Gross asked her about the way the church treats child-raping priests compared with the way it treats the Leadership Conference of Women Religious – protective lenience on the one hand versus harsh public scolding and interference on the other. Farrell said it was totally unacceptable.

She didn’t sound the least bit overawed by the Vatican. She wasn’t as compliant as I’d expected. She basically said they don’t know what they’re talking about, and they shouldn’t be excluding women from leadership roles and then bossing them around. She clearly thought the stuff about “radical feminism” was absurd.

Sincerely, what I hear in the phrasing … is fear — a fear of women’s positions in the church. Now, that’s just my interpretation. I have no idea what was in the mind of the congregation, of the doctrine of the faith, when they wrote that. But women theologians around the world have been seriously looking at the question of: How have the church’s interpretations of how we talk about God, interpret Scripture, organize life in the church — how have they been tainted by a culture that minimizes the value and the place of women?

Shall we make a list?

Jesus recommends child-like faith to the barmaid. The barmaid is less than eager to comply. [Read more…]