It’s a pain to edit html in a web page. So I am trying a blog client called Drivel.

This is a test to see if it works.

The shortlist for world player of the year was announced today.

The list is

• Ronaldo (with the magic feet)
• Messi
• Kaka

It’s hard to choose between them - but they can’t give it Messi because he is only 20 and is certain to win it every subsequent year until 2017.

Here’s the common thread that runs through half-a-dozen news stories every day. Yesterday, for example: a schoolteacher arrested and charged in Sudan for allowing children to call a teddy bear Muhammad; the poor, ethnically mixed housing estates around Paris going up in smoke again; Israel-Palestine peace talks, with their implications for relations between Muslims and non-Muslims everywhere; a Jewish school in London criticised for insisting that for a child to qualify for admission the applicant’s mother had to be born Jewish; angry scenes in Oxford as a student debating society offers a platform to a Holocaust denier.

Timothy Garton Ash, in The Guardian, might have also mentioned a incident that occurred today in my workplace.

Someone had left a pile of flyers for a performance of sacred music at their local church on the counter in the kitchen. I was intrigued because I happen to enjoy cello music, Christmas Carols and Episcopalian churches and I expect I would find the combination of the three especially pleasing.

A colleague, though, felt that it was inappropriate to advertise a religious service in the workplace and we discussed the topic over email. I made a rather clumsy case for liberal tolerance of religion and so was pleasantly surprised to find, during my lunchtime browsing, TGA’s article making the same case in The Guardian in which he says many wise things.

We do, however, need to be clearer about the difference between secularism and atheism. Secularism, in my view, should be an argument about arrangements for a shared public and social life; atheism is an argument about scientific truth, individual liberation and the nature of the good life.

It’s a good article and I heartily agree with most of it. The comments are (mostly)  good too.

I think western civilisation would be much the poorer without Christmas Carols and a policy that bans flyers for church services in the workplace would not only be unfair (unless it also banned flyers for craft fairs of wives CEOs and Free Kiwis) but would make the workplace a less pleasant place to be.

Not sure why TGA felt it necessary to preface his article with a declaration of his liberal faith…

I’m a liberal, so I start from liberalism - not in the parody version propagated by the American right, but liberalism properly understood as a quest for the greatest possible measure of individual human freedom, compatible with the freedom of others.

… but I kind of like that too.

Who knew that browsing through the available themes would actually change the theme for the whole site? Where did my old theme go? Oh well. I didn’t like it much anyway.

What are the chances that my wife (actually, wife’s friend Rose) would take a random picture over London and get a picture of the flat where I used to live in Senrab St?

(you can just make out my flat beneath that wisp of cloud to the right of the wing tip)

Now that she can upload her own photos, I guess she won’t need a Mac after all!

Because I will never forget that the only reason that I’m standing here today is because somebody, somewhere stood up for me when it was risky. Stood up when it was hard. Stood up when it wasn’t popular. And because that somebody stood up, a few more stood up. And then a few thousand stood up. And then a few million stood up. And standing up, with courage and clear purpose, they somehow managed to change the world.

He talks a good talk but is he the real thing?

I hope so.

If we are really serious about wining this election Democrats, we can’t live in fear of losing it.

Since the real Wikipedia is tainted by reality’s well-known liberal bias, conservatives now have their very own source of reliable information, Conservapedia.

Truthiness now has a life of its own. Maybe it’s evolving? Unlike the entry for Theory of Evolution (redirected from Evolution):

After much debate, the Conservapedia Panel has finished reviewing the Theory of Evolution page. We have determined that the article will remain protected indefinitely, to protect it from inevitable vandalism. We have decided that the article will not be changed in any major way. However, we agree that the article lacks an adequate, concise explanation of the Theory of Evolution.

Clearly if they didn’t protect it, the article would lose its distinctive character, like listing all the people who did not discover the theory of evolution:

The great intellectuals in history such as Archimedes, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and Lord Kelvin did not propose an evolutionary process for a species to transform into a more complex version. Even after the theory of evolution was proposed and promoted heavily in England and Germany, most leading scientists rejected the evolutionary position.^[5][6]

By an interesting coincidence, none of those people discovered penicillin either (or quantum physics! Idiots!).

What kind of information is so lacking in liberal sources of knowledge that conservatives have to have their own encyclopedias??

Check out their usage stats:

Most viewed pages

1. Main Page‎ [1,904,286]
2. Homosexuality‎ [1,556,262]
3. Homosexuality and Hepatitis‎ [516,962]
4. Homosexuality and Promiscuity‎ [420,476]
5. Homosexuality and Parasites‎ [387,947]
6. Homosexuality and Domestic Violence‎ [357,968]
7. Gay Bowel Syndrome‎ [350,337]
8. Homosexuality and Gonorrhea‎ [331,270]
9. Homosexuality and Mental Health‎ [283,500]
10. Homosexuality and Syphilis‎ [265,254]

I only had 15 minutes when I nipped into B&N during Jazz’s piano lesson and I wanted to pick up a copy of V for Vendetta for Dylan. Since he had dressed as him for Halloween, I thought it only fair that he read the book too.

I was distracted though by a display of mini hardback books by the door - ooh those clever marketing people! I am most cured of impulse book buying these days. I rarely buy books any more and the times when I would just walk past a bookshop and end up with three books on photography are long gone. But there was something about these books…they were calling my name like a tiny voice from the past.

The little books were on various subjects - physics, geometry, chemistry, about a dozen others - and I didn’t have much time so I just grabbed the philosophy one and the geometry one and rushed off to find V. On the way to the checkout I realised that I couldn’t go home with books for me and Dylan but nothing for Jazz so I picked up a quite beautiful Inuyasha book making this my biggest book purchase since 1999.

Oh my word, this book is fantastic. If you only ever read one book on philosophy, read this one. Every important point is illustrated with a joke and the jokes are hilarious. As I finish each chapter (all very short), I go do a stand up routine for my family to great applause. I am trying to pace my reading to make it last but it’s mostly unputdownable.

Here’s a sample joke, (adapted for my own nefarious purposes):

Atheist: Look! All the sheep on that hillside have been sheared!

Agnostic: Yes. On this side.

Read the introduction online. Then buy it. You’ll thank me for it even if you think posts on philosophy are too cerebral for a blog.

The BBC is awesome.

This is the kind of programme that only the BBC can make and is likely to cause me to say something that will merit the response “Why don’t you go back to your own country then?”. To which I might reply “Maybe my new country can learn something from the old one so I don’t need to”.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6

I hope it’s a part of a series and I can find the rest. It raises the question “Why am I suddenly all atheist in America when, before, I was just someone who didn’t believe in God?”. Good question!

Still catching up on my book reviews here…

I have read a bunch of books about philosophers but I have never before read a book about philosophy. The trouble with reading about philosophers is that by that time you have slogged through 18 Greeks with similar sounding names they all blur into one and you can’t recall the difference between an atomist and an epicurean. It’s much easier to read about, say, ethics when it is all in one chapter.

Reading the book pretty much confirmed for me what Paul Graham said that the only thing 3000 years of philosophy has taught us is that there are limits to what we can know.

I am glad I read it but I won’t recommend it to anyone else.

The most disappointing thing was to read so many chapters about aesthetics, ethics, justice and morality and never once come across the word ‘evolution’. It seems a shocking oversight and I have written to Professor Grayling asking him to rectify that in a future edition.